Theft at the Public Till
harbor, the marketplace, the factory-and offer consumers the opportunity to combine shopping with touristic voyeurism into the city's past. The am- biance of authenticity is important to establish the critical mass of shoppers vital to retail competition. In some downtowns where a high density of business services creates demand, even an artificial sense of place enhances consumption. In other cities, however, the downtown is still too tied to in- dustrial uses to encourage the multiplicity of uses of a consumption space. In the process of revitalizing the waterfront, old piers and Main Streets were turned into emporia of mass consumption. Beneath the image of locality these places project, they are really marketplaces for goods that are not locally produced. Gourmet foods and croissant shops were at least initially imported, and the chains of retail clothing stores that fill these urban shop- ping centers sell mainly imported apparel. Tourist items are nearly always made outside the country. Even products like Samuel Adams beer, which is associated with Boston, and Vermont butter are either produced out of state (the beer in Pittsburgh) or with out-of-state materials (milk for the butter from dairies outside Vermont). Projects like Faneuil Hall are, moreover, developed by national firms and financed by New York money center hanks. Like the high-class shopping street, these shopping centers unify interna- tional investment, production, and consumption. In France and Italy as well as the United States, a return to fresh goods from freezing and other, technologically advanced means of food preserva- tion was perceived as part of the pursuit of culinary authenticity. Because consumers were willing to pay for this special taste, both regional produc- tion and national distribution systems changed. Paul Bocuse himself said on a visit to the United States in the 1980s, 'When I first came here in 1967 you could nor find fresh chervil or tarragon anywhere, and now you can buy ingredients like that in the supermarket." The pursuit of local sources of sup- ply, moreover, enhanced the cultural value of regional cooking traditions. Most of these traditions had died out during the period of mass industrial- ization from 1880 to 1940, when new food production technologies were developed and imposed, and national networks standardized procedures of food distribution. But new sources of supply in the 1980s not only reflected
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