The Sociology of Food and Agriculture, Third Edition [3 ed.] 9780367680022, 9780367680015, 9781003133780

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Preface to the third edition
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction to a complex and ever-changing field
Part I The multi-scalar food economy
2 Understanding foodscapes: past, present, and future
3 Food and nutrition (in)security
4 Financialization of food
Part II Community, culture, and knowledge
5 Community, labor, and peasantries
6 Food and culture
7 Gender, ethnicity, and poverty
Part III Food justice and the environment
8 Agro-ecosystems and the nature of “natures”
9 Food, agriculture, and the environment
10 Food sovereignty – beyond food security
Part IV Agrifood futures: solutions, trade-offs, and opportunities
11 Sustainable diets and ethical consumption
12 The “traps” in agrifood studies . . . and beyond
13 Reimagining healthy eating
Index

Citation preview

Praise for Previous Editions

“Carolan delivers a brilliant and insightful overview of agrifood systems with a level of accessibility that will reach undergraduates and rigor that will convince graduate students. Supported by evidence and scholarly references throughout, this work exceeds the standards of most textbooks, while infusing pedagogy that is absent in typical monographs.” – Gregory Fulkerson, Associate Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Oneonta, USA “The interactions between food and society are incredibly complex, as well as increasingly contested. This book illustrates the value of applying a critical, sociological lens to these topics. The second edition is even more comprehensive, and remains an extraordinary synthesis of a very diverse field of scholarship.” – Philip H. Howard, Associate Professor of Community Sustainability, Michigan State University, USA, and author of Concentration and Power in the Food System “I found the first edition quite useful for helping the growing number of students enrolling in my sociology of agriculture and food systems course survey the field. I appreciate the expanded topics in this second edition that explore in more depth an even broader range of food system topics that reflect where the field is evolving. I  also really love all the graphics integrated into the text.” – Jeff S. Sharp, Director and Professor of Rural Sociology, The Ohio State University, USA “Michael Carolan’s second edition of The Sociology of Food and Agriculture is a timely addition to a growing chorus that describes our current predicaments while offering sources and tools of hope. Carolan’s unique style blends the breadth and depth of a creative academic, a driven sociological imagination and a passion for justice around issues of food and agriculture that can inform and inspire students and scholars alike. This is a vital book at an important time.” – Paul V. Stock, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Environmental Studies Program, The University of Kansas, USA

The Sociology of Food and Agriculture

Thoroughly revised and updated, the third edition of The Sociology of Food and Agriculture provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive introduction to the study of food and society. The book begins by examining the food economy, with chapters focusing on foodscapes, the financialization of food, and a new chapter dedicated to food and nutrition (in)security. In Part II, the book addresses community and culture. While some books only look at the interrelationships between food and culture, this section problematizes the food system from the standpoint of marginalized bodies. It contains chapters focusing on agricultural and food labor and the peasantries, topics which are often overlooked, and gender, ethnicity, and poverty. Part III examines food and the environment, with chapters addressing important topics such as agro-ecosystems, food justice, sustainable food, and agriculture and food sovereignty. The final part focuses on food futures and includes a brand-new chapter on sustainable diets and ethical consumption. The book concludes by showcasing how we can rethink food production and consumption in a way that can help heal social, political, and cultural divisions. All chapters draw on international case studies and include learning objectives, suggested discussion questions, and recommendations for further reading to aid student learning. The Sociology of Food and Agriculture is perfect for students of food studies, including food justice, food and nutrition security, sustainable diets, food sovereignty, environmental sociology, agriculture, and cultural studies. Michael Carolan is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development in the College of Liberal Arts at Colorado State University, USA. He is the author or co-editor of numerous books, including the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems (2020), The Real Cost of Cheap Food (2018), Society and the Environment (2017), and Cheaponomics (2014), all published by Routledge.

Other books in the Earthscan Food and Agriculture Series

Multifunctional Land Uses in Africa Sustainable Food Security Solutions Elisabeth Simelton and Madelene Ostwald Food Security Policy, Evaluation and Impact Assessment Edited by Sheryl L. Hendriks Transforming Agriculture in Southern Africa Constraints, Technologies, Policies and Processes Edited by Richard A. Sikora, Eugene R. Terry, Paul L.G. Vlek and Joyce Chitja Home Gardens for Improved Food Security Edited by D. Hashini Gelhena Dissanayake and Karimbhai M. Maredia The Good Farmer Culture and Identity in Food and Agriculture Rob J.F. Burton, Jérémie Forney, Paul Stock and Lee-Ann Sutherland Deep Agroecology and the Homeric Epics Global Cultural Reforms for a Natural-Systems Agriculture John W. Head Fighting for Farming Justice Diversity, Food Access and the USDA Terri R. Jett Political Ecology of Industrial Crops Edited by Abubakari Ahmed and Alexandros Gasparatos The Sociology of Food and Agriculture Third Edition Michael Carolan For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/books/series/ ECEFA/

The Sociology of Food and Agriculture Third Edition

Michael Carolan

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Michael Carolan The right of Michael Carolan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carolan, Michael S., author. Title: The sociology of food and agriculture / Michael Carolan. Description: 3rd edition. | Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Earthscan food and agriculture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture—History. | Agriculture—Social aspects—History. | Food—Social aspects—History. Classification: LCC S419 .C366 2022 (print) | LCC S419 (ebook) | DDC 630—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013599 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013600 ISBN: 978-0-367-68002-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68001-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13378-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figuresix List of tablesxi Preface to the third editionxii Acknowledgementsxiii   1 Introduction to a complex and ever-changing field

1

PART I

The multi-scalar food economy23   2 Understanding foodscapes: past, present, and future

25

  3 Food and nutrition (in)security

46

  4 Financialization of food

67

PART II

Community, culture, and knowledge87   5 Community, labor, and peasantries

89

  6 Food and culture

111

  7 Gender, ethnicity, and poverty

128

PART III

Food justice and the environment145   8 Agro-ecosystems and the nature of “natures”

147

  9 Food, agriculture, and the environment

167

10 Food sovereignty – beyond food security

190

viii  Contents PART IV

Agrifood futures: solutions, trade-offs, and opportunities205 11 Sustainable diets and ethical consumption

207

12 The “traps” in agrifood studies . . . and beyond

226

13 Reimagining healthy eating

241

Index259

Figures

1.1 Price index for agricultural outputs and farm expenses, 1950 to 2020 (US) 9 1.2 Agricultural and input treadmills of conventional agriculture 10 2.1 US food system “hourglass” (hanging by a thread) 29 2.2 New Zealand food system “hourglass” (hanging by a thread) 30 2.3 Seed industry structure, 1996–2018 32 3.1 Medium change in the relative contribution to calories from crops of interest to CGIAR in national diets in developing countries, 1969–2009 54 3.2 Each country’s food supply composition in contribution to calories: 1961, 1985, 2009 55 3.3 Sustainable nutrition security (SNS) metric indicators 62 3.4 SNS indicators for select countries 62 4.1 Global FDI inflows in for Food, Beverages, and Tobacco, 1991–2018 (in USD billion) 68 4.2 Global ethanol production, 2007–2019 70 4.3 Top biodiesel producers worldwide in 2019, by country (in billion liters) 70 4.4 Deforestation on peatland for palm oil plantation, Central Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia 71 4.5 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations 72 4.6 Countries most affected by land grabs 78 5.1 Share of non-regular and employed farm labor in the EU-28 2016 93 5.2 Area for fresh vegetable production in the EU-28 2016 94 5.3 Racial segregation of restaurant industry, US 95 5.4 Gender segregation of restaurant industry, US 96 5.5 Classic extension model of knowledge generation/transfer 101 5.6 Model of knowledge generation/transfer based on open understanding of expertise 103 6.1 1917 advertisement for Airline Honey 118 7.1 Gender and vulnerability to climate change 138 8.1 Changes (and increasing diversity) in scale and scope of agroecology research148 8.2 The seven capitals that constitute ecological, social, and economic sustainability156 8.3 The four “myths of nature” 160

x  Figures

9.1 Food imports by volume and average distance traveled by food for select countries 9.2 Global greenhouse gas emissions from food production 9.3 Breakdown of the 17,000+ calories (daily per capita) consumed by US food system 10.1 2021 ranking of high-performing countries according to their respective HPI scores 10.2 Food sovereignty activists protest outside a closed corporate seed conference convened by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development 11.1 Decision tree depicting the criteria considered in the choice between organic and conventional farm management in northeast Austria 11.2 Organic industry structure as of August 2020 12.1 Walmart’s commitment to local food 13.1 Svalbard Global Seed Vault

169 172 174 194 198 213 217 227 242

Tables

1.1 Number of commodities produced for sale in at least 1% of all Iowa farms for various years from 1920 to 2017 7 1.2 Top 20 farm subsidy programs in US, 1995–2019 12 2.1 Concentration of US agricultural markets 26 3.1 Emergency food security needs by country by late 2020, top 10 50 3.2 Dietary guidelines for Australian adults for 1982, 1992, and 2003 59 4.1 FDI in food 69 4.2 The four “generations” of biofuels 73 4.3 The 17 SDGs with target points associated with agrifood systems 77 4.4 FAO Food Price Index, Cereal Price Index, and Cargill Profits, 2002–202082 8.1 Seven capitals and their role in creating sustainable agroecosystems and communities158 9.1 Top contributors to the natural capital costs for select crop sectors (US$ billion) 168 9.2 Estimates on the real costs of pesticides from Leach and Mumford (2008) and Pimentel (2005), in US$ 168 9.3 Energy and emissions intensities for different modes of freight transportation170 9.4 Average energy efficiency and intensity by vehicle type 171 9.5 Top 25 water food-prints of national production (Mm3/yr)176 9.6 Top 25 per-capita water footprints of national production (Mm3/yr)177 9.7 The global average water footprint of crop and animal products in relation to their nutritional value 177 10.1 Dominant regime versus Food Sovereignty Models 197 13.1 Local food hubs as hybrids between direct marketing and large-scale regional or global hubs. Some hypothetical comparisons based on a review of the literature 244 13.2 Final sample demographics 251 13.3 Survey results for all cases, T1 and T2, and phone survey 252

Preface to the third edition

I am often disheartened to see new editions of texts come out with only cosmetic changes and updated citations and statistics but little else. Don’t get me wrong; any good text needs to be current. But I  also believe authors have a responsibility to update text in additional ways. Fields change – at least they should! And authors don’t always get everything right. I certainly didn’t. With this being the third edition, I am not claiming to have achieved perfection. Far from it. But with each revision, I am making an honest attempt to improve upon the survey of the literature offered in The Sociology of Food and Agriculture. While the third edition has the same chapter total as the previous edition, a lot of material has been added. I also approached this revision with an eye towards trade-offs, realizing that I cannot keep adding material with each edition. One place where I economized is with how I historically contextualized the field. I still do it – I’m in fact rather proud of this piece of the text. But that material from the second edition was condensed based on feedback I received from instructors and students with experience using the text. As for elements/topics that are either new to the third edition or expanded on relative to the second edition, those include: • Food sovereignty; • Sustainable diets and ethical consumption; • Regenerative agriculture; • More international examples that go beyond North American and European cases; • The intersectionality of race, class, and gender; • Digital agriculture (“smart” farming, robotics, etc.); • Food and nutrition security; • Labor; • Food justice; • COVID-19. Those are only the most significant changes. Each chapter has been updated and rewritten to offer up-to-date statistics and timely examples. It is a dynamic and broad field, which is precisely why I take such pleasure in being part of this community of scholars. But at the same time, that dynamism and breadth make it impossible to exhaustively cover everything in a single book.

Acknowledgements

“Stone Soup” is an old folk story about a hungry stranger who persuades the local people of a town to contribute food to what turns out to be a dish consumed by everyone. Writing this book has reminded me repeatedly of this tale of sharing and cooperation. So many have contributed to its making; realizing, too, that the list of names with each edition has become too long to be exhaustive. The term “generosity” keeps coming to mind as I search for words to explain the gratitude I feel toward so many. Names of those who have shared material (and permissions) with me include: Alison Alkon, Dominique Apollon, Ika Darnhofer, Neal Flora, Jan Flora, Peter Giovannini, Michael Goodman, Julie Guthman, James Hale, Mary Hendrickson, Philip Howard, Josée Johnston, Colin Khoury, Jack Kloppenburg, Yvonne Liu, Linda Lobao, Philip McMichael, Miranda Mirosa, Patrick Mooney, Gyorgy Scrinis, Jeff Sharp, Rachel Slocum, Paul Stock, Curtis Stofferahn, and Julie Zimmerman. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the reviewers. I know there were a lot of you; some whose identity I  know because you’ve since identified yourself to me, others who I will likely never be able to thank personally. For the known and the anonymous reviewers: your efforts were appreciated tremendously – thank you. Gratefulness, too, to the amazing staff at Routledge; to my employer, Colorado State University; and to my students. Lastly: to Nora, Elena, and Joey. For everything: thank you.

1 Introduction to a complex and ever-changing field

Is anything as simultaneously familiar and distant as food? The average American spends a little more than an hour each day eating and drinking: less for those in their teens and twenties; more for those over 65 (Restrepo and Zeballos 2019). In contrast, the French spend 2 hours and 13 minutes consuming food and drink (OECD 2018). Regardless of where you live or how many “sit-down” meals you enjoy a day, the act of eating is an intimate one. This can be evidenced by not only the fact that the act involves placing something into our bodies. This assimilation is further witnessed by how food is a source of identity – a different take on the old saying, “You are what you eat.” In both respects, the material and the symbolic, food quite literature makes us who we are. And yet, how much do we really know about it? Children as young as five can name all the planets in our solar system (and a few constellations too!), while their older brothers and sisters still do not know where items like pickles and bacon come from. I am reminded of an earlier survey out of the United Kingdom that found 36 percent of the 2,000 surveyed 16- to 23-year-olds did not know that bacon comes from pigs, 40 percent failed to link milk with dairy cows (7 percent attributed it to wheat), and 33 percent were unaware of the origins of eggs (11 percent attributed eggs to wheat or corn) (Telegraph 2012). Hence my motivation for writing a book like this, to support programs and educators directed at helping build among eaters a careful, critical reflection upon all things food and agriculture related. I am not just talking about knowing where our food comes from. Food’s Big Picture is a lot bigger than that, as you are about to discover. So: what does it mean to think about food and agriculture sociologically? I have no standard boilerplate response to this query, even though it is a question I get a lot. And the two- or three=sentence answer I give never seems to do justice to the field. What I tend to do is quickly explain how varied the literature is in terms of subject matter, theoretical orientations, and methods. As the reader will quickly learn, one’s sociological imagination can truly run wild thinking about food systems and foodscapes – I’ll tease apart how these terms differ momentarily. Even a question as seemingly simple as “What is food?” proves to be exceedingly complex once exposed to sociological treatment. As Harris (1986: 13) reminds us, “[w]e can eat and digest everything from rancid mammary gland secretions to fungi to rocks (or cheese, mushrooms, and salt if you prefer euphemisms).” Anyone who has traveled to another country – or spent much time watching, say, the Discovery Channel – knows the label “food” is a terminological box that can be filled with wildly different phenomena depending on culture, circumstances, income level, and time period.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-1

2  Introduction to a complex field

The food system is an incredibly (and increasingly) entangled network of people, organizations, states, regulations/laws, ecosystems, and values/beliefs, which is why I occasionally opt for the term “foodscape.” The benefit of using the term “food system” is that people are finally – this wasn’t the case even a decade ago – becoming familiar with the term. The drawback of the term is that, well, people’s understanding of the term is often too constrained. When I hear people talk about food systems, they often equate it to the concept “commodity chain” – a world populated only by producers, distributors, processors, retailers, and consumers. This presents a very linear and cold (what about culture, compassion, justice, ethics. . .) understanding of food. The truth is, as you will quickly learn, food is about a lot more than what is captured in any talk about supply or commodity chains. Moreover, if we reduce food systems to those linear, market-based systems of food provision, we are also making assumptions about what it means to be an eater. Eaters, following this framework, are consumers. But we’re not; at least, not exclusively. That is why I like the term “eater” (or even better “food citizen”) over “consumer,” because the latter is too reductive. As consumers, it seems our priorities center principally on getting the best deals, while social change is reduced to voting with our wallets. (Never mind that you cannot vote for what those supply chains cannot – or will not – provide, and never mind that voting with your wallet means those with more money get more votes.) Alternatively, as citizens, we are also people with the capacity to love, care, and work collectively with others to afford change that goes way beyond merely buying the “right” stuff. I find myself writing the third edition in the shadow of COVID-19 – this manuscript went to press in early 2021. Just a few months prior, roughly 1 in 5 people around the world were under lock-down. Yet, through it all, we ate. A nugget of wisdom frequently attributed to Warren Buffett, which he is said to have passed along more than once to Berkshire Hathaway investors, is this: “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Mr. Buffett first made the comment in 1992, after Hurricane Andrew exposed insufficiencies in the insurance industry, to describe how systemic recklessness and dangers cannot be easily hidden during times of chaos and crisis. I have heard this quote a lot lately. The tide, due to COVID-19, has gone out in a big way. It is more than the emperor who is without clothes (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1  COVID Gave Us a Peak at How Climate Change Will Disrupt Food Chains In June, 2020, a team associated with CGAIR (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) published a “blueprint” for making foodscapes more resilient in the future, whether in the face of future pandemics or climate change. The group calls for US$320 billion in public and private funding to transform food systems (Steiner et al. 2020). “The disruptions caused by this terrible pandemic have at least awakened the world to the fact that our food systems are far more vulnerable than many realized,” said Bruce Campbell, one of the report’s co-authors (quoted in Gustin 2020). Beyond calls for billions of dollars of additional funding to transform how and what we eat, the plan also recognizes

Introduction to a complex field 3

the power of social movements and the involvement of the world’s youth. For instance, “Challenge 4.3” calls for the need to “reach 10 million young people by 2025 through science-based social movements to catalyze climate action in food systems” (Steiner et al. 2020: 52). One reason for doing this is inclusivity. As the report later explains, we need to “catalyze innovative volunteerism among rural youth to capitalize on their skills and experience for societal and individual benefit,” adding, “radical changes need new perspectives and voices that can speak freely about the changes needed” (p. 52).

The coronavirus has wreaked havoc on our so-called efficient supply chains. Meatprocessing plants are closing, as workers, without health care, fall ill and die. Due to those closings, I know farmers who, at the pandemic’s height, were killing all their young animals because none of the area’s slaughtering facilities were open; all the while, they were feeding their full-size animals a ratio designed to hold weight steady in the hope that someday soon those plants would once again open. Meanwhile, at local grocery stores, the price of pork and beef skyrocketed. Or take the dairy farmers, who had to dump millions of gallons of milk once under contract to any of the thousands of schools that closed for the final months of the 2019/2020 academic year. Crises always highlight the core flaws of any system. And boy, ours is definitely in need of a major overhaul.

The sociology of food and agriculture: a brief historical overview As far as names go, “sociology of food and agriculture” dates back a couple of decades, though its roots extend more than a century in the rural sociological literature. Initially inserting its way into studies as a background variable (subordinate to things like community structure), agriculture’s rapidly changing structure during the latter half of the twentieth century caused a growing number of rural sociologists to devote more time to its study as a primary (dependent) variable. African American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois (1898, 1901, 1904), for example, conducted a number of studies at the turn of the twentieth century looking at the plight of Black rural laborers and farmers in such states as Virginia and Georgia. At around that same time, James Williams (1906) was writing his dissertation at Columbia University. Completed in 1906, An American Town: A Sociological Study examines a rural community in New York. The study determined agriculture to be the town’s most important economic activity, and as such, it was viewed by Williams as an essential variable for understanding the community’s past, present, and future social trajectories. C. E. Lively (1928) provides us with one of the first comparative community studies, with agriculture looming large as an important independent variable. Looking at a dairy-farming community in Wisconsin and a grain-farming community in Minnesota, Lively was able to document that the type of agricultural system can impact community life as a result of, for example, seasonal fluctuations in farm income, population density, and labor demands. The most famous early comparative study is now known simply as the Goldschmidt Study (or the Goldschmidt Thesis). Walter Goldschmidt’s (1978 [1947]) book As You Sow, which I discuss in greater detail later, examined two communities in California’s upper San Joaquin Valley: one community surrounded by small-scale farms

4  Introduction to a complex field

(averaging 23.1 hectares [57 acres]), the other surrounded by large-scale farms (averaging 201 hectares [497 acres]). Goldschmidt then attempted to discern how farm structure shapes community structure. The general thesis to emerge from this research is that largescale, industrial agriculture has, on the whole, a greater number of negative than positive impacts on surrounding rural communities. The 1950s marked a turning point in rural sociological circles, toward the social psychological. Buttel and colleagues (1990: 44) describe this period as the “social psychological-behaviorist era of rural sociology,” which “would remain unchallenged in rural sociological studies of agriculture until the early to mid-1970s” (p.  46). This era is defined largely by scholarship devoted to the adoption-diffusion research tradition. One of the earliest adoption and diffusion studies came out of Iowa State University in the 1940s. Sociologists Bryce Ryan and Neal C. Gross (1943) examined the adoption of hybrid corn among Iowa farmers. From this they were able to highlight social and psychological variables they believed hastened the adoption of new technologies (which hybrid corn was at the time) throughout a social network. Since the adoption-diffusion model is primarily concerned with the process by which a technology is communicated through social channels, it ignores many other relevant sociological questions, like “Should technology X be adopted in the first place?” and “Who gains  – politically, economically, and socially  – from adoption and who loses”? The adoption-diffusion model has also been heavily criticized for offering a top-down, expert-driven model of social change. Evidence of its “promotional posture toward technology” (Buttel et al. 1990: 46) can be seen in how the model seeks to educate change agents in how to get an innovation adopted. Adoption-diffusion scholars discuss, for example, how important it is “for change agents to work through opinion leads in a society” and how “a change agent will be more successful if innovations are introduced that match clients’ needs” (Rogers et al. 1988: 314). But what if the change agents are the ones needing to be changed? This question began to be asked with greater frequency in the 1970s, particularly as conventional agriculture and its proponents (those aforementioned “change agents”) came under increasing critical scrutiny. Rural sociology underwent a profound change in the 1970s. This shift, as described by Buttel (2001: 168), who witnessed it firsthand, rejected “the 1960s American rural sociology” with “its emphasis on technique, its diffusionism, its lack of attention to rural poverty and deprivation, and its lack of critical imagination with respect to state policymaking and the role of rural sociology in policy.” A number of variables lie behind this change. For one, rural sociologists, especially those engaged in international development, were growing increasingly disillusioned with the prevailing paradigms. Some, while conducting research in lower-income countries, were becoming exposed to theoretical perspectives (often Marxist in orientation) that challenged the then-dominant development orthodoxy (Buttel et al. 1990: 75). Related to this was the “discovery” of Marxian thought (and shortly thereafter the scholarship of Durkheim and Weber), which had previously gone largely unrecognized in the sub-discipline. This burst of theoretical activity energized a new generation of rural scholars, causing them to see the world more critically. As Marxism is concerned almost exclusively with issues tied to production, it should not be surprising that New Rural Sociology – the title given to this shift in rural sociology in the 1970s – ushered in an intense interest in agriculture and its transformation. While being pulled theoretically toward agriculture, rural scholars also could not ignore the profound systemic changes taking place throughout the agrifood chain. The US lost farms at a rate of 1.1 percent annually from 1980 to 1995. In Japan, the figure

Introduction to a complex field 5

was 2.2 percent, while in the European Union (EU), it was 1.8 percent (Tweeten 2002: 17). This was also the period when the food system began to take on its characteristic “hourglass” shape, referring to the highly concentrated “middle” that connects farms with consumers (see Chapter 2). But even before this, in the early 1970s, a growing chorus of criticism was directed at what was perceived as an unjust, unsustainable system. Critics took aim at things like the green revolution, the environmental impacts of conventional farming, the growing grip agribusiness had on the food system, and the perceived role that land-grant universities had in promoting agricultural technologies to the detriment of family farms and indigenous and local knowledge. From this point on, “the sociology of agriculture became an important focus in rural sociologists’ research” (Friedland 2002: 353). One particularly exciting thing about the sociology of food and agriculture is its multidisciplinary makeup, which explains the growing use of such titles as “agrifood studies” among scholars of this persuasion. C. Wright Mills wrote famously about what he called the sociological imagination. His book The Sociological Imagination, first published in 1959, is arguably still the most widely read book in sociology today. The sociological imagination, to put it simply, involves stepping back and grasping the wildly interconnected character of today’s world. Mills contrasts this with what the “mere technician” does, who, while incredibly well trained, possesses an exceeding myopic understanding of the world. According to Mills, you need not be a professional sociologist to have this imagination. A sociological imagination obeys disciplinary boundaries about as well as air obeys geopolitical borders. What you’ll therefore read in this book is agrifood scholarship infused with a sociological imagination. Far be it from me to play the role of disciplinary police, looking at colleagues’ credentials to determine whether their scholarship ought to be included in this book. Do they look at the (food) world with a critical sociological imagination? Are they committed to generating data, theoretical insights, and methodological innovations in the hope of contributing to a careful conversation about today’s food worlds, both real and imagined? If yes, then they are part of this collective community, regardless of whether their resume lists a “sociology” degree. In his 2004 Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy (2005) called for a public sociology. Public sociology can take one of two forms. The first he calls a “traditional public sociology.” This form of sociology is primarily instrumental, meaning its value lies in advising. The other Burawoy calls “organic public sociology.” This is a form of public sociology that is consciousness raising, which is to say it’s an activity that imparts upon others a sociological awareness. In actively seeking to make the invisible visible, by getting readers to think imaginatively (sociologically speaking) about food, agriculture, and society, I would like to think that this book qualifies as a work of organic public sociology. But then again, much of the sociology of food and agriculture literature is precisely that: a consciousness-raising resource.

Mechanization revolution in agriculture There have been numerous consequential innovations since agriculture’s inception: advances in irrigation in the valleys of Mesopotamia and the Nile 3,000 to 5,000 Before Present (BP); the development of aquatic rice growing in the valleys and deltas throughout Asia between 2,000 to 3,000 BP; and the emergence of cultivation agriculture based on animal-drawn plows, which emerged between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries

6  Introduction to a complex field

in Europe. One of the more momentous innovations over the last two hundred years was the substitution of capital for labor – what is often referred to as the mechanization revolution in agriculture. Examples include the cotton gin in 1793, which separated the cotton lint from the seed (and initially greatly increased the demand for slave labor in US Southern slave states); the threshing machine in 1816, which separated grain from the stalk; the John Deere steel plow in 1837, which turned the soil cleanly, thereby minimizing drag that bogged down earlier plows; and Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1834, which cut grain. Later in the nineteenth century came the tractor, which, unlike the horses it replaced, did not require food, water, or sleep and freed up land used previously to raise hay and oats to feed these four-legged laborers to produce even more commodities. All of this labor-saving technology had a clear impact on the structure of agriculture in countries where it was widely adopted. Take, for example, the US, where the number of human hours required to farm an acre of corn dropped rapidly throughout the first half of the twentieth century: from 38 hours/acre in 1900 to 33 in 1920–4, 28 in 1930–4, and 25 in 1940–4 (and by 1955–9 the figure had dropped to only 10 hours of labor per acre). A study conducted by Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) in the 1930s concluded that while the average farmer left about 1 to 2.5 bushels of corn per acre in their field when harvesting by hand, a hired husker left 3 to 5 bushels – not surprisingly, the latter tended to rush the job. By comparison, a mechanical corn picker left 2 to 3 bushels. In addition, hired huskers charged on average US$2.00 per acre, while custom mechanical pickers cost roughly US$1.25 to US$1.50 per acre. It is not surprising, then, that by 1938 one-third to one-half of the laborers previously hired to hand-pick corn were replaced by mechanical pickers (Colbert 2000). Mechanization also encourages specialization and scale increases at the farm level. Though not the only force driving the specialization trends illustrated in Table 1.1, the mechanization of agriculture undoubtedly contributed to the state’s shrinking commodity basket. The table shows the commodities grown on at least 1 percent of Iowa’s farms, spanning more than a century – bold designates those grown on at least 50 percent of farms. Iowa is not unusual in this regard. Agricultural specialization at the farm level has occurred wherever conventional agriculture is practiced. It is easy to understand why: when a farmer purchases a combine with a corn and soybean head there are certain benefits to expanding the farm’s size while reducing the number of commodities produced on it. Some of this equipment costs more than US$700,000, like John Deere’s “quad track” crop monster – a tractor with four triangle “wheels,” each with its own Caterpillar-like track. To pay-off something that expensive requires going B-I-G, as defined by farming a lot of land planted in one or two commodities. The rationale for this is taught in every AG ECON 101 class, as you want to spread the cost of that sizable investment over as large an operation as possible. The aforementioned mechanical revolution found particular favor in the rapidly expanding agricultural sector in the US, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains, where land was plentiful but labor scarce. Pfeffer (1983), for example, argues that the variability of available labor across the US – specifically looking at family farming in the Great Plains, corporate farming in California, and sharecropping in the South – helps explain the multiple trajectories taken by agriculture across the country. Throughout much of Europe, conversely, the situation was just the opposite at the turn of last century, where population was increasing but the arable land base remained unchanged. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the production “end” of the commodity chain – namely, the farm. It also starts the process, which is carried on through multiple

(%)

1935

(%)

1945

(%)

1954

Horses (95) Cattle (94) Cattle (92) Corn Cattle (95) Horse (93) Chicken (91) Cattle Chicken (95) Chicken (93) Corn (91) Oats Corn (94) Corn (90) Horses (84) Chicken Hogs (89) Hogs (83) Hogs (81) Hogs Apples (84) Hay (82) Hay (80) Hay Hay (82) Potatoes (64) Oats (74) Horses Oats (81) Apples (56) Apples (41) Soybeans Potatoes (62) Oats (52) Soybeans (40) Potatoes Cherries (57) Cherries (34) Grapes (23) Sheep Wheat (36) Grapes (28) Potatoes (23) Ducks Plums (29) Plums (28) Cherries (20) Apples Grapes (28) Sheep (21) Peaches (16) Cherries Ducks (18) Peaches (16) Sheep (16) Peaches Geese (18) Pears (16) Plums (15) Goats Stwberry (17) Mules (13) Pears (13) Grapes Pears (17) Ducks (12) Rdclover (10) Pears Mules (14) Wheat (12) Mules (06) Plums Sheep (14) Geese (11) Stwberry (06) Wheat Timothy (10) Sorghum (09) Ducks (06) Rdclover Peaches (09) Barley (09) Wheat (04) Geese Bees (09) Rdclover (09) Timothy (04) Popcorn Barley (09) Stwberry (08) Geese (03) Timothy Raspbry (07) Soybeans (08) Rye (02) Swtpatoe Turkeys (07) Raspbry (06) Popcorn (02) Swtcorn Wtmelon (06) Bees (05) Swtcorn (02) Turkeys Sorghum (06) Timothy (05) Rasbry (02) Goosebry (03) Turkeys (04) Bees (02) Swt corn (02) Rye (02) Sorghum (01) Apricots (02) Popcorn (02) Tomatoes (02) Swt corn (02) Cabbage (01) Swtclovr (01) Popcorn (01) Goats (01) Currents (01) n = 34 n = 33 n = 29 n = 26 Based on data from the US Census of Agriculture, 1920–2012

1920

n = 17

(91) (89) (83) (82) (79) (72) (42) (37) (18) (16) (05) (05) (04) (04) (04) (03) (03) (03) (03) (03) (03) (02) (02) (02) (01) (01)

(%) Corn Cattle Hogs Hay Soybeans Oats Chicken Horses Sheep Potatoes Wheat Sorghum Rdclover Apples Ducks Goats Geese

1964

n = 12

(87) (81) (69) (62) (57) (57) (48) (26) (17) (06) (03) (02) (02) (02) (02) (02) (01)

(%) Corn Soybeans Cattle Hay Hogs Oats Horses Chicken Sheep Wheat Goats Ducks

1978

n = 12

(90) (68) (60) (56) (50) (34) (13) (09) (08) (01) (01) (01)

(%) Corn Soybeans Cattle Hay Hogs Oats Horses Sheep Chicken Ducks Goats Wheat

1987

n = 10

(79) (65) (47) (46) (35) (25) (10) (08) (05) (01) (01) (01)

(%)

Table 1.1  Number of commodities produced for sale in at least 1% of all Iowa farms for various years from 1920 to 2017

Corn Soybeans Hay Cattle Hogs Oats Horses Sheep Chicken Goats

1997

n = 10

(68) (62) (42) (42) (19) (12) (11) (04) (02) (01)

(%) Corn Soybns Hay Cattle Horses Hogs Chicken Sheep Oats Goats

2012

n = 10

(54) (47) (30) (30) (11) (07) (04) (03) (03) (02)

(%)

Corn Soybns Chicken Hay Cattle Horses Hogs Sheep Goats Oats Honey

2017

(52) (47) (38) (31) (27) (10) (07) (03) (03) (02) (01)

(%)

8  Introduction to a complex field

chapters, of looking more closely at what is known as the changing structure of agriculture. The term is a catchall that speaks generally of changes occurring throughout the food system. Some of these changes include the trend toward fewer and larger farms, the growth in market dominance of food processors and retail chains, and changing food consumption patterns. For the remainder of this chapter, however, the changes examined are those occurring on the farm.

Agricultural treadmills In the 1950s, agricultural economist Willard Cochrane introduced the concept of the agricultural treadmill. Cochrane pointed out that farmers are under tremendous economic pressure to adopt new technologies and increase the size of their operations. The logic behind the argument is straightforward. Those first to adopt a technology, especially those technologies that increase yields and/or a farm’s efficiency, initially experience windfall profits from increased output. Take the case of hybrid corn, which, immediately upon adoption, doubled farmers’ yields. Soon others, seeing the relative advantage of the technology and wanting to capture additional profits, choose to adopt. Yet the cumulative effect of the heightened output eventually exerted downward pressure on prices as the market became flooded – lest we forget, new agricultural technologies rarely do anything to directly increase consumer demand. At this point, following the treadmill logic, those yet to adopt the technology must if they wish to remain in the market. Say the price of corn drops 50 percent as a result of overproduction. Those producing 50 percent more corn are now making the same as they did prior to adopting the output increasing technology, while those who have yet to adopt are now making 50 percent less, even though they are farming exactly the same way as they always have. Note the aptness of the “treadmill” metaphor: those who have invested in new technologies are essentially running in place. They might be producing considerably more, but because of shrinking profit margins, they are not profiting wildly from these increases in productivity. They may even be making less than they did prior to the treadmill picking up “speed.” At the other end, producers slow to adopt are likely to fall off the treadmill, which, in turn, gives farmers still running additional land to acquire as they attempt to pick up speed; though, in reality, most farmers are, at best, merely running in place. For Cochrane, the treadmill logic points to inevitable overproduction as supply continually outstrips demand. To bolster his case Cochrane restates Engel’s Law (after the nineteenth century statistician Ernst Engel), noting that whereas demand for food grows mainly with population growth and is therefore inelastic because the stomach is inelastic, production grows much faster as new technologies increase yields and as additional land is brought into production. One could criticize Cochrane (and Engel), however, for overstating the fixed nature of food demand, which is understandable given when the treadmill argument was first described some sixty years ago. Since then, the biofuel industry has greatly expanded demand for grains, as has the livestock industry. Finally, the data do not entirely support Cochrane’s premise that the human stomach cannot expand. According to the US government-funded National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), US men increased their calorie consumption from 1971 to 2000 by an average of 150 calories per day, while women increased their consumption by over 350 calories (Taubes 2007: 250). Global grain prices have not acted quite as predicted by the treadmill argument either. Market prices and profit margins have not been in an unending downward decline since

Introduction to a complex field 9

the dawn of last century. It is obvious that, in absolute terms, the price of, say, corn has increased many times during the last century – in the US, from roughly US$0.30 a bushel in 1931 to US$3.44 a bushel in mid-2020. Yet when indexed (converted to a normalized average that allows for comparisons across time), the price of farm outputs has remained surprisingly stable  – that US$0.30 in 1931, after adjusting for inflation, would be the equivalent to roughly US$5 in 2020. Meanwhile, the price of inputs has more than doubled – a phenomenon known as the double squeeze in agriculture (van der Ploeg 2006: 259; see Figure 1.1). Unlike other sectors of the economy, farmers sell their products at wholesale prices but pay retail for their inputs (Magdoff et al. 2000: 12). And over the decades the prices of inputs – fuel, seed, pesticides, fertilizer, and labor – have been on the rise. The fact that there are far fewer full-time farmers in affluent countries than a couple of generations ago points to the enduring truth of the treadmill logic. Even though the average farm size has increased considerably with agriculture’s industrialization most farmers today cannot make enough to survive without supplemental off-farm income and government subsidies. More land, more equipment, more expenses, and more output: all for the same (or less) profit. Let’s look more closely at the “squeeze” that farmers experience in terms of their costs. The agricultural treadmill allows us to speak generally about these ever-increasing costs. A consequence of being on the agricultural treadmill is the continual pressure to adopt the latest technologies and inputs while at the same time increasing the scale of one’s operation. This expands operating costs, requiring farmers to produce more just to break even. Yet there are other input-specific treadmills also at work here, which give us a more fine-tuned understanding of why conventional (input-intensive) farming costs as much as it does (see Figure 1.2). The “pesticide treadmill” is perhaps the best known of these additional treadmills, having first been discussed back in the 1970s (van den Bosch 1978). This is the phenomenon where insects evolve to become resistant to pesticides, which leads to more applications and/or higher concentrations and/or new chemicals. This, in turn, leads to still further resistance, and so on. Studies going back to the 1970s note that despite large increases in pesticide use during the 1960s and 1970s crop losses due to 800 700 600

1950 =100

500

Inputs Outputs

400 300 200

100 0

1960 1950 1970 1 2 3 1980 4

2000 1990 2020 2010 5 6 7 8

Figure 1.1  Price index for agricultural outputs and farm expenses, 1950 to 2020 (US) Source: Data obtained from USDA.

10  Introduction to a complex field

• Output • Land under cultivation • “Head” of livestock • Capital/inputs

Market Price

Ability to save seed

Purchased “Internal” seed pest controls

Pesticide Productive use soil ecology

Synthetic fertilizer

Figure 1.2  Agricultural and input treadmills of conventional agriculture Source: Adapted from Howard 2009.

insect pests were actually increasing during the same period (Pimentel et al. 1978), a trend that continues to this day (Pu et al. 2020). Another input-specific treadmill involves the use of synthetic fertilizers. Synthetic fertilizer use can beget higher application rates of these chemicals. This treadmill is particularly acute when tilth, levels of organic matter, and microorganism activity are diminished due to poor soil management practices and a general “mining” of one’s land. Under such a scenario, the only option becomes ever-increasing application levels of synthetic fertilizer in order to maintain one’s yield. Lastly, there is the seed treadmill. A number of protections, as discussed in later chapters, are utilized by the seed industry that either discourage or outright prevent farmers from saving their seeds and replanting them the following season. Moreover, the knowledge of how to save and replant seeds is another resource that farmers lose when they cease practicing seed saving. This creates a dependency upon seed firms. While seed saving continues to be widely practiced in many lower-income countries it is coming under increasing threat. For example, in the US the rate of saving corn seed fell from approximately 100  percent at the turn of last century to less than 5  percent by 1960, while rates for soybean saving dropped from 63 percent in 1960 to 10 percent in 2001 (Howard 2009).

Agricultural subsidies Along with the question, “What does it mean to think about food and agriculture sociologically?” the other query I routinely get from students learning of my interests involves the subject of agricultural subsidies.

Introduction to a complex field 11

Governments have a long history of supporting agriculture. In 1839, for example, the US Patent Office began importing seeds from around the globe and freely distributing them to US farmers, a practice continued by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) with its formation in 1862. British Corn Laws are another example. Introduced by the Importation Act 1815 (though later repealed by the Importation Act 1846), these import tariffs were designed to protect domestic corn (and other grain) prices from less expensive foreign imports. Modern agricultural subsidy policy emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century. Initially, the policies were put into place to act as income redistribution measures. At this time farm incomes, on average, were considerably lower and less stable than those obtained in other sectors of the economy (Gardner 1987). We should also be mindful of the political realities at the time. The rural voting electorate in all countries was a sizable percentage of the total population. In the US in 1930, with 56 percent of the population classified as “urban” and 44 percent classified as “rural,” the problem of rural poverty carried significant currency in Washington, DC. Similar demographics were also found In Europe, though some countries (e.g., France) were significantly more rural than others (e.g., England). Politicians no doubt wanted to be seen as sensitive to the plight of this sizable voting constituency. This justification for subsidies no longer holds. Today, farm incomes in affluent countries are, on average, above those of the average (non-farm) household. But this does not mean that farmers are on the whole better off than their non-farming neighbors. What is different today, compared to the 1930s, is the level of income disparity that exists within the agricultural sector. Unlike three-quarters of a century ago, when subsidies served more as a safety net to protect those most in need, the overwhelming majority of farm subsidies today are going to the most wealthy. Between 1995 and 2019, the US government paid US$396.9  billion in farm payments (see Table  1.2). That is a huge number. Yet China reigns supreme with having the most generous subsidies as far as totals are concerned. China’s government reported annual farm subsidies in excess of US$200 billion (Hopewell 2019), though I do have to point out that their population is more than four times greater than the US population. These payments constitute a large portion of earning for Chinese farmers, accounting for 38 percent of their revenue for wheat, 32 percent for rice, and 29 percent for corn. Among US farmers, by comparison, these figures are 8 percent, 2 percent, and 4 percent, respectively (Hopewell 2019). Globally, the public is paying for more than US$ 1million per minute in farm subsidies, according to one report – a whopping US$700 billion per year (Food and Land Use Coalition 2019). This report notes also that a mere 1 percent of that US$700 billion is spent to benefit the environment, while much of the remainder goes to incentivizing high-emission/high-intensity cattle production, deforestation, and the overuse of fertilizers. Switzerland and Norway deserve a mention here, too. Government agricultural subsidies in these two countries account for approximately 60 percent of farm income. But like in countries like China and the US, these nations are clear that what is really being subsidized is not food as much as landscape coupled with a certain countryside aesthetic. To quote one Swiss farmer, “If we maintain a beautiful landscape, we can also request a salary, a certain remuneration for that” (quoted in BBC News 2018). Tourists, this farmer later notes in the news interview, expect the Swiss countryside to look a certain way; it is in part what drives people to visit. Alternatively, if tourists want a different look they go elsewhere – “If they want to see wilderness they go to Canada, they go to Russia” (quoted in BBC News 2018).

12  Introduction to a complex field Table 1.2  Top 20 farm subsidy programs in US, 1995–2019 Rank

Program

# of Recipients

Subsidy total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Corn Subsidies Wheat Subsidies Soybean Subsidies Conservation Reserve Program Cotton Subsidies Disaster Payments Rice Subsidies Livestock Subsidies Sorghum Subsidies Dairy Program Subsidies Peanut Subsidies Env. Quality Incentive Program Barley Subsidies Tobacco Subsidies Sunflower Subsidies Canola Subsidies Wetlands Reserve Program Oat Subsidies Apple Subsidies Sugar Beet Subsidies

1,907,042 1,600,527 1,285,369 1,045,175 311,183 1,528,421 85,723 953,067 715,117 166,768 105,360 279,783 398,927 405,078 78,470 27,297 6,491 718,523 8,586 9,071

$113,904,922,114 $47,809,641,956 $46,083,242,351 $42,511,699,304 $39,815,217,178 $32,606,270,241 $16,754,924,119 $11,576,869,324 $8,972,594,741 $6,107,850,469 $5,776,245,697 $4,236,241,343 $3,202,992,010 $1,895,477,983 $1,331,893,175 $981,613,616 $532,964,046 $384,837,207 $261,540,987 $242,064,005

Source: Environmental Working Group 2020.

When thinking about farm subsidies, as when thinking about anything that pertains to food and agriculture, it is best to first appreciate the variability in the foodscape, from what is grown, by whom, and for what end. With this in mind, it is worth remembering that while the US remains a major influencer in global food and agricultural policy circles, in large part because of the oversized role it plays geopolitically, other countries are becoming powerhouses in their own right. According to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) of the UN, Brazil and Argentina are now ranked first and second as net exporters – exports minus imports. China, meanwhile, is home to close to a quarter of all world agricultural production (by value in US dollars) and is the fourth-largest exporter and the third-largest importer of agricultural goods. Meanwhile, India became a net food exporter in the 2010s, ranking among the top ten net food exporters worldwide with gross exports close to those of Australia (Diaz-Bonilla 2017). As for that aforementioned variability across foodscapes: while the US has roughly 2.1 million farms, averaging about 175 hectares, the EU reports approximately 11 million farms, averaging 16 hectares. Or take India, which has an estimated 140 million farmers, which average less than 1.5 hectares. And China: about 395 million farms, with an average per farm that is below 1.5 hectares (Diaz-Bonilla 2017). When thinking about things like subsidies and domestic trade policies we need to be mindful of these differences. This variety in landholding structures shows very different country-specific landscapes when thinking through how to connect producers with markets. It also highlights realities on the demand side. In those nations with a majority of small farms, those growers might actually buy more food than they produce and sell. This raises some important policy questions. Should food and agriculture policy in those countries protect and privilege farmers, such as with tariffs that protect domestic

Introduction to a complex field 13

producers by inflating the price of commodities, thus helping to ensure a livable wage but at the expense of increasing the cost of those foods at the retail end of the supply chain? Or should policy focus on consumers, where the aim is to make food affordable, but at the expense of lower commodity prices for farmers? Or might be wondering: Well, can’t we aim for both – well-paid farmers and affordable food? Yes! To get there, however, requires a major restricting of business as usual, a transformation of not only food systems but our entire economy. I’ll touch on that point at various points throughout the book. If subsidies receive such a bad rap, why are they allowed to continue? There is no easy answer to this question. One might begin by noting how the benefits of farm subsidies are concentrated, while their costs are relatively diffuse, namely, spread across all taxpayers. Agricultural producers have more to lose than any other group would individually gain from the removal of subsidies. Consequently, those who gain from this arrangement will likely spend more to maintain the status quo than consumers and taxpayers, for whom subsidies cost individually very little. And so while agricultural subsidies might change subtly from year to year in any given country the policies themselves will likely not go away anytime soon. Another useful concept as we think through why subsidies have proven so resilient is policy path dependence: the well-documented phenomenon whereby once a policy is enacted it tends to become “locked in” (e.g., Knox-Hayes 2012). The greater the levels and history of support, the more dependent the farm and farm supply chain becomes on continuing levels of support, which creates tremendous resistance to the removal of these policies. As farm outputs today are utilized by not only traditional food manufactures but also fuel, livestock, and industrial sectors of the economy, there are a lot of parties interested in maintaining the status quo (though as New Zealand has shown, as discussed in Box 1.2, it is possible to roll subsidies back).

Box 1.2  New Zealand’s Rollback of Agricultural Subsidies The New Zealand government’s Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries explains that “no other country in the world has reduced its subsidies for agricultural production to the same extent [. . .] from 34 percent of gross agricultural revenue in 1984 to almost zero in 1995” (as quoted in Le Heron and Roche 1999: 203–204). To quote one New Zealand farmer who went through the “transition”: “The government took away our subsidies. It didn’t just reduce them. It didn’t phase them out over a stretch of time. It wiped them out all at once. It cut us off cold turkey” (Mackenzie 2018). The level of government protection for agriculture in New Zealand is now among the lowest of all countries. Export subsidies were eliminated, and import tariffs were gradually phased out. Fertilizer and other input subsidies were also abolished, as were free government services for farmers. The elimination of subsidies has led to significant reductions in the use of fertilizers and pesticides as well as in levels of soil erosion while improving water quality; though the increased use of nitrogen fertilizer, used to feed a growing dairy sector, to some degree negates some of these environmental gains. Meanwhile, the concentration of capital – farm consolidation – continues.

14  Introduction to a complex field

Since the mid-1990s, people have been pointing to New Zealand as a nation all countries ought to be emulating, at least when it comes to their approach to subsidies and their embracing of free-market principles. Yet, again, it is important to realize not all countries want the same from their agricultural sector – nor, I should point out, do all Kiwis believe that this highly neoliberal, export-oriented push has resulted in a fair, sustainable, and resilient national-level foodscape. When Christian Berger, from the French Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry, visited New Zealand in 2000 he explained why his country could never adopt a zero-farm subsidy policy (quoted in Reuters 2000). “We have 135,000 dairy farmers,” he explained, talking about France’s dairy and cheese sector. “We could go down to 15,000 farmers by concentrating dairying in a particular area of France that is suitable for dairy farming. But the social and cultural cost would mean putting 100,000 people out of work and losing some quality French cheeses.” Mr. Berger then explained that the French people are willing to pay to maintain these farmers and “safeguard our national cheese heritage.” In short, French farmers do not only produce amazing cheese; they are also tasked with growing and maintaining culture and heritage.

An early sociological question: family farm perseverance Rural sociology took a theoretical “turn” in the 1970s. This gave birth to what was called at the time New Rural Sociology, which, in turn, helped lay the foundation for what we know today as the sociology of food and agriculture. The earliest contributions associated with this turn took the form of a Marxist political economy of agriculture. Prior to this, Marx was all but ignored in rural sociological circles. There were multiple reasons for this, from the unpopularity of Marxist thought in the traditionally more conservative land-grant system to a general theoretical problem with Marxism that seemed to suggest that this framework did not translate well to agriculture. The latter problem centered on the continued perseverance of the family farm. In most other sectors of the economy the capitalist and labor classes were becoming increasingly distinct. Yet in agriculture the family farm, through the first half of the twentieth century at least, was not only surviving but thriving. The “discovery” of Karl Kautsky’s writings was immensely influential upon agrarian-minded sociologists of that era, specifically his book The Agrarian Question (published in 1899). The book attempts not only to extend Marx’s analysis of capitalism to agriculture but also explains why, as all other sectors of the economy were becoming more capitalistic, the German family farm continued to persist. I am introducing this early literature here because it helps contextualize the deeply critical nature of the scholarship to be reviewed throughout this text. Sociologists of food and agriculture are not all self-identified Marxists; indeed, I know few who identify outright with such a label. What we all practice, however, is diligence to never take things at face value and to reject calls for one-size-fits-all solutions, whether talking about markets, neoliberalism, biotechnology, intensification, etc. Bear with me as I review an important early framework that remains relevant to this day.

Introduction to a complex field 15

Perhaps the most influential article from that era comes from Susan Mann and James Dickinson. Published in 1978, this path-breaking work, titled “Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture,” rejects the dominant “subjectivist” arguments about why family farms persist in advanced capitalist societies. One popular subjectivist argument at the time was that family farms persist because of their willingness to accept lower levels of wages – self-exploitation – allowing them to overcome the productivity advantages of capitalist farms. Mann and Dickinson develop instead, through Marx, a structural explanation for why capital–labor relations proceed more slowly in agriculture than in other sectors of the economy – that is another hallmark of sociology, to contextualize everything rather than individualize issues. Mann and Dickinson (1978: 467) note that “[c]apitalist development appears to stop, as it were, at the farm gate.” That represents, for them, a significant anomaly in relation to Marx’s theory of the transitional (which is to say temporary) nature of petty commodity production (a.k.a. the family farm). What then accounts for this anomaly? According to Mann and Dickinson (1978: 466), “the secret of this ‘anomaly’ lies in the logic and nature of capitalism itself.” To put it another way, there’s something about nature itself that is holding capitalism at bay when it approaches the farm gate. Drawing inspiration from Marx, Mann and Dickinson identify the following “barriers”: the gap between production time and labor time, unproductive production time, and risks/invariabilities of production. The gap between production time and labor time

Marx distinguished between the time it takes to produce a commodity, what he called “production time,” and the amount of labor time injected into that production process, what he called “labor time.” Often the two are inaccurately conflated. Yet while “working time is always production time [. . .] not all time during which capital is engaged in the process of production is necessarily working time” (Marx 1967: 242). In many industries these two times almost imperceptibly overlap, such as in manufacturing. And when there is some divergence between the two, such as in the painting of an automobile, technologies are employed to bring the two times more in line (e.g., utilizing special ovens and/or quick-dry-paints). In agriculture, however, production time and labor time are often wildly out of sync. Factors inherent in the production of living things have historically presented natural barriers that capital has been slow to penetrate. As Mann and Dickinson (1978: 472) explain: For example, cereal production is characterized not only by a relatively long total production time (as the produce only matures annually), but also by a great difference between production time and labor time; there is a lengthy period when labor time is almost completely suspended as when the seed is maturing in the earth. In this case the reduction of production time is severely restricted by natural factors and thus cannot easily be socially modified or manipulated as occurs in industry proper. Similarly, in stock production, the reproduction of the species is prescribed by definite natural processes. Neither the period of gestation nor the period of growth to economic maturity (i.e., to five-year-old cattle) can be easily shortened. And those spheres of agricultural production in which labor time and production time diverge the greatest from each other will “prove unattractive to capital on a large scale” (Mann and Dickinson 1978: 473).

16  Introduction to a complex field

In the forty-plus years since the Mann-Dickinson Thesis was first articulated much within agriculture has changed. Most notably, the gap between labor time and production time has been reduced considerably with the help of things like genetic engineering and hormones. For instance, beef cows in the 1930s did not go to slaughter until they were four or five years old. In the 1950s, that number was reduced to between two and three years. Today, the magic number is down to around fourteen months. Dairy cows injected with the hormone rBST (recombinant bovine somatotrophin), which helps mobilize body fat for energy and diverts feed calories more toward milk production than for tissue synthesis, experience increases in milk production by, on average, 10 to 15 percent (although increases of 30 percent have been recorded). Unproductive production time

The divergence between labor time and production time also means there is a lot of unproductive production time. If rent is paid by the farmer that rent covers the entire growing year, regardless of whether they are engaged in value-producing labor. Largescale, industrial agriculture also involves significant sunken costs, in machinery, buildings, land, and so forth. Many of these items are not only steadily depreciating but can lie idle for many months of the year. That aforementioned half-million-dollar tractor, for instance, may be used for only a couple of weeks during fall harvest. The remainder of the year it lies in the machine shed collecting dust and depreciating. This “[i]dle, constant capital thus appears as a burden to the farmer and something to be avoided by the capitalist” (Mann and Dickinson 1978: 475). One of the goals of any profit-maximizing farmer is reducing this unproductive production time. Increasing the efficiency and thus productivity of, for example, a dairy cow increases the number of milkings a dairy farmer performs in a day and therefore reduces the idle time of their milking parlor and milking equipment. Another way to reduce this unproductive production time is to hire someone and their equipment – known as “custom work” – for a specific task to avoid purchasing for oneself expensive equipment that is only used a handful of times a year. Risks/invariabilities of production

Food can also be highly perishable, especially compared to typical industrial products, like cars, shoes, and light bulbs. As Marx (1967: 131) wrote, “the more perishable the commodity is and the greater the absolute restriction of its time in circulation as a commodity on account of its physical properties, the less it is suited to be an object of capitalist production.” Yet recent changes in the food system have reduced these risks considerably, from improvements in packaging, transportation, and refrigeration to the invention of food additives and the genetic engineering of food to withstand picking and transportation. Uncertainties related to weather have also historically presented considerable risk to farmers, though crop insurance and federal farm subsidies now make the production of certain commodities a far safer bet than was the case a century ago. Mann and Dickinson are not arguing that capital has not penetrated agriculture. For them, like Marx, any and all barriers are potentially penetrable, with sufficient research, capital, and knowledge. The question is more a matter of when than of why not. Goodman et al. (1987: 20–21) speak succinctly to the point about how capitalism

Introduction to a complex field 17

has had to treat agriculture differently than most nonfarm industries. In their own words: In manufacturing, “nature” is broken down by processing and introducing into the machine as a raw material input, which thus can be adapted to the speed of machine production. By contrast, nature in agricultural production cannot be reduced to an input; indeed it is the “factory” itself. Consequently, instead of restructuring the production process, mechanization effectively represented an implement adapted to the spatial and temporal characteristics of agriculture. Rather than the Copernican revolution of manufacturing whereby nature must circulate around the machine, nature in agriculture maintains its predominance and it is the machine which must circulate. (Goodman et al. 1987: 20–21) Boyd and colleagues (2001) extend portions of this argument when they propose a distinction between the formal and real subsumption of nature. Doing this highlights the distinct ways that biological systems are industrialized and often made to operate as productive forces in and of themselves. Formal and real subsumption allow for analytic distinctions to be made between biologically based (e.g., cultivation) and non-biologically based (e.g., extractive) industries. Under real subsumption, capital circulates through nature (albeit unevenly) as opposed to around it, as in the case of formal subsumption. This move allows for a more forceful argument to be made about the social agency of capital itself, as having the power to literally transform nature into its own image.

Organic agriculture: the “conventionalization debate” For an excellent example of how sociologists of food and agriculture are trained to question everything, take the conventionalization debate, in which the often-celebrated rise of organics is critically interrogated. The concept of “conventionalization” to reference trends in the organic sector was first introduced by Buck and colleagues in 1997 to describe the infiltration of capital into the organic vegetable industry in Northern California (Buck et al. 1997). As agribusiness capital became increasingly successful in “finding ways to re-shape the particularities of organic agriculture to its own advantage” (p. 17) the original spirit of the organic movement became marginalized as ecological and social concerns went to the wayside. Another key term in this literature is “bifurcation,” which is said to be the result of conventionalization. As agribusiness enters organics, the organic system essentially splits into two: one made up of larger conventional operations that employ input substitution strategies directed at monoculture production of high-value crops for distant markets, the other consisting of smaller farms growing a variety of products for local markets. The conventionalization of organics was helped along considerably by the formation of a uniform organic standard for the entire US. Prior to this, the regulatory environment was a patchwork, with considerable variability across the country. A single organic standard benefited agribusinesses. It meant they now only needed to invest according to that single standard, after which they would then have access to high price premiums across the entire country. The standards eventually adopted in the US – as throughout much of the world – allow for input substitution. That means, just like in conventional agriculture, “internal” (agroecological) controls can be substituted for external inputs. The resulting

18  Introduction to a complex field

agriculture thus differs from the conventional systems only in the type of inputs used. There is therefore nothing about the “organic” label that says it cannot come from a system that is energy intensive, based on large-scale monocultures, and inattentive to social justice and animal welfare issues. There are unquestionably still smaller organic operations out there, just as there are organic farmers that treat their workers and animals with great care. Yet they are frequently relegated to those local markets that do not interest large agribusinesses, like farmers’ markets, roadside stands, and subscription farming (such as Community Supported Agriculture schemes). While these local arrangements might seem to contradict the conventionalization thesis, they, in fact, according to proponents of this argument, are nothing more than default choices for growers with few alternatives. The conventionalization thesis is not without its critics. Some have questioned, for example, the apparent implied inevitability of conventionalization. Research out of New Zealand has led some to conclude that small-scale organic growers can in fact thrive under the current arrangement, even with the obvious infiltration of capital into organics (see, e.g., Coombes and Campbell 1998; Campbell and Coombes 1999). While these studies acknowledge that organics is undergoing a level of conventionalization and bifurcation, they disagree that the trends are inevitable or inherently negative. Take, for example, the government programs in Europe that explicitly support small-scale, artisan, and (often) organic agriculture. And national certification standards: do they not benefit all organic producers – large and small – by increasing the legitimacy of the entire organic sector? In response to critics, and specifically the argument that small-scale organic growers need not worry about becoming marginalized by larger producers, Guthman (2004a) points to the regulatory success had by agribusiness in the formation of federal organic standards in the US. According to Guthman, it is not just that corporate actors have been able to extract significant profits from organics. More importantly, their very participation in organics “alters the conditions under which all organic growers participate in the sector by unleashing the logic of intensification” (Guthman 2004b: 304). In other words, all organic growers, small and large alike, are essentially now participating in a game whose rules were written by (and thus favor) agribusiness. Rosin and Campbell (2009) have argued for the need to go “beyond bifurcation,” making the point that it greatly oversimplifies things to say that capital either has or has not penetrated this sector – or any sector, for that matter. For them, capitalism is neither monolithic nor inconsequential, drawing upon the augments of Gibson-Graham (1996), who point out importantly that concepts like capitalism – or for that matter organic agriculture, conventional agriculture, etc. – ought to be thought of as having diverse potentials. To say something has become, say, coopted by capitalism, or it hasn’t, is not nuanced enough. To do that is to paint (or theorize) with too-broad strokes. Just as we need to use our sociological imaginations to think about food, I  believe Rosin and Campbell are arguing the same imagination ought to apply to our understanding of capitalism and power more generally.

Transition . . . The focus of this chapter has remained (mostly) confined to the farm gate. This limited scope in part mirrors the scope of sociology of agriculture during its early days, from its inceptions in the 1970s up through the 1980s – though, as reflected by the conventionalization thesis debate, the farm remains a popular site of study for scholars to this day. The 1990s, however, marked a noticeable change in the literature, as scholarship expanded

Introduction to a complex field 19

beyond, while still remaining interested in what goes on within, the farm. And with that, the sociology not just of agriculture but also of food (systems) began to take shape.

Discussion questions 1 When sociology first emerged as a discipline in the 1800s the world was predominantly agrarian and all its population ate (including sociologists). Why, then, did it take almost another 100 years until its practitioners started studying agriculture and food systems systematically? 2 Besides mechanization, what else might explain the specialization trends depicted in Table 1.1? 3 What role, if any, should government subsidies play in our foodscapes?

Suggested readings: introductory level Food and Land Use Coalition. 2019. Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use. Food and Land Use Coalition, United Kingdom, September, www.foodandlandusecoalition. org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/FOLU- GrowingBetter-GlobalReport.pdf. Pollan, Michael. 2020. The Sickness in Our Food Supply. The New York Times Review of Books. June 11, www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/covid-19-sickness-food- supply/.

Suggested readings: advanced level Carolan, M. 2020. Rural Sociology Revival: Engagements, Enactments and Affectments for Uncertain Times, Sociologia Ruralis 60(1): 284–302. Gaitán-Cremaschi, D., L. Klerkx, J. Duncan, J.H. Trienekens, C. Huenchuleo, S. Dogliotti, M.E. Contesse, and W.A. Rossing. 2019. Characterizing Diversity of Food Systems in View of Sustainability Transitions. A  Review, Agronomy for Sustainable Development 39(1), https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s13593-018-0550-2.pdf. Lawrence, G. 2017. Re-Evaluating Food Systems and Food Security: A Global Perspective, Journal of Sociology 53(4): 774–796. Reiher, C., and T. Yamaguchi. 2017. Food, Agriculture and Risk in Contemporary Japan, Contemporary Japan 29(1): 2–13.

References BBC News. 2018. Switzerland’s Farmers Become Landscape Gardeners. BBC News, January 24, www. bbc.com/news/world-europe-42731932. Boyd, W., W. Prudham, and R. Schurman. 2001. Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature, Society and Natural Resources 14(7): 555–570. Buck, Daniel, Christina Getz, and Julie Guthman. 1997. From Farm to Table: The Organic Vegetable Commodity Chain of Northern California, Sociologia Ruralis 37: 3–20. Burawoy, Michael. 2005. 2004 American Sociological Association Presidential Address: For Public Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology 56(2): 259–294. Buttel, Fredrick. 2001. Some Reflections on Late-Twentieth Century Agrarian Political Economy, Sociologia Ruralis 41(2): 165–181. Buttel, Fredrick, Olaf Larson, and Gilbert Gillespie. 1990. The Sociology of Agriculture. New York: Greenwood Press. Campbell, Hugh, and Brad Coombes. 1999. Green Protectionism and Organic Food Exporting from New Zealand: Crisis Experiments in the Breakdown of Fordist Trade and Agricultural Policies, Rural Sociology 64(2): 302–319.

20  Introduction to a complex field Colbert, Thomas. 2000. Iowa Farmers and Mechanical Corn Pickers, 1900–1952, Agricultural History 74(2): 530–544. Coombes, Brad, and Hugh Campbell. 1998. Dependent Reproduction of Alternative Modes of Agriculture: Organic Farming in New Zealand, Sociolgia Ruralis 38(2): 127–145. Diaz-Bonilla, E. 2017. That Was Then, This Is Now: WTO and Agriculture. International Food Policy Research Institute. Washington, DC, www.ifpri.org/blog/was-then-now-wto- and-agriculture. DuBois, W.E.B. 1898. The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study, Bulletin of the Department of Labor 3(14): 1–38. DuBois, W.E.B. 1901. The Negro Landholders of Georgia, Bulletin of the Department of Labor 6(35): 647–777. DuBois, W.E.B. 1904. The Negro Farmer, In Negros of the United States, Pp. 69–98, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Environmental Working Group. 2020. The United States Farm Subsidy Information. Washington, DC, https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&statename=UnitedStates. Food and Land Use Coalition. 2019. Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use. Food and Land Use Coalition, United Kingdom, September, www.foodandlandusecoalition. org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/FOLU- GrowingBetter-GlobalReport.pdf. Friedland, William. 2002. Agriculture and Rurality: Beginning the ‘Final Separation’? Rural Sociology 67(3): 350–371. Gardner, Bruce. 1987. Causes of US Farm Commodity Programs, The Journal of Political Economy 95(2): 290–310. Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldschmidt, Walter. 1978 (1947). As You Sow. New York: Harcourt. Goodman, David, Bernardo Sorj, and John Wilkinson. 1987. From Farming to Biotechnology. New York: Blackwell. Gustin, G. 2020. Think Covid-19 Disrupted the Food Chain? Wait and See What Climate Change Will Do, Inside Climate News, July  7, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06072020/ coronavirus-agriculture-food-chain- future-climate-change. Guthman, Julie. 2004a. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Guthman, Julie. 2004b. The Trouble with ‘Organic Lite’: A  Rejoinder to the ‘Conventionalization’ Debate, Sociologia Ruralis 44(3): 301–316. Harris, Marvin. 1986. Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. London: Allen and Unwin. Hopewell, K. 2019. The WTO Just Ruled Against China’s Agricultural Subsidies. Will This Translate to a Big U.S. Win? The Washington Post, March 4, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/04/ wto-just-ruled-against-chinas- agricultural-subsidies-will-this-translate-big-us-win/?arc404=true. Howard, Philip. 2009. Visualizing Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry: 1996–2008, Sustainability 1: 1266–1287. Knox-Hayes, J. 2012. Negotiating Climate Legislation: Policy Path Dependence and Coalition Stabilization, Regulation & Governance 6(4): 545–567. Le Heron, Richard, and Michael Roche. 1999. Rapid Reregulation, Agricultural Restructuring, and the Reimaging of Agriculture in New Zealand, Rural Sociology 62(2): 203–218. Lively, C. 1928. Type of Agriculture as a Conditioning Factor in Community Organization, Publications of the American Sociological Society 23: 35–50. Mackenzie, C. 2018. A  New Zealand Farmer Looks at Subsides Through a Different Lens, Global Farmer Network, August 16, https://globalfarmernetwork.org/2018/08/a-new-zealand- farmer-looksat-subsidies-through-a-different-lens/. Magdoff, F., J.B. Foster, and F.H. Buttel (eds.). 2000. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. New York: NYU Press. Mann, Susan, and James Dickinson. 1978. Obstacles to the Development of Capitalist Agriculture, The Journal of Peasant Studies 5: 466–481.

Introduction to a complex field 21 Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital, Vol. 2. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. Mills, C. Wright. 2000 (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. OECD. 2018. Balancing Paid Work, Unpaid Work and Leisure. Organisation for Economic Co- Operation and Development. Paris, France, May  3, www.oecd.org/gender/balancing-paid-work-unpaid-workand-leisure.htm. Pfeffer, Max. 1983. Social Origins of Three Systems of Farm Production in the United States, Rural Sociology 48(4): 540–562. Pimentel, D., J. Krummel, D. Gallahan, J. Hough, A. Merrill, I. Schreiner, P. Vittum, F. Koziol, E. Back, D. Yen, and S. Fiance. 1978. Benefits and Costs of Pesticide Use in United States Food Production, BioScience 28(772): 778–784. Pu, J., Z. Wang, and H. Chung. 2020. Climate Change and the Genetics of Insecticide Resistance, Pest Management Science 76(3): 846–852. Restrepo, B., and E. Zeballos. 2019. Time Spent Eating Varies by Age, Education, and Body Mass Index. United State Department of Agriculture, April  1, Washington, DC, www.ers.usda.gov/ amber-waves/2019/april/time-spent-eating-varies-by-age- education-and-body-mass-index/. Reuters. 2000. French Farm Subsidies ‘Safeguard Heritage’. Reuters, December 3, www.nzherald.co.nz/ business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=163021. Rogers, Everett, Rabel Burdge, Peter Korsching, and Joseph Donnermeyer. 1988. Social Change in Rural Societies, 3rd edition. Englewood, CA: Prentice-Hall. Rosin, Chris, and Hugh Campbell. 2009. Beyond Bifurcation: Examining the Conventions of Organic Agriculture in New Zealand, Journal of Rural Studies 25(1): 35–47. Ryan, B., and N.C. Gross. 1943. The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities. Rural Sociology 8(1): 15–24. Steiner, A., G. Aguilar, K. Bomba, J. Bonilla, A. Campbell, R. Echeverria, R. Gandhi, C. Hedegaard, D. Holdorf, N. Ishii, K. Quinn, B. Ruter, I. Sunga, P. Sukhdev, S. Verghese, J. Voegele, P. Winters, B. Campbell, D. Dinesh, S. Huyer, A. Jarvis, A. Loboguerrero, A. Millan, P. Thornton, L. Wollenberg, and S. Zebiak. 2020. Actions to Transform Food Systems Under Climate Change. Wageningen, The Netherlands: CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/108489/Actions%20to%20Transform %20Food%20Systems%20Under%20Climate%20Change.pdf. Taubes, Gary. 2007. Good Calories, Bad Calories. New York: Knopf. Telegraph. 2012. Where Do Milk, Eggs, and Bacon Come From? One in Three Youths Don’t Know, June  14, www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/9330894/Where-do-milk-eggsand-bacon-come-from-One-in-three-youths-dont-know.html. Tweeten, Luther. 2002. Farm Commodity Programs, In Agricultural Policy for the Twenty First Century, edited by L. Tweeten and S. Thompson, Pp. 1–34. Ames, IA: Iowa State Press. van den Bosch, Robert. 1978. The Pesticide Conspiracy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. van der Ploeg, Jan. 2006. Agricultural Production in Crisis, In Handbook in Rural Studies, edited by P. Cloke, T. Marsden, and P. Mooney, Pp. 258–277. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Williams, James. 1906. An American Town, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, Columbia.

Part I

The multi-scalar food economy

2 Understanding foodscapes Past, present, and future

A discernible shift occurred in the sociological literature in the late 1980s. After this point, the title “sociology of agriculture” no longer adequately describes the empirical and theoretical focus of the subdiscipline. Increasingly, terms like “food” and “food system” began to be discussed to reflect practitioners’ and scholars’ budding interest in issues beyond the farm. In this chapter, I review some of the frameworks and approaches responsible for redirecting sociologists away from an almost exclusively productivist orientation to one more open to the entire foodscape.

The agrifood hourglass: market concentration A popular measure of market concentration is the four-firm concentration ratio – or simply CR4. The CR4 is defined as the sum of market shares of the top four firms for a given industry. A standard rule of thumb is that when the CR4 reaches 20 percent a market is considered concentrated, 40 percent is highly concentrated, and anything past 60 percent indicates a significantly distorted market. With this rule of thumb in mind, note the CR4s (unless otherwise noted) list for certain agrifood markets in the US in Table 2.1. The CR4 statistic is a measure of horizontal concentration, concentration at one “link” in the food commodity chain. Horizontal integration occurs when firms in the same industry and at the same stage of production merge and dominate a market. Yet the food system has also undergone tremendous vertical concentration – a phenomenon describing companies united throughout the supply chain by a single owner. Smithfield Farms, for example, slaughters one of every four hogs raised in the US – i.e., CR1 of 25 percent. They also own enough US farms (through contract farming) to have possession of about one of every four hogs raised in the country. This duel concentration – horizontal and vertical – gives firms unique advantages that cannot be had in more open markets (see Box 2.1).

Box 2.1  Costco’s vertically Integrated Rotisserie Chicken Supply Chain Costco sells almost 100  million of its famous $4.99 rotisserie chickens annually (Meyersohn 2019). When other companies were raising the price of their chickens, due to, for instance, avian flu, Costco’s price held firm, even if it meant taking a loss.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-3

26  The multi-scalar food economy

Why? This fully cooked and ready-to-eat bird brings people into the store, which is why, to obtain this item, you have to travel to the far back of the building. The hope is that you’ll pick up a few other items while you are there. To ensure that they can hold to that price of $4.99 well into the future, the company is thinking big. There is no better evidence of this than their 2019 opening of a massive $450 million poultry complex in Nebraska. The company is pivoting to become its own meat supplier. The goal: to control its entire chicken supply chain – taking the old saying, “eliminate the middleman,” to the extreme. If Costco can show that such a move is profitable, other companies are sure to follow. Two processes said to underpin agribusiness expansion are “appropriationism” and “substitutionism” (Goodman et al. 1987; Goodman and Redclift 1991). Appropriationism refers to the replacement of elements of the production process with industrial (or manufactured) artifacts. Off-farm industries appropriating on-farm processes and practices allow the former to further extract profits from the latter. Examples of appropriationism include bringing the machine (e.g., combine) to nature (e.g., field); speeding up elements of production time with technology (such as feeding growth hormones to livestock); and making farmers purchase seed every spring rather than allowing them to save seed from one year to the next. Substitutionism speaks to the replacement (or substitution) of costly agricultural end-products with seemingly cheaper industrial ones. Take cane sugar, which was later replaced with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS); then we switched back to cane sugar following public backlash against HFCS. As Friedmann (1991: 74) points out, what food processing firms want “is not sugar, but sweeteners; not flower or cornstarch, but thickeners; not palm oil or butter, but fats; not beef or cod, but proteins. Interchangeable inputs, natural or chemically synthesized, augment control and reduce cost better than Table 2.1  Concentration of US agricultural markets Sector

CR4*

Beef Slaughter Beef Production (feedlots) Pork Slaughter Pork Production Broiler Slaughter Turkey Slaughter Animal Feed Flour Milling Wet Corn Milling Soybean Processing Rice Milling Cane Sugar Refining Corn Seed Soybean Seed GE Cotton Seed

84% Top 4 have one-time feeding capacity of approx. 2 million head 66% Top four have 1.90 million sows in production 55% 58% 44% 52% 87% 85% 85% 95.0% CR1 80.0% CR1 93.0% CR1 96.0%

Source: USDA. *

Unless otherwise stated.

Understanding foodscapes 27

older mercantile strategies for diversifying sources of supply.” The ability to substitute one sweetener (or thickener, fat, protein, etc.) for another gives firms tremendous power, as it allows them to bypass particular farmers, commodities, and entire regions when sourcing ingredients. Most are familiar with the term “monopoly.” It refers to a level of seller dominance, at which point they can effectively choose the price at which to sell something. Monopoly is a state of seller power. But that’s not what we have in the food system, at least not among food processors and manufactures. What they possess (the big ones at least) is buyer power – what is also known as monopsony. Under monopsony conditions, market concentration has reduced the number of potential buyers to the point that the seller has few options other than to accept the price dictated by the buyer. Farmers are in a particularly precarious position. For one thing, they are susceptible to buyer power given the perishable nature of what they produce, meat and dairy producers especially. Those raising livestock rely on selling their animals the moment they have reached an optimum weight. In the case of hogs, a timely sale is also essential in order to clear room for the next litter. For dairy producers, the bulk tank must be emptied daily – sometimes multiple times a day. All of these realities make it difficult for the seller to hold out for a better price, unlike, say, when you post furniture for sale on Nextdoor – the value of that coach isn’t going to drop appreciably from one day to the next. To make matters worse, livestock producers also have an incentive to avoid, when at all possible, distant markets, which makes seeking out competitive bids from faraway buyers unlikely. Shipping live animals long distances can be prohibitively expensive, increase animal mortality and carcass shrinkage, and result in a drop in the quality of their meat, which all negatively impact the price farmers can hope to receive. Another important component to all of this is the rise of contract farming. In livestock production, where contracts are most widely utilized, the contractor (the processing firm) owns the animals. The farmers, conversely, are responsible for building and managing the facilities – usually to the contractors’ specifications. Those farmers, in turn, receive all inputs from their buyer: animals, feed, veterinary services, and transportation when it is time for the animals to be slaughtered. Yet there are a number of problems with this relationship for those at the producer end. First, farmers have little negotiating power. While processors have their pick of producers, farmers may have only one or two processors from whom to obtain a contract. This means producers lack exit power – the power to walk away from the negotiating table knowing others are out there to purchase your product. Contracts also place considerable – many say too much – risk on the shoulders of the producer. Chicken producers can invest as much as US$500,000 to US$1,000,000 in facilities that have a twenty- to thirty-year economic life with no practical alternative use. So once such a facility is built the producer is under tremendous pressure to obtain and maintain their contract with processors, no matter how unfairly it might be structured. And then there are the required upgrades, which can cost a poultry grower an additional US$50,000 to US$100,000. A medium-sized finishing hog operation with six 1,100-head hog houses costs on average between US$600,000 and US$900,000 to build. Is contract farming good or bad for the farmers involved? Well, it all depends on who you are talking about. As I have tried to impress repeatedly, the sociological imagination makes it hard to talk about anything in black-and-white terms. A study of contract farmers involved in tobacco production in Mozambique concludes by saying “that pressures of contract farming are transmitted differently in the case of petty commodity producers

28  The multi-scalar food economy

and capitalist farmers, since each exemplifies different expressions of the struggle between capital and labor and constitutes a different facet of the co-production of class, gender and kinship structures” (Pérez Niño 2016: 1801). Those with large land holdings and access to capital and credit and in possession of social and political capital, tended to fare better with contracts than those without. Standards represent another barrier for many farmers. Research examining Vietnam fish farmers, for instance, shows a positive overall impact of standards on farmers’ well-being but only among middle- to high-income farmers (Hansen and Trifković 2014). Lowerincome farmers, the population most in need of livelihood improvements, received no benefit, as they could not access markets due to lacking the capital and credit to make the investments needed to meet the standards. Interestingly, the richest farmers studied did not benefit from standards either. It was reasoned that this group already possessed wellestablished market positions and benefited most from focusing on quantity (i.e., more units at a lower per-unit price) over quality (i.e., higher per-unit price but producing fewer units), which meant they did not need access to the markets made available through new standards. Who do you suppose pays for the investments needed in order for a farmer to qualify for these new, premium markets? Those with the least market leverage – farmers. This has been going on for decades. Nestlé and Parmalat, for instance, together forced more than 50,000 Brazilian dairy farmers out of business by buying out milk cooperatives in the 1990s and changing the standards for handling and storing milk prior to purchase (Birn et al. 2009). With no other buyers (including cooperatives) left, farmers had little choice but to accept these new demands. Parmalat and Nestlé, after establishing their market dominance, placed the burden of meeting these standards, which involved, among other things, purchasing and installing expensive refrigeration units, squarely on the shoulders of the dairy farmers. The expense was simply too great for many of the small-scale producers, who had minimal capital reserves and limited access to credit. Consequently, many were forced out of business. It is worth being aware of the above processes in light of consumers’ growing desire to know where their food is coming from – what is known as traceability. Traceability is important not only from a “know your food, know your farmer” perspective but also from a food safety perspective. But again, who do you suppose is asked – though it is not really “asking” in light of the aforementioned power asymmetries – to pay for the costs of traceability; of bar coding and other forms of tracking technology that ultimately allow for the tracing of, say, a loaf of bread back to one or two wheat farms? Maybe it should be consumers paying for this knowledge and security. But consumers are price sensitive, especially if another company is willing to squeeze farmers and thus shield eaters from these price increases. Or the companies themselves could absorb those costs, though, of course, that would upset their shareholders. And so, time and again, we find the costs associated with traceability pushed onto farmers (Raine 2019). Rising concentration in the supermarket sector is also proving to be of considerable consequence. Large retail firms like Walmart and Kroger are dealing increasingly with just a handful of very large packers, bypassing the wholesale sector entirely. Retail firms do this in part to exploit the buyer power held by large processing firms. Large retailers, in pursuit of the best price possible, are usually able to get a better deal from large firms like Smithfield Farms than from smaller processors who do not wield the same influence over producers. The processors then pass the tighter margins on to producers rather than absorbing them, which might explain the growing gap between what farmers are paid and retail prices for those products.

Understanding foodscapes 29

Retail sector concentration varies considerably around the world. Independent grocers, for example, still account for 85 percent of all retail sales in Vietnam and for 77 percent in India. At the other extreme is Australia, whose retail sector has a CR2 statistic of 80 percent. CR3 ratios for the retail sectors in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Greece, and Italy are 95  percent, 83  percent, 64  percent, 44  percent, 32  percent, and 32 percent, respectively (Carolan 2018). Large retail firms wield tremendous buyer power thanks in part to the sheer volume they deal in. Walmart’s global sales for 2020 topped US$500 billion. Amazon’s net sales in 2020 topped US$300 billion (up from approximately US$250 billion in 2003). Food and agriculture activists like to beat on companies on the input side of the equation for the power and influence they demonstrate. But to put things in perspective, Bayer-Monsanto does about US$15 billion in sales annually. That is a drop in the bucket compared to what those at the retail end of the supply chain are making. When looked at from farm to fork, the demographics of the food system take on an hourglass figure. The system is relatively wide at both “ends,” representing farmers and consumers, with a severely truncated “middle,” where the food processors and manufactures and food and beverage retailers reside. Adding the even less competitive seed industry (as detailed earlier in Table 2.1), a better metaphor might be an hourglass hanging by a thread. Figures 2.1 and 2.2 illustrate this market concentration for both US and New Zealand, respectively, to show that this phenomenon is not unique to the American case.

Consolidation in the global seed industry Prior to the early 1800s, US farmers either saved seed from their own crops or obtained it through personal networks. Then in 1819, Treasury Secretary William Crawford called upon all ambassadors and military officers stationed overseas to collect seeds and bring them home, where they would be shared freely. This program started informally. Yet in 1839, Commissioner of Patents Henry Ellsworth persuaded Congress to 10–20 dominant input suppliers (e.g., seed, fertilizer, herbicide, implement firms) 2.2 million farms

25,000 (approx) food processors & manufacturers 32,500 (approx) food wholesalers

112,600 (approx) food & beverage retailers

300+ million consumers

300 million

3 million

2 million

1 million

0

1 million

Figure 2.1  US food system “hourglass” (hanging by a thread) Source: Compiled by author.

2 million

3 million

300 million

30  The multi-scalar food economy 10–20 dominant input suppliers (e.g., seed, fertilizer, herbicide, implement firms) 70,000 farms

50 (approx) food processors & manufacturers

5,228 food & beverage retailers

4.4 million consumers

4.4 million

1 million

0

1 million

4.4 million

Figure 2.2  New Zealand food system “hourglass” (hanging by a thread) Source: Compiled by Michael Carolan, with assistance from Paul Stock and Miranda Mirosa.

appropriate funds for it. Ellsworth owned large tracts of land in the Midwest, so his motives may not have been strictly public minded. His office was soon distributing 60,000 seed packages annually through the US mail. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Department of Agriculture was shipping a billion free packages of seed each year. This continued without much controversy until 1883, when a group of representatives from mostly vegetable seed trade firms formed the American Seed Trade Association. No business model can work if the government gives away for free what private merchants want to sell. After decades of lobbying, the group finally convinced Congress to end the free seed program in 1924. Without granting ownership rights to plant breeders, members argued, there would be no incentive to “improve” seed for qualities such as yield, tolerance, germination length, root depth, or aesthetics. As two plant breeders put it in 1919: The man [sic] who originates a new plant which may be of incalculable benefit to the whole country gets nothing – not even fame – for his pains, as the plants can be propagated by anyone. (Bugos and Kevles 1992: 81) Various changes to patent law helped pave the way for the highly commercialized seed sector that we have today. Hybrid corn also played an early role in helping spur along this transformation. By producing progeny that does not breed “true” (which is to say they do not yield at the same level as their parents), hybrid corn essentially forced farmers back to their local seed dealers every spring. And the reason farmers were willing to suddenly

Understanding foodscapes 31

pay for something that had previously been free: higher yields. As Kloppenburg (1988: 92) explains: Despite a reduction of 30 million acres on which grain corn was harvested between 1930 and 1965, the volume of production increased by over 2.3 billion bushels [. . .]. And hybrid corn’s 700 percent annual return on investment remains the much cited and archetypical examples of the substantial returns society enjoys from agricultural research. Yet this praise for hybrid corn must be tempered. It has been argued that had an equal investment been made in utilizing more conventional methods, breeders could have created high-yielding varieties of corn that still bred true, in which case farmers would have been able to save and replant harvested seeds (Dutfield 2008). The adoption of hybrid corn was also helped along with mechanization and increases in farm size that accompanied this movement away from animal and human labor. With mechanization farmers suddenly needed crops that matured at an even rate, allowing stalks to be harvested at the same time. Also required were plants vigorous enough to remain standing by harvest so the ears were accessible to the mechanical corn picker. Stalks lying on the ground are missed by the picker’s head. As a de facto patent, hybrid vigor forced farmers to come back year after year to purchase seed. Once it had been adopted, farmers needed to purchase this previously free input. Yet hybridization does not work for crops like wheat. With no law keeping farmers from replanting their seeds, breeders and seed companies continued to seek legal (e.g., patent) protections for their labors, even after the discovery of hybridization. The hybrid seed corn industry was first to consolidate, as it had the earliest viable market. Seed industry consolidation has been rapid since the 1970s, helped along considerably by plant patents and biotech patents. Philip Howard developed the illustration depicted in Figure 2.3. The figure shows the global seed industry structure (as of 2018), noting also that this sector is dominated by more than just seed firms – those “other” companies tend to be biotechnology firms. Full ownership is represented with a solid line; partial ownership is represented with a dashed line. The figure also shows connections between key firms through joint ventures.

Tensions: legal protections and regulations Patents give seed firms a twenty-year monopoly over their products and have been key in helping firms shore up their market dominance. They also increase firms’ seller power over farmers, as patents allow patent holders to set the price of their products (as opposed to letting the market decide). The right to patent seeds has not always existed, however. In Ex parte Latimer, the US Commissioner of Patents rejected an application on a fiber made out of Southern Pine. This fiber had been “eliminated in full lengths from the silicious, resinous, and pulpy part of the pine needles [of Southern Pine] and subdivided into long, pliant filaments adapted to be spun and woven” (1889 Comm’r Dec.: 123: 124). In rejecting the patent, the Commissioner emphasized the naturalness of the fiber. Specifically, he likened Latimer’s invention to “wheat which has been cut by a reaper or by some new method of reaping” as well as to a middle ear bone that had been removed “in its natural condition” (1889 Comm’r Dec.: 126–127). The Commissioner argued that

Source: Philip Howard. See https://philhowardnet.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Seed2018-1.pdf.

Figure 2.3  Seed industry structure, 1996–2018

32  The multi-scalar food economy

Understanding foodscapes 33

Latimer’s discovery of this “natural product” did not entitle him to patent protections “any more than to find a new gem or jewel in the earth would entitle the discoverer to patent all gems which should be subsequently found” (1889 Comm’r Dec.: 127). The Commissioner also raised concerns over what might happen if the patent were granted, noting that other “patents might be obtained upon the trees of the forest and the plants of the earth” (1889 Comm’r Dec.: 125–126). Thus, while “the alleged invention is unquestionably very valuable” and of “immense value to the people of the country [. . .] the invention resides, I am compelled to say, exclusively in the process and not at all in the product” (1889 Comm’r Dec.: 127). And so was born the “product-of-nature doctrine,” a legal barrier the kept patents from being issued to any and all organisms – including seeds – throughout much of the twentieth century. A property right is only valuable if it can be enforced. The first step towards enforcement is the ability to specify the identity of the property. While relatively easy to accomplish with a tract of land, specifying the identity of a living organism was long considered problematic given the lack of knowledge about biological identity (e.g., blood types, DNA, etc.). The identity-specifying tools born out of the genetic revolution were not yet available to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientists, inventors, and judges. This left patent law ill equipped to see independent “objects” when it looked at biological artifacts, even those altered by human hands. This is why, for example, the product-of-nature doctrine disqualified all but asexually reproducing plants from gaining patent protection under the 1930 Plant Patent Act; only those plants looked sufficiently “fix” (unchanging). An asexually reproduced plant – like a rose propagated through a “cutting” – is genetically identical to the plant it was derived from. The legal landscape changed entirely in 1980 with the in/famous US Supreme Court ruling of Diamond v Chakrabarty. In 1972, Ananda Chakrabarty, a biochemist for General Electric Company, filed a patent for a bacterium that had been genetically altered to consume oil slicks. Initially, Chakrabarty’s patent application was denied for reasons relating to the product-of-nature doctrine. In the end, however, the US Supreme Court granted Chakrabarty his patent claims in a 5-to-4 vote. The court ruled that the bacterium was human made, that it was a new composition of matter, and, finally, that whether an invention is alive is not a legitimate legal question. In supporting their ruling, the Court wrote the now-famous passage that explains the virtually limitless subject matter potentially eligible for patent protection: The Patent Act of 1793, originally authored by Thomas Jefferson, defined statutory subject matter as “any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new or useful improvement.” [. . .] In 1952, when the patent laws were recodified, Congress replaced the word “art” with “process,” but otherwise left Jefferson’s language intact. The Committee Reports accompanying the 1952 Act inform us that Congress intended statutory subject to include anything under the sun that is made by man. (447 U.S 303 [1980]: 308–309) (my emphasis) What the Court essentially argued was that Chakrabarty’s involvement in making this bacterium disqualified it from being labeled “natural,” a fact that in turn exempted it from the product-of-nature doctrine. In the court’s own words: “His discovery is not nature’s handiwork, but his own; accordingly, it is patentable subject matter under § 101” (Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 206 USPQ 193 [1980]). Yes, the patented bacteria

34  The multi-scalar food economy

were still living organisms. But what the Court chose to focus on instead was Chakrabarty’s involvement in making them. This involvement, essentially, was sufficient to give them a non-natural identity, therefore qualifying this invention for patent protections. And so was born bio-technology. Yet this identity is not fixed, as reflected in the tensions that have arisen between patent laws and, for instance, food safety regulations. Proponents of biotechnology, when discussing issues of regulation, routinely make statements such as: “The genes introduced through GM [genetic modification] are not qualitatively different from those genes introduced by conventional breeding from exotic sources or from novel genes produced through mutation” (Trewavas and Leaver 2001: 456). How can this be? Do not genetic patents rest upon the assumption that biotechnologies are qualitatively different from their non-GM counterparts? In short: how can they be both natural and unnatural? When the goal is minimizing government regulation and winning over public opinion, biotechnology is given a different identity. The goal among proponents now becomes to make these objects appear “natural” by directing attention away from the social networks, people, capital, and technology that brought them into existence. Instead, connections to the biophysical realm, which were earlier ignored when the argument was about patents, are now elevated. Bt corn provides a good example of this. This corn has been genetically modified by transfer of a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that has insecticidal properties. To minimize government regulation and win over public sentiment, proponents of Bt corn like to point out that Bt corn is natural given that this bacterium occurs naturally in soils. Another “naturalizing” technique is what is known as the substantial equivalence principle. The principle of substantial equivalence is widely used by national and international agencies, such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare, the US Food and Drug Administration, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Health Organization and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The concept was first articulated by the OECD, in the seminal publication “Safety Evaluation of Foods Derived by Modern Biotechnology: Concepts and Principles” (OECD 1993). The principle requires regulators to compare genetically engineered foods with their nearest known “natural” counterpart. If the engineered food is found to be substantially equivalent to its non-engineered counterpart, through such techniques as metabolic profiling and protein profiling, it is said to be at least as safe as that counterpart. Evaluating the substantial equivalence of a new food involves measuring the bioavailability and concentration of important nutrients in the food, such as proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and fats. Such biochemical profiling is conducted to ensure that engineered foods fall within the normal range of variability as found in their non-engineered counterparts. If no discernible differences are noted, then the food is said to be of an “equivalent composition.” At this point, these objects have had their identity reversed to bio-technology.

The rise of digital agriculture “Digital agriculture” is an umbrella term that speaks to the growing use in agriculture of cloud based, big data applications and other platforms that rely heavily upon code and other digital applications  – platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics and other so-called autonomous equipment. The digital agriculture sector has changed radically in

Understanding foodscapes 35

the last decade. As with biotechnology, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) was an early investor into this space. In 2012, the company spent US$210 million to acquire Precision Planting, which at the time was one of the largest precision planting equipment manufacturers in the US. In 2013, they bought Climate Corporation – the world’s largest precision farming platform at the time – for almost $1 billion. Estimates from 2014 reported the platform was used on as much as one-third of all US farmland. Then in 2014, Monsanto purchased the soil analysis division of Solum, and, in a separate deal, 640 Labs, a mobile technology and cloud-computing firm specializing in smart farming applications. In 2016, the company acquired the European farm management software company VitalFields, and in 2017 they added to their portfolio the irrigation-specific data analytics company Hydrobio. John Deere has also made significant investments in these technologies, especially since 2017 with the purchase of the artificial-intelligence startup Blue River Technology. Blue River was one of the first companies to make substantial advancements into the “see & spray” space, creating a weed control cotton machine capable of scanning the ground and distinguishing between crops and the weeds, down to a level of millimeters. The technology is designed to target weeds with herbicides and kill them. Diagnostic tools have also been designed for harvest. In addition to allowing farmers to keep detailed records of crop quantity (and yield variability within a field), crop quality can also be monitored. In cereals, traits like protein and moisture content are measured in combines equipped with near-infrared spectroscopy. Advances are also being made with autonomous equipment, like the tractors being developed by Case IH and New Holland. These machines were introduced at the 2016 Farm Progress Show and can be controlled from a smart phone. The French company Naio Technologies engineered a tractor that uses laser and camera guidance to navigate between rows of fruits and vegetables while its sensors scan individual plants as it hunts for weeds. Automation has also made considerable inroads in dairy farming with automated milking parlors. Though less than 5  percent of US dairy farms utilize robots, the figure is expected to increase by 20 to 30 percent annually “for the foreseeable future” (Mulvany 2018). Robotics in dairy farming is already a US$1.6 billion global industry (Mulvany 2018). Or take the case of New Zealand: while some level of automation (e.g., rotary dairy sheds) has been reported on 77  percent of farms, out of the country’s roughly 12,000 dairy farmers, only 25, as of 2019, had fully robotic dairy sheds (McBeth 2019). Facial recognition is also used in agriculture. Dairy and other livestock operations are using repurposed facial recognition algorithms to detect lameness or variability in animals. Estimates place these A.I.-assisted detections as occurring a full two days prior to when a trained technician can see problems (Grifths 2020). The agricultural drone market is also growing rapidly, with analysts expecting its valuation to hit US$2 billion by 2026 due to the technology’s versatility regardless of a farm’s size (Ag Daily 2018). Drones are used for applications such as crop assessment, where they generate spectral data and reveal crops that have been injured by drifting pesticides. They can also spot herbicide-resistant weeds growing between rows. Other drone uses include counting livestock, monitoring for disease, monitoring water (e.g., checking irrigation cannels), and even pollination – a New York–based start-up has developed pollinating drones for almond, cherry, and apple orchards (Ehrenberg 2018). While adopting these technologies at high rates, conventional farmers nevertheless have mixed feelings over their use. To quote from a report based on a survey conducted

36  The multi-scalar food economy

by the American Farm Bureau (2015), “Fully 77.5 per cent of farmers surveyed said they feared regulators and other government officials might gain access to their private information without their knowledge or permission. Nearly 76 per cent of respondents said they were concerned others could use their information for commodity market speculation without their consent.” Moreover, while 81 percent of farmers believed they retain ownership of their farm’s data, 82 percent said they had no idea what companies were doing with it. This ambivalence is not unique to North American farmers. Farmers around the world are adopting these technologies, for mixed reasons, while simultaneously remaining anxious about if and how companies use this data (Pierpaoli et al. 2013). While rates of adoption of these technologies are high, as evidenced above, there is concern – rightly so – over what this all means from the standpoint of ownership and access. The (US) Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in 1998 to prevent digital piracy. The DMAC, to put things plainly, made it illegal for a tractor’s owner to access the “brains” of their smart equipment. This act essentially made it illegal for farmers to do most repairs to equipment they allegedly owned, save for things like changing oil and repairing belts, as most repairs require accessing their equipment’s engine control unit. According to John Deere, in a 2015 letter to the US Copyright Office, farmers do not actually own the equipment they buy. Rather, they receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle” (as quoted in Wiens 2015), an argument with remarkable parallels to those made by biotechnology firms on the question of who owns patented seeds (Carolan 2010). In October  2015, the Librarian of Congress ruled in favor of an exception to the DMCA that would allow anyone who owned a tractor (or car, truck, etc.) to tinker with its code. (The Librarian of Congress has a curious position, in that she or he both oversees the operation of the world’s largest library, with a staff that numbers in the thousands and a collection in the millions, and oversees the US Copyright Office, the government office that manages the register of all copyrighted materials.) While seemingly a blow against farmer dependency, by freeing farmers from their implement dealerships and their “approved” technicians, the win was hollow. As it turned out, only the individual who purchased the equipment can access and tinker with its software under the exception. The moment she brings her (non-approved) tech-savvy mechanic to look at it, a line in the legal sand will have been crossed, and they all become liable for copyright infringement. Moreover, the exemption does nothing to free up diagnostic equipment and manuals, which remain in the control of firms like John Deere. It is hard to fix something if you do not know what exactly is wrong with your device due to a lack of equipment, manuals, and expertise. And so, this dependency continues. A lot has been written about how farmers have lost important local knowledge of their land and livestock thanks to intensification and scale expansion (e.g., Nazarea et al. 2013; Shiva 2016). Many digital farming applications  – often called “smart” or “precision” farming – promise to correct this knowledge deficit, allowing farmers the ability to make management decisions down to the square inch of their fields (Nebraska Corn Board 2019). At one level, then, techniques like precision agriculture make adopters as knowledgeable about their land as someone with intimate local knowledge of their fields. Yet at another level, it is important to realize that “local knowledge” from precision techniques is different in important ways from “local knowledge” acquired through agroecological/ regenerative agriculture techniques (topics for a later chapter). Recognizing these differences helps us talk about further dependencies introduced by these platforms, namely as farmers lose the ability to “read” fields and animals in a certain way.

Understanding foodscapes 37

To illustrate this point, about precision techniques fostering a distinct type of local knowledge, I  will draw from some of my own research. The following comes from a study based on interviews with farmers from the US states of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Illinois and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan (Carolan 2020). James – not his actual name – farmed approximately 2,000 acres and has come to rely, in his words, “heavily on these digital platforms for knowing what’s going on in my fields.” He proceeded to show me on his phone a variety of different dashboards and interfaces that told me almost anything a conventional farmer would ever want to know about their fields, from predictive weather software to plant counts, end-of-season yield estimates, and satellite soil maps. The farm had been in his family for multiple generations, so I asked how previous generations knew the land, without the aid of satellites, predictive analytics, drones, and broadband internet displays. “My dad knew his ground like the back of his hand,” James explained, later adding that “while he didn’t have the detailed knowledge that I have – it’s called ‘precision agriculture’ for a reason – he learned to read the land better than I ever could” (Carolan 2020: 6). When asked to say more about how his knowing of the farm differed from how his parents knew the land, he told me: I read screens and dashboards. That’s where I  get my info from. My parents read fields. They made judgements by the look of the plants. I even remember dad when he used to smell and taste the soil. (Carolan 2020: 6) I am not suggesting that one way of knowing is better or worse than the other. What does it mean to know one’s operation like a dashboard versus knowing it by, say, the smell, feel, and taste of things? The latter is not even possible given the size of farms today in countries like the US, where many are well in excess of 1,000 acres. But once you become dependent on a platform for your knowledge, you become . . . well, dependent on it. And there are real costs associated with that dependency.

Commodity systems approach The commodity systems approach emerged in the 1980s as part of the “new” sociology of agriculture. Over time, it had grown into one of the “major foci of theory and research” for agrifood scholars (Buttel 2001: 171). Commodity systems analyses include but cannot be reduced to what are called “commodity studies.” For example, de Janvry and colleagues (1980) provide an early example of a tomato commodity study. They focused on one issue as it related to one segment of the commodity chain – namely, the mechanization of tomatoes at the site of production and its social consequences. Such limited breadth justifies locating this study in the commodity studies camp. Compare this to an early lettuce study (Friedland et al. 1981), which more fully embodies the spirit of a commodity systems approach. In order to fully understand the social consequences that came with mechanical harvesting the authors looked beyond the site of production and included in their analysis lettuce processors as well as non-agricultural aspects of life, such as community well-being; after all, there are always households and communities reliant about commodities for their livelihoods. The difference between commodity studies and commodity systems studies (and other related approaches; see Box  2.2) are often matters of degree rather than of kind. For

38  The multi-scalar food economy

example, while Wells’s (1996) Strawberry Fields spends a great deal of time examining labor relations, space is also given to issues like ethnicity, worker–grower relations, and corporate power. Conspicuously absent from her analysis, however, are issues related to strawberry distribution, processing, and marketing. Morgan’s (1980) Merchants of Grain omits just the opposite, looking almost entirely at the agribusinesses that dominate the global trade of grain while ignoring grain farmers. While both studies look at a number of variables, the general consensus seems to be that neither looks at enough to justify the label commodity systems study (Friedland 2001: 83).

Box 2.2  Commodity Chains and Networks, Filières, and Global Commodity Chains Even among the initiated (I speak from personal experience), the commoditytype literature can be head-scratchingly complex. You have, for example, commodity chain analyses, commodity network analyses, the filière approach, and the global commodity chain literature. Not helping matters, while some view these approaches as each offering something unique, others prefer to “use ‘commodity systems,’ ‘commodity chains,’ and ‘filières’ interchangeably [. . .] [as] all have a similar meaning and refer to the methodology for studying a specific commodity from its origins in production to consumption” (Friedland 2004: 5). With this in mind, I will do my best to distinguish these approaches in a couple sentences. • •

•

•

Commodity chain: Illuminates the connections between consumers, producers, and workers, giving particular attention to the unequal distribution of power between actors and the social relationships they possess to capital. Filière approach: The filière approach can follow any number of research traditions, including systems analysis, institutional economics, management science, and Marxist economics. As Raynolds and Wilkinson (2007: 35) explain, “French filière traditions emphasize the institutional regulation of commodity circuits. A regulation framework provides an analytical window into the organizational dynamics of agrifood chains and agro-industrial complexes, illuminating how economic power is exercised by lead actors over distinct links in the production chain without resorting to vertical integration.” Global commodity chain: Researchers interested in global commodity chains (GCC) place particular importance on issues of governance. This concept highlights that GCC rarely operate in either a free-market or through a series of arm’s-length market-based transactions. In GCC, rules, laws, and organizations (e.g., WTO) are said to strongly influence actors along the entire commodity chain. Commodity network: “The commodity network approach is more inclusive and wider-reaching than the GCC analysis on which it is based” by also looking at the values actors draw on during market transactions (Klooster 2006: 545).

William Friedland published a seminal paper in 1984 detailing five basic foci for commodity systems research: production practices or labor process; how growers organize

Understanding foodscapes 39

themselves with respect to other actors; the character of the labor market and supply and the ways workers organize themselves with respect to production; how scientists are mobilized and conduct their research with respect to food production; and the marketing and distribution of commodities beyond the farm gate. Since then, others have added to Friedland’s original list. Dixon (2002), for example, argues that attention must also be paid to product design and regulatory politics. Dixon has also argued that Friedland’s original methodology unwisely omits the site of consumption, noting the importance of such variables as food access, the eating environment, and the eating experience. By nature of its focus on the system, this approach shows how little control exists at either “end” (farm or fork) of the commodity chain. Power, rather, lies in the middle of the hourglass, with giant agribusinesses, supermarket retailers, and fast food producers. Making room for consumption in commodity system analyses does, however, allow researchers to examine the influence of such important actors as nutritionists, market researchers, and specialists, who engage in symbolic manipulation and thus give shape to consumption patterns. The commodity systems literature, on the whole, tends to be heavily empirical (Buttel 2001: 174). While not atheoretical, commodity systems scholars tend to let empirical concerns – for instance, “How should I go about studying strawberries?” – guide their research. Lacking a shared theoretical grounding allows different “flavors” of commodity systems scholarship to emerge, based upon the theoretical inclinations of the analyst. One such “flavor” comes from commodity system scholars guided by actor network theory, also known as ANT. To put it simply, ANT privileges nothing (or everything). What matters, according to ANT, are patterned networks consisting of human, nonhuman, living, and inanimate artifacts. Who (or what) make up those networks are given equal explanatory weight. This separates ANT from most social theories, where humans (and human action) are given analytic superiority. Lawrence Busch and Arunas Juska were among the first to offer a sustained ANT-inspired commodity systems approach (see, e.g., Busch and Juska 1997; Juska and Busch 1994). They examined rapeseed, or what is better known as canola. This seed had limited market and agricultural value until a scientific network was mobilized, including the mobilization of rapeseed itself, and certain negative qualities associated with the seed were removed. The success of this network is evidenced by rapeseed’s transformation from a marginal global commodity to something traded to the tune of US$40 billion a year. It is difficult to adequately define the boundaries of the commodity systems literature; a point that speaks to the impact the approach has on the sub-discipline as a whole. One would be hard-pressed today to find an analysis that does not, when examining a commodity or a category of commodities, follow the artifact as it moves through space and time within an ever-changing food system. In many cases, studies might read like a commodity systems analysis without formally taking up such an identity (see, e.g., de la Pena 2010; Freidberg 2009; Reynolds and Cohen 2016). This is perhaps the greatest testament of all to this approach: that it is now common sense when studying food to never just look at food itself but also at the actors, institutions, and rules and regulations that connect farms with kitchen tables.

Food regime By the late 1980s, rural studies was said to be suffering from a “hangover” (Marsden 1989: 313) thanks to a decade of literature giving analytic superiority to the point of production – in other words, to agriculture itself. Perhaps the term “hangover” overstates

40  The multi-scalar food economy

things a bit. At the very least, we can say sociologists of agriculture were sipping heavily from the Mann-Dickinson Thesis bottle, which helps explain why the debate began to grow old by 1989, the year Friedmann and McMichael’s seminal Sociologia Ruralis paper on food regimes was published. Almost a decade earlier we can already find studies that look beyond the point of production, which recognize agriculture as but one point in a complex network (see, e.g., Friedland et al. 1981). As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, agrifood scholars were calling for approaches that left analytic room for dynamics, processes, and practices beyond the farm gate, like those associated with supply chains and at the point of consumption. There was also concern that the theoretical arguments that dominated sociology of agriculture scholarship in the 1980s were – or at least could be interpreted as – suggesting linear trajectories of agrarian change. Much of the “agrarian question” literature from the 1980s ignored issues of historical, spatial, and social contingency, leaving us with a single-arrow understanding of social change. Yet the arrows of history point in all directions when it comes to agrifood systems. For example, commercial farms in Japan average 1.9 hectares, while in the US the average farm (both commercial and noncommercial) size is 182 hectares. I’ve already written earlier in this chapter about the tremendous variability in market concentration across national retail sectors. Or take global tomato processing: the US and EU account for 42 percent and 34 percent of world production, respectively. Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Latin America (minus Chile), the Middle East, and Africa, and Turkey make up 1 percent, 1 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent, 4 percent, and 4 percent, respectively, of the world’s share of tomato processing (Pritchard and Burch 2003: 253). The agrarian theories of the1980s are not terribly helpful at helping us understand this global variability. The field made a dramatic turn in the late 1980s. The late Fred Buttel (2001: 171, 173), famous for (among other things) his encyclopedic knowledge of the literature, summed up this “turn” as follows: But only five years after the seminal piece – Friedmann and McMichael’s 1989 Sociologia Ruralis paper on food regimes  – was published, the sociology of agriculture had undergone a dramatic transformation. [. . .] [T]he Friedmann and McMichael Sociologia Ruralis article on food regimes was arguably the seminal piece of scholarship in the abrupt shift away from the new rural sociology, and “regime-type” work has proven to be one of the most durable perspectives in agrarian studies since the late 1980s, in large part because it is synthetic and nuanced. “Regime-type” research seems to be as popular today as in 2001. I concede that as this research tradition is now over twenty-five years old I cannot possibly do it justice through brief review. There are some characteristics shared by all food regime studies, which I will attempt to highlight. Just to be clear, regime-type theorizing is not a rejection of agrarian political economy but an extension of it (Borras et al. 2010: 575). It is also debatable whether we should think of food regime as theory per se. Some (like McMichael) think it is best understood as an approach to the contingent history of capitalist relations; a way, in other words, of ordering how we think about the structuring of the world food order. The aforementioned 1989 Friedmann and McMichael piece views the global food system as driven as much by historically specific political variables as by economic logics. Regime-type research is careful not to divorce agriculture and the food system more generally from state agricultural policies and the capitalist world economy. That is because,

Understanding foodscapes 41

ultimately, “the food regime concept is a key to unlock not only structured moments and transitions in the history of capitalist food relations, but also the history of capitalism itself ” (McMichael 2009b: 281). The term “food regime” is therefore a bit of a misnomer, as it “is not about food per se, but about the relations within which food is produced, and through which capitalism is produced and reproduced” (McMichael 2009b: 281). A key component of the food regime is the “rule-governed structure of production and consumption of food on a world scale” (Friedmann 1993: 30–31). Food regimes are defined by periods of relatively stable sets of rule-governed relationships, separated by unstable periods shaped by political contests over a new way forward (Friedmann 2005: 228). This focus on rules reflects a long-standing influence by what is known as regulation theory. A significant focus of the regulationist literature is on detailing the modes of control (based on rules, culture, and political arrangements) that lie behind periods of capitalist growth, which, in regulation theory, have historically been separated into two distinct epochs: mid-twentieth-century Fordism (mass production, undifferentiated mass market, etc.) followed by post-Fordism (flexible production, diversification of commercialized cultures and lifestyles, etc.). An influential critique by Goodman and Watts published in 1994 caused most scholars to rethink Fordist-type concepts to describe epochs in the political economy of agriculture; though regulation theory lives on through, for example, revised concepts like “global post Fordism” (e.g., Bonanno and Constance 1996). Among other things, Goodman and Watts argue that agriculture is sufficiently different from industry, which precludes the two sectors from being conflated into one. The critique did not, however, stop scholars from seeing “significant world-historical periodisation anchored in the political history of capital” (McMichael 2009a: 144). The Goodman and Watts piece appears to have, however, pushed regime scholars to make their frameworks more open to historical, spatial, and social contingency. Evidence of this can be seen in McMichael’s (2009a) and Friedmann’s (2005) recent iterations on the subject, where they make space for social movements in their theorizing. Food regime scholars agree about what are known as the first and second food regimes. The first food regime (approximately 1870–1930s) was rooted in British imperialism. Its networks consisted of colonial tropical imports to Europe and basic grain and livestock imports from settler colonies, all to help fuel Britain’s image as the “workshop of the world.” Under this regime, “development” was understood as an articulation between agricultural and industrial sectors. The policies and actions located in the former spurred growth in the latter. For instance, producing calories cheaply makes it easier for workers to stomach low wages, which is why sugar was so important to early industrial capitalism (Mintz 1986). Later, cheap corn, rice, and wheat became equally essential for fueling cheap labor and thus the treadmill of production. Harriet Friedmann’s (1978) study of the late-nineteenth-century North American family farmer details how the growth of a world wheat market reduced grain prices and thus the cost of labor. The second food regime (approximately 1950–1970s) was organized around the disposal of agricultural surplus from the key settler state – namely, the US. Within this food regime, excess food was utilized as a strategic resource in an attempt to win the Cold War. Food aid helped secure loyalty against communism while aiding in opening up markets to US products. The second food regime was thus organized around the reproduction of US hegemony. The country’s highly subsidized cheap food (food surplus) following World War II helped feed labor in less affluent nations (if food is cheap, people won’t demand to be paid so much) while helping to pacify urban labor forces in the developed North (McMichael 2009b: 285).

42  The multi-scalar food economy

While there is remarkable consensus among food regime scholars, there are also points of debate. For example: where are we today  – the second food regime, a third food regime, or perhaps somewhere in between? There seems to be an emerging consensus that a third food regime is either emerging or well underway. Friedmann (2005: 229), who can be placed in the former camp, claims to have identified certain contradictions that point to an emerging “green capitalism” regime: “a new round of accumulation [. . .] based on selective appropriation of demands by environmental movement, and including issues pressed by fair trade, consumer health, and animal welfare activists.” Campbell (2009: 309) has echoed this argument in his description of an emerging “Food from Somewhere” regime, which he characterizes as “having denser ecological feedbacks and a more complex information flow in comparison to the invisibility and distanciation characterizing earlier regimes as well as contemporary “ ‘Food from Nowhere.’ ” Campbell notes that, while this regime does offer an opportunity for changing in important ways the character of certain key food relations and their impacts on the environment, its legitimacy, somewhat paradoxically, relies on the continuing existence of the global-scale, unsustainable regime which it is viewed as an alternative to. “The key question,” according to Campbell, is “whether new food relations can open up spaces for future, more ecologically connected, global-scale food relations” (p. 309). McMichael is less tentative in his assertions about where we are, arguing that we have entered a third food regime  – what he calls the “corporate food regime.” Under this regime, the goal is no longer about providing labor with cheap food but “rendering [. . .] the peasantry increasingly unviable” with the goal of eliminating all remaining barriers – to land, nature, labor, capital, etc. – to agribusiness (McMichael 2009b: 285). Unlike the two previous regimes, the third is said to have moved away from being controlled by one hegemonic nation-state, with China being perhaps the most important new player on the global agrifood stage (McMichael 2019). We can, on the one hand, view this uncertainty around the so-called third regime as evidence of weakness on the part of the framework for explaining the world we are in. Or, on the other hand – the position I prefer – we can view this productive debate among food regime theorists as evidence that the framework is not linear and that it is sufficiently flexible to see multiple food trajectories, which are simultaneously unfolding before our very eyes (Carolan 2013).

Transition . . . Chapters  1 and 2 devoted significant space to discussing changes to the structure of agriculture and the food system more generally. Building on this discussion, Chapter 3 reviews additional reasons for these changes, particularly at the international level. It also critically examines beliefs underlying contemporary food policy toward issues such as hunger, malnutrition, and development.

Discussion questions 1 What are some potential benefits associated with market concentration within food systems? What are some of the costs? 2 What would it take to break up this market concentration and thus make the food system hourglass less “skinny” in the middle? 3 After reading this chapter, how would you begin to describe the concept of “food system” to a friend or family member, making clear how it differs from a supply chain?1

Understanding foodscapes 43

Note 1 Taken from personal communication with Phil McMicheal, June 18, 2011.

Suggested readings: introductory level Del Ray, J. 2020. Amazon Was Already Powerful. The Coronavirus Pandemic Cleared the Way to Dominance. Vox, April  10, www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/10/21215953/amazon- fresh-walmartgrocery-delivery-coronavirus-retail-store-closures. Mintz, Sidney. 2009. Sugar: Old Champion, New Contenders, Food Ethics 4(2): 5–10. Orlowski, A. 2019. Open Source Technology Could Be a Boon to Farmers. Civil Eats, December 2, https://civileats.com/2019/12/02/open-source-technology-could-be-a-boon-to- farmers/.

Suggested readings: advanced level Carolan, M. 2020. Acting Like an Algorithm: Digital Farming Platforms and the Trajectories They (Need Not) Lock-In, Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020- 10032-w. Howard, Phil. 2019. Corporate Concentration in Global Meat Processing: The Role of Feed and Finance Subsidies, In Global Meat: Social and Environmental Consequences of the Expanding Meat Industry, edited by Bill Winders and Elizabeth Ransom, Pp. 31–54. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McMichael, Philip. 2019. Does China’s ‘Going Out’ Strategy Prefigure a New Food Regime? The Journal of Peasant Studies 47(1): 116–154.

References Ag Daily. 2018. Ag Drone Market to Near $2 Billion in Value by 2026. Ag Daily, February 26, www. agdaily.com/technology/agdrone-market-to-near-2-billion-in-value-by-2026/. American Farm Bureau. 2015. The Voice of Agriculture. American Farm Bureau, Spring 1–8. Birn, Anne-Emanuelle, Yogan Pillay, Timothy Holtz, and Paul Basch. 2009. Textbook of International Health: Global Health in a Dynamic World. New York: Oxford University Press. Bonanno, A., and D. Constance. 1996. Caught in the Net: The Global Tuna Industry, Environmentalism and the State. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Borras, S., P. McMichael, and I. Scoones. 2010. The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change: Editor’s Introduction, The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 575–592. Bugos, G.E., and D.J. Kevles. 1992. Plants as Intellectual Property: American Practice, Law, and Policy in World Context, Osiris 7: 74–104. Busch, Lawrence, and Arunas Juska. 1997. Beyond Political Economy: Actor Networks and the Globalization of Agriculture, Review of International Political Economy 4(4): 688–708. Buttel, Fredrick. 2001. Some Reflections on Late-Twentieth Century Agrarian Political Economy, Sociologia Ruralis 41(2): 165–181. Campbell, H. 2009. Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory: Corporate Environmentalism, Ecological Feedbacks and the ‘Food from Somewhere’ Regime? Agriculture and Human Values 26: 309–319. Carolan, Michael. 2010. The Mutability of Biotechnology Patents: From Unwieldy Products of Nature to Independent ‘Object/s’, Theory, Culture and Society 27(1): 110–129. Carolan, Michael. 2013. The Wild Side of Agrifood Studies: On Co-Experimentation, Politics, Change, and Hope, Sociologia Ruralis 53(4): 413–431. Carolan, Michael. 2018. The Real Cost of Cheap Food, 2nd edition. New York; London: Earthscan/ Routledge. Carolan, Michael. 2020. Acting Like an Algorithm: Digital Farming Platforms and the Trajectories They (Need Not) Lock-In, Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020- 10032-w. de Janvry, Alain, Philip Leveen, and David Runsten. 1980. Mechanization in California Agriculture: The Case of Canning Tomatoes. Berkeley: University of California.

44  The multi-scalar food economy de la Pena, Carolyn. 2010. Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Dixon, Jane. 2002. The Changing Chicken: Chooks, Cooks, and Culinary Culture. Sidney, Australia: University of South Wales Press. Dutfield, Graham. 2008. Turning Plant Varieties into Intellectual Property: The UPOV Convention, In The Future Control of Food, edited by Geoff Tansey and Tasmin Rajotta, Pp. 27–47. London: Earthscan. Ehrenberg, R. 2018. Eyes in the Sky: 5 Ways Drones Will Change Agriculture.  Knowable Magazine, October 11, https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2018/eyes-sky-5-ways-droneswill-change-agriculture. Freidberg, S. 2009. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friedland, William. 1984. Commodity Systems Analysis: An Approach to the Sociology of Agriculture, In Research in Rural Sociology and Development: A  Research Annual, edited by Harry Schwarzweller, Pp. 221–235. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Friedland, William. 2001. Reprise on Commodity Systems Methodology, International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 9(1): 82–103. Friedland, William. 2004. Agrifood Globalization and Commodity Systems, International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 12: 5–16. Friedland, William, Amy Barton, and Robert Thomas. 1981. Manufacturing Green Gold: Capital, Labor, and Technology in the Lettuce Industry. New York: Cambridge University Press. Friedmann, Harriet. 1978. World Market, State, and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in an Era of Wage Labor, Comparative Studies in Society and History 20(4): 545–586. Friedmann, Harriet. 1991. Changes in the International Division of Labor: Agrifood Complexes and Export Agriculture, Edited by W. Friedland, L. Busch, F. Buttel, and A. Rudy, Pp. 65–93. Boulder: Westview Press. Friedmann, Harriet. 1993. The Political Economy of Food: A  Global Crisis, New Left Review 197: 29–57. Friedmann, Harriet. 2005. From Colonialism to Green Capitalism: Social Movements and the Emergence of Food Regimes, In New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development, edited by Fredrick Buttel and Philip McMichael, Pp. 229–267. Oxford: Elsevier. Friedmann, Harriet, and Philip McMichael. 1989. Agriculture and the State System: The Rise and Fall of National Agricultures, 1870 to the Present, Sociologia Ruralis 29: 93–117. Goodman, David, and Michael Redclift. 1991. Refashion Nature: Food, Ecology and Culture. London: Rutledge. Goodman, David, Bernardo Sorj, and John Wilkinson. 1987. From Farming to Biotechnology: The Industrialization of Agriculture. New York: Blackwell. Goodman, David, and Michael Watts. 1994. Reconfiguring the Rural or Fording the Divide? Capitalist Restructuring and the Global Agro-food System, The Journal of Peasant Studies 22(1): 1–49. Grifths, C. 2020. 20 Mega Trends for 2020 and Beyond. AgroProfessional, January  29, www.agprofes sional.com/article/20-mega-trends-2020-and-beyond. Hansen, H., and N. Trifković. 2014. Food Standards Are Good  – for Middle-Class Farmers, World Development 56: 226–242. Juska, Arunas, and Lawrence Busch.1994. The Production of Knowledge and the Production of Commodities: The Case of Rapeseed Technoscience, Rural Sociology 59(4): 581–597. Klooster, Dan. 2006. Environmental Certification of Forests in Mexico: The Political Ecology of a Nongovernmental Market Intervention, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(3): 541–565. Kloppenburg, Jack. 1988. First the Seed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Marsden, Terry. 1989. Restructuring Rurality: From Order to Disorder in Agrarian Political Economy, Sociologia Ruralis 29(3/4): 312–317. McBeth, P. 2019. Fully Automated Milking Several Decades Away – Dairy NZ. Scoop, June 18, www. scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1906/S00446/fully-automated-milking-several- decades-away-dairy-nz.htm. McMichael, Philip. 2009a. A Food Regime Genealogy, Journal of Peasant Studies 36(1): 139–169. McMichael, Philip. 2009b. A Food Regime Analysis of the “World Food Crisis,” Agriculture and Human Values 26: 281–295.

Understanding foodscapes 45 McMichael, Philip. 2019. Does China’s ‘Going Out’ Strategy Prefigure a New Food Regime? The Journal of Peasant Studies 47(1): 116–154. Meyersohn, N. 2019. It’s Only $4.99. But Costco’s Rotisserie Chicken Comes at a Huge Price. CNN, October 11, www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/business/costco-5-dollar-chicken/index.html. Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. Morgan, Dan. 1980. Merchants of Grain. New York: Penguin. Mulvany, L. 2018. Robots Coming to a Dairy Farm Near You. Farm Futures, January 30, www.farm futures.com/dairy/robots-coming-dairy-farm-near-you, last accessed June 10, 2019. Nazarea, V.D., R.E. Rhoades, and J. Andrews-Swann (eds.). 2013. Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope: Place and Agency in the Conservation of Biodiversity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Nebraska Corn Board. 2019. Corn Production: Kernels of Knowledge. Nebraska Corn Board, Lincoln, Nebraska, https://nebraskacorn.gov/todays-farm/. OECD. 1993. Safety Evaluation of Foods Derived by Modern Biotechnology. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Pérez Niño, H. 2016. Class Dynamics in Contract Farming: The Case of Tobacco Production in Mozambique. Third World Quarterly 37(10): 1787−1808. Pierpaoli, E., G. Carli, E. Pignatti, and M. Canavari. 2013. Drivers of Precision Agriculture Technologies Adoption: A Literature Review. Procedia Technology 8: 61−69. Pritchard, Bill, and David Burch. 2003. Agri-Food Globalization in Perspective: International Restructuring in the Processing Tomato Industry. Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Raine, T. 2019. Traceability Ultimately Costs Farmers. The Western Producer, July  4, www.producer. com/2019/07/traceability-ultimately-costs-farmers/. Raynolds, Laura, and John Wilkinson. 2007. Fair Trade in the Agriculture and Food Sector: Analytical Dimensions, In Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization edited by L. Raynolds, D. Murray, and J. Wilkinson, Pp. 33–47. New York: Routledge. Reynolds, K., and N. Cohen. 2016. Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Shiva, V. 2016. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Trewavas, A., and C. Leaver. 2001. Is Opposition to GM Crops Science or Politics? EMBO Reports 2(6): 455–459. Wells, Miriam. 1996. Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wiens, K. 2015. We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership. Wired, April 21, www. wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/.

3 Food and nutrition (in)security

We have moved beyond equating food and nutrition security to calorie security. In fact, the goal of more (and cheaper) calories is partially responsible for the nutritional mess that we are in. Lest we forget, undernutrition is often linked to overnutrition, and not just in high-income countries. A report released in 2020 (2020 Global Nutrition Report) revealed that the various forms of malnutrition, which include such states as underweight, undernourished, overweight, and obese, collectively constitute the leading causes of death and illness worldwide.

Amartya Sen on famine According to Amartya Sen (1981), who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, modern food crises are less about the absence of food and more about the inability to buy it. Examining the 1943 Bengal famine, Sen found there was plenty of food around. The problem, which a Life magazine reporter at the time estimated was taking the lives of more than 50,000 Bengalese a week (Fisher 1943: 16), was not a lack of food but a lack of available food. Those who had it would generally hoard it, knowing that this action would only increase its market price and make them more money in the not-too-distant future. The Bengal famine revealed the limits of the market for delivering food during times of crisis. The British (the famine occurred during the British Raj) bet, incorrectly, that the market would justly and efficiently distribute food to the poor. Sen notes that similar variables can explain the 1974 Bangladesh famine. Floods put farm laborers out of work and therefore drastically reduced their incomes. These events created expectations of impending rice shortages that led to hoarding among those with the resources to do so. This panic buying pushed the price of rice beyond the reach of the poor. Sen sees democracy – not biotechnology, advances in plant breeding, or more fertilizer – as offering the surest path to a world free of famine. As Sen (1981: 16) famously wrote: “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” Famines tend to only affect the poorest segment of a country’s population. In non-democratic states, those most likely to experience a famine are those who lack political access. Their famine-related suffering, in other words, is allowed by the elites, as it does little to threaten their grip on power. Among other things, democracy gives those living on the margins a voice, meaning even a country’s political elite can feel the pain of famine, even though they and their families remain well fed (though I admit having a vote

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-4

Food and nutrition (in)security 47

is not enough to level the playing field in modern capitalist democracies.) In a democracy, elected leaders have a vested interest in responding promptly during times of food scarcity. India managed to avoid famine in 1965 and 1966 despite two consecutive years of failed crops due to massive monsoon rains. In this case, officials quickly looked to outside sources for food aid (receiving 10 million tons of grain from the US), while simultaneously investing in the public food distribution system to ensure that those who needed food received it. It is therefore Sen’s contention that famines are, at their root, political problems, which can be cost-effectively alleviated. Famines only strike a small proportion of the population, a figure that rarely exceeds more than 5 percent. And since the shares of income and food of those stricken usually do not exceed more than 3 percent of the total for the nation, it is neither difficult nor expensive to fill in whatever income and food is lost during these events (Sen 2004).

Political economy of hunger: the scourge of “development” In April 2008, Haitian protestors, objecting to rising food prices, attempted to storm the Presidential Palace gates in Port-au-Prince. They were protesting the rising price of basic foods like rice, beans, and condensed milk, which had increased by more than 50 percent in less than 12 months. A 50 percent price increase would have been hard to swallow in an affluent nation. In a country where 80 percent survive on less than 1 US dollar a day, its effects were devastating. A mother working in Port-au-Prince told a reporter that before the food crisis US$1.25 could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal, and a little cooking oil. At the height of the crisis, that US$1.25 made it impossible to “even make a plate of rice for one child” (as quoted in Quigley 2008). After dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was overthrown in 1986 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided Haiti a US$24.6  million loan (see Box  4.1). Since Duvalier had pillaged the treasury before fleeing, the country desperately needed cash. Government officials thus accepted the loan. But it came with strings attached – in international developmental parlance it required the country to undergo certain “structural adjustments.” These adjustments are attached to all loans provided to lower-income nations by agencies like the IMF. In Haiti’s case, acceptance of the loan required the country to reduce tariff protections for their rice and other agricultural products and to open up their markets to imports. Coincidently, as Haiti was forced to reduce its government support for agriculture, the US was doing just the opposite (direct US taxpayer subsidies to the rice sector have averaged $1 billion a year since 1998).

Box 3.1  IMF and World Bank Known collectively as the Bretton Woods Institutions after the small community in rural New Hampshire (US), where they were founded in July 1944, the Bank and the IMF are charged, in different ways, with directing and supporting the structure of the world’s economic and financial order. The World Bank’s first loans were granted following World War II to help finance the reconstruction of Western Europe. As these nations recovered, the Bank turned increasingly to the world’s

48  The multi-scalar food economy

poorest countries to, in part, help them “develop” by folding them into the world economy and thus lure them away from Soviet-style communism (as this was at the height of the Cold War). The World Bank’s statement mission is to promote economic and social progress (though the Bank believes the latter only comes after the former) in developing economies. The IMF’s role is essentially to keep the international monetary system running smoothly by making sure the unpredictable variations in the exchange values of national currencies that helped trigger (and unduly extend) the Great Depression in the 1930s do not happen again. Both institutions wield considerable power, as their loans come with substantial strings attached, which are said to benefit less affluent nations by opening them up to, and making them competitive with, other export/import-oriented economies. Yet, to date, those nations most benefiting from these arrangements tend to be higher-income countries. For this reason, both institutions have come under intense criticism in recent decades for making matters worse for the world’s poorest economies rather than better.

Prior to 1986, Haiti imported very little rice. The agricultural sector was heavily protected through tariffs and import prohibitions. Trade liberalization drastically reduced these protections, leading, not surprisingly, to a flood of cheap rice into the country, most coming from the US. In 1985, Haiti imported only 7,000 metric tons of rice. By 2004, the country was importing 225,000 metric tons. All those cheap imports did make, at least in the short term, food more affordable for the urban poor. Estimates by the World Bank (2002: 43) indicate that the real price of rice to consumers was reduced by about 50 percent after trade liberalization in Haiti. But this cheap food came at a steep price. Trade liberalization policies have had a largely negative effect on the macroeconomic stability of the country. In the early 1960s, the agricultural sector employed 80 percent of the labor force and made up 90 percent of all exports. With trade liberalized those export revenue streams dried up. Moreover, income tax receipts dropped as the country’s farmers fell further into poverty. And so began a vicious circle. As foreign investments dropped, the country’s infrastructure fell into disrepair. This, in turn, further undermined trade capacity as the country became even less attractive to foreign investors, which further reduced income tax receipts and investment in infrastructure. It is a downward cycle that continues to this very day. Another example: the Philippines. As noted by a prominent scholar and former Representative in the Congress of Republic of the Philippines, when it came to curbing hunger, the one-time Philippines Dictator Ferdinand Marcos had a better track record than either the World Bank or the IMF: To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit schemes, and built rural infrastructure. During the14 years of the dictatorship, it was only during one year, 1973, that rice had to be imported owing to widespread damage wrought by typhoons. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were reported to be 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses. Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw

Food and nutrition (in)security 49

the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico, the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. (Bello 2008: 451) Like other countries, the Philippine government was instructed by the IMF to abandon the practice of surplus storage. The elimination of surplus grain inventories occurred because the Bank and IMF believed countries suffering crop failures could always import the food they need. A problem with this reasoning, however, is that these countries were also instructed (by these same institutions) to reduce expenditures so more money would be freed up to service their debt. Rolling back state investment also eviscerated the infrastructure of these countries and with that their organizational capacity to effectively handle and distribute the massive levels of grain coming in as food aid during times of crisis. The net result of these policies has been increased food dependence, which translates into hunger and malnutrition, particularly during times of heightened global grain prices. Between 1950 and 1970, less affluent nations went from importing no grain to accounting for almost half of all world imports (Friedmann 1990: 20). Before World War II, no nations in Africa, Latin America, or South Asia imported wheat. Up until the 1960s, countries like Nigeria were almost entirely food independent. Yet by 1983, a quarter of the country’s total earnings went to importing wheat (Friedmann 1992). So, when prices double, as they did for certain commodities during the food crisis of 2007–2008, food imports suck an enormous amount from public coffers in countries like Nigeria. This dependency started with cheap imports from the US. After World War II, the US had large stocks of surplus wheat thanks to New Deal price-support programs, and the government was looking to rid itself of this surplus without harming market prices. It was decided this could be accomplished through “concessional sales” to developing countries. These sales were highly subsidized under Public Law 480 – “food aid.” During the 1950s, the US share of wheat exports grew from a third to over half of the global market, with the majority destined for lower-income countries. Between 1950 and 1976 per-capita consumption of wheat increased in the developing world by more than 60 percent, while per-capita consumption of cereals (minus wheat) increased 20  percent, and per-capita consumption of root crops (a tradition staple in many developing nations) decreased by 20 percent.

Global food crises linked to COVID-19 COVID-19 has sometimes been called an equalizer because viruses are indiscriminate in whom they infect. Yet, when it comes to food, who suffers is anything but equal – it’s poor people. And in those countries that have struggled to achieve food insecurity within a geopolitical environment that has long disadvantaged them, these crises have become particularly acute. An estimated 12,000 people per day died from hunger at the peak of COVID-19, as estimated by an Oxfam (2020) report. A UN-supported study, alternatively, estimates that the virus is responsible, in 2020, for 10,000 hunger-related deaths per month among children (Hinnant and Mednick 2020). Table 3.1 spells out country-specific food insecurity levels in 2020, at the highlight of the global epidemic. Hunger is always the product of multiple variables. Hunger in the age of COVID is no different. Contributing factors in all of this include: the sudden loss in income for

50  The multi-scalar food economy Table 3.1  Emergency food security needs by country by late 2020, top 10 Country

Food insecure (in millions)

Total population (in millions)

Percent of population food insecure

Yemen Democratic Republic of the Congo Zimbabwe South Sudan Afghanistan Sudan Ethiopia Nigeria Somalia Kenya

19 5 5 5 5 5 3 3 3 3

28.5 84 14.5 11 37 42 109 196 15 51

67% 6% 34.5% 45% 13.5% 12% 3% 1.5% 20% 6%

Source: Hinnant and Mednick (2020).

hundreds of millions who were already living in a precarious state; the collapse in oil prices; the immediate drying up of “hard” currency as international tourism came to a halt in countries dependent upon these revenue streams; overseas workers not having earnings to send home; the closing of international boarders, which in many cases stopped the flow of foreign aid; and ongoing problems like climate change, conflict, and the like that are made even worse in a world upended by a near-unprecedented global epidemic. It is important to also realize that while food distribution and retail in rich nations is increasingly automated, these sectors in lower-income countries remain highly labor intensive, meaning these supply chains are especially vulnerable to the disease and COVID-related social-distancing prescriptions. The economically vulnerable during a global pandemic face tremendous pressure to go to work, in order to remain gainfully employed so they can eat and live – though at the risk of getting sick and dying – or they stay home, risk losing their job, and face financial ruin. Not much of a choice when facing those options. For an example of how the virus indirectly impacts food security, note how the pandemic has slowed efforts to deal with an historic locust plague that has devastated fields in East Africa, a pest outbreak unlike anything seen there in decades that emerged a year after extreme droughts and floods in the region (Kennedy 2020). COVID-related travel bans, airport closures, and border restrictions have greatly disrupted the supply of pesticides that would have otherwise been used to combat the infestation and save pastureland and crops (Dahir 2020).

Food aid The US is, and has long been, the largest food aid–donating country. In 1954, the US government created Public Law 480 (PL 480) with the passing of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act. The Marshall Plan (a large-scale economic recovery program offered by the US to aid Europe’s recovery following World War II) showed how foreign aid could be used to increase trade dependence despite a country’s lack of money. This history also fed the belief that food could be used strategically to promote US interests abroad. To quote Senator Hubert Humphrey, in remarks to the Agriculture

Food and nutrition (in)security 51

and Forest Committee of the US Senate in 1957: “[I]f you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific” (as quoted in Weis 2007: 66). We must also remember that food aid arose during the height of the Cold War, a war that was about winning over not just hearts and minds but also stomachs. Some believed that the ideology most likely to prevail – democratic capitalism versus centralized communism  – would be the one that could offer its citizens the most food. General Lucius Clay, while military governor of West Germany immediately after World War II, said in 1946 that food shortages meant “no choice between becoming a Communist on 1,500 calories and a believer in democracy on 1,000 calories” (quoted in Major 1997: 236). Anxiety that West Germans would side with the Soviets simply to obtain more food precipitated the Berlin airlifts, in which food and other goods were flown into Berlin from June 1948 to May 1949. Soon after Public Law 480 passed and was used to similar effect as the Berlin airlifts, namely, to stop Soviet-style communism from spreading in poor countries on account of calories. It also helped bolster the Eisenhower administration’s claim that “free men eat better,” later echoed by the Kennedy administration by its claim that “wherever Communism goes, hunger follows” (quoted in Cullather 2007: 363). There is considerable debate, however, about how much food aid actually helps recipient nations. Part of the issue lies in how it is distributed. When an emergency arises surplus food from affluent nations is donated to relief organizations working closely with the United Nations World Food Program. Another option is to donate food directly to the governments in need. The recipient governments then sell the food at below-market prices to raise money for general development programs. In either case, farmers residing in countries receiving food aid typically get less for their products, as the food aid often drives market prices downward. Consequently, most donating countries, except for the US, give cash to the World Food Program rather than surplus grain, which explains why the US is responsible for half of all global food aid. President Obama sought to change this practice in 2013, but Congress stymied his plans. His administration proposed that the government buy food from developing countries near the epicenter of need instead of shipping food from American farmers overseas, a policy change that would speed up delivery to donor countries and save millions of taxpayer dollars in shipping costs. Critics, however, cited that such a policy would not benefit American farmers and could kill US jobs in the shipping sector (Nixon 2013). Beyond providing a means to distribute surplus grain, there are other important geopolitical strategic reasons for keeping with the food aid status quo, of providing food rather than cash. The US government, for instance, requires that 75 percent of all food aid be transported by US flag carriers, regardless of cost. Having those US ships distributed around the world, it is believed, has important military value in the event of a conflict (e.g., those assets could be quickly used). The requirement is also a way to prop up the US shipping industry, as it helps to ensure ships have sufficient cargo. The US government also requires that 25 percent of all food aid must pass through Great Lakes ports, regardless of where it originates. These requirements cost US taxpayers an additional $70 per ton of food aid shipped in 2007 (Martin 2010). They also slow delivery times substantially. Aid can take as long as six months to get from a US grain storage facility to a foreign village (Martin 2010). All these extra steps, versus just giving cash, which can be accomplished with a click of a button, add enormous expenses to the enterprise. Americans

52  The multi-scalar food economy

spend $2.5 billion annually in food assistance. About 75 percent of that money is used to cover the cost for processing and shipping that food overseas (Park 2019).

The green revolution The green revolution was a series of research and technology transfer initiatives that occurred immediately after the Second World War, lasting until the late 1970s. The revolution centered primarily on the development of high yield varieties of a handful of grains coupled with the expansion of the necessary irrigation infrastructure and input supply chains (fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, etc.). It started in the late 1940s, as international agricultural research centers, funded by large American private foundations like Ford and Rockefeller were developing high-yield varieties of rice, wheat, corn, and soybeans. The benefits of the green revolution have been far from evenly distributed. Those with access to fertile ground, adequate water, and credit (to buy the necessary costly inputs and technology) gained the most. Other parts of the world, like much of Africa, lacking water, capital, and arable land, missed out almost entirely on the movement. The land of Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa is only 17 and 19 percent arable, respectively. The vast majority of their agricultural land is permanent pasture, at roughly 80 percent. Most of the high-yielding crops developed under the banner of the green revolution require copious amounts of water. The green revolution had a measurable positive impact (at least in terms of yields) in Asia, in part because the region receives considerable rainfall and has an extensive river system to support irrigation platforms. Contrast this to dry Sub-Saharan Africa. Eighty-five percent of Kenya’s arable land, for example, cannot be irrigated (too far from any consequential water source) and must rely on rainfall that may, in any growing season, never come. A widely cited review from 1995 of more than 300 peer-reviewed studies published between 1970 and 1989 evaluates the green revolution’s success. Eighty percent of the articles conclude that the green revolution increased inequality at both farm and regional levels (Freebairn 1995). The green revolution sought to export conventional agricultural methods to other parts of the world at the same time when conventional agriculture was itself becoming increasingly energy intensive. A team of researchers concluded in a 1973 Science article that agriculture was using an equivalent of 80 gallons of gasoline to produce an acre of corn (Pimentel et al. 1973). Furthermore, they note that while the production of corn per acre increased 2.4 times from 1945 to 1970, fuel inputs rose 3.1 times. In other words, yields in corn energy relative to fuel input declined 26 percent during this period. While the green revolution can be credited with helping bring forth remarkable productivity gains, at least in some parts of the world, it can be equally lambasted for its failure to make necessary social, political, and economic gains. This failure took two forms. The first involved its explicit emphasis on technological solutions. The other, related to the first, was that the green revolution’s implicit technological optimism led to apathy in many circles for a need to create broader social change. For example, in 1985 the head of the international body overseeing green revolution research, Syed Shahid Husain, argued that gains in productivity were all the poor required and that “added emphasis on poverty alleviation is not necessary” (quoted in Lappe and Collins 1986: 49). The green revolution may also have forestalled many of the very reforms that we know (with hindsight) promote prosperity and food security, especially among the rural poor. Critics of the green revolution have argued that it reduced pressure for radical political change in Asia and Latin America by promoting technological innovation, market

Food and nutrition (in)security 53

integration, and scale increases. Its rise coincided with the growth of peasant movements in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India and land-reform movements in Latin America. The green revolution likely put a halt to many of these movements and the broader social transformations they looked to spawn. As one study on the subject from the early 1970s notes, “There has been no substantial recent land reform at all in the other major countries affected by the green revolution” (Cleaver 1972: 178). This was due to the fact that the green revolution further empowered the landed elite while simultaneously marginalizing the smallholder and landless peasant (de Janvry and Sadoulet 1989). Countries where land was more equitably distributed in 1980 made greater advances in reducing food insecurity over the last two decades of the century than countries where land ownership was more concentrated (Gonzalez 2004). As for countries where the green revolution took deepest root during this period, land inequities increased (Lappe and Collins 1986). Anything that increases land inequality is worrisome. As noted in a working paper by the International Monetary Fund, “land inequality has been shown to have a negative impact on other key aspects of economic development  – education, institutions and financial development  – and on poverty” (Vollrath and Erickson 2007). We can now say unequivocally that gains in agricultural productivity are not all the poor require to improve their livelihoods. Rather, we know from research (e.g., Ramankutty et al. 2018; Smith and Haddad 2015) that things like dietary diversity, sanitation, clean water, and women’s education are either just as or even more important to reducing hunger and improving standards of living. Farmer income also plays an important role in increasing food security, especially in lower-income countries. Globally, national GDP is inversely related to the proportion of labor force in agriculture. Some 69 percent of the world’s farmers live in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa), with 30 percent of the food raised in these operations coming from farms less than 2 hectares in size (Ramankutty et al. 2018). Putting these small-scale farmers out of business is precisely the opposite of what our food policy ought to be doing.

Micronutrient malnutrition: hidden hunger The standard measure of poor nutrition has been what is known as caloric hunger. According to this metric, some 800 million (1 in 9) people were undernourished (FAO 2017). And the prognosis, even using this narrow and highly problematic definition of nutritional insecurity, does not look good. For instance, the FAO (2017) estimates that if we continue doing what we are doing – what they call, “business-as-usual progress” – that by 2030 653 million people will still be undernourished (FAO 2017). But as you have probably already guessed, these metrics greatly underestimate the number of people not being adequately nourished by food systems. It has been estimated, for example, that roughly 1 billion people suffer from protein deficiency; one-third of children under the age of five are stunted (low height for age); more than 2 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, also known as “hidden hunger,” while, perhaps paradoxically, another 2-plus billion are classified as overweight or obese (Ritchie et al. 2018). There are many factors to blame for micronutrient malnutrition, like poor food access and extreme poverty. Another factor is the green revolution. There is no disputing that the green revolution has negatively impacted dietary diversity. Crops bred for traits associated with improved yields or to withstand mechanization have displaced traditional crops that are higher in iron and other micronutrients (see Box 3.2).

54  The multi-scalar food economy

Box 3.2  The Narrowing of Dietary Diversity An important study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals an emerging standard global food supply consisting of such energy-dense foods as soybeans, sunflower oil, and palm oil, along with more historically familiar staples like rice and wheat (Khoury et al. 2014). Wheat was found to be a major staple in 97.4 percent of all countries and rice in 90.8 percent, whereas soybean has

Since the inception of the CGIAR, diets in developing countries have shifted dramatically, including greater amounts of major oil crops and lesser quantities of regionally important staples. Median change in the relative contribution to calories from crops of interest to the CGIAR in national diets in developing countries, 1969–2009

Sunflower

24%

Wheat

23%

%

21%

Rice

19%

Sugar

2%

Groundnut

2%

–3%

Beans

–3%

Bananas & plantains Pulses, other

–29%

Cassava

–32%

Yams

–33%

Coconuts

–63%

0

71%

Barley

–38%

30

73%

Potatoes

–52%

%

112%

Palm oil

–21%

0

282%

Soybean

Maize

25

% 0

0 15

10

20

%

% 0

% 50

% 0

–5

–1 0

0

0

%

%

Percent change in relative contribution to calories in food supplies

Crop increasing in contribution to diet Crop decreasing in contribution to diet

Sweet potatoes Sorghum Millets

Figure 3.1 Medium change in the relative contribution to calories from crops of interest to CGIAR in national diets in developing countries, 1969–2009 Source: Adapted from Khoury et al. 2014. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.

Food and nutrition (in)security 55

become significant in 74.3 percent of countries. Meanwhile, many crops with longheld regional and cultural importance – cereals like sorghum, millet, and rye as well as root crops such as sweet potato, cassava, and yam – are disappearing from fields and diets. For example, a nutritious tuber crop known as oca, once grown throughout the Andean highlands, has declined significantly in this region in both cultivation and consumption. Figure 3.1 illustrates these trends. As the figure details, soybean consumption has increase 282  percent in developing countries between 1969 and 2009, while the consumption of millet and sorghum has more than halved during that same time period. There is a stark nutritional disparity between the foods at the top and bottom of the figure. Those being eaten at greater rates tend to be richer in macronutrients, while those disappearing are micronutrient rich – remember what I said about the “calorie-ization” of food security. Not only that, many of the crops near the bottom of the figure are stress tolerant, which make them particularly valuable when we talk about sustainably feeding future populations in the context of climate change. Each country's food supply composition in contribution to calories in: 1961

1985

2009

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

THAILAND

1961

BELIZE

1985

2009 RWANDA

NEPAL

Figure 3.2  Each country’s food supply composition in contribution to calories: 1961, 1985, 2009 Source: Khoury et al. 2014. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.

56  The multi-scalar food economy

Another way to visualize this move toward global diet homogeneity is through the following image constructed, and graciously provided to me, by the above study’s lead author, Colin Khoury: Figure  3.2. Notice the dietary “spread” that existed a half century ago around the world, by the dispersal of light-colored dots. And today: a clear “clumping” of darker dots near the middle of the figure. In a later publication, the same researchers offer the following five policy recommendations to foster diversity in food production and consumption and thus improve nutrition and food security (Khoury and Jarvis 2014: 6). • Continue to safeguard and improve major staple crops. • Extend the benefits of emerging crops to more farmers in an eco-efficient manner. • Aggressively promote the development of previously neglected crops that are resilient and nutritious. • Address food security in a holistic manner through the development of ecologically sensitive and nutritionally diverse food systems. • Better explain the relationships between food diversity and nutrition while closely monitoring this diversity and advocating for its use to improve human health.

While micronutrient malnutrition has been receiving more attention, the problem continues to be misdiagnosed  – as something that can be addressed by adding to the existing system instead of changing it. Take biofortification, which involves the breeding and/or genetic engineering of plants to increase their micronutrient content. Golden Rice  – rice genetically engineered to contain high levels of vitamin A  – is a wellknown example of biofortification. Yet as a solution to a diet deficient in beta carotene, Golden Rice seems to sidestep larger sociological questions. Vitamin A is fat soluble, which means its uptake within the body is dependent upon a level of fat in the diet. In lower-income parts of the world, however, levels of dietary fat are often insufficient. And simply increasing a population’s daily intake of rice, by itself, provides none of this dietary fat. But more importantly: Why is vitamin A deficiency increasing throughout the developing world? Such irony: the green revolution, with the help of biofortification, is cast as the solution to . . . itself! Golden Rice is directed at symptoms, not the root cause of vitamin A deficiency. And we cannot expect a technological fix to solve a problem that is fundamentally social, political, and economic in nature. Biofortification also reflects a broader trend within food policy and science, where “nutrition” is being reduced to the absolute or relative quantities of certain nutrients in food. Scrinis (2008: 44) refers to this as the ideology of nutritionism: a “quantitative logic” that “obscures the broader cultural, geographical, and ecological contexts in which foods, diets, and bodily health are situated.” Scrinis claims all the attention being paid to nutrients in isolation – rather than understanding nutritional health as a complex socioecological process – deliberately distracts consumers from asking “deeper” questions about their food. Focusing on the fact that a food has, say, 100 percent of the recommended daily amount of vitamin C or folic acid draws attention away from, among other things,

Food and nutrition (in)security 57

the overall nutrient profile of a food. Let us not forget, however, a nutritionally fortified Twinkie is still a Twinkie. Similarly, reducing food to fundamental chemical components makes it hard for us to talk about food systemically, which is to say it blinds us to, among other things, a food’s ecological footprint or to questions related to whether it was raised and processed in socially just ways.

Macronutrient malnutrition: obesity In 2020, more than 2 billion adults 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these, some 700 million were classified as obese. Approximately 40 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese, and another 350 million children and adolescents aged 5 through 17 are overweight or obese (WHO 2020). Obesity and overweight are driven by different variables, depending in large part on one’s situational and national context. A recent study published in a Lancet publication (Jaacks et al. 2019) introduces the concept of “obesity transition,” which speaks to some of these complex pathways. Examining the world’s thirty most populous countries, representing 78 percent of the world’s population, they organized obesity typologies into “stages.” To quote from the study, where the authors explain these categories: Stage 1 of the obesity transition is characterized by a higher prevalence in women compared to men, in those with higher compared to lower socioeconomic status, and adults compared to children. Many countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are at this stage. In Stage 2, there is a large increase in the prevalence among adults, a smaller increase among children, and a narrowing of the gender gap and socioeconomic differences among women. Many Latin American and Middle Eastern countries are at this stage. High-income East Asian countries are also at this stage, albeit with a much lower prevalence of obesity. Stage 3 occurs when the prevalence of obesity among those with lower socioeconomic status surpasses that among those with higher socioeconomic status and plateaus in obesity may be observed among women with high socioeconomic status and children. Most European countries are currently at this stage. (Jaacks et al. 2019: 231) They also include in their model a fourth stage, “of declining obesity prevalence,” but note there are “few signs” (p. 231) that any country falls into this category. Such a model has value, as it can help guide researchers, policymakers, and healthcare professionals identify their situation and anticipate sub-populations that will experience increases in the future so proactive measures can be activated. Similar findings have been replicated elsewhere, giving credence to the idea that obesity is linked to macro-economic policy and global food policy regimes. For example, another recent study, looking at data from 1980 to 2008, finds that “domestic factors associated with ‘modernization’ including increasing GDP per capita, urbanization and women’s empowerment were associated with increases in mean BMI over time” (Fox et al. 2019: 1). The study also found – here is where we find something like the aforementioned stages – evidence of a curvilinear relationship between GDP per capita and overweight and obesity. Specifically, among low-income countries, economic growth predicted increases in BMI, whereas among high-income countries, higher household incomes predicted lower BMI.

58  The multi-scalar food economy

Box 3.3  Obesity: An Individual Problem? The cultural link, for example, between “fatness” and individual fault – as a cultural statement about, say, one’s laziness or lack of control – corresponds with a larger societal shift toward neoliberal forms of what French philosopher Michel Foucault called “governance” (Carolan 2005; Guthman and DuPuis 2006). Foucauldian governance, to greatly simplify a concept that is quite nuanced, refers to the reduction of social problems to an aggregate of individual problems. Doing this skillfully transfers responsibility for developing solutions from society as a whole onto individuals – a move that ends up supporting the very system responsible for ill health in the first place. As good consumer-citizens we are therefore taught to shop our way to safety, happiness, and sustainability by buying, in the case of environmental problems, eco-friendly products, and, in the case of the obesity epidemic, weightloss pills and diet plans. Guthman (2011) develops this point extensively, noting how, in the interest of economic growth, capitalism has helped to create obesity as a material phenomenon (adiposity) and then made it into a moral problem (e.g., obesity = laziness) that can only be resolved through capitalism – normative pressures others call the “weight of expectation” (Williams and Annandale 2020). She likens current treatments of obesity to prescriptions to combat climate change. In both cases, the treatment involves, in her estimation, a disproportionate focus on individual consumption choices rather than on creating policies that would enforce corporate accountability or that would mitigate effects on those most harmed. Obesity and climate change are thus seen as “apolitical ecologies,” which is to say that our explanations for each do not fully account for the asymmetries in power that first create them materially and then later define them as “problems.” Instead, both are viewed as the product of bad decision-making at the individual level, which can be remedied with such things as education. This move effectively absolves the system of any blame.

The politics of eating “good” food A lot has also been written about the politics behind America’s dietary guidelines (see Nestle 2007). For example, the statement “decrease consumption of meat,” found in the first edition of the US Dietary Goals in 1977, led to the meat industry demanding an immediate revision and the removal of the word “decrease.” When the second edition came out in 1977, the statement read “choose meats [. . .] which will reduce saturated fat intake,” which was changed again in 1980 to read “choose lean meat.” By the 1990 edition, the phrase changed again, to “have two or three servings of meat [. . .] with a daily total of about 6 ounces.” Similar changes have been recorded in Australia, in part because US nutritional policies have been looked to as a resource among Australian nutritionists when crafting national dietary policy (Duff 2004; Lawrence and Germov 2004). There, national nutritional guidelines changed from telling consumers to “avoid too much” meat in 1981 to “choose a diet low in” meat in 1992. As a result of heavy lobbying from agricultural interest groups, the words “avoid,” “less,” and “too much” disappeared entirely from Australian nutritional guidelines by the 1990s, replaced by words like “care” (Duff 2004). Table 3.2

Food and nutrition (in)security 59 Table 3.2  Dietary guidelines for Australian adults for 1982, 1992, and 2003 1981

1992

2003

Promote breastfeeding

Enjoy a wide variety of nutritious foods Eat plenty of breads and cereals (preferably wholegrain), vegetables (including legumes), and fruits Eat a diet low in fat, and in particular, low in saturated fat Maintain a healthy body weight by balancing physical activity and food intake If you drink alcohol, limit your intake Choose low-fat foods and use salt sparingly

Enjoy a wide variety of nutritious foods

Encourage and support breastfeeding

Drink plenty of water

Choose a nutritious diet from a variety of foods Control your weight Avoid eating too much fat Avoid eating too much sugar Eat more bread and cereals (preferably whole-grain) and vegetables and fruit Limit alcohol intake Use less salt

Eat plenty of vegetables, legumes, and fruits Eat plenty of cereals (including breads, rice, pasta, and noodles), preferably whole-grain Include lean meat, fish, poultry, and/or alternatives Include milks, yogurts, cheeses, and/or alternatives Reduced-fat varieties should be chosen where possible

And take care to: Limit saturated fat and moderate total fat intake Choose foods low in salt Limit your alcohol intake if you choose to drink Consume only moderate amounts of sugars and foods containing added sugars Prevent weight gain: be physically active and eat according to your energy needs Care for your food: prepare and store it safely Encourage and support breastfeeding

Source: Based on Duff (2004).

documents this change, showing dietary guidelines within Australia for 1981, 1992, and 2003. Note also the growing inclusion of non-dietary items in the dietary guidelines, like the emphasis on physical activity and caring for one’s food by way of proper storage and preparation. These recent inclusions are politically safe (no food lobbyist would fret this language). But also, they introduce elements that further individualize poor health, thus further deflecting attention from the food system. Note in both the US and Australia cases that when eaters are told to eat more of something, foods are cited – e.g., eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. But when told to eat less of something, the guidelines switch to nutrients – e.g., eat less saturated fats, sugar, and sodium. That said, the Australian government’s most recent guidelines iteration, released in 2013 (Australian Government 2013), does make the following recommendation, albeit as a parenthetical statement: “Most Australians need more [. . .] lean meats and poultry, fish, eggs, nuts and seeds and legumes/beans (except many Australian men would benefit from eating less red meat).”

60  The multi-scalar food economy

Guidelines in themselves do little to change actual dietary patterns. This is especially true among the most disadvantaged in society, recognizing that eating healthy often costs more than a diet failing to meet recommended guidelines. There is also a concern among social scientists that guidelines keep consumers from seeing the food-system-forest for the nutrient-trees. In other words, reducing “food” to its constituent nutrients – nutritionism – which is a consequence of national dietary recommendations and nutritional standards, makes the larger structures of food production, processing, and distribution more difficult to see (see Box 3.4). This also makes it easier for food companies to project the image of being “good” corporate citizens, thus absolving them of responsibility for poor public and individual health due to malnutrition and over-consumption. Making transparent the nutritional value of foods also allows food companies to play the “individual choice” card and thus steer debate away from the food system itself (Carolan 2015). Under this ideological rubric, obesity, poor diet, and malnutrition all become issues attributable to the individual, via such alleged personal faults as poor self-control, lack of individual dietary knowledge, or just plain laziness.

Box 3.4  Can Junk Food End Obesity? David Freedman, in a 2013 issue of The Atlantic, offers a contrarian voice to the hunger debate, lauding the benefits of fast and cheap processed foods. Freedman (2013) argues, “despite the best efforts of a small army of wholesome-food heroes, there is no reasonable scenario under which these foods could become cheap and plentiful enough to serve as the core diet for most of the obese population” (p. 70). Only “Big Food,” he claims, can do that. It does seem a bit disingenuous to criticize the development of healthier processed food options when that food is often the only thing available to food-insecure households, especially those living in urban food deserts. Given that approximately half of all calories consumed in the US are consumed away from the home – it is said that the power window is the favorite food appliance among Americans – there are clear immediate benefits associated with making junk food healthier. Yet it is equally disingenuous to pin all of our hopes on items like the Charbroiled Atlantic Cod Fish Sandwich at Carl’s Jr., which Freedman described as not only the “best meal” he had in Los Angeles but also “probably the healthiest” (p. 80). I would push Freedman to elaborate on what he means by “health.” Could junk food be healthier, in a nutritional sense? Of course it could. But just because something has a more nutritious micronutrient profile does that make it a healthy alternative? Not according to the World Health Organization, which has been defining the term since 1948 as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO n.d.). To ascertain the total health benefits of, say, a Carl’s Jr. Cod Sandwich, according to this definition, requires we look beyond the food itself, regardless of how tasty it may be, its price (US$3.99), and even its nutritional profile. Freedman fails to do this. Were the cod sustainably harvested? Were the workers, from fisher-persons to fry cooks, fairly compensated for their labor? What about the field laborers who harvested the tomatoes and lettuce? Were they exposed to pesticides? Were they

Food and nutrition (in)security 61

migrant laborers, and if so, how were they treated? Were they children who should have otherwise been in school? You cannot make health claims about a product without first looking into these questions. The problem with fast and processed foods does not lie just with nutrition. We ought to also be concerned about the links these foods have with issues of worker exploitation, environmental sustainability, and market concentration.

Food and nutritional security is about more than food and nutrition I am not arguing we should replace one one-size-fits all “solution” to food and nutritional security (e.g., the green revolution) with another. That is perhaps the most important take-home point of this chapter: the finding that there is no such thing as a solution (singular) on this topic. Context matters – a principle that matters as much in sociology as in agroecology. We will be returning the question of, “What does a more just, equitable, and healthy foodscape look like?” repeatedly over the remainder of the text. Even so, I would like to start that conversation here with a review of research, taking a 30,000-foot look at the topic. It seems pretty clear, for instance, that reducing food and nutritional security to calorie security is highly problematic. This has led scholars to broaden their definition to include numerous elements, which have resulted in the incorporation of, for instance, ecological, sociological, economic, and micronutrient variables (e.g., Béné 2020; Galiè et al. 2019). One such study proposes the concept of “sustainable nutrition security” (SNS) (Gustafson et al. 2016), which includes the following seven metrics: (1) food nutrient adequacy; (2) ecosystem stability; (3) food affordability and availability; (4) sociocultural well-being; (5) food safety; (6) resilience; and (7) waste and loss reduction. As the authors write, “each of the metrics comprises multiple indicators that are combined to derive an overall score (0–100)” (p. 1). These metrics and indicators are listed in Figure 3.3 (“Shannon Diversity” measures how many food items there are in a given country, while “MFA” [Modified Functional Attribute] diversity is used to track the diversity of nutrients provided by the different food items in the supply chain food supply). The authors then use available data for each of the indicators to describe SNS among nine countries. The outcome of this calculation can be seen in Figure 3.4. Reflecting on the images, the researchers add, Not surprisingly, “Food Nutrient Adequacy” is low in Bangladesh and is highest in the two higher-income countries included in the analysis (The Netherlands and USA). “Ecosystem Stability” is quite low in India, due to the relatively large amount of non-renewable energy use and irrigation in that country. “Food Affordability and Availability” reaches its lowest value in Senegal, but is also quite low in Bangladesh, Cameroon, and India. “Sociocultural Wellbeing” is lowest in Cameroon and India, while Bangladesh has the lowest Resilience score. “Food Safety” is very high in Argentina, Brazil, China, The Netherlands, and USA. The only category where the high-income countries (The Netherlands and USA) score worse than other countries

Figure 3.3  Sustainable nutrition security (SNS) metric indicators Source: See https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/3/196.

Figure 3.4 SNS indicators for select countries. Numbers correspond to the following: 1. Food Nutrient Adequacy; 2. Ecosystem Stability; 3. Food Affordability & Availability; 4. Sociocultural Wellbeing; 5. Resilience; 6. Food Safety; 7. Waste & Loss Reduction Source: See https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/3/196.

Food and nutrition (in)security 63

is on “Waste and Loss Reduction,” due to their relatively high post-consumer food waste. (Gustafson et al. 2016: 13) When presenting metrics, I like to remind my audience of the quote, usually attributed to Albert Einstein, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” I am not about to suggest that food and nutritional security can be reduced to the metrics and indicators captured in the SNS. I am quite sure the authors of the above study would agree with this point, too. But it is useful for starting a conversation around the question, “What does, or what should, the concept of food and nutritional security entail?” I included the term should in the prior sentence because we have to realize that this is not just a scientific question. It is sociological, too, which is to say it draws in part upon our interests and values.

Transition . . . Issues of food, as should now be clear, impact people far and wide. Yet we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding how current food policies and practices impact (often negatively) human communities. The following chapter pulls the veil back still further, exposing additional costs associated with our food through its financialization.

Discussion questions 1 While famines may be rare in democracies, hunger and hidden hunger especially are widespread phenomena. Why is this? 2 Why does obesity continue to be looked upon in many societies as signifying individual fault rather than an issue caused by larger sociological phenomena? 3 Do dietary guidelines and nutritional labeling make it easier for us to make more informed dietary choices? Can consumers ever have too much information when it comes to food labeling and product displays at supermarkets? 4 What does, and what should, food and nutritional security look like?

Suggested readings: introductory level Cox, K. 2020. Marion Nestle Knows It’s Not Easy to Be a Smart Consumer of Food, or of Media. The Only Solution May Be to Get Political. The Counter, September  10, https://thecounter.org/ marion-nestle-interview-lets-ask-marion-school-lunch/. FAO. 2020. Food Security and Nutritional Around the World in 2020. Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, Rome, Italy, www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html#chapter-1_1.

Suggested readings: advanced level Béné, C. 2020. Resilience of Local Food Systems and Links to Food Security – A Review of Some Important Concepts in the Context of COVID-19 and Other Shocks, Food Security, 1–18. Vercillo, S., T. Weis, and I. Luginaah. 2020. A Bitter Pill: Smallholder Responses to the New Green Revolution Prescriptions in Northern Ghana, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2020.1733702. Williams, O., and E. Annandale. 2020. Obesity, Stigma and Reflexive Embodiment: Feeling the ‘Weight’ of Expectation, Health 24(4): 421–441.

64  The multi-scalar food economy

References Australian Government. 2013. Eat for Health: Australian Dietary Guidelines Summary. Cambria, Australia, www.eatforhealth.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/The%20Guidelines/n55a_australian_dietary_guide lines_summary_131014_1.pdf. Bello, Walden. 2008. How to Manufacture a Food Crisis, Development 51(4): 450–455. Carolan, Michael. 2005. The Conspicuous Body: Capitalism, Consumerism, Class, and Consumption, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture and Ecology 9(1): 82–111. Carolan, Michael. 2015. Affective Sustainable Landscapes and Care Ecologies: Getting a Real Feel for Alternative Food Communities, Sustainability Science 10: 317–329. Cleaver, H. 1972. The Contradictions of the Green Revolution, American Economic Review 62(1/2): 177–186. Cullather, Nick. 2007b. The Foreign Policy of the Calorie, American Historical Review 112(2): 337–364. Dahir, A. 2020. ‘Instead of Coronavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us.’ A Global Food Crisis Looms. The New York Times, May  13, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/world/africa/coronavirus-hunger-crisis. html. de Janvry, A., and E. Sadoulet. 1989. A Study in Resistance to Institutional Change: The Lost Game of Latin American Reform, World Development 17(9): 1397–1407. Duff, John. 2004. Setting the Menu: Dietary Guidelines, Corporate Interests, and Nutrition Policy, In A Sociology of Food and Nutrition, edited by J. Germov and L. Williams, Pp. 148–168. New York: Oxford University Press. FAO. 2017. The Future of Food and Agriculture – Trends and Challenges. Rome: UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Fisher, William. 1943. The Bengal Famine: 50,000 Indians Weekly Succumb to Disease and Starvation in Spreading Catastrophe, Life 15(21): 16, 19–20. Fox, A., W. Feng, and V. Asal. 2019. What Is Driving Global Obesity Trends? Globalization or “Modernization”? Globalization and Health 15(1): 1–16. Freebairn, Donald. 1995. Did the Green Revolution Concentrate Incomes? A Quantitative Study of Research Reports, World Development 23(2): 265–279. Freedman, David. 2013. How Junk Food Can End Obesity. The Atlantic, July–August, Pp. 68–89. Friedmann, Harriet. 1990.The Origins of Third World Food Dependence, In The Food Question: Profits Versus People, edited by H. Bernstein, B. Crow, M. Mackintosh, and C. Martin, Pp. 13–31. New York: Monthly Review Press. Friedmann, Harriet. 1992. Distance and Durability: Shaky Foundations of the World Food Economy, Third World Quarterly 13(2): 371–383. Galiè, A., N. Teufel, A.W. Girard, I. Baltenweck, P. Dominguez-Salas, M.J. Price, R. Jones, B. Lukuyu, I. Korir, I. Raskind, and K. Smith. 2019. Women’s Empowerment, Food Security and Nutrition of Pastoral Communities in Tanzania, Global Food Security 23: 125–134. 2020 Global Nutrition Report. 2020. Action on Equity to End Malnutrition. Bristol, UK: Development Initiatives, https://globalnutritionreport.org/documents/566/2020_Global_Nutrition_Report_2hrss Ko.pdf. Gonzalez, C. 2004. Trade Liberalization, Food Security, and the Environment: The Neoliberal Threat to Sustainable Rural Development, Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 14: 419–498. Gustafson, D., A. Gutman, W. Leet, A. Drewnowski, J. Fanzo, and J. Ingram. 2016. Seven Food System Metrics of Sustainable Nutrition Security. Sustainability 8(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/su8030196. Guthman, Julie. 2011. Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Guthman, Julie, and Melanie DuPuis. 2006. Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(3): 427–448. Hinnant, L., and S. Mednick. 2020. Virus-Link Hunger Tied to 10,000 Child Deaths Each Month. AP News, July 27, https://apnews.com/5cbee9693c52728a3808f4e7b4965cbd.

Food and nutrition (in)security 65 Jaacks, L.M., S. Vandevijvere, A. Pan, C.J. McGowan, C. Wallace, F. Imamura, D. Mozaffarian, B. Swinburn, and M. Ezzati. 2019. The Obesity Transition: Stages of the Global Epidemic, The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology 7(3): 231–240. Kennedy, M. 2020. Why Are Swarms of Locusts Wreaking Havoc in East Africa? NPR, February 21, www.npr.org/2020/02/21/807483297/why-are-swarms-of-locusts-wreaking- havoc-in-east-africa. Khoury, Colin, and Andy Jarvis. 2014. The Changing Composition of the Global Diet: Implications for CGIAR Research. CIAT Policy Brief International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Cali, Columbia, No 18, November, http://ciat.cgiar.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/11/policy_brief_global_diets.pdf. Khoury, Colin, A. Bjorkman, H. Dempewolf, J. Ramirez-Villegas, L. Guarino, A. Jarvis, L. Rieseberg, and P. Stuik. 2014. Increasing Homogeneity in Global Food Supplies and the Implications for Food Security, PNAS 111(11): 4001–4006. Lappe, F., and J. Collins. 1986. World Hunger: Twelve Myths. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, a Food First Book. Lawrence, Mark, and John Germov. 2004. Future Food: The Politics of Functional Food and Health Claim, In A Sociology of Food and Nutrition, edited by J. Germov and L. Williams, Pp. 119–146. New York: Oxford University Press. Major, Patrick. 1997. The Death of KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945– 1956. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, Susan. 2010. Restrictions on US Food Aid Waste Time and Money. Tampa Bay Times, February 8, www.tampabay.com/news/world/restrictions-on-us-food-aid-waste- time-and-money/1070813. Nestle, Marion. 2007 (2002). Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nixon, Ron. 2013. Obama Administration Seeks to Overhaul International Food Aid. The New York Times, April  4, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/us/politics/white-house- seeks-to-change-interna tional-food-aid.html. Oxfam. 2020. The Hunger Virus. Oxfam, Oxford, July 9, https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/ bitstream/handle/10546/621023/mb-the- hunger-virus-090720-en.pdf. Park, K. 2019. The Great American Food Aid Boondoggle. Foreign Policy, December 10, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/10/america-wheat-hunger-great-food-aid- boondoggle/. Pimentel, D., L. Hurd, A. Bellotti, M. Forster, I. Oka, O. Sholes, and R. Whitman. 1973. Food Production and the Energy Crisis, Science 182(4111): 443–449. Quigley, Bill. 2008. The US Role in Haiti’s Food Riots. Counterpunch, April 21, www.counterpunch. org/quigley04212008.html. Ramankutty, N., Z. Mehrabi, K. Waha, L. Jarvis, C. Kremen, M. Herrero, and L.H. Rieseberg. 2018. Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security, Annual Review of Plant Biology 69: 789–815. Ritchie, H., D.S. Reay, and P. Higgins, P.  2018. Beyond Calories: A  Holistic Assessment of the Global Food System, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 2, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ fsufs.2018.00057/full. Scrinis, Gyorgy. 2008. On the Ideology of Nutritionism, Gastronomica 8(1): 38–48. Sen, Amartya. 1981. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. New York: Oxford University Press. Sen, Amaryta. 2004. Rationality and Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, L., and L. Haddad. 2015. Reducing Child Undernutrition: Past Drivers and Priorities for the Post-MDG Era, World Development 68: 180–204. Vollrath, D., and L. Erickson. 2007. Land Distribution and Financial System Development, IMF Working Paper WP/03/83, International Monetary Fund, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2007/ wp0783.pdf. Weis, Tony. 2007. The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming. New York: Zed. WHO. n.d. WHO Definition of Health. Geneva: World Health Organization, http:// www. who.int / about /definition /en /print.html.

66  The multi-scalar food economy WHO. 2020. Obesity and Overweight. Geneva: World Health Organization, www.who.int/news-room/ fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight. Williams, O., and E. Annandale. 2020. Obesity, Stigma and Reflexive Embodiment: Feeling the ‘Weight’ of Expectation, Health 24(4): 421–441. World Bank. 2002. Global Economic Prospects and the Developing Countries 2002. Washington, DC: World Bank.

4 Financialization of food

The American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have observed that “money often cost too much.” There is arguably no better example of this than through processes linked with what is called the financialization of food and agriculture. As this chapter details, the interrelationship between money and food is complex and often strained. While convention might lead one to think investments into food and agriculture produce on the whole positive ends, the truth of the matter is far more complex.

Nutrition transition: thinking globally to understand locally The globalization of food helped give rise to the liberalization of finance, which has increased the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) between countries. FDI is investment by a firm in one country into a business (or businesses) located in another, leading to the former owning a substantial, though not necessarily a majority, interest in the latter. This practice is one of the primary mechanisms by which companies enter new markets. It also explains how companies are able to spread their activities across multiple countries, resulting in complex production chains. Between 1991 and 2018, food, beverage, and tobacco global FDI has increased many orders of magnitude – see Figure 4.1 (Punthakey 2020). Food companies generate revenue that is at least five times higher through FDI sales than through export sales (Rayner et al. 2007). Exporting highly processed foods can be cost prohibitive, as transport and storage costs relative to the value of the product are high. Producing these foods in the host country for domestic distribution avoids many such costs. FDI also optimizes the effectiveness of branding and promotional marketing, allowing companies – from Nestlé to PepsiCo and Walmart – to benefit from economies of scale in marketing and advertising. Investing in well-known domestic brands is also advantageous for firms by giving them instant ownership over a brand already known in regional and/or national markets. The rise of FDI has aided the spread of nutritiously shallow calories. In Argentina, for example, 18 percent of all food expenditures in 1996 were on meals eaten outside the home, up from a mere 8 percent in 1970. This increase correlates strongly with an increase in FDI in restaurant – and coffee, doughnut, ice cream, etc. – chains and processed foods in the country (Hawkes 2005). Or take Brazil, where growth in the sales of hamburgers, pre-made desserts, yoghurts, and flavored milk averaged 27 percent between 1993 and 1997, compared with 5 percent for such items as vegetable oils, margarine, poultry, and pork. In India, FDI in the food processing sector rose 44 percent to US$904.7 million in the financial year 2019–20, up from US$628.24 million the year prior (The Economic

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-5

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Figure 4.1  Global FDI inflows in for Food, Beverages, and Tobacco, 1991–2018 (in USD billion) Source: Punthakey 2020.

Times 2020), which tracks with data indicating that Indians are eating more and more process foods at the expense of whole foods (e.g., Sharma et al. 2020). In other words, dietary patterns track remarkably close with FDI trends. Talking about FDI therefore adds to our understanding of what is known as the nutrition transition – changes in dietary patterns (namely, the consumption of more processed fats and sugars) and physical activity levels (increasingly sedentary lifestyles) that accompany a country’s rising affluence and increasing urbanization (Popkin 1994). Medical innovation in disease treatment and improvements in infrastructure, such as the delivery of clean water and disposal of waste, seems no longer sufficient to offset the negative impact of diets linked with the green revolution and, more recently, FDI. By the early 2000s, nearly three-quarters of all FDI into Mexico was directed at the production of processed foods. During this period, sales of “snacks” increased annually by roughly 12 percent, while “baked goods” saw a 55 percent increase (Hawkes 2005). More remarkable still was the increase in carbonated soft-drink consumption in this country, which increased from 275 8-oz servings per person per year in 1992 to 487 8-oz servings in 2002 (Hawkes 2005) to 557 8-oz servings in 2018 – the highest per-capita consumption of such beverages in the world (Reddy 2018). Given the large amount of FDI coming out of the US (see Table 4.1), it should not be a surprise that these transitions involve moving toward a diet that looks quite typical for the average North American. China, the most populous country in the world, is undergoing a profound nutrition transition. The traditional Chinese diet included cereals and vegetables with few animal foods. Yet from 1982 to 2012, the Chinese significantly decreased their intake of cereals, tubers, and vegetables, which declined from 509.7 g/d (grams per day) to 337.3 g/d, 179.9 g/d to 35.8 g/d, and 316.1 g/d to 269.4 g/d, respectively. Moreover, due

Financialization of food 69 Table 4.1  FDI in food Rank

Centrality*

Number of deals

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

United States United Kingdom Spain Russian Federation Germany China Poland France Australia Brazil

United States China United Kingdom France Brazil Germany Spain Australia Poland Russian Federation

Source: Punthakey 2020. * Centrality, or relative influence, is a network term that speaks to the importance and magnitude of a node. When mapping FDI, “centrality” speaks to the nation that yields the greatest influence.

to investments and advancements in processing, resulting in increases in processed (i.e., white) flour, there has been a marked decline in consumption of coarse grains during this period. From 1982 to 2012, the average intake of animal-based foods also increased dramatically, from 52.6 g/d to 137.7 g/d, while daily cooking oil intake increased from 18.2 g/d to 42.1 g/d (Huang et al. 2020). What is so powerful about the nutrition transition and its link to global trade and FDI is that there is evidence that it is happening, to various degrees, in every country – save, perhaps, for nations like North Korea that remain largely “closed” to these forces. For example, a recent study looking at twenty-six post-communist countries in the period 1996 to 2013 finds evidence of such a transition for each (Krivonos and Kuhn 2019). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of these economies to global capital flows, all countries were found to increased their overall calorie availability measured by the dietary energy supply. At one level, this sounds like a positive development – more food! But you need to look at the type of calories that were being made available. When you do that, you discover that many were highly processed calories in the form of sugar, fats, and oils, while the share of cereals, roots, and tubers in daily diets declined during the transition period (Krivonos and Kuhn 2019).

Biofuels I could have slipped the topic of biofuels into any number of the chapters, as the impacts of their growth and use can be felt around the world in a multitude of ways. I am discussing them here because biofuels are driving major investments in agrifood chains. World ethanol production has increased from roughly 5.5  billion gallons in 2000 to close to 30 billion gallons in 2019. Roughly half of the world’s ethanol comes from the US, with Brazil responsible for another third of global production – see Figure 4.2. Biodiesel production is also on the rise. As of 2019, Indonesia led the world in biodiesel production, the majority of which comes in the form of palm oil – some 90 percent of the world’s oil palm trees are grown on a few islands in Malaysia and Indonesia, which are also home to some of the most biologically diverse tropical forests found on Earth. Rounding out the top five, we have the US followed by Brazil, Germany, and France, as detailed in Figure 4.3.

70  The multi-scalar food economy

Figure 4.2  Global ethanol production, 2007–2019 Source: Statisa nd.

0.2 0.3

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Figure 4.3  Top biodiesel producers worldwide in 2019, by country (in billion liters) Source: Statisa nd.

Oils used to generate biofuels are not equal. Sunflowers, rapeseed, and soybeans were originally grown in temperate countries, though that is changing, especially with the rising share of soybeans now being produced in Brazil due to genetically improved varieties. Oil palms, alternatively, grow only under humid tropical conditions, and they produce five to eight times more oil per hectare than the other crops. They also require less labor to grow per unit than other oil crops (Roda 2019). Taken together, this means palm oil is by far the cheapest oil to produce. Palm oil is therefore frequently associated with

Financialization of food 71

deforestation as the market share of this commodity increases (Malins 2020), as depicted in the image in Figure 4.4. Palm oil has also been associated with child labor. The Associated Press (AP) (2020) investigated the industry in 2020 and “exposed [cases of] rape, forced labor, trafficking and slavery.” Focusing on Malaysia and Indonesia, reporters spoke to more than 130 current and former workers  – including roughly two dozen child laborers  – at nearly 25 companies. (Palm oil is not just used for biofuels. The AP report specifically focused on connections between palm oil, this exploitive industry, and the beloved Girl Scout cookies, which are annually sold in the US to raise money for local troops as well as the parent organization.) Their locations are not being disclosed, and only partial names or nicknames are being used due to fears of retribution. Quoting from the report, the investigated journalists found “children working on plantations and corroborated accounts of abuse, whenever possible, by reviewing police reports and legal documents.” Moreover, “reporters also interviewed more than 100 activists, teachers, union leaders, government officials, researchers, lawyers and clergy, including some who helped victims of trafficking or sexual assault.” Biofuels have a long history as a fuel source. At the dawn of the twentieth century, between 5 and 6  percent of all potatoes grown in Germany were going into the production of ethanol. In 1903, Germans consumed 1 million gallons of ethanol to power internal combustion engines, with the government calling for production of alcohol fuel to grow to exceed 3 million gallons. And in Greece, at around the same time, the use of ethanol had become so great that the government was forced to impose an ethanol fuel tax to compensate for the loss of revenues from petroleum taxes (Carolan 2009). The scope of biofuel production and consumption today, however, vastly surpasses anything seen in the past.

Figure 4.4  Deforestation on peatland for palm oil plantation, Central Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia Source: Flickr images.

72  The multi-scalar food economy Biofuel production and the Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a set of standards directed at the elimination of global poverty. There are seventeen goals in all – see Figure 4.5. Every goal had targets associated with it, for a total of 169 targets. For example, SDG 15 calls upon governments, the private sector, and others to “Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.” A target associated with this goal is: “By 2020, promote the implementation of sustainable management of all types of forests, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests and substantially increase afforestation and reforestation globally.” If you’re wondering: that target has not been realized . . . and we’re well past 2020. Biofuels are seen as injecting contradictory elements into this conversation, which can be framed in terms of SDGs. Proponents, for instance, tout them as presenting solutions to climate change (SDG 13) and as necessary or creating sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11), while opponents are quick to criticize biofuel regimes for their numerous negative impacts to livelihoods and the environment, particularly as they are associated with the distortion of food supplies, leading to food price increases, in addition to the role they play in competition for land and water. It is helpful to realize that biofuels differ not only in terms of their material components – e.g., corn ethanol is not the same as, say, palm oil–based biofuels. They also differ in terms of when they were developed and the (engineering/chemical) processes involved, which leads to the distinction between what are known as first-, second-, third-, and fourth-generation biofuels. Table 4.2 provides an over view of these differences. But while there are technically different types  – or generations – or biofuels, the great majority of that produced continues to be of the firstgeneration variety.

Figure 4.5  17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations Source: Flickr images.

Financialization of food 73 Table 4.2  The four “generations” of biofuels Generation Description First Second

Third Fourth

Based on the chemical conversion of oils (vegetable oil and animal fats) to produce biodiesel and the fermentation of starch and sugar to produce ethanol Based on the biochemical or thermochemical processes to convert agricultural lignocellulosic biomass to fuels. Generally speaking, this involves the conversation of by-products (e.g., cereal straw, forest residues), wastes (e.g., organic components of municipal solid wastes), and dedicated feedstocks (e.g., purpose-grown vegetative grasses). Based on microbiological processes of species such as yeast, fungi, and microalgae and the genetic engineering of algae biomass and other aquatic biomass sources Based on petroleum-like hydroprocessing or thermochemical processes with a focus on genetically optimized feedstocks geared towards capturing and storing carbon during processing

Source: Adapted from Renzaho et al. 2017.

When weighing the costs and benefits of biofuels, it is important to not think about them monolithically but to realize each type comes with its own opportunities and challenges. First-generation biofuels, for example, have been heavily criticized for threatening food security. While food price volatility predates biofuels, the intensity of that volatility has increased considerably over the last twenty years. And biofuels, especially first-generation biofuels, have been called out as playing a central role, along with other factors such as climate change, increases in food production costs due to higher energy and fertilizer prices, national export restrictions, rising global food demand, and low food stocks (e.g., de Gorter and Drabik 2016; Taghizadeh-Hesary et al. 2019). There is considerable disagreement in the peer-reviewed literature, however, as to whether biofuels are responsible for a considerable amount of that volatility (e.g., Subramaniam et al. 2019) or some lesser amount (e.g., Carpio 2019). While the first-generation biofuels continue to dominate many of the discussions, particularly in terms of their impact on food supply, it is worth reviewing whether secondgeneration ones lived up their often-touted economic and environmental benefits. It has been argued that cellulosic (second generation) biofuel crops have important environmental advantages, most notably the argument that the use of agricultural residue crops to produce biofuels means that there are no requirements for additional land and almost no direct impact on food supplies and prices. The idea, again, is that crop residue produced in the process of growing food is what is used to produce fuel (Hanssen et al. 2019). It has also been argued that second-generation biofuels create jobs by lengthening employment past the harvest season through the production and transport of agricultural residues or waste (Paschalidou et al. 2016). Yet the production costs of second-generation fuels remain considerably higher than first-generation fuels, which explains the continued use of the latter. The cost of converting cellulosic fuels has been estimated at $1.46 per gallon, which is considerably higher than corn-based ethanol, which can be produced at $0.78 per gallon, though this “cheapness” is in part due to the availability of generous corn/ ethanol subsidies, plus early taxpayer-funded supports (e.g., tax holidays) that helped prop up this infrastructure. Switchgrass biofuel is even more expensive – more than two times as expensive – relative to corn ethanol, while the production costs of cellulosic biofuels from corn stover and miscanthus are roughly a quarter higher than those of corn ethanol (Renzahoa et al. 2017). As for so-called third- and fourth-generation biofuels, there is not a lot to say about them, as their technologies remain in their infancy, and as such they

74  The multi-scalar food economy

remain expensive, which explains why they account for only 1 percent of global biofuel production (Renzahoa et al. 2017). Let us spend a little time looking at specific studies to produce a finer understanding of the subject. One such study looked to understand what benefits (if any) local ownership of ethanol-processing plants has upon the communities in which they are located (Bain 2011). A widely popular argument within the rural development literature is that local ownership of firms has an overall net positive effect on local economic and community well-being (a belief underlying the Goldschmidt Thesis discussed in Chapter 5). Rather than merely assume local ownership is better than non-local ownership, this study explores, by interviewing community and business leaders in a community with a locally own ethanol plant, whether this all-too-common assumption actually holds true in the case of ethanol plants. The study concludes by arguing that “beyond the opportunities presented to individual farmers and investors participants did not consider that local ownership had influenced company practices or its socioeconomic impacts within the community” (p. 1405). In making this argument, the author points out that ethanol plants, even local ones, remain embedded within national and international supply chains and networks. Whereas rural development asserts that firms operate at different scales, with local firms embedded within local supply chains and institutions, locally owned ethanol firms remain connected to national and global networks. As a fuel additive, ethanol cannot be divorced from petroleum’s global organizational structure. Even locally owned ethanol plants therefore remain embedded within larger petroleum networks, as its main customers remain just a handful of international petroleum firms. Ethanol plants are but small players in a supply chain over which they have little control. Consequently, the price offered to local corn growers and returns to investors is largely dictated by major oil firms, the global petroleum market, and government ethanol policies and subsidies. In a similar study involving forty-eight farming and non-farming individuals involved in switchgrass bioenergy projects in Iowa and Kentucky, respondents held simultaneously positive and negative perceptions toward biofuel’s potential as a tool for local and regional development (Rossi and Hinrichs 2011). Some of the strongest skepticism stemmed from observations of the growing concentration of the food system, expecting similar trends and influence to be wielded in the emerging bioeconomy. At the same time, participants were hopeful that biofuels would help revitalize local and regional economies and community structures. This willingness to sacrifice local autonomy in exchange for greater capital investment (by multinational firms) at the local and regional levels reflects some of the trade-offs that must be negotiated when thinking about biofuel’s potential as a strategy for rural development. When investigating the links between rural development and biofuels, it is therefore essential to ask, “Rural development for whom?” (see Box 4.1).

Box 4.1  Impacts of Oil Palm Biofuel Expansion in Colombia A study by three Columbia-based scholars (Castiblanco et  al. 2015) analyzes the socioeconomic impacts of the expansion of oil palm plantations in Columbia. The findings collaborate those from North American–based scholars (discussed earlier),

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as they emphasize how institutional and social conditions are deeply consequential in shaping who benefits from biofuel-based rural development schemes. Oil palm municipalities had larger per-capita incomes than those where the crop was not cultivated. However, violence and land tenure concentration also tended to be higher in municipalities with palm plantations, which helps explain the persistence of inequality and poverty in these areas. As the authors argue: For oil palm production to become a “blessing,” it is important that the agroindustry generates sustained positive economic linkages with other land uses and economic activities, in order to contribute to a regional productive transformation and diversification. (Castiblanco et al. 2015: 41) In other words, institutional conditions (high levels of corruption, overlapping jurisdictions, institutional and infrastructural isolation of certain municipalities, etc.) and social conditions (violence, low levels of social and political capital, high levels of inequality, etc.) inhibit long-term growth and rural development, even in those zones that attract oil palm plantation investment. Put still differently, rural development is only partially about economic development. Also important are those social, cultural, and political organizations and networks that determine the distribution of those resources (and whether they are distributed fairly).

There is general consensus within the social science literature that raising biofuel crops is a questionable (at best) pro-poor strategy. Biofuel production may provide opportunities for high economic returns for some farmers, especially among those who can afford initial capital investments. Instances have been documented in which peasant farmers have profited from biofuel crops, such as when the price of palm oil rose from US$570 to more than US$1,440 per metric ton from 2007 to 2008 (McCarthy and Zen 2010), when global sugar prices reached a thirty-year high in August 2009 (Richardson 2010), or when global investors jumped on the jatropha (more about this commodity in a second) bandwagon, and some smaller-scale farmers benefited from this huge influx of capital (Antwi-Bediako et al. 2019). More often, however, peasant farmers are unable to capitalize on these opportunities. One crop receiving a lot of attention of late is jatropha, a hardy, drought-tolerant shrub, which explains its wide promotion as a crop ideally suited for marginal lands. In 2008, jatropha was planted on an estimated 900,000 hectares globally, 760,000 of which were located in Asia, 120,000 in Africa, and 20,000 hectares in Latin America (primarily Brazil and Mexico). Investment in jatropha then largely withered up with the recession. However, back in 2014, with the price of oil hovering at around US$100 a barrel, firms entered what has come to be known in the industry as Jatropha 2.0, which is said to involve breeding programs to improve the “hybrid vigor” of these plants. A massive re-investment in this crop was being made, as huge jatropha plantations were planned for Brazil, India, and other countries. While jatropha is twice as land intensive as sugarcane, sugarcane is three times more capital intensive than jatropha. Consequently, farmers with greater access to capital and

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credit have the option of investing in sugarcane and the higher returns per unit of land that this crop brings (Dauvergne and Neville 2010). Sugarcane is a capital-intensive crop to establish and, as such, is arguably most economically efficient at large plantation scales (Richardson 2010). Jatropha farming, conversely, is widely believed to require minimal levels of capital, credit, and water (Soto et al. 2015). This is why biodiesel from jatropha is said to be more pro-poor than bioethanol from sugar, as the former can more easily be produced by small-scale farmers. Indeed, jatropha has repeatedly been called the pro-poor biofuels plant (see, e.g., Brittaine and Lutaladio 2010). Another popular claim by jatropha proponents is that it grows almost anywhere, including marginal lands where very little else can. This has given it the identity of being a pro-wasteland crop. Allow me to unpack all this. The flexible classification of “wastelands” has allowed governments and corporations to easily acquire land under the auspices of this label, including for purposes of jatropha cultivation. Social scientist have long been suspicious about designations referring to “idle,” “waste,” or “marginal” land. Such labels inevitably ask the question, “idle” or “marginal” for whom and in pursuance of what end? As one study on the subject notes, “growing evidence raises doubts about the concept of ‘idle’ land. In many cases, lands perceived to be ‘idle,’ ‘underutilized,’ ‘marginal’ or ‘abandoned’ by government and large private operators provide a vital basis for the livelihoods of poorer and vulnerable groups, including through crop farming, herding and gathering of wild products” (Cotula et al. 2008: 22–23). The pro-poor discourse surrounding jatropha is aided by the belief that the crop requires minimal water and labor, making it perfectly suited, it is said, for the small-scale farmer. Framing jatropha as “pro-poor” also helps build consensus around the idea that local rural development is compatible with raising biofuels for industrial economic growth. In reality, analyses of plantations’ performance reveals that jatropha irrigation inputs were much higher than expected and the yield of the crop one-tenth of what farmers were promised. Only farmers with access to capital and credit could maximize yields through irrigation and the application of petrochemical inputs. Moreover, the conversion of land to a jatropha monoculture diminished crop diversity. This loss of diversity increased farmers’ vulnerability, particularly among small-scale farmers who lacked the resources to mitigate risks with external inputs (Ariza-Montobbio et al. 2010). In a study of jatropha plantations in the Dakatcha woodlands of Kenya, it was found that the plants require copious amounts of water and nutrients to maximize yields (IRIN 2011). It is true that the plant can survive droughts and poor soil. But there is a catch – it will not produce many seeds in such a scenario. And it is the seed that you make biofuels from. The more water, the more seed, and the better the harvest – so much for being a wasteland, pro-poor crop. The study also casts jatropha-based biofuels as having a significant carbon footprint. Specifically, the life cycle of jatropha-based biofuels has been shown to emit between 2.5 and 6 times more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, due largely to the clearing the forest (which stores significant quantities of carbon in its vegetation and soil) in order to make room for the plant. In Mexico, jatropha resulted in decreases in bean and corn production, even though it was said that the crop would initially only be raised on “marginal” (i.e., non-food-producing) lands (Antwi-Bediako et al. 2019). A similar promise was made and broken in India, as it ended up being cultivated on foodproducing lands there too (Antwi-Bediako et al. 2019). Returning briefly to the topic of how biofuels promote, or not, those SDGs. Table 4.3 helps us think through this question while also demonstrating the different ways that biofuel policy, and agrifood policy more generally, touches livelihoods around the world.

Financialization of food 77 Table 4.3  The 17 SDGs with target points associated with agrifood systems   #1 End poverty in all its forms everywhere – Assist smallholder farmers living in poverty – Ensure equal rights to ownership and control of land   #2 End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture – Meet the global demand for nutritious food – Improve productivity of small-scale farmers through equal access to land – Maintain seed genetic diversity and manage seed banks   #3 Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages – Reduce non-communicable diseases through prevention – Reduce the consequences of excess fertilizer and pesticides   #4 Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all – Afford government ability to support education   #5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls – End discrimination against women – Give women access and control over land and property   #6 Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all – Improve irrigation systems to reduce waste   #7 Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all – Improve access to clean energy, such as biofuel production   #8 Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all – Support secure working environments, such as farmer safety during operations – Support food trade among countries   #9 Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation – Improve roads and transit systems to markets – Translate new innovations to farmers wanting to change #10 Reduce inequality within and among countries – Promote social, economic and political inclusion of all, such as woman farmers – Monitor and improve market legislation and policies #11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable – Safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage – Support links between urban, peri-urban, and rural areas #12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns – Maximize use of non-food or non-feed components to reduce waste #13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts – Adapt crops to varying climates and preserve nutrients #14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development – Minimize farm runoff #15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss – Maintain international seed banks to ensure biodiversity and access to genetic resources #16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels #17 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development – Use diverse partnerships to improve agrifood systems Source: Adapted from Tanumihardjo et al. 2019.

Some of these touchpoints are obvious, such as with SDGs 1 and 2. Other connections, however, are opaque, as with SDG 4 – there are many aspects of agrifood policy (e.g., land grabbing) that hobble the ability of states to provide basic services to their people, like education.

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Biofuels are often debated narrowly, such as in terms of whether they are carbon neutral, negative, or positive. Granted, climate change touches all of our lives in multiple ways. But as Table 4.3 reminds us, the concept of “sustainable development” is complex. And our evaluation of any aspect of the foodscape needs to be attuned to that complexity.

The global land grab The term “global land grab” refers to transcontinental land deals whereby corporations, investment firms, or state-owned enterprises lease or purchase large areas of land in other countries for agricultural purposes (Carolan 2018). Although these data underrepresent the scale of what is happening around the world, the Land Matrix (https://landmatrix. org/), as of fall 2020, has data for concluded investments covering 79 million hectares (195,213,251 acres), 12.7  million hectares (31,382,383 acres) of intended deals, and 16.3  million hectares (40,278,177 acres) of failed initiatives. To put those figures into some perspective, the USDA reports a total of 125,857,235 hectares (311,000,000 acres) of “principal crops” planted in the entire US for 2020 (Farm Bureau 2020). (“Principal crops” is an all-encompassing category for the agency  – hay, barley, canola, chickpeas, corn, cotton, dry edible beans, durum wheat, oats, other spring wheat, peanuts, potatoes, proso millet, rice, rye, sorghum, soybeans, sunflower, sugar beets, sugarcane, tobacco, and winter wheat.) Even before realizing that the Land Matrix’s dataset underestimates the amount of land being grabbed globally (Cochrane and Legault 2020), these figures are staggering. Figure 4.6 gives a snapshot of the countries most effected by land grabbing, as defined by total amount of land acquired by these deals, between 2000 and 2019. For some countries, we are talking about a tenth (or more) of a country’s total area being locked up in

Figure 4.6  Countries most affected by land grabs

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leasing arrangements that stretch decades. There are numerous trends driving what we are seeing in the figure: increasing competition for land; population growth; demands for food, biofuels, raw materials, and timber; carbon-offset markets; and speculative investment flows, which I talk more about later in this chapter. Land is either practically or literally given away under these deals. Job creation and infrastructure development are viewed as the main economic benefits for developing countries. In Sudan, for example, a feddan (0.42 hectare) can be leased for as little as US$2 or US$3 a year. In Ethiopia, rent was being paid in four out of the six projects examined in an FAO-sponsored study, with lease prices ranging from US$3 to US$10 per hectare per year. Madagascar is under contract with the biofuel conglomerate Green Energy Madagascar (GEM). Under this contract, GEM pays no rental fees for the leased 450,000 hectares. Instead, they promise to build up local infrastructures and hire around 4,500 part-time workers (Torres and Branford 2018; Vandergeest and Schoenberger 2019; Van den Broeck et al. 2020). How, then, do the countries leasing their lands benefit under contracts so seemingly favorable to the lessee? There is little evidence that these deals increase public revenues through taxes, given the “tax holidays” involved. International land deals granted by Ethiopia, for example, typically come with a profit tax holiday for a period of five years. It is estimated that this five-year tax exemption costs the Ethiopian government US$ 60,276,000 for each project (Van den Broeck et  al. 2020). Instead, benefits are said to come in the form of other commitments. Qatar, for instance, has committed to a multidecade leasing arrangement that involves 40,000 hectares of land in a fertile River Tana Delta on the north coast of Kenya. In exchange for the lease Qatar provided the Kenyan government a £2.4 billion loan to construct a port on the Indian Ocean island of Lamu (Telegraph, The 2008). Such benefits, however, depend heavily on whether the lessee actually delivers on its promise. And enforceability of promises depends upon the details of the contract and national legislation. GEM in Madagascar, for example, ended up investing in increased mechanization, despite promises to pursue a labor-intensive business model and create jobs in exchange for 450,000 hectares. Other countries, such as Mali, have legislation allowing for the termination of leases if lessees fail to pay fees or maintain contractual obligations. Those who lose the most from these arrangements are the indigenous communities living on the land prior to it being sold or leased to foreign entities. While the land in many of these cases may be technically owned by the state, it is a vital resource to a number of populations, from farmers to hunter-gatherers and herders. In these countries, because land laws do not require the consent of those living on the land in order for it to be leased to another party, most contracts can be enacted without any local participation or notification. Not surprisingly, then, conflicts have erupted between local populations and new landowners/renters ( e.g., Abubakari et al. 2020). We are also beginning to see more clearly the links between violence and land-grabbing leases. In 2016, the International Criminal Court broadened its mandate to include land grabbing as a “crime against humanity,” which it promises to prosecute (I have yet to find evidence of this happening, however) (Grain 2018). In 2017, Global Witness (2018) – an NGO with offices in London and Washington, DC, established in 1993 to fight against natural resource exploitation, conflict, poverty, corruption, and human rights abuses worldwide – recorded a record number of land defenders being killed (201 in total), noting that the top driver was agribusiness.

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Many of the nations handing over land to foreign entities are already incredibly food insecure. Reports have surfaced indicating that some investors are pushing for explicit provisions guaranteeing full repatriation of produce, including where this requires amending the national law of the host state. Pakistan’s Federal Investment Minister, Waqar Ahmad Khan, is quoted as saying that the government would make sure the investors in corporate farming get the entire crop, even when those crops are located in food-insecure countries: “We are negotiating with investors from Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, for investment in corporate farming. Investors will be ensured repatriation of 100 per cent crop yield to their countries, even in the case of food deficit” (as quoted in News, The 2009). In the end, the Pakistani government had to revise its policy in response to public outrage and now calls for “reasonable percentages” of produce to be exported. Researchers have estimated that the total land grabbed by foreign governments and corporations – for biofuels, mining, food production, and other uses – could feed up to 550 million people (Rulli and D’Odorico 2014), to say nothing of the large-scale tropic forest loss (and hence biodiversity lose and CO2 sink capacity) associated with these acquisitions (Davis et al. 2020).

Wall Street finds food It has been argued that financialization can be grouped into three distinct yet mutually reinforcing forms: “as a process that opens up new arenas for capital accumulation; as the increasing prioritization of returns to shareholders over other values in corporate management; and as the permeation of financial values and activities into the everyday practices of social provisioning” (Clapp and Isakson 2018: 438). Collectively, this translates into processes that exacerbate inequalities and injustices (by concentrating power and wealth), ecological harms and vulnerabilities (privileging short-term economic thinking over long-term ecological thinking around things like limits), and barriers to collective action (through collusion with government to weaken regulation and laws). As the concept is incredibly complex, let us take a step back and start at the beginning, discussing briefly its history and terms relevant to the topic. This section is not looking to delve into the subject at great depths. Rather, I aim to introduce the financialization of agrifood and its concepts. Even with more than ten years of scholarship on the subject, it is surprisingly hard to find an accessible account of the processes (and terms) involved. The review provided in what follows, while just a sketch of the underlying logics and tools involved, will nevertheless give the reader a deeper appreciation of how financial markets have evolved over the years and in a way that radically alters food and agriculture commodity markets. Financialization refers to the growing role played by financial markets within a specific sector, which in this case is the agrifood sector (Clapp 2014). Many scholars have pointed to the role of financial investors in agricultural commodity future markets in helping create the 2007–08 food price crises (e.g., Kaufman 2012). Moreover, the larger global recession that hit at the same time drove massive amounts of investment capital into agricultural markets, which ought to make us more than a little nervous about the future (price) of food. Investors saw (and continue to see) things like food and land as far more “real” and thus reliable investments than that available in, say, the mortgage market that went underwater in 2008. After all, people have to eat, land is a fixed good (no one is making more of it), and the world’s population is only going to increase. The futures market originally made a lot of sense and arguably made everyone better off – producers, processors, and consumers. In the mid 1880s, US grain merchants

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came up with a new way to trade future wheat. This ingenious system involved buyers and sellers coming together and signing forward contracts to deliver/buy grain on the expiration date of the contract for a pre-negotiated price. As mentioned in prior chapters, agriculture is an inherently risky activity and riddled with many “natural barriers.” The futures market was another way to overcome some of those barriers and risks. It gave wheat farmers and bakers, for instance, a level of security, knowing that they have a locked-in price for their outputs and inputs, respectively. Without such a contract, farmers risk selling when prices are low, while bakers risk buying when prices are high. Originally, futures gave agrifood markets stability, as they helped manage the risky business of farming and milling while making sure, for consumers, that the price of bread remained steady. A couple important terms you ought to know: “hedgers” and “speculators.” Hedgers are the farmers, millers, bakers, and, today, multinational corporation – General Mills, Pizza Hut, Sara Lee, etc. – that have an actual need, from a business standpoint, for the commodity in question. Sometimes these actors are referred to as bona fide hedgers, especially those at the processing end of the hourglass, as their fortunes require the purchasing of massive quantities of these commodities. By utilizing futures contracts, hedgers are able to hedge some of the risks inherent to agriculture. Speculators, in contrast, have traditionally made their futures through one principle, which is buying low and selling high (though, as I’ll get to briefly, that has changed to an even simpler maximum today, buy). The speculator makes money without ever touching the commodity. They are interested in future commodities that do not yet exist, that are a derivative of something that is not entirely real (in a material sense) but which is very real in its consequences. Another important term you ought to know: “normal backwardation.” Coined by the famous twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes, “backwardation” is the name for the condition whereby the market quotes a lower price for a more distant delivery date and a higher price for a nearer delivery date. (The reverse condition, contango, exists when the market quotes a higher price for a more distant delivery date and a lower price for a nearby delivery date.) The real-time price for a commodity brought to and sold in the market is called the spot price, which is another term you ought to be familiar with. Backwardation, in many, instances makes sense. If you were a farmer, I bet you would be willing to take a secured lower price for a yet-to-be-harvested (or maybe even yet-to-be-planted) crop then you would for a crop already in hand. But in the last few decades common sense has been thrown out the window when it comes to futures markets. Frederick Kaufman (2012) recounts an interview with an individual who traded commodities for Cargill in the 1980s. Kaufman wanted to try to better understand why and how futures trading changed over the last thirty years. The trader explained how in the 1980s agricultural “commodities had died.” He went on to say, “we sat there every day, and the market wouldn’t move. People left. They couldn’t make a living anymore” (p. 212). The market wouldn’t move, people left, they couldn’t make a living anymore: those words capture why and how futures trading has transformed into something best described as surreal. The crux of the point is that traders today make money when commodity prices move. Whether the price goes up or down is irrelevant. What is relevant is that they go up and down, and the wilder the ride the better. Markets are only as good, from a trader standpoint, as the profits that can be extracted from them. As Kaufman (2012: 214) explains: “For more than a century, traditional buying and selling on the Chicago Exchange, the Kansas City Board of Trade, and other assorted commodity clearinghouses across the

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country had helped to keep the price of grain on an even keel. [. . .] But traditional buying and selling did not satisfy the new generation of banker-traders.” The “leader” in all of this was the investment firm Goldman and Sachs. In 1991, Goldman bankers came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked twenty-four raw materials  – precious metals, energy, coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. This complicated formula that was expressed as a single metric has come to be known as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI). But the GSCI remained largely inconsequential until 1999, when the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. This resulted in “long-only” investments, which means, essentially, investments only bought, never sold. (To “short” an investment is to sell it.) Commodity trading, in other words, started to look a lot like investments in Apple, Microsoft, or General Motors, where they would sit in a portfolio and accrue for decades. Every time a due date of a long-only commodity futures contract neared investors “rolled” the order into another futures contract. This practice distorts what is known of “price discovery” – when futures meet the present in a buyer/seller transaction, giving rise to its spot price. Markets do not work very well without price discovery, especially for people who actually use – or, in the case of food, need – the commodities in question. For investors, however, such markets work splendidly. This provides some context for the unprecedented price volatility in food that we are now seeing. As illustrated in Table 4.4, food prices (indexed to the average across the years 2014–2016) have been volatile. Increasing food prices are problematic enough, for obvious reasons – it is hard to keep one and one’s family fed when food’s expensive. Volatile food prices add another level of misery. Roller-coaster markets make planning difficult, thus endangering future food security for entire countries. Meanwhile, banks and traders are making a lot of money. Barclays Capital, for instance, Europe’s largest player in the agricultural commodity derivatives market, is said to have Table 4.4  FAO Food Price Index, Cereal Price Index, and Cargill Profits, 2002–2020 Year

FAO Food Price Index

Cereal Price Index

Cargill Profits

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

53.1 57.8 65.5 67.4 72.6 94.2 117.5 91.7 106.7 131.9 122.8 120.1 115.0 93.1 1.9 8.0 95.9 95.0 101.1

55.6 59.4 64.0 60.8 71.2 100.9 137.6 97.2 107.5 142.2 137.4 129.1 115.8 95.5 88.3 91.0 100.6 96.4 102.0

US$800 million US$1.3 billion US$1.3 billion US$2.1 billion US$1.5 billion US$2.3 billion US$4.0 billion US$3.3 billion US$2.6 billion US$2.7 billion US$1.2 billion US$2.3 billion US$1.8 billion US$1.6 billion US$2.4 billion US$2.8 billion US$3.1 billion US$2.6 billion US$3.0 billion

Source: FAO 2020; Blas 2020.

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earned more than €406 million during the 2007–08 food crisis from financial speculation on food (Oxfam 2011). Table 4.4 also includes columns that highlight almost twenty years of profits for Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodity trader, and a cereal price index, to capture a food type that Cargill dominates. Note the bizarre relationship between Cargill’s profits and food prices. Cargill did incredibly well in 2008, when food prices had spiked. Granted, profits dropped a little the following years as food prices continued to increase. Yet the company’s profits still greatly exceeded levels experienced at the beginning of the millennium, when food prices were far lower. Isn’t the argument for industry and market consolidation greater efficiencies for the consumer? So, as opposed to making billions as prices rise, would you not prefer to see companies do their part to improve food security? As I write these words, for instance, in the middle of COVID-19 and the huge food disruptions the pandemic has created, it is being reported that the 125 family members that control Cargill – it is a private company, so it doesn’t have traditional “shareholders” – received the biggest payout ever, with dividends totaling US$1.13 billion (Blas 2020). Finally, who are the actors involved in this, beyond the Cargills, Barclays, and those attached to Wall Street? You might be; chances are even better that your parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents are, too. Principal investors in these new agricultural commodity derivatives products are large-scale institutional investment firms – insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and university and foundation endowments. Most institutional investments  – e.g., 401(k) plans  – do not allow for active management at the individual level. I am not trying to point fingers. My retirement portfolio is quite possibly involved in some of this as well. (I have tried to find out but have yet to get any definitive answers, which is part of the problem . . . the murkiness of it all.) This forces the question: Do we all hold some level of responsibility for the financialization of food?

Transition. . . Issues of food, as by now should be clear, impact people far and wide and in ways that are numerous. Yet I have only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding how current food policies and practices impact (often negatively) human communities. The following chapter and the new section it kicks off pull the veil back still further, exposing additional costs associated with dominant food systems to community well-being and public health.

Discussion questions 1 Table 4.4 illustrates the price volatility of food over the last decade, while the Cargills of the world are continuing to make more and more – US$3 million in 2020 and “only” US$800 million in 2002. And yet farmers are making the same, an in many cases less, per unit than what they did two decades ago. Can you explain why? 2 How will countries like Japan (an island) or Egypt (more than 90  percent of it is desert) be able to ensure their future food security if not by land grabbing in other countries? 3 Why do biofuels remain a popular “solution” to certain ills (e.g., climate change, energy independence, etc.) in some circles even though their environmental benefits are questionable and the price of food is becoming more volatile?

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Suggested readings: introductory level Associated Press. 2020. Child Labor in Palm Oil Industry Tied to Girl Scout Cookies. Associated Press, December  29, https://apnews.com/article/palm-oil-forests-indonesia-scouts- 83b01f2789e9489569 960da63b2741c4. Clapp, J., and S.R. Isakson. 2018. Risky Returns: The Implications of Financialization in the Food System, Development and Change 49(2): 437–460. FIAN. 2017. Land Grabbing and Human Rights. Heidelberg, Germany: FIAN International, www.fian. org/fileadmin/media/publications_2017/Announcements_Calls_Flyer/ WEB_Eng.pdf. Land Matrix, https://landmatrix.org/.

Suggested readings: advanced level Baker, P., P. Machado, T. Santos, K. Sievert, K. Backholer, M. Hadjikakou, C. Russell, O. Huse, C. Bell, G. Scrinis, and A. Worsley. 2020. Ultra-Processed Foods and the Nutrition Transition: Global, Regional and National Trends, Food Systems Transformations and Political Economy Drivers, Obesity Reviews, https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.13126. Cochrane, L., and D.D. Legault. 2020. The Rush for Land and Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: What We Know and What We Are Missing, Land 9(5) https://doi.org/10.3390/land9050167. de Gorter, H., and D. Drabik. 2016. Biofuel Policies and the Impact of Developing Countries’ Policy Responses to the 2007–2008 Food Price Boom, Global Food Security 11: 64–71. Renzaho, A.M., J.K. Kamara, and M. Toole. 2017. Biofuel Production and Its Impact on Food Security in Low and Middle Income Countries: Implications for the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 78: 503–516.

References Abubakari, M., K.O. Twum, and G.A. Asokwah. 2020. From Conflict to Cooperation: The Trajectories of Large-Scale Land Investments on Land Conflict Reversal in Ghana, Land Use Policy 94: 104543. Antwi-Bediako, R., K. Otsuki, A. Zoomers, and A. Amsalu. 2019. Global Investment Failures and Transformations: A Review of Hyped Jatropha Spaces, Sustainability 11(12), https://doi.org/10.3390/ su11123371. Ariza-Montobbio, P., L. Sharachchandra, K. Giorgos, and Joan Martinez-Alier. 2010. The Political Ecology of Jatropha Plantations for Biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India, The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 875–897. Associated Press. 2020. Child Labor in Palm Oil Industry Tied to Girl Scout Cookies. Associated Press, December  29, https://apnews.com/article/palm-oil-forests-indonesia-scouts- 83b01f2789e9489569 960da63b2741c4. Bain, Carmen. 2011. Local Ownership of Ethanol Plants: What are The Effects on Communities? Biomass and Bioenergy 35: 1400–1407. Blas, J. 2020. Cargill Pays Record Dividend to Family Owners After Profits Boom. Bloomberg, July 31, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/cargill-pays-record-dividend-to-family-owners-afterprofits-boom. Brittaine, R., and N. Lutaladio. 2010. Jatropha: A Smallholder Bioenergy Crop – The Potential for Pro-Poor Development. Paris: FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, www.fao.org/ docrep/012/i1219e/i1219e.pdf. Carolan, Michael. 2009. Ethanol Versus Gasoline: The Contestation and Closure of a Socio-Technical System in the USA, Social Studies of Science 39: 421–448. Carolan, Michael. 2018. The Real Cost of Cheap Food, 2nd edition. London: Earthscan. Carpio, L.G.T. 2019. The Effects of Oil Price Volatility on Ethanol, Gasoline, and Sugar Price Forecasts, Energy 181: 1012–1022.

Financialization of food 85 Castiblanco, Carmenza, Andrés Etter, and Alberto Ramirez. 2015. Impacts of Oil Palm Expansion in Colombia: What Do Socioeconomic Indicators Show? Land Use Policy 44: 31–43. Clapp, Jennifer. 2014. Financialization, Distance and Global Food Politics, Journal of Peasant Studies 41(5): 797–814. Clapp, J., and S.R. Isakson. 2018. Risky Returns: The Implications of Financialization in the Food System, Development and Change 49(2): 437–460. Cochrane, L., and D.D. Legault. 2020. The Rush for Land and Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: What We Know and What We Are Missing, Land 9(5), https://doi.org/10.3390/land9050167. Cotula, L., N. Dyer, and S. Vermeulen. 2008. Fuelling Exclusion? The Biofuels Boom and Poor People’s Access to Land. International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and FAO, www.iied.org/ pubs/pdfs/12551IIED.pdf. Dauvergne, P., and K. Neville. 2010. Forests, Food, and Fuel in the Tropics: The Uneven Social and Ecological Consequences of the Emerging Political Economy of Biofuels, Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 631–660. Davis, K.F., H.I. Koo, J. Dell’Angelo, P. D’Odorico, L. Estes, L.J. Kehoe, M. Kharratzadeh, T. Kuemmerle, D. Machava, A.D.J.R. Pais, and N. Ribeiro. 2020. Tropical Forest Loss Enhanced by LargeScale Land Acquisitions, Nature Geoscience 13(7): 482–488. de Gorter, H., and D. Drabik. 2016. Biofuel Policies and the Impact of Developing Countries’ Policy Responses to the 2007–2008 Food Price Boom, Global Food Security 11: 64–71. The Economic Times. 2020. FDI in Food Processing Rises 44 pc to $904.7  Million in 2019–20. The Economic Times, June 11, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/finance/fdi-infood-processing- rises-44-pc-to-904–7-mn-in-2019–20/articleshow/76326264.cms. FAO. 2020. Food Price Index. Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy, www.fao.org/ worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/. Farm Bureau. 2020. June Acreage Report Shows Sharp Decrease in Corn Planted Area from March Intentions. Farm Bureau, June 30, www.fb.org/market-intel/june-acreage- report-shows-sharp-decreasein-corn-planted-area-from-march-in. Global Witness. 2018. At What Cost? Irresponsible Business and the Murder of Land and Environmental Defenders in 2017. July  24, www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/ at-what-cost/. Grain. 2018. The Daewoo-Madagascar Land Grab: Ten Years on. November  19, www.cadtm.org/ The-Daewoo-Madagascar-land-grab-Ten-years-on. Hanssen, S.V., V. Daioglou, Z.J. Steinmann, S. Frank, A. Popp, T. Brunelle, P. Lauri, T. Hasegawa, M.A. Huijbregts, and D.P. Van Vuuren. 2019. Biomass Residues as Twenty-First Century Bioenergy Feedstock  – A  Comparison of Eight Integrated Assessment Models, Climatic Change, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10584-019-02539-x. Hawkes, C. 2005. The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in the Nutrition Transition, Public Health Nutrition 8(4): 357–365. Huang, L., Z. Wang, H. Wang, L. Zhao, H. Jiang, B. Zhang, and G. Ding. 2020. Nutrition Transition and Related Health Challenges Over Decades in China, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-020-0674-8. IRIN. 2011. Jatropha − Not Really Green, March  23, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/ news/2011/03/23/jatropha-not-really-green. Kaufman, Frederick. 2012. Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Krivonos, E., and L. Kuhn. 2019. Trade and Dietary Diversity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Food Policy 88, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2019.101767. Malins, C. 2020. Biofuel to the Fire  – The Impact of Continued Expansion of Palm and Soy Oil Demand Through Biofuel Policy. Report Commissioned by Rainforest Foundation Norway, Oslo, Norway. McCarthy, J., and Z. Zen. 2010. Regulating the Oil Palm Boom: Assessing the Effectiveness of Environmental Governance Approaches to Agro-Industrial Pollution in Indonesia, Law and Policy 32(1): 153–179.

86  The multi-scalar food economy The News. 2009. Corporate Farming Raises Concerns Among Local Growers. The News, January 28, www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=159380. Oxfam. 2011. Not a Game. Speculation vs Food Security, October  3, https://www.oxfam.org/en/ research/not-game-speculation-vs-food-security. Paschalidou, A., M. Tsatiris, and K. Kitikidou. 2016. Energy Crops for Biofuel Production or for Food? – SWOT Analysis (Case Study: Greece), Renewable Energy 93: 636–647. Popkin, B. 1994. The Nutrition Transition in Low-Income Countries: An Emerging Crisis, Nutrition Reviews 52(9): 285–298. Punthakey, J. 2020. Foreign Direct Investment and Trade in Agro-Food Global Value Chains, OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Papers, No. 142, OECD Publishing, Paris, http://dx.doi. org/10.1787/993f0fdc-en. Rayner, G., C. Hawkes, T. Lang, and W. Bello. 2007. Trade Liberalization and the Diet Transition: A Public Health Response, Health Promotion International 21(S1): 64–74. Reddy, P. 2018. The Average Mexican Now Drinks 371 Bottles of Soda a Year. Vice, February 14, www. vice.com/en_us/article/j5bpwb/the-average-mexican-now-drinks-371- bottles-of-soda-a-year. Renzaho, A.M., J.K. Kamara, and M. Toole. 2017. Biofuel Production and Its Impact on Food Security in Low and Middle Income Countries: Implications for the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 78: 503–516. Richardson, B. 2010. Big Sugar in Southern Africa: Rural Development and the Perverted Potential of Sugar/Ethanol Exports, Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 917–938. Roda, J. 2019. The Geopolitics of Palm Oil and Deforestation. The Conversation, July 1, https://theconversation.com/the-geopolitics-of-palm-oil-and-deforestation-119417. Rossi, A.M., and C.C. Hinrichs. 2011. Hope and Skepticism: Farmer and Local Community Views on the Socio-economic Benefits of Agricultural Bioenergy. Biomass and Bioenergy 35(4): 1418–1428. Rulli, M.C., and P. D’Odorico. 2014. Food Appropriation Through Large Scale Land Acquisitions, Environmental Research Letters 9(6), https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748- 9326/9/6/064 030/pdf. Sharma, M., A. Kishore, D. Roy, and K. Joshi. 2020. A Comparison of the Indian Diet with the EATLancet Reference Diet, BMC Public Health 20: 1–13. Soto, Iria, Wouter Achten, Bart Muys, and Erik Mathijs. 2015. Who Benefits from Energy Policy Incentives? The Case of Jatropha Adoption by Smallholders in Mexico, Energy Policy 79: 37–47. Subramaniam, Y., T.A. Masron, and N.H.N. Azman. 2019. The Impact of Biofuels on Food Security, International Economics 160: 72–83. Taghizadeh-Hesary, F., E. Rasoulinezhad, and N. Yoshino. 2019. Energy and Food Security: Linkages Through Price Volatility, Energy Policy 128: 796–806. Tanumihardjo, S.A., L. McCulley, R. Roh, S. Lopez-Ridaura, N. Palacios-Rojas, and N.S. Gunaratna. 2019. Maize Agro-Food Systems to Ensure Food and Nutrition Security in Reference to the Sustainable Development Goals, Global Food Security, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2019.100327. Telegraph, The. 2008. Qater to Lease 100,000 Acres in Kenya in Return for Port Loan. Telegraph, December 3. Torres, M., and S. Branford. 2018. Amazon Besieged: By Dams, Soya, Agribusiness and Land Grabbing. Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing. Van den Broeck, P., A. Sadiq, I. Hiergens, M.Q. Molina, H. Verschure, and F. Moulaert (eds.). 2020. Communities, Land and Social Innovation: Land Taking and Land Making in an Urbanising World. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Vandergeest, P., and L. Schoenberger (eds.). 2019. De-centring Land Grabbing: Southeast Asia Perspectives on Agrarian-Environmental Transformations. London: Routledge.

Part II

Community, culture, and knowledge

5 Community, labor, and peasantries

Human impacts associated with aforementioned changes to the structure of agriculture and the broader food system command the spotlight in this chapter. It begins with a discussion of what is known as the Goldschmidt Thesis, in which the impacts of industrial agriculture on rural communities are explored. Attention then turns to the subject of labor, noting various injustices faced by those who feed us. The chapter concludes by examining some of the impacts that agricultural practices and policies have had on peasant communities.

Goldschmidt thesis: community effects of industrial farming One research tradition that stands out for its lengthy pedigree looks at community impacts linked to the changing structure of agriculture. In Chapter 1, when briefly discussing the evolution of the subdiscipline, a number of studies were mentioned from the first half of the twentieth century that examined the relationship between a community’s structure and the characteristics of its surrounding farms. The most famous of these studies was conducted more than three-quarters of a century ago. Overseen by Walter Goldschmidt, a USDA anthropologist, and funded by the USDA, the study looks at two California communities in the early 1940s: Arvin, where large, absentee-owned, non-family-operated farms were more numerous, and Dinuba, where locally owned, family-operated farms were the norm (the names of both towns are pseudonyms). Goldschmidt concluded that industrial agriculture has, overall, a negative impact on a variety of community qualityof-life indicators (Goldschmidt 1978). He noted that, for example, relative to Dinuba, Arvin’s population had a smaller middle class, a higher proportion of hired workers, lower mean family incomes, higher rates of poverty, poorer-quality schools, and fewer churches, civic organizations, and retail establishments. Residents of Arvin also had less local control over public decisions due to disproportional political influence by outside agribusiness interests. Goldschmidt’s research went virtually unmentioned in the literature until the 1970s (for a superb review of this literature, see Lobao and Stofferahn [2008]). Rodefeld (1974) is often credited with its “rediscovery” and subsequent popularization in rural sociological circles, especially after the publication of Change in Rural America (Rodefeld et al. 1978). Regardless of the reasons behind its resurgence, a steady stream of Goldschmidt-type research has been conducted since the 1970s. The tradition is especially strong in the US, where farm consolidation has been happening at a breakneck pace since at least the 1980s and having huge impacts on rural communities in the process.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-7

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Most research since the 1970s has given varied levels of support to the Goldschmidt Thesis. Neo-Goldschmidt studies have also expanded upon the original methodology. For example, Goldschmidt’s study was a highly qualitative, comparative anthropological study. Much of the research today, conversely, is highly quantitative, often involving large data sets and/or surveys. Since the 1970s, researchers have also developed elaborate indicators of community well-being, looking at, among other things, socio-economic, psychological, and even environmental variables (see Box 5.1).

Box 5.1  Social Scientists Report the Following Negative Impacts That Industrialized Farms Have Upon Community Well-Being Socioeconomic Well-Being   1. Greater income inequality and/or higher rates of poverty   (Tetreau 1940; Goldschmidt 1978a; Heady and Sonka 1974; Rodefeld 1974; Flora et al. 1977; Wheelock 1979; Lobao 1990; Crowley 1999; Deller 2003; Crowley and Roscigno 2004: Peters 2002; Welsh and Lyson 2001; Durrenberg and Thu 1996)   2. Higher rates of unemployment   (Skees and Swanson 1988; Welsh and Lyson 2001)   3. Reduced employment opportunities.   (Marousek 1979; Thompson and Haskins 1999)

Social Fabric   1. Decline in local population   (Goldschmidt 1978a; Heady and Sonka 1974; Rodefeld 1974; Wheelock 1979; Swanson 1980)   2. Social class structure becomes poorer (due to, for instance, increases in hired labor)   (Gilles and Dalecki 1988; Goldschmidt 1978a; Harris and Gilbert 1982)   3. Social disruption • Increases in crime rates and civil suits   (North Central Regional Center for Rural Development 1999); • General increase in social conflict   (Seipel et al. 1999); • Greater childbearing among teenagers   (Lobao 1990); • Increased stress and social-psychological problems   (Martinson et al. 1976; Schiffman et al. 1998) • Swine CAFOs located in census blocks with high poverty and minority populations (Wilson et al. 2002) • Deterioration of relationships between farming neighbors   (Jackson-Smith and Gillespie 2005; McMillan and Schulman 2003)

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• More stressful neighborly relations   (Constance and Tuinstra 2005; Smithers et al. 2004)   4. Deterioration in community organizations; less involvement in social life   (Goldschmidt 1978a; Heffernan and Lasley 1978; Poole 1981; Rodefeld 1974; Lyson and Welsh 2005; Smithers et al. 2004)  5. Decrease in local-level political decision-making (as outside interests gain influence)   (Tetreau 1940; Rodefeld 1974; Goldschmidt 1978a; McMillan and Schulman 2003)   6. Reduction in the quality of public services (Tetreau 1940; Fujimoto 1977; Goldschmidt 1978a; Swanson 1980)   7. Decreased retail trade and fewer, less diverse retail firms   (Goldschmidt 1978a; Heady and Sonka 1974; Rodefeld 1974; Fujimoto 1977; Marousek 1979; Swanson 1980; Skees and Swanson 1988; Foltz et al. 2002; Foltz and Zueli 2005; Smithers et al. 2004)  8. Reduced enjoyment of outdoor experience (especially when living near CAFO)   (Schiffman et al. 1998; Wing and Wolf 1999; Constance and Tuinstra 2005; Reisner et al. 2004; Wright et al. 2001; Wing and Wolf 2000; McMillan and Schulman 2003)  9. Neighbors of hog CAFOs report upper-respiratory, digestive tract disorders and eye problems (Wing and Wolf 1999; Constance and Tuinstra 2005; Reisner et al. 2004; Wright et al. 2001; Wing and Wolf 2000) 10. Residences closest to hog CAFOs experience declining values relative to those more distant (North Central Regional Center for Rural Development 1999; Constance and Tuinstra 2005; Reisner et al. 2004; Wright et al. 2001)

Environment 1. Depletion of water and other energy resources   (Tetreau 1940; Buttel and Larson 1979; North Central Regional Center for Rural Development 1999) 2. Environmental consequences of CAFOs (increase in Safe Drinking Water Act violations, air quality problems, and increased risks of nutrient overload in soils)   (North Central Regional Center for Rural Development 1999) (Based on Stofferahn 2006)

It is important to clarify that “industrial agriculture” in this tradition often goes beyond just scale, looking also at indicators of farm organization. Scale is a measure of an operation’s sales or acreage. Yet scale alone does not seem to capture the organizational characteristics of industrial agriculture. According to the research, features like absenteeism (when land is leased and the owners live outside the community), contract farming, dependency on hired labor, and operation by farm managers (as opposed to owneroperator situations) seem far more likely to place communities at risk than if surrounding

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farms (even large ones) lack these characteristics. According to the research, large-scale family-owned farms tend to still purchase their inputs, farm equipment, and services (e.g., custom baling) locally, volunteer their time to local organizations (church groups, school fundraisers, etc.), and regularly interact with their neighbors. As noted in Box 5.1, Goldschmidt-type research has also looked at the impact of CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) on community well-being and public health. Workers, as discussed momentarily, are not the only ones whose health is negatively impacted by CAFOs. Neighbors of CAFOs have been shown to have higher levels of respiratory and digestive disturbances (Radon et al. 2007; Schultz et al. 2019; Wing and Wolf 2000). They also have abnormally high rates of psychological disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbances (Carolan 2008a; Schiffman et al. 1995). Children living on and near hog farms have abnormally high rates of asthma (Guidry et al. 2015). These rates are known to increase proportionally with the size of the operation (Donham et al. 2007; Schultz et al. 2019). School administrators in North Carolina whose schools were within three miles of one or more large hog feeding facilities report rates of asthma among the student population at levels well above the state average (Mirabelli et al. 2006). Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has also been reported among residents living near CAFOs (Donham et al. 2007). This can result from such things as a reduction in one’s quality of life and/or property values. For example, one study focusing on a community in rural Kentucky found price reductions of 23 to 32 percent for residential properties sold within 1.25 miles of the facility and much larger losses northeast (downwind) of the facility (Simons et al. 2014). Researchers have also documented that a significant level of social tension – specifically between producers and their neighbors – can emerge when CAFOs are present within a community (Doane 2014). There is also support that the Goldschmidt Thesis holds even when looking at rural land ownership more generally. A recent study of timberland ownership in Alabama shows that out of 432,000 owners of timberland in this state, 0.3 percent own more than 1,000 acres, which accounts for 35 percent of all privately-owned timberland (Bailey et al. 2020). The study’s authors argue that “in Alabama, concentrated and absentee ownership of land creates conditions of an internal colony, where key decisions are made by powerful outside forces supported by local elites” (p. 25). They go on to show that concentrated ownership of timberland and absentee ownership of timberland are negatively associated with quality of life in rural Alabama as measured by educational attainment, poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch at public schools, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program participation, and population density. When taken as a whole, this research seems to support those calls for smaller farms and more local food systems as conduits for more sustainable, compassionate, and socially just platforms of food production. We must be careful not to extrapolate such a general conclusion from these findings. I address the problems of such an assumption in a later chapter when discussing what is known as the local trap. Without getting ahead of myself, I will merely point out that Goldschmidt-type research says nothing about one model of food production being inherently “better” (sustainable, just, etc.) than another. Indeed, reading the Goldschmidt literature closely you will find that it is not really industrial agriculture per se that negatively impacts community but the socio-organizational forms that tend to be associated with this model of food production. Do people trust each other? Do they interact regularly? Are levels of income inequality in the community low? Are social institutions (schools, church groups, bowling leagues, etc.) robust? Communities that are able to answer “Yes” to these questions tend to be considerably healthier – socially and economically speaking – than those that can’t. The Goldschmidt research simply tells us

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that communities surrounded by “industrial” farms are more likely to fall into the latter category.

Labor: wage inequities

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Figure 5.1  Share of non-regular and employed farm labor in the EU-28 2016 Source: Eurostat 2016, with assistance from Sebastian Lakner.

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I have already touched on how a public sociology of food and agriculture is about consciousness raising through efforts to make the hidden visible. Few aspects of our food system require more unmasking than labor. The environmental consequences of our food system are routinely discussed, as evidenced by the growing popularity of organic food and talk about food miles. The subject of labor, however, seems to get lost in the discussion. Occasionally it enters into the public’s consciousness – there are a number of excellent documentaries out there on the subject, such as Dolores, 2017, directed by Peter Bratt, 5 Stick Films, and East of Salinas, 2015, directed by Laura Pacheco and Jackie Mow, Bullfrog Films. Yet usually the issue of labor takes a backseat to topics like environmental sustainability, organic agriculture, and local food, which is an egregious omission when you consider just how populated our food systems are. Governments vary greatly in terms of their reliance on immigrant, especially seasonal immigrant, labor. The following two figures are based on the latest Eurostat data (as of late 2020) and show the share of non-regular (i.e., seasonal) and employed labor forces for a variety of EU countries. Figure 5.1 shows that seasonal labor is especially important for Italy, Spain, Romania, France and Greece, which are principle producers of vegetables, fruits, wine and permanent crops. Vegetable production is particularly reliant upon seasonal labor, as many are easily damaged when harvested mechanically. Figure 5.2 emphasizes this point. Looking exclusively at vegetable production, we can begin to see just how dependent certain agricultural sectors are on seasonal labor. Note especially Italy’s reliance, with 61 percent of its farm labor in this sector coming from immigrant laborers (Lakner 2020). A survey of 133 fine-dining establishments found that 81 percent of management and 78 percent of higher-level non-management positions are occupied by white workers,

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3%

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Figure 5.2  Area for fresh vegetable production in the EU-28 2016 Source: Data from Eurostat 2020, with assistance from Sebastian Lakner.

with the majority being male. After adjusting for education and language proficiency, workers of color where found in this study to receive 56 percent lower earnings when compared to equally qualified white workers (Restaurant Opportunities Center United 2018). Women and workers of color disproportionately inhabit those spaces in the restaurant industry that are the lowest paying. Wages in the restaurant industry lie on a continuum from the lowest in fast food to the highest in so-called fine-dining restaurants. Wages also increase as you move from the back of the house to the front – see Box 5.2.

Box 5.2  Front and Back of the House: Perpetuating Inequalities Through Invisibility Sachs et al. (2014) interviewed sixty-three restaurant and farm owners, managers, and workers in California and Pennsylvania. Their research explores two questions: 1) “How do men and women experience inequality in restaurant and farm work and is this related to their gender and race-ethnicity; 2) How can the naturalization/ entrenchment of inequality in farm and restaurant work be made visible?” (p. 4). By answering these questions, they explore a long-held spatial metaphor describing restaurant work, between the front of the house and the back, where the “other” workers are. The research concludes by noting that farms and restaurants continue to be gendered and racially segregated spaces. While the finding might not be particularly surprising the authors wisely point to an important consequence that arises from this front house/back house division. In their words: With this spatial segregation, consumers are shielded from the extent to which their food is brought to them through the efforts of this population. In general,

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consumers are served their food in restaurants or at farmers markets by servers who are often English-speaking, white, and female. These spatial divisions in the food system are not unknown, but they are normalized or kept out of sight, further entrenching inequality regimes. These hidden spaces make alliances between workers and consumers difficult to foster. As long as consumers do not see the faces of marginalized workers it is hard to empathize and to be motivated to change inequality regimes in food work. (p. 16)

The following figures illustrate this distribution between people of color and whites (Figure 5.3) and women and men (Figure 5.4). Note, for example, that people of color are more likely to have a job in the kitchen rather than up front interacting with customers, except when talking about fine-dining restaurants – establishments that generally have white employees regardless of position. Meanwhile, while women make up the majority of fast food workers, they are less far less likely to be found working in fine-dining restaurants. It is worth noting that fine-dining restaurants are the exception to the rule that “front” always pays better than “back.” In fine-dining restaurants, for example, the head chef, located in “back,” might be the highest-paid employee – a role that is overwhelmingly male and white. Servers and bartenders at fine-dining restaurants can make over $100,000 annually, thanks to tips, while bussers, also located up front, might come home with the equivalent of minimum wage. So just because women seem well-represented up front in fine-dining establishments, we have to realize that being a “greeter” and “host” 90

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Figure 5.3  Racial segregation of restaurant industry, US Source: Restaurant Opportunities Center United 2018.

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Figure 5.4  Gender segregation of restaurant industry, US Source: Restaurant Opportunities Center United 2018.

(overwhelmingly feminized jobs) do not have the same rates of compensation as other front-facing positions in those establishments. Competition forces firms to continually seek out ways to reduce their operating costs as they strive to outperform (and undercut) their competitors. This has historically been achieved a number of ways. One is to replace humans with machines, which is a popular strategy in affluent countries where the costs of labor have been rising faster than the costs of technology. Firms can also seek out cheaper labor. One relatively easy way to do this is to move operations overseas. Another option, which is often employed in labor-intensive sectors of agriculture (e.g., vegetable production), where it is hard to move one’s farm to another country, is to employ immigrant labor, who, for various reasons, can be more easily exploited. Let’s think a moment about the pressures this creates on the wage structure for those sectors impacted by these practices. A popular term to explain the effect of such pressures is the “race to the bottom” scenario (Tonelson 2002). The term refers to an international dynamic between (typically lower-income) countries competing with each other to attract foreign investment, racing to see who can come closest to offering firms what amounts to a free ride. In actuality, however, there is nothing “free” about it, as the ride comes at great expense to things like the environment, worker rights, and domestic tax revenue. A similar phenomenon has been documented between firms within a given country, resulting in a “gloves-off economy” (Bernhardt et al. 2008). This refers to employer strategies and practices, even within well-governed nations, that evade or outright violate laws and standards meant to govern job quality and safety. Doing this creates pressure for even reputable employers to take their “gloves off” too, as unsavory employers gain unfair market advantages by violating labor laws and standards (see Box 5.3).

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Box 5.3  The US Food System: A Gloves-Off Economy? The following examples come from the US, where workplace regulations, while far from perfect, are still stricter than in many other countries. Is this evidence of a gloves-off economy? •

Though low paying, field work is very dangerous: 24.7 of every 100,000 farm workers die from work-related accidents  – all for a median annual wage of $24,620 (undocumented laborers are not part of this figure). • Twenty-five percent of all grocery workers in the US experience minimum wage violations. • Real wages for meatpacking workers have fallen from US$20/hr in 1977, back when they were unionized, to US$13/hr in 2017. • Wages in the poultry industry are 24 percent lower than they were in 1977. • Medium wages among food system employees in the US are consistently below what’s considered an adequate living wage. (Braverman 2019; Gershon 2020)

In some industries, especially those that employ high numbers of immigrants, unscrupulous behavior is, sadly, the norm. In 2019, news broke that Big Chicken was the target of a class action lawsuit filed by former employees – if this sounds familiar, it is because poultry processors were accused of price fixing three years before this and taken to court. This more recent lawsuit alleges that a conspiracy occurred among eighteen poultryprocessing companies (including Tyson Foods Inc., Sanderson Farms Inc., Perdue Farms Inc., and Pilgrim’s Pride Corp.), their subsidiaries and affiliates, and two consulting firms. While filed on behalf of three former workers, the litigation seeks class-action status for hundreds of thousands of poultry laborers. Most of the chicken processing in the US is concentrated in the Southeast. The plants are so close to each other that they are in some instances less than 30 miles apart, according to the lawsuit. This fact should make the labor market in these areas highly competitive, thus reflecting higher salaries, as workers are able to move between employers and find one that pays the best. Instead, the suit claims, the defendants colluded – this is illegal according to antitrust law – and agreed to pay their employees the same rate. t Another cost-reducing strategy followed by firms is to externalize costs onto the environment – or, to put it another way, pollute. In truth, however, it is not just the environment that pays these costs. Future generations incur them, as do farm laborers (as you’ll soon see), and society as a whole, from taxpayers to residents living near CAFOs and people who get their water from polluted waterways. Finally, do low wages really make things cheaper for consumers? On the one hand, cheap labor might help lower the retail price of goods. But on the other, low wages also trigger one’s eligibility for social safety nets. A report from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, concludes that the US federal minimum wage of US$7.25 an hour costs taxpayers roughly US$153 billion each year, as those underpaid people in turn qualify

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for various welfare safety nets (Jacobs et al. 2015). So while low wages might reduce the retail price of a good, consumers are still paying for that cheap labor as taxpayers. Savings for consumers that result in expenses for taxpayers is a questionable accounting practice when the end goal is affordable food. The next time, therefore, you see an advertisement for cheap food (or cheap anything), ask yourself this one question: At what and whose expense is allowing that product to be made so cheaply?

Labor: health impacts A considerable body of scholarship points to the impacts of CAFOs upon worker health. The consensus of this literature: working in an industrial livestock facility is bad for your health. The following review draws from this sprawling literature – specially, Donham et al. (2007), Palacios and Sexsmith (2020), Radon (2014), Ramos et al. (2018), and Wells et al. (2014). More than 25  percent of CAFO workers report suffering from respiratory diseases, ranging from bronchitis to mucus membrane irritation, asthma, and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Exposure to high concentrations of bioaerosols (biological-in-origin airborne particles) has been linked to organic dust toxic syndrome, which inflicts more than 30 percent of workers in the swine industry. Acute respiratory symptoms have been documented early in the work history of some individuals severe enough to warrant immediate and permanent removal from the workplace. The greatest risk, however, is among those working full-time for extended periods. Roughly 60 percent of swine confinement workers who have worked for more than five years in a CAFO environment experience, on average, at least one respiratory symptom. Public health scientists have placed the maximum recommended exposure of dust in livestock buildings at 2.5 mg/ m3. This figure is well below the 15 mg/m3 rate set by, for example, the US Occupational Health and Safety Administration. With this in mind, recognize also that it is not unusual to find CAFO dust concentration levels between 10 and 15 mg/m3 in winter months or when animals are being moved (an activity that can kick up considerable dust). As industrial CAFOs, as a model of animal protein production, are being exported to other parts of the world, so too are the these problems associated with these systems of meat production. These operations are attractive to less affluent nations not only for economic development and food security but also as a way to increase access to lower-cost animal proteins. Yet in many of these countries the central government is either weak or corrupt, leading to weaknesses in regulation and capacity for enforcement surrounding production, worker and public health, and animal welfare. In other words, many of the aforementioned problems associated with CAFOs in the US are even worse when this production system is situated within a lower-income nation (Lam et al. 2019). Even emerging economic powerhouses like China struggle to grapple with the health impacts of these systems (e.g., Borkenhagen et al. 2020). CAFOs are not the only hazardous work environment in the food system. The farm field has proven an equally dangerous place to work due to the widespread use of pesticides and herbicides. Pesticides and herbicides can enter the human body by three common ways: through the skin (contact), the mouth (ingestion), and the lungs (inhalation). Agro-chemical use remains widespread, even with the rise of organic agriculture. In lower-income countries, many old, non-patented (or patent expired), highly toxic, environmentally persistent, and inexpensive types of chemicals are used extensively; chemicals

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that in many cases are outlawed in places like North America and Europe. Curiously, however, the US still allows the use of many chemicals that have been banned elsewhere. A 2019 peer-reviewed study found that the US allows the use of eighty-five pesticides – totaling 322 million pounds applied per year – that have been banned or are being phased out in the EU, China, or Brazil, according to a peer-reviewed study published by the academic journal Environmental Health. Of that 322 million, US applicators use 40 million pounds annually of pesticides that are banned or being phased out in China and 26 million pounds that are banned or being phased out in Brazil (Donley 2019). For example, 81 percent of pineapple farmers and 43 percent of vegetable farmers in the West African country of Benin reported “considerable” negative health effects from pesticide exposure (Williamson 2005). It has been estimated that approximately 7.5 percent of agricultural workers in Sri Lanka experience occupational pesticide poisoning annually (Van Der Hoek et al. 1998). A more recent study showed Sri Lankan farmers who have been exposed to high levels of pesticides have long-term neurocognitive deficits – poorer working memory, slower response speeds to task, and an inability to focus (Dassanayake et  al. 2020). In Costa Rica and Nicaragua, those figures are 4.5  percent and 6.3 percent, respectively (Wesseling et al. 1993; Garming and Waibel 2009). When broken down according to ethnicity, poisoning rates in the US disproportionately affect Latinos (Liu and Apollon 2011). A survey of epidemiological literature indicates that the incidence of cancer in the US population due to pesticides ranges from about 10,000 to 15,000 cases per year (Pimentel 2005). A study in Pakistan of farm workers and those living near fields found pesticide residues in the blood of participants (Saeed et al. 2017). Pesticide toxicity figures based upon government statistics tend to understate the problem. For example, a study of Indonesian farmers found 21 percent of those interviewed reported three or more neurobehavioral, respiratory, and/or intestinal symptoms indicative of pesticide toxicity. Yet only 9  percent of the farmers in the study said they had reported being poisoned in a government survey (Kishi et  al. 1995). Similar issues of underreporting plague the government toxicity statistics in countries like Brazil (Magalhães and Caldas 2018) and Tanzania (Lekei et al. 2016), though I suspect that problem is widespread. There are numerous reasons for the underreporting of pesticide poisonings. Many of the affected simply ignored the symptoms, as they cannot afford to leave their job and/or medical attention is beyond their financial means. Another potential explanation for underreporting has to do with who epidemiological studies have tended to examine – namely, the field workers who apply the pesticides. This population is overwhelmingly male. Yet women also spend long hours working in freshly sprayed fields. Moreover, exposure can occur at home, from, for example, the husband’s contaminated clothes, which are often mixed and washed with other laundry.

Impacts on peasant communities Before turning to conventional agriculture’s impact on peasant communities, it might help the reader to understand what “peasant” means, at least when sociologists of food and agriculture use the term. This point is addressed again later, when discussing peasantbased social movements. For the moment simply remember that “peasant,” in sociological parlance, is not meant as a pejorative term – it does not imply, in other words, “backwards,” “traditional,” or anything like that. It is a title that brings great pride and a shared identity uniting hundreds of millions of small-scale landholders from around the world. Unfortunately, throughout much of the twentieth century food, and international

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development policies where clearly biased against this population. The Washington Consensus – those widely adopted neoliberal policies that have been dictating developmental (and food) policy for much of the last thirty years – viewed peasants, to be blunt, as wasted potential urban labor. A central goal of the Consensus has been to free peasants “from the shackles of unremitting toil on the land” (Ellis 2005: 144). A bias exists in conventional food and agriculture policy circles painting traditional farming as too labor intensive. Leave food production to capital-intensive enterprises that have the capacity to produce far more with far less labor, or so the logic goes. Doing this would free up literally billions to work in factories – there are roughly 2.5 billion peasants in the world today (Holt-Giménez and Kerssen 2015) – where the real wealth is generated. At least 570 million of that 2.5 billion are classified as “farmers,” which refers to those who are engaged in commodity production (Lowder et al. 2016). The rationale behind current global agrifood policy continues by arguing: as peasant farmers are dispossessed and replaced by fewer modern enterprises, those growers that remain need to produce food more efficiently with the help of technology inputs and advancements in seed breeding. This will help not only feed a growing non-farming population but, as overproduction begins driving down prices, avoids rising food prices. This cheap food will serve multiple developmental ends – from helping to offset low wages in cities to redistributing wealth from the countryside to urban areas as the wages of urban dwellers go toward buying more than just food. The neglect of peasant agriculture and the rural poor in general in lower-income countries has been referred to as the “urban bias” in international policy. Popularized by Michael Lupton (1977), the term refers to a tendency in developmental and international agricultural policy circles, dating back to World War II, to under-allocate resources to and extract surplus from the rural class in poorer nations. The urban bias, in other words, is just as it suggests: a developmental bias toward urban areas and the sectors of the economy that tend to be located there. So why have these policies been allowed to continue even though they undermine the livelihoods of billions? One reason lies in the fact that poor rural populations are arguably the world’s most politically disenfranchised group. Throughout much of Africa and Central and South America, rural populations are geographically isolated not only from centers of power but also from each other, making collective mobilization difficult. The story in Asia is slightly different. Many Asian countries had and still have a high rural density, which makes the organization of rural pressure groups more likely than in countries where the countryside is becoming depopulated. The threat of a rural-based communist insurgency – in countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Indonesia – also made the political elite historically more sensitive to the interests of their country’s small farmers. And in those countries, small farmers are notably better off. An alternative paradigm is therefore emerging, one that views development and food security as something that occurs because of the peasantry rather than in spite of it. An example of this comes from a report released by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (United Nations 2010). The report, Agro-ecology and the Right of Food, notes that small-scale sustainable farming holds tremendous potential to secure global food security, especially among the world’s poorest households. Olivier De Schutter, who at the time was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, is quoted as saying, “We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations.” Instead, “the solution lies in supporting small-scale farmers’ knowledge and experimentation, and in raising incomes of smallholders so as to contribute to rural development.”

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Peasant agriculture might be more labor intensive, but by many accounts, it works, a point I will discuss later when discussing topics like agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and food sovereignty. Remember also that peasants have the resources to practice laborintensive agriculture; after all, labor – namely, their own – is the one thing they can afford. Of the fifty-seven low-income countries surveyed in the aforementioned UN report, yields increased by an average of almost 80 percent when farmers used methods that drew upon human and ecological capital, like placing weed-eating ducks in rice paddies in Bangladesh or planting desmodium (an insect repellant) in Kenyan cornfields. The labor intensity of the practices highlighted in the report would also bring jobs to the landless rural poor in less affluent economies, thus helping to reverse the bias I spoke of earlier. The fragility of global supply chains had become particularly clear with COVID-19. National borders were closed to immigrant labor for fear they might spread the virus domestically. At the same time, many immigrant laborers did not feel safe crossing international borders into foreign lands where they are viewed as disposable labor. Food processing plants, and meat processing plants in particular, around the world became outbreak “hotspots,” thus further disrupting conventional supply chains. In light of this carnage, peasant agriculture is receiving renewed attention, especially from the perspective of ensuring food security within lower-income countries during a global pandemic, realizing COVID-19 will not be the last one we face (e.g., van der Ploeg 2020).

Knowledge in agriculture There is a rich literature examining how knowledge is generated and transferred between farmers and specialists (see, e.g., Chambers et  al. 1989; Carolan 2008b, 2011; Pretty 1995). The classic “extension model” presumes a linear model of knowledge exchange. This model begins with university experiment station “experts,” who practice scientific innovation in the laboratory. The knowledge to arise from this activity is then funneled through extension agents and then off to growers, the ultimate consumers of the knowledge and users of the technology. (If this model sounds familiar, the adoption-diffusion model discussed earlier views technology transfer in much the same way.) The expertise within this model lies with the scientists alone (see Figure 5.5). This model has come under intense criticism in recent decades. For starters, it problematically attributes failures to adopt new farming technologies to ignorance or cultural conservatism on the part of farmers. Yet as research has conclusively illustrated, agricultural science succeeds only when the needs and goals of farmers are met and when the conditions on the farm coincide with those of the laboratory or test field. A deeper criticism lies in how the classic extension model naïvely views “expertise” as something that only scientists possess. This claim flies in the face of mounting empirical evidence that

“Solution” development University agricultural experiment station

Field testing

Dissemination

Cooperative extension

Figure 5.5  Classic extension model of knowledge generation/transfer Source: Author.

Farmers

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university scientists do not have a monopoly over expertise when it comes to knowing the production end of the food system (see Box 5.4).

Box 5.4  Multiple Forms of Expertise in Agriculture Building upon Collins and Evans (2002), Carolan (2006) attempts to sketch out different forms of expertise among farmers in Iowa who actively practice sustainable agricultural methods. This research inductively leads him to construct the following typology: • • •

No expertise: A cognitive state that does not fall within either of the following categories. Contributory expertise: Enough expertise to contribute to the knowledge base of the topic in question, noting, importantly, that such cognitive authority can come in the form of either abstract/generalizable or local/ practical knowledge. Interactional expertise: Having enough expertise to allow for interesting interactions between contributory experts of both abstract/generalizable and local/ practical knowledge domains, which allows for interactions to occur to the extent that all participants leave the process cognitively changed.

Based upon this research, Carolan argues that it is not enough to merely reverse the classic extension model. Whether scientists or farmers are “first,” without interactional expertise, any meaningful communication between university scientists and farmers will likely be problematic and incomplete. University scientists, of both the “natural” and “social” persuasions, spend most of their careers developing abstract/ generalizable contributory expertise. And while they value local knowledge, very little time is actually spent examining how farmers and university scientists – both of whom are arguably in possession of a type of contributory expertise – interact. Carolan (2006: 430–431) concludes arguing that while “the importance of ‘local’ knowledge has been emphasized, attention must now turn to better understanding how such knowledge is communicated (or not) to certified (contributory) experts and, in doing this, to help nurture institutional arraignments to better utilize the expertise of those on the ground.” Scholars have since heeded this call (e.g., Lowe et al. 2019; Orlando et al. 2020). Yet more work needs to be done on the subject.

Take Wynne’s (1996) now-classic study on the relationship between scientists and sheep farmers after the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster contaminated the Cumbrian fells (a mountainous region in North West England). Wynne examined the relationships between UK Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries (MAFF) scientists and the Cumbrian sheep farmers. It is his contention that the expertise of the sheep farmers, with respect to sheep, should not have been ignored by the government when they were attempting to assess risks to livestock from the fallout. Wynne documents that the farmers knew a great deal about the ecology of the sheep, prevailing winds, and the behavior of rainwater on the pasture land that was relevant in discussions of how the sheep should be

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University agricultural experiment station

Cooperative extension

Figure 5.6  Model of knowledge generation/transfer based on open understanding of expertise Source: Author.

treated in order to minimize the impact of radioactivity. Nevertheless, the MAFF scientists failed to listen to the farmers because they (the farmers) lacked the proper scientific training and credentials. They were not viewed, in other words, as “experts.” Unfortunately, not understanding the local ecology, weather patterns, and hydrology, government scientists made poor policy recommendations that exacerbated risks to livestock and the farms that depended upon them for their livelihoods. So what would an alternative to the classic extension model look like? One way to visualize this alternative model is found in Figure 5.6. The model is non-linear, to acknowledge that expertise is not concentrated into the hands of any one group. Note also that university specialists are not insulated from farmers through extension agents. If all parties are to be engaged in social learning, university scientists are going to have to step foot, literally, on the farms of farmers that they will be advising. If anyone is privileged in this model it is the farmer. By placing farmers first – coincidently, this model has also been called “farmer first” (Chambers et al. 1989) – the main objective shifts from the linear transfer of knowledge and technology to the empowerment of farmers. The primary research and development location likewise moves from the experiment station or laboratory to the farmers’ fields. And the “thing” transferred to farmers shifts from a prescribed package of practices to a basket of choices. For, in the end, who knows the “needs” of a farm better than the farmer, who in some cases has spent their entire life on the same plot of land (see Box 5.5)?

Box 5.5  Weak” and “Strong” Citizen Science Closely related to and better known than the farmer-first model is citizen science. Citizen science occurs when individuals from the non-scientific community are active participants (and not passive research “subjects”) in academic research.

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A review of the literature on the subject reveals that the concept is grasped differently. For instance, what I would call a “weak” application is popular in the natural and ecological sciences. This involves instances when citizens participate in only the research phase. Examples of this include those cases where volunteers – essentially unpaid field assistants – are used to help monitor, count, and record wild animals, pollinators, plants, and/or other environmental markers. These individuals are not, however, involved in the construction of research questions or in data analysis. “Stronger” applications are those where lay individuals are involved throughout the research process (see, e.g., Granzow and Jones 2020). This could include volunteer/ paid involvement in any of the following: the grant application process, research design, question/survey design, data analysis, and the writing of such outputs as reports, publications, and presentations.

Farmer-first models are also empowering. Versus the passive, sponge-like identity given to farmers under the classical extension model – where growers are expected to soak up what they are told and act accordingly – these alternative approaches place farmers (not university or corporate scientists) in the driver’s seat. I will conclude by briefly describing two specific active-learning models that have been successfully used to empower and benefit farmers: Farmer Field Schools and Campesino-to-Campesino. Farmer field schools

Farmer Field School (FFS) is a season-long group training activity that takes place in the field (e.g., Choudhury and Castellanos 2020). It has been widely used by a number of governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international agencies to promote what is known as integrated pest management (IPM) (a farm management technique that relies on ecological principles rather than petrochemical inputs to control pests). The first FFS were designed and managed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Indonesia in 1989. Since then, more than 2 million farmers across Asia have been involved in this type of active learning. The training process is always learner centered, participatory, and heavily reliant on an experiential learning approach. The basic elements of this approach, as it applies to IPM, include the following: the FFS consists of a group of twenty to twenty-five farmers; the experience is field based, lasting for at least one cropping season (from seeding to harvest); farmers conduct a study comparing IPM strategy with common farmers’ practice; the FFS address special topics that are selected by the farmers; and the FFS group is guided by at least one facilitator offering experiential learning opportunities rather than delivering top-down instruction. Campesino-to-Campesino

Campesino, which translates into peasant, is literally what the name describes, a peasantcentered approach to innovation and knowledge sharing (Acevedo-Osorio and Chohan 2020). Campesino-to-Campesino (CAC) is an active-learning model based around farmers who have innovated new solutions to problems common among many farmers or who

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have recovered/rediscovered older traditional solutions. A central tenet of CAC is that farmers are more likely to believe – and thus more likely to be willing to learn from – a fellow farmer who has successfully used a technique on their own farm, especially when they can witness it firsthand. The CAC model thus involves regular visits to peer farms, where peasants learn new techniques and knowledge, which are then disseminated to other peasants. In recent years, this method has been coupled with other attempts to scale out these more localized lived experiences with other peasants situated elsewhere. And so these processes have been linked to, for instance, spaces of local, national, and international political organization (meetings, events, workshops, etc.), often with a focus on “South-South cooperation” (e.g., Val et al. 2019).

Transition. . . Having touched on how the conventional food system impacts rural communities, labor, public health, and peasant agriculture, the next chapter shifts focus by examining more closely the subject of culture. Structural changes in agriculture have altered social relationships in a variety of ways, some of which were discussed in this and previous chapters. As a product of social relationships, between individuals, animals, and material things, culture has not been immune to those structural changes either, as you will now see.

Discussion questions 1 Does the Goldschmidt Thesis romanticize the family farm? 2 What should be prioritized when thinking about food – labor equity, environmental sustainability, public health. . . ? (Realizing that everything comes with costs.) How often does the issue of labor enter into your mind when you think about food? 3 How does this model of knowledge differ from how it tends to be understood in, say, higher education?

Suggested readings: introductory level Barry, J. 2020. Abenaki Land Link Project Plants Seeds of Food Sovereignty. Seven Days, October 13, www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/abenaki-land-link-project-plants-seeds-offood-sovereignty/ Content?oid=31421746. Carolan, M. 2017. Think Immigrants Are Taking Our Jobs? Try Picking Strawberries for a Day. The Counter, September 7, https://thecounter.org/strawberry-empathy-study-labor/. Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. 2018. Ending Jim Crow in America’s Restaurants: Racial and Gender Occupational Segregation in the Restaurant Industry. New York: ROC United, https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2015/racial-gender-occupational- segregation.pdf.

Suggested readings: advanced level Bailey, C., A. Gopaul, R. Thomson, and A. Gunnoe. 2020. Taking Goldschmidt to the Woods: Timberland Ownership and Quality of Life in Alabama, Rural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12344. Lowe, P., J. Phillipson, A. Proctor, and M. Gkartzios. 2019. Expertise in Rural Development: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis, World Development 116: 28–37. van der Ploeg, J.D. 2020. From Biomedical to Politico-Economic Crisis: The Food System in Times of Covid-19, The Journal of Peasant Studies 47(5): 944–972.

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References Acevedo-Osorio, Á., and J.K. Chohan. 2020. Agroecology as Social Movement and Practice in Cabrera’s Peasant Reserve Zone, Colombia, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems l 44(3): 331–351. Bailey, C., A. Gopaul, R. Thomson, and A. Gunnoe. 2020. Taking Goldschmidt to the Woods: Timberland Ownership and Quality of Life in Alabama, Rural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12344. Bernhardt, Annette, Heather Boushey, Laura Dresser, and Chris Tilly. 2008. The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of American’s Labor Market. Champaign, IL: Labor and Employment Relations Association. Borkenhagen, L.K., G.L. Wang, R.A. Simmons, Z.Q. Bi, B. Lu, X.J. Wang, C.X. Wang, S.H. Chen, S.X. Song, M. Li, and T. Zhao. 2020. High Risk of Influenza Virus Infection Among Swine Workers: Examining a Dynamic Cohort in China, Clinical Infectious Diseases 71(3): 622–629. Braverman, B. 2019. The 10 Most Dangerous Jobs in America. CNBA, December  28, www.cnbc. com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-according- to-bls-data.html. Buttel, Frederick, and Oscar Larson. 1979. Farm Size, Structure, and Energy Intensity: An Ecological Analysis of U.S. Agriculture, Rural Sociology 44: 471–488. Carolan, M. 2006. Sustainable Agriculture, Science and the Co-Production of ‘Expert’ Knowledge: The Value of Interactional Expertise, Local Environment 11(4): 421–431. Carolan, M. 2008a. When Good Smells Go Bad: A Sociohistorical Understanding of Agricultural Odor Pollution, Environment and Planning A 40(5): 1235–1249. Carolan, M. 2008b. Democratizing Knowledge: Sustainable and Conventional Field Days as Divergent Democratic Forms, Science, Technology and Human Values 33(4): 508–528. Carolan, M. 2011. Embodied Food Politics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Chambers, R., A. Pacey, and L. Thrupp (eds.). 1989. Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research. Sussex, UK: Institute of Development Studies. Choudhury, A., and P. Castellanos. 2020. Empowering Women Through Farmer Field Schools, In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture, Pp. 251–262. London: Routledge. Collins, H.M., and R. Evans. 2002. The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience. Social Studies of Science 32(2): 235–296. Constance, Douglas, and Reny Tuinstra. 2005. Corporate Chickens and Community Conflict in East Texas: Growers’ and Neighbors’ Views on the Impacts of the Industrial Broiler Production, Culture and Agriculture 27(1): 45–60. Crowley, Martha. 1999. The Impact of Farm Sector Concentration on Poverty and Inequality: An Analysis of North Central U.S. Counties, Master’s Thesis, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH. Crowley, Martha, and Vincent Roscigno. 2004. Farm Concentration, Political Economic Process and Stratification: The Case of the North Central US, Journal of Political and Military Sociology 31: 133–155.34. Dassanayake, T.L., V.S. Weerasinghe, I. Gawarammana, and N.A. Buckley. 2020. Subacute and Chronic Neuropsychological Sequalae of Acute Organophosphate Pesticide Self-Poisoning: A  Prospective Cohort Study from Sri Lanka, Clinical Toxicology, 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1080/15563650.2020.1 778719. Deller, Steven. 2003. Agriculture and Rural Economic Growth, Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 35: 517–527. Doane, Molly. 2014. Politics and the Family Farm: When the Neighbors Poison the Well, Anthropology Now 6(3): 45–52. Donham, Kelley, Steven Wing, David Osterberg, Jan Flora, Carol Hodne, Kendall Thu, and Peter Thorne. 2007. Community Health and Socioeconomic Issues Surrounding Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, Environmental Health Perspectives 115(2): 317–320. Donley, N. 2019. The USA Lags Behind Other Agricultural Nations in Banning Harmful Pesticides, Environmental Health 18(1): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-019-0488-0. Durrenberg, Paul, and Kendall Thu. 1996. The Expansion of Large Scale Hog Farming in Iowa: The Applicability of Goldschmidt’s Findings Fifty Years Later, Human Organization 55: 409–415.

Community, labor, and peasantries 107 Ellis, Frank. 2005. Small Farms, Livelihood Diversification, and Rural-Urban Transitions: Strategic Issues in Sub-Sahara Africa, In The Future of Small Farms: Proceedings of a Research Workshop, Organized by International Food Policy Research Institute and Overseas Development Institute, Pp. 135–149. London: Imperial College, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.139.3719&re p=rep1&type= pdf#page=142. Flora, Jan, Ivan Brown, and Judith Conby. 1977. Impact of Type of Agriculture on Class Structure, Social Well-Being, and Inequalities, Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Rural Sociological Society, Burlington, Vermont, August. Foltz, Jeremy, Douglas Jackson-Smith, and Lucy Chen. 2002. Do Purchasing Patterns Differ Between Large and Small Dairy Farms? Economic Evidence from Three Wisconsin Communities, Agricultural and Resource Economics 31: 28–32. Foltz, Jeremy, and Kimberly Zueli. 2005. The Role of Community and Farm Characteristics in Farm Input Purchasing Patterns, Review of Agricultural Economics 27: 508–525. Fujimoto, Isao. 1977. The Communities of the San Joaquin Valley: The Relation Between Scale of Farming, Water Use, and Quality of Life, In U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Obstacles to Strengthening the Family Farm System. Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Family Farms, Rural Development, and Special Studies of the Committee on Agriculture, 95th Congress, First Session, Pp. 480–500. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Garming, H., and H. Waibel. 2009. Pesticides and Farmer Health in Nicaragua: A Willingness-To- Pay Approach to Evaluation, The European Journal of Health Economics 10(2): 125–133. Gershon, L. 2020. Why Does Meatpacking Have Such Bad Working Conditions? Daily, May 8, https:// daily.jstor.org/why-does-meatpacking-have-such-bad-working-conditions/. Gilles, Jere Lee, and Michael Dalecki. 1988. Rural Well-Being and Agricultural Change in Two Farming Regions, Rural Sociology 53: 40–55. Goldschmidt, Walter. 1978a. As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun and Company. Goldschmidt, Walter. 1978b. Large-Scale Farming and the Rural Social Structure, Rural Sociology 43(3): 362–366. Goss, Kevin, Richard Rodefeld, and Frederick Buttel. 1980. The Political Economy of Class Structure in U.S. Agriculture: A Theoretical Outline, In The Rural Sociology of the Advanced Societies, edited by Frederick Buttel and Howard Newby, Pp. 83–132. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, and Company. Green, Gary. 1985. Large-Scale Farming and the Quality of Life in Rural Communities: Further Specification of the Goldschmidt Hypothesis, Rural Sociology 50: 262–273. Granzow, M., and J.E. Jones. 2020. Urban Agriculture in the Making or Gardening as Epistemology, Local Environment 25(5): 381–396. Guidry, V., C. Gray, A. Lowman, D. Hall, and S. Wing. 2015. Data Quality from a Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health at Schools Near Industrial Livestock Facilities, Annals of Epidemiology, 25(7): 532–538. Harris, Craig, and Jess Gilbert. 1982. Large-Scale Farming, Rural Income, and Goldschmidt’s Agrarian Thesis, Rural Sociology 47: 449–458. Heady, Earl, and Steven Sonka. 1974. Farm Size, Rural Community Income, and Consumer Welfare, American Journal of Agricultural Economics 56: 534–542. Heffernan, William, and Paul Lasley. 1978. Agricultural Structure and Interaction in the Local Community: A Case Study, Rural Sociology 43: 348–361. Holt-Giménez, E., and T. Kerssen. 2015. The World Bank’s Long War on Peasants. Food First, April 20, https://foodfirst.org/the-world-banks-long-war-onpeasants/#:~:text=The%20implied%20prescription%20is%20yet,roughly%20a%20third% 20of%20humanity. Jackson-Smith, Douglas, and Gilbert Gillespie. 2005. Impacts of Farm Structural Change on Farmers’ Social Ties, Society and Natural Resources 18: 215–240. Jacobs, Ken, Ian Perry, and Jenifer MacGillvary. 2015. Low Wages Cost U.S. Taxpayers $152.8 Billion Each Year in Public Support for Working Families. UC Berkeley Labor Center, April 13, http://labor center.berkeley.edu/the-high-public-cost-of-low-wages/, last accessed May 19, 2015.

108  Community, culture, and knowledge Kishi, Misa, Norbert Hirschhorn, Marlinda Djajadisastra, Latifa Satterlee, Shelley Strowman, and Russell Dilts. 1995. Relationship of Pesticide Spraying to Signs and Symptoms in Indonesian Farmers, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health 21: 124–133. Lakner, S. 2020. Effects of Coronavirus on Agricultural Production – a First Approximation (part 2). Arc 2020, April  6, www.arc2020.eu/effects-of-coronavirus-on-agricultural- production-a-first-approxi mation-part-2/. Lam, Y., J.P. Fry, and K.E. Nachman. 2019. Applying an Environmental Public Health Lens to the Industrialization of Food Animal Production in Ten Low-and Middle-Income Countries, Globalization and Health 15(1), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-019-0479-5. Lekei, E.E., A.V. Ngowi, and L. London. 2016. Underreporting of Acute Pesticide Poisoning in Tanzania: Modelling Results from Two Cross-Sectional Studies, Environmental Health 15(1): 118. Liu, Yvonne, and Dminique Apollon. 2011. The Color of Food. New York: Applied Research Center. Lobao, Linda M. 1990. Locality and Inequality: Farm and Industry Structure and Socioeconomic Condition. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lobao, Linda M., and Curtis Stofferahn. 2008. The Community Effects of Industrialized Farming: Social Science Research and Challenges to Corporate Farming Laws, Agriculture and Human Values 25(2): 219–240. Lowder, S.K., J. Skoet, and T. Raney. 2016. The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide, World Development 87: 16–29. Lowe, P., J. Phillipson, A. Proctor, and M. Gkartzios. 2019. Expertise in Rural Development: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis, World Development 116: 28–37. Lupton, Michael. 1977. Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in World Development. London: Temple Smith. Lyson, Thomas, and Rick Welsh. 2005. Agricultural Industrialization, Anticorporate Farming Laws, and Rural Community Welfare. Environment and Planning A 37: 1479–1491. Magalhães, A.F.A., and E.D. Caldas. 2018. Underreporting of Fatal Poisonings in Brazil – a Descriptive Study Using Data from Four Information Systems, Forensic Science International 287: 136–141. Marousek, Gerald. 1979. Farm Size and Rural Communities: Some Economic Relationships, Southern Journal of Agricultural Economics 11: 57–61. Martinson, Oscar, Eugene Wilkening, and Richard Rodefeld. 1976. Feelings of Powerlessness and Social Isolation Among ‘Large-Scale’ Farm Personnel, Rural Sociology 41: 452–472. McMillian, MaryBe, and Michael Schulman. 2003. Hogs and Citizens: A Report from the North Carolina Front. In Communities of Work: Rural Restructuring in Local and Global Context, edited by William Falk, Michael Schulan, and Ann Tickamyer, Pp. 219−239. Dayton, OH: University of Hio Press. Mirabelli, M., S. Wing, S. Marshall, and T. Wilcosky. 2006. Asthma Symptoms Among Adolescents Who Attend Public Schools That Are Located Near Confined Swine Feeding Operations, Pediatrics 118(1): 66–75. North Central Regional Center for Rural Development (NCRCRD). 1999. The Impact of Recruiting Vertically Integrated Hog Production in Agriculturally-Based Counties of Oklahoma, (Report to the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture). Ames, IA: Iowa State University. Orlando, F., S. Alali, V. Vaglia, E. Pagliarino, J. Bacenetti, and S. Bocchi. 2020. Participatory Approach for Developing Knowledge on Organic Rice Farming: Management Strategies and Productive Performance, Agricultural Systems 178, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2019.102739. Palacios, E.E., and K. Sexsmith. 2020. Occupational Justice for Latinx Livestock Workers in the Eastern United States. In Latinx Farmworkers in the Eastern United States, Pp. 107–131. New York: Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36643-8_5. Peters, David J. 2002. Revisiting the Goldschmidt Hypothesis: The Effect of Economic Structure on Socioeconomic Conditions in the Rural Midwest. Technical Paper P-0702–1, Missouri Department of Economic Development, Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, Jefferson City, MO. Pimentel, David. 2005. Environmental and Economic Costs of the Application of Pesticides Primarily in the United States, Environment, Development and Sustainability 7: 229–252. Poole, Dennis. 1981. Farm scale, Family Life, and Community Participation, Rural Sociology 46: 112–127.

Community, labor, and peasantries 109 Pretty, J.N. 1995. Participatory Learning for Sustainable Agriculture.  World Development  23(8): 1247–1263. Radon, K. 2014. To Live or Not to Live Near a Farm? Occupational and Environmental Medicine 71(2): 79–79. Radon, K., A. Schulze, V. Ehrenstein, R. van Strien, G. Praml, and D. Nowak. 2007. Environmental Exposure to Confined Animal Feeding Operations and Respiratory Health of Neighboring Residents, Epidemiology 18: 300–308. Ramos, A.K., A. Fuentes, and M. Carvajal-Suarez. 2018. Self-Reported Occupational Injuries and Perceived Occupational Health Problems Among Latino Immigrant Swine Confinement Workers in Missouri, Journal of Environmental and Public Health, https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/8710901. Reisner, Ann, Dawn Coppin, and Pig in Print Group. 2004. But What Do the Neighbors Think? Community Considerations and Legal Issues Paper. Swine Odor Management Papers number 5, March 17, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. 2018. Ending Jim Crow in America’s Restaurants: Racial and Gender Occupational Segregation in the Restaurant Industry. New York: ROC United. Rodefeld, Richard. 1974. The Changing Organizational and Occupational Structure of Farming and the Implications for Farm Work Force Individuals, Families, and Communities, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Rodefeld, Richard, Jan Flora, Donald Voth, Isao Fujimoto, and Jim Converse (eds.). 1978. Change in Rural America: Causes, Consequences and Alternatives. St. Louis: C.V. Mosby Co. Sachs, C., P. Allen, A. Terman, J. Hayden, and C. Hatcher. 2014. Front and Back of the House: SocioSpatial Inequalities in Food Work, Agriculture and Human Values 31: 3–17. Saeed, M.F., M. Shaheen, I. Ahmad, A. Zakir, M. Nadeem, A.A. Chishti, M. Shahid, K. Bakhsh, and C.A. Damalas. 2017. Pesticide Exposure in the Local Community of Vehari District in Pakistan: An Assessment of Knowledge and Residues in Human Blood, Science of the Total Environment 587: 137–144. Schiffman, Susan, Elizabeth Miller, Mark Suggs, and Brevick Graham. 1995. The Effect of Environmental Odors Emanating from Commercial Swine Operations on the Mood of Nearby Residents, Brain Research Bulletin 37: 369–375. Schiffman, Susan, Elizabeth Slatterly-Miller, Mark Suggs, and Brevick Graham. 1998. Mood Changes Experienced by Persons Living Near Commercial Swine Operation, In Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities, edited by Kendall M. Thu and E. Paul Durrenberger, Pp. 84–102. Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press. Schultz, A.A., P. Peppard, R.E. Gangnon, and K.M. Malecki. 2019. Residential Proximity to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and Allergic and Respiratory Disease, Environment International 130, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2019.104911. Seipel, Michael, Katie Dallam, Anna Kleiner, and Sanford Rikoon. 1999. Rural Residents’ Attitudes Toward Increased Regulation of Large-Scale Swine Production, Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Rural Sociological Society, August. Shanker, D., and P. Mosendz. 2019. U.S. Chicken Industry Accused of Conspiring to Keep Immigrant Wages Down. Los Angeles Times, September  3, www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/u-schicken-industry-accused-of- conspiring-to-keep-immigrant-wages-down. Simons, Robert, Youngme Seo, and Spenser Robinson. 2014. The Effect of a Large Hog Barn Operation on Residential Sales Prices in Marshall County, KY, The Journal of Sustainable Real Estate 6(2): 93–111. Skees, Jerry, and Louis Swanson. 1988. Farm Structure and Rural Well-Being in the South, In Agriculture and Community Change in the U.S.: The Congressional Research Reports, edited by Louis Swanson, Pp. 238–321. Boulder CO: Westview Press. Smithers, John, Paul Johnson, and Alun Joseph. 2004. The Dynamics of Family Farming in North Huron County, Ontario. Part II: Farm-Community Interactions, The Canadian Geographer 48: 209–224. Stofferahn, Curtis. 2006. Industrialized Farming and Its Relationship to Community Well-Being: An Update of a 2000 Report by Linda Lobao. Prepared for the State of North Dakota, Office of the Attorney General, September.

110  Community, culture, and knowledge Swanson, Larry. 1980. A Study in Socioeconomic Development: Changing Farm Structure and Rural Community Decline in the Context of the Technological Transformation of American Agriculture, PhD Dissertation, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Tetreau, E.D. 1940. Social Organization in Arizona’s Irrigated Areas, Rural Sociology 5: 192–205. Thompson, N.L., and L. Haskins. 1999. Searching for “Sound Science”: A Critique of Three University Studies on the Economic Impacts of Large-Scale Hog Operations. Lyons, NE: Center for Rural Affairs. Tonelson, Alan. 2002. Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. United Nations. 2010. Agro-Ecology and the Right to Food. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, December  20, www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/officialreports/20110308_a-hrc16- 49_agroecology_en.pdf. Val, V., P.M. Rosset, C. Zamora Lomelí, O.F. Giraldo, and D. Rocheleau. 2019. Agroecology and La Via Campesina I. The Symbolic and Material Construction of Agroecology Through the Dispositive of “Peasant-to-Peasant” Processes, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 43(7–8): 872–894. van der Hoek, W., F. Konradsen, K. Athukorala, and T. Wanigadewa. 1998. Pesticide Poisoning: A Major Health Problem in Sri Lanka, Social Science and Medicine 46(4): 495–504. van der Ploeg, J.D. 2020. From Biomedical to Politico-Economic Crisis: The Food System in Times of Covid-19, The Journal of Peasant Studies 47(5): 944–972. Wells, A., J. Poole, and D. Romberger. 2014. Influence of Farming Exposure on the Development of Asthma and Asthma-Like Symptoms, International Immunopharmacology 23(1): 356–363. Welsh, Rick, and Thomas A. Lyson. 2001. Anti-corporate Farming Laws, the ‘Goldschmidt Hypothesis’ and Rural Community Welfare, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, Albuquerque, NM, August. Wesseling, C., L. Castillo, and C. Elinder. 1993. Pesticide Poisonings in Costa Rica, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health 19(4): 227–235. Wheelock, Gerald. 1979. Farm Size, Community Structure and Growth: Specification of a Structural Equation Model, Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Rural Sociological Society, Burlington, VT, August. Williamson, Stephanie. 2005. Breaking the Barriers to IPM in Africa: Evidence from Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Senegal, In The Pesticide Detox, edited by Jules Petty, Pp. 165–180. London: Earthscan. Wilson, Sacoby, Frank Howell, Steve Wing, and Mark Sobsey. 2002. Environmental Injustice and the Mississippi Hog Industry, Environmental Health Perspectives 110(2): 195–201. Wing, Steve, and Susanne Wolf. 1999. Intensive Livestock Operations, Health, and Quality of Life Among Eastern North Carolina Residents, Report to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Chapel Hill, NC: Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina. Wing, Steve, and Susanne Wolf. 2000. Intensive Livestock Operations, Health and Quality of Life Among Eastern North Carolina Residents, Environmental Health Perspectives 108(3): 233–238. Wright, Wynne, Cornelia Flora, Kathy Kremer, Willis Goudy, Clare Hinrichs, Paul Lasley, Ardith Maney, Margaret Kronma, Hamilton Brown, Kenneth Pigg, Beverly Duncan, Jean Coleman, and Debra Morse. 2001. Technical Work Paper on Social and Community Impacts. Prepared for the Generic Environmental Impact Statement on Animal Agriculture and the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board. Wynne, B. 1996. May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of the Expert-Lay Knowledge Divide, In Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, edited by S. Lash, B. Szerszynski, and B. Wynne, Pp. 44–83. London: Sage.

6 Food and culture

Food is more than its material components, more than a composition of macro- and micronutrients. Food blurs boundaries, between internal/external, self/Other, and nature/culture (Gething 2010; Lupton 1996). As Goodman (2011: 250) once put it, “You are what you eat – literally – but also how, when, where and why you eat.” This chapter explores some of food’s fluid identity as both a thought and a thing. The meanings and practices attached to food have changed considerably over the last century for a variety of reasons. Those changes are the subject of this chapter.

The cooked (Western) meal Social scientists have been interested in food for quite some time. This is especially true of anthropologists, which explains the particularly long tradition of the “food and culture” literature (see, e.g., Messer 1984; Mintz and DuBois 2002). There was, for instance, Garrick Mallery’s essay, “Manners and Meals,” published in an 1888 issue of the American Anthropologist. Better remembered is Franz Boas’s 1921 analysis of Kwakiutl (North American Indians who lived in what is now British Columbia) salmon recipes, a treatment later picked up mid-century by Helen Codere (1957) to explain the social organization and hierarchy of this community – yes, all from how this society prepared its fish! This early food and culture scholarship took a “structural turn” in the 1960s. According to structuralism (or at least early structuralism), the symbolic meaning of food is rooted in something deeper. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1996 [1966]), one of the founders of the structural school, constructed what he called his culinary triangle to show the connection between culture and nature in human thought. The three “points” of this triangle are the raw, cooked, and rotten. The underlying idea of his approach (though stated in very general terms) was that the human brain operates according to a “deep structure” – hence the label structuralism. Consequently, even across different cultures there is a shared universal background that all humans have in common. Many scholars have since adopted a less rigid approach. Those that today speak of structuralism now refer to something more mutable and less hardwired. According to Beardsworth and Keilt (1997: 61): The questions posed about food and eating from a structuralist perspective have a different emphasis as compared with those posed from a functionalist viewpoint. Rather than focusing upon practicalities and the social processes involved in producing, allocating and consuming food, the structuralist gaze is directed towards the rules and conventions that govern the ways in which food items are classified, prepared and combined with each other.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-8

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Regardless of the depth of these structures, Lévi-Strauss’s point is an interesting one: all cultures seem to make a distinction between the raw and the cooked. The former speaks to something closer to nature, whereas the latter – cooked food – arrives at this designation because it has been materially and culturally transformed. (The rotten is also transformed but by “natural” processes.) You can learn a lot about a society by looking at how it treats foods in these categories and by who is allowed to eat what. Think of the masculine symbolism attached to eating rare meat. According to conventional gastronomic stereotypes, while no “real man” is supposed to eat meat well done, it is perfectly acceptable for women in many Western societies to make precisely such a request when describing how they want theirs prepared. Other classic works center on the pioneering work of Mary Douglas and her studies of dining. In the article “Deciphering a Meal” (1972), Douglas identifies two contrasted food categories: meals and drinks. Meals are structured and named events, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, whereas drinks, typically, are not. Meals (Western ones at least) are also rooted more deeply in rituals and assumptions – at least one mouth-entering utensil per individual, a table, a seating order (one that at least recognizes a “head” of the table), cultural restrictions on the pursuit of alternative activities (such as reading) while at the table, etc. A “proper” meal also incorporates a series of contrasts: hot and cold, bland and spiced, liquid and semi-liquid. Drinks are generally available to strangers, acquaintances, and family. Meals, conversely, are reserved for family, close friends, and honored guests. For example, I doubt you would prepare a meal for (or give food to) your postal carrier if asked, but you might offer her a drink if she made the request. Douglas’ study with Michael Nicod (Douglas and Nicod 1974) relates meal structure to meal content. Examining the dining patterns of English working-class families, they note their diets centered on two staple carbohydrates – potatoes and cereals. This was in contrast to upper-and middle-class diets, which made greater use of a range of cereals, beans, and roots. Building on this, Anne Murcott (1982) studied thirty-seven pregnant women in South Wales in order to better understand how a “proper” cooked dinner is culturally understood within this population. Murcott found that it was comprised of meat, potatoes, at least one additional vegetable, and gravy, all of which were perceived as essential to family feelings of health and well-being. Fresh meat was a priority, and potatoes were always specified and itemized separately from other vegetables. This population also did not regard fish as an acceptable substitute for meat (something I was also taught growing up in rural Iowa, except during Lent, which I suppose added to the feeling of “sacrifice” on Fridays). While potatoes were a constant, there was flexibility toward what additional vegetables could be eaten alongside this starch. Yet even here Murcott picked up on some interesting rules that seemed to shape diet. For instance, these additional vegetables were almost always green and from “above ground” – peas, beans, sprouts, cabbage, and occasionally broccoli and cauliflower. The final ingredient necessary to the structural integrity of the cooked dinner was gravy, which, being poured onto the plate on top of other items, was said to link and transform them in the cooked dinner into a coordinated whole.

Thinking about taste sociologically Western philosophy long ago established a hierarchy of the senses. Assumed within this hierarchy is the belief that distance – namely between knower and known – has a cognitive, moral, and aesthetic advantage, while a bodily sense like taste brings one dangerously

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close to the object of perception (Korsmeyer 1999). Plato, in his famous discussion of the cave in Republic VII, uses a wealth of metaphors to convey the intellectual power of sight: shadows, light, the sun, and the darkness of a cave. The belief, then as now, has been that vision, though open to creating illusions, is freer from the pull of emotions and appetite than other more corporeal forms of knowledge, like taste. For Plato, the philosophic life required the denial of these lower senses. In his Symposium, for example, friends gathered for a banquet. But as they philosophize about love they make sure not to eat or drink so as to keep their intellect sharp. Similarly, the denial of the fleshier “lower” senses has been a constant theme in theological scholarship for more than two millennia. Not until the twentieth century did scholars begin to think sociologically about taste. Norbert Elias (2000) devoted much of his career to uncovering the sociological underpinnings of this phenomenon. For Elias, our feelings about what constitutes good and bad manners, proper and improper behaviors, and civil and uncivil tastes and dispositions are ultimately social in nature. Yet their social nature does not make them any less objective and real. Over time, through repetitive practices, these social constructions become taken for granted, and their origins become less transparent – in a word, they become “natural.” Elias provides considerable insight into this process, specifically in regards to those feelings and tastes that pertain to manners and our understandings of civility. For Elias, tastes do not occur randomly. Taste is strategic, as evidenced by the fact that these dispositions have been used to maintain and, when possible, to expand, class divisions in society. Socially desirable tastes often take time, and frequently money (e.g., taking etiquette lessons), to acquire. This point has also been famously articulated by French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1984: 13), who too spent much of his career talking about the strategic role of taste (see Box 6.1). For Bourdieu, taste can take the form of a type of capital – what he called “cultural capital.” According to both Elias and Bourdieu, taste orders society. It organizes people into groups and is therefore central to class and individual identities.

Box 6.1  Bourdieu on Culture, Class, and Consumption Pierre Bourdieu, most notably through his book Distinction (1984), has had a significant impact on sociological studies examining the intersection between food consumption, class, and culture. Studying the consumption practices of the French in the 1960s, Bourdieu argues that class-based “tastes” – in art, literature, films, and food  – are an important means by which class differences are produced and maintained. On the subject of food, Bourdieu maintained that while the French working class have “a taste for the heavy, the fat and the coarse,” the palette among the upper class centered on foods that are “light,” “refined,” and “delicate” (P. 185). But taste does more than just mark one’s place in the social hierarchy; it reproduces those very class distinctions, acting like a barrier for those hoping to move up the socio-economic ladder. The term “cultural capital” is important in Bourdieu’s argument. What you like – your tastes – can help (or hinder) your ability to access other forms of capital, like social capital (social networks) and financial capital (money and credit). For Bourdieu, these various forms of capital are interrelated. Tastes associated with the

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upper class (so-called highbrow culture) are often associated with artifacts that are expensive – think of caviar or an old bottle of a dry red wine. Moreover, often the tastes themselves take time to acquire, which is precisely why they are valued. If the tastes were easily learned they would not signal as strongly one’s position in the class structure. The ability to distinguish the subtle differences between wines – in terms of, say, their “notes” and “bouquet” – is often cited for its function as a class marker (Charters 2006). The acquisition of this knowledge requires time (to practice drinking wine), money (to purchase the wine and perhaps sessions at a wine-tasting class), and access to particular social networks (not knowing anyone with this knowledge would make it considerably more difficult to acquire). Remember also that we are not just talking about the acquisition of knowledge but also physical routines, such as learning to properly swirl the glass of wine so as to release the aromas, slurp the wine, and swirl it about in one’s mouth before either swallowing or spitting it out. These routines too take time, money, and social networks to develop before the wine-tasting performance can be successfully pulled off. And why are these tastes, knowledges, and performances like a type of capital? Because, according to Bourdieu, knowing them makes it easier to socially maneuver amongst the upper echelons of society, while, conversely, not knowing them can be detrimental to one’s hopes of ever acquiring access to these social networks.

It is not unusual for food writers and activists to talk about how, for example, local or organic food is better tasting or fresher than that provided by conventional means. Claims like these must be treated with caution, however. We know, for example, that “freshness” in the context of food is dependent on a host of carefully coordinated practices and technologies, like plastic salad bags employing modified atmosphere packaging technology, which involves a special concoction of gases designed to retard the growth of microorganisms (Freidberg 2009). We also know that designates like “better tasting,” “fresh,” and “quality” can vary considerably based upon one’s social networks and personal connections to food (Carolan 2011). Then there is the issue of affordability. Local, organic, and artisan foods are notoriously more expensive than conventional fare (though this price disparity is narrowing). This led Guthman (2003) to at one point classify organic food as “yuppie chow,” as opposed to the counter-cuisine organic food that emerged out of the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, which brings us back to Elias’s and Bourdieu’s point about taste as a potential marker of social status (I return to this idea of taste as distinction later in the book, when talking about so-called ethical consumption).

Food and memory I was lecturing in one of my classes about slow food, noting that while society places importance on saving things like biodiversity, language, and material cultural artifacts (paintings, pottery, historical buildings, etc.), we have yet to think about food in a similar way (see Box 6.2). I could tell they still were not buying the argument, so I decided to give them a personal example. I explained to them how I felt more closely connected with my Czechoslovakian heritage than to either my Irish or German roots. This connection,

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I told them, has nothing to do with my familiarity with authentic Czech music, clothing, or language. Rather, the connection I feel to this heritage is almost entirely felt through and because of food. Even my limited grasp of the Czechoslovakian language is mostly confined to either foods (such as the delicious kolache [a fruit-filled bread]) or food-related artifacts (such as kuchenka [cooker/stove]); knowledge that, coincidently, was most likely acquired while sitting around the table eating. This is what I mean when I say food diversity is culturally consequential.

Box 6.2  The Ark of Taste You cannot save polar bears by eating them, but consuming rare foods can lead to their preservation. This brings us to a core premise of slow food: Want to save rare foods? Get people excited about growing, preparing and consuming them. Slow food organizers therefore created an ark, like the Biblical character Noah, to help save food. The Ark of Taste is what it is called. Slow-food activists recognize that every set of genes in this ark encodes for not only biological traits but also cultural practices. Launched in 1996, the Ark of Taste selects, catalogues, and promotes endangered foods and the practices needed to keep those foods alive. Yet identification and promotion alone cannot save all foods that are rare. Consequently, in 1999 Slow Food created presida, an arm of the Ark of Taste designed specifically to assist artisans and producers of items admitted to the ark by helping them purchase equipment, create necessary infrastructure, and market their products (Allen and Albala 2007). To qualify for the ark, food products must be (1) outstanding in terms of taste (as defined in the context of local traditions and uses), (2) at risk biologically or as culinary traditions, (3) sustainably produced, (4) culturally or historically linked to a specific region, locality, ethnicity, or traditional production practice, and (5) produced in limited quantities (by farms or by small-scale processing companies). Product categories include (but are not limited to) beverages, cereals, cheeses, fish, fruits, honey, legumes, livestock, nuts, shellfish, spices, syrups, vegetables, vinegars, and wild game. There are currently (as of early 2021) almost 5,000 products on this list.

A leader of the slow food movement describes a lesson that occurred in an Australian primary school (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008: 467). The students were given a blind taste test of homemade and commercial strawberry jams. Before the experiment they were asked which jam they thought they would like most. Most answered the homemade jams. Their taste buds, however, betrayed their expectations. The vast majority of students reported actually preferring the jam they grew up eating – commercial jam. After describing this story the slow food member remarked: “It illustrates the need to educate their tastes [. . .] or they won’t be able to appreciate other tastes and they will always go for the industrial products” (as quoted in Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008: 467). Let’s think sociologically about this recommendation. Who does this educating, what tastes ought to be appreciated, and, finally, who determines all of this? This example points back to the interrelationship between food, habit, and memory. If we learn as a society to prefer industrial, highly processed food products over, say, whole (or at least less-processed) foods, how will

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that shape future food choices and food system trajectories? Going back to my earlier personal example: If I lose the taste for and fail to acquire the knowledge that would allow me to make those kolaches that tie me to my Czechoslovakian heritage I would undoubtedly lose a piece of who I am. For these reasons, are not foods and tastes worth saving? Food is also important in building national and regional identities in addition to remembering past events that further feed into that larger collective identity. Caldwell (2009), for example, writes about how food in the former Soviet Union emerged as a commemorative medium for past victories. Even farm implements, livestock, peasant farming traditions, and other agricultural themes had long been part of the communist mythology utilized by the state to create a collective “Soviet” identity.

Knowing food through images and stories I have already discussed at length the changing structure of agriculture. Yet to be discussed, however, are the equally momentous technological advances in food preservation. Any move to free people from agriculture so they can work in the city presupposes the simultaneous development of techniques to keep the food from spoiling before it reaches its final destination. Thanks to food preservation techniques, people could be separated by great distances from the land, farms, and farmers that fed them. Arguably the first modern food-preserving innovation (recognizing that people have been salting, smoking, fermenting, and drying food for millennia) occurred in 1809, when Nicolas Appert won 12,000 francs from Napoleon for inventing a technique for preserving food in bottles that was then quickly adopted by the military during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1819, William Underwood applied the same principles in the US with tin canisters – hence the term “canned food.” Shortly thereafter, Louis Pasteur’s pasteurization process was invented in 1862. And the pieces for a food revolution began falling into place. People initially viewed industrialized food with a degree of suspicion. Previous to this, food was largely something individuals and families produced themselves (or at least it was produced by someone familiar). Understandings of freshness and quality were consequently wrapped up in particular sets of relations, which usually involved people being in intimate contact with what they ate. So, understandably, when food began coming in a can or box most were initially suspicious. W. K. Kellogg believed consumers needed symbols they could identify with that would give them confidence about the quality of the food they were buying. He therefore began in 1906 to print his signature on every box of corn flakes in an attempt to build trust in the Kellogg brand. In 1907, Kellogg placed an actual face on their product. Called the Sweetheart of Corn, the illustrated image was of a young girl holding an ear of corn in each hand. Between 1905 and 1940, Kellogg spent $100 million on advertising in an attempt to further assure consumers of the quality of their product. The industry as a whole followed suit, and by 1940 Americans consumed nearly as much processed foods as fresh (Blay-Palmer 2008). Given the stance of medical professionals today towards processed foods it might surprise readers to learn that health professionals encouraged this early push to industrial food. Their argument – echoed by such industrial food giants as W. K. Kellogg and C. W. Post – was that the early pioneer diet was too rich for the sedentary, urban lifestyle (BlayPalmer 2008). What the “modern” body needed, so it was argued, was access to standardized, safe, and healthy processed foods. This argument was used quite effectively and led, for example, to the flaked cereal revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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Companies knew early on about the importance of savvy marketing for gaining consumer trust. Consumers, for their part, sought out this knowledge too. Looking to fill in these knowledge gaps brought on by an increasingly industrialized food system, consumers turned to labels and advertisements to make sense of food. Early food manufacturers constructed a “founder” and a “founding story” through which they communicated their product. For example, with the passage of the 1870 federal trademarks law in the US firms could protect images and narratives designed to provide a proxy of sorts for the firsthand experience previous generations had of their food. The Quaker Oats Man was “born” in 1877, followed by Aunt Jemima in 1905, the (earlier-mentioned) Sweetheart of Corn in 1907, the Morton Salt Girl in 1911, Betty Crocker in 1921, and the Jolly Green Giant in 1926. All sought to place a face – real or imagined – on food that had been removed by the industrialization process. Most early food packages also contained text; indeed, by today’s standards, a remarkable amount of it. Its purpose, as best as I can tell, was to provide consumers additional “information” about the food they were thinking about purchasing and assuage any fears about its distant origins. From today’s perspective  – where the five-second sound bite and two- or three-word catchphrase dominate food adverts – it is difficult to understand why firms a century ago would have bothered offering so much detail within their ads. One must assume consumers read them. Otherwise this strategy would not have been so widely used; though I firmly doubt many consumers today would take the time to read, say, an advert containing an entire page with text about a particular brand of honey (see Figure 6.1). Perhaps this gives some insight into the level of suspicion people at the time had of food raised without a face. This suspicion was so great that consumers actually took the time to read the stories contained in the ads in the hope of learning more about their food (Carolan 2011). We know food in part through the stories we tell, which in part explains its power to produce and reproduce culture and identity. In the past, these stories were often entangled in the physical, social, and symbolic acts of raising, harvesting, preserving/storing, and consuming food. Food today still comes with stories. Yet as our physical relationship to food has changed so too have these narratives. Many people, after all, still go to the grocery store looking for a good story (Carolan 2015). Perhaps it is a tale of how many miles a food has traveled before reaching one’s dinner table; or the story of the organic label, telling consumers about how a particular commodity was raised and processed; or, following the a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words logic, some consumers may merely be looking for a friendly face that they have known since childhood. Speaking of a good story. . .

Geographical indications: GIs, PDOs, and PGIs Food labels have changed considerably since the days that gave birth to such iconic figures as the Morton Salt Girl and the Jolly Green Giant. Labels from a century ago seemed to mask specifically where food was coming from. There were no images of or descriptions about, say, the specific slaughterhouse or farm from which a specific food item originated. (And for good reason if Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle has any truth to it, which described the working conditions of meatpacking plants in nightmarish terms.) Today, however, some labels attempt to do something to this effect. It is a curious technique to promote rural development while preserving local artisan techniques and thus conserving culture.

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Figure 6.1  1917 advertisement for Airline Honey Source: From Good Housekeeping 1917. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Good_Housekeeping/J9E2AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22what +is+sweeter+than+honey%22+good+housekeeping&pg=PA123&printsec=frontcover.

Geographical indications (GI) of origin is an example of just such a label. While there is no universally agreed upon definition of GIs, the following captures its general spirit: A Geographical Indication identifies a good as originating in a delimited territory or region where a noted quality, reputation or other characteristic of the good is

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essentially attributable to its geographical origin and/or the human or natural factors there. (Giovannucci et al. 2009: 2) GIs serve multiple functions. They can promote rural development while simultaneously preserving local foods and artisan practices, culture, and tradition (Barham 2007; Rippon 2014). They have been called an example of “glocalization” (Giovannucci et al. 2009: 3) in that they require participation in global markets while supporting local culture and economies. GIs help products distinguish themselves from the otherwise undifferentiated mass that is bought and sold daily on conventional commodities markets. This gives GI-designated commodities a competitive advantage – and the region supplying the commodity a monopoly – precisely because no one else in the world can produce that particular branded good. The more well-known GIs include Darjeeling tea (which must come from the Darjeeling region in West Bengal, India), Bordeaux wine (any wine produced in the Bordeaux region of France), Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (named after the producing areas near Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Mantova), and Idaho potatoes (which can only be grown in the US state of Idaho). These material objects can still be produced anywhere in the world, like champagne, though it’s usually called something like “sparkling wine,” as “champagne” is a protected GI. That said, producers can get away with designations like American- (or Australian-, New Zealand-, etc.) produced “camembert,” “champagne,” “feta,” “gruyere,” and “sangria,” even though these titles are all GI protected. Roughly nine out of ten of all GIs are located in the thirty-four OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. This should not come as a surprise, as establishing GIs often comes at some expense, in terms of organizational and institutional structures, infrastructural requirements, and ongoing operational requirements (like marketing and legal enforcement). As a rural development tool for less affluent nations, then, GIs might have limited impact. The scope of protections offered by a GI is extensive and not limited only to a specific geographical name, like Darjeeling tea. A GI can also be a picture, like that of a Cornish pastry for genuine Cornish pastries, the outline of a geographic area, such as the outline of the state of Florida for Florida oranges, or almost anything else that can identify the source of the commodity. GIs are secured through multiple layers of protection. This can include, but is not limited to, trademark laws, consumer fraud protection laws, and laws that explicitly recognize (and thus protect) individual GIs. Two examples of GIs are PDOs (Protected Designation of Origin) and PGIs (Protected Geographic Indication). These legal frameworks are specific to the European Union (EU). PDOs and PGIs differ most significantly in the extent of their link to a specific geographic region. A PDO product must be composed of materials originating from the area, have characteristics attributable to the locale (associated with, say, climate or soil type), and be produced and processed in the defined GI region. PGIs, in contrast, only need to have at least one of the production or processing stages take place in the defined area. In most other respects PDOs and PGIs are the same in terms of the application process, the control systems involved, and the consumer guarantees available (Hegnes 2019). While GIs have been shown to improve the welfare of some farmers, they have also been criticized as a protectionist instrument. The EU is home to the most GIs of any other economic entity in the world, with considerable numbers concentrated in its southern countries. If we were to even exclude wines from that list, there are seven times more

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food GIs per capita in the southern EU Member States than in other EU Member States (Huysmans and Swinnen 2019).

Thinking sociologically about the non-humans that feed us Talking about animals in a chapter on culture might seem a little odd. Its placement reflects the fact that when sociologists talk about animals they are not talking about nonhuman animal societies per se – after all, the field is usually called the sociology of animals, never animal sociology (although socio-biologists occasionally evoke the latter term). When social scientists study animals what they are really interested in is our changing associations with them, namely, human–animal relationships. Some of these relationships center on how we think about, treat, and organize alongside animals; all of which are topics relevant to this chapter. Some of the earliest work pertinent to this review comes from the twentieth-century social and cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas and her research into societal definitions of “pollution.” According to Douglas, these definitions are culturally variable and reflect societal views of defilement or disorder. This led to her now famous definition of pollution as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: 35). Public understandings of pollution thus reflect socially defined moral boundaries  – that is, of what is (and is not) natural and thus right. These moral boundaries are defined spatially, in terms of phenomena being “in place” (e.g., the good/the right) or “out of place” (e.g., defilement/the bad/ the unnatural). This framework has been used to understand our changing relationship and attitudes toward animals by explaining how animals (and in particular livestock) were slowly excluded from city spaces in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. Initially, this shift in public understandings of animals within city spaces had links to public-health discourses and fears of moral degeneracy. In terms of the former, health reformers were looking to cleanse the filthy urban environment, with animal secretions (e.g., odor, manure, etc.) being at the top of their list of prime offenders. There was also a fear that humans could become morally debased if they were exposed with frequency to the unregulated urges of the uncivil beast (Philo 1995). Thus began the process of extricating animals from the urban environment, a process that has been of sociological consequence to how we understand them and the food they provide us. Previous to this, animals and humans regularly lived in close proximity to one another. Not only did humans and animals share urban environments, but animals readily transgressed boundaries between the “in here” of the home and the “out there” found beyond one’s doorstep. Centuries ago it was not uncommon to find, for example, chickens, goats, and pigs scurrying about one’s home, particularly among the peasant class (and in some parts of the world we still see this). By the early nineteenth century, not only was it becoming unacceptable to allow animals into one’s home (save for “pets”), it was also becoming increasingly objectionable for animals to be located near large populations of people – hence, their expulsion to the countryside. In both cases, within the “in here” of one’s home and the “in here” of the city, animals had become “out of place.” The countryside, in many respects, now represents the last bastion of space – except for notable exceptions like zoos, stockyards, dog parks, and the like – where animals are still considered “in place.” Yet this is also changing. Recent trends threaten to make animals “out of place” even in the countryside. The cause of this most recent movement can be traced, at least in part,

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to structural changes within agriculture and the parallel movement of non-farmers into the countryside. Take the consolidation of the hog industry in the US, which (with poultry) has been at the forefront of livestock concentration trends. While the number of hogs in the US has changed little over the last century, the number of farms raising these animals has decreased precipitously. For example, the number of farms producing hogs in the US has declined from almost 700,000 in 1980 to approximately 63,000 in 2012 to around 50,000 at the present (early 2021). As for farms that are primarily hog farms, that number is closer to 20,000. At the same time, the percentage of hogs raised by the largest-sized farms (greater than 5,000-head inventory) rose from 20 percent of total US production in 1992 to approximately 81 percent in 2012, and now the number sits at more than 90 percent today. As livestock become concentrated in fewer and fewer areas, many other areas are becoming sanitized as animals are disappearing from them. These trends also lie at the center of a number of arguments pertaining to how we relate to and thus treat animals. Philosopher Hub Zwart (1997) argues that the conventional Western view of animals, where they are reduced to amoral machines, has helped legitimize their objectification and sustained the view that they are resources for human use. Elsewhere I have written on what I call “epistemic distance” (Carolan 2006). I coined this term to speak specifically about how many of the benefits of sustainable agriculture cannot be immediately experienced  – for instance, improvements in soil fertility and tilth take time to occur after one adopts more sustainable farm management practices. Conventional agriculture, conversely, has witnessed such success in part because many of its benefits are immediate in comparison to its costs, like applying fertilizer at high application rates and witnessing immediate short-term increases in yields. But the term “epistemic distance” has wider applications. When taken as a whole, food production has become epistemologically distant from the average consumer. This distance benefits the food system status quo because it creates gaps and distortions in terms of the information available to consumers. This distance, one could argue, also has an impact on our ethical orientation toward distant phenomena, as it makes it easier for us to act with moral indifference toward those faraway people, places, and nonhuman animals that provide us with what we eat. Beck (1992) has written at length about how non-knowledge is an inevitable product of the expansion of capital and techno-scientific rationality. Following Beck’s thesis  – what is known as the “risk society thesis” – this unawareness allows for the global flow of information and technologies. According to Beck, risks today are an ever-present and largely unavoidable by-product of modernity with its associated technological and organizational forms. Take our global food system. While production efficiencies and economies of scale make food today remarkably inexpensive, they also presuppose an organizational form that is inherently risky. As slaughter facilities, for example, continue to increase their speed and improve their efficiency mistakes will inevitably happen. Increasing production line speeds, for example, increases the risk of cutting open internal organs while the animals are being eviscerated, thus exposing meat to fecal matter. And as the meat from different animals becomes mixed in processing facilities, so increase the chances of crosscontamination as the bacteria of one animal suddenly finds itself spread across thousands. Another term is helpful here: agnotology. Coined by Proctor (1996), agnotology refers to manufactured ignorance. A  prime example of agnotology is the tobacco industry’s decades-long public relations assault that involved producing doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use (Michaels and Monforton 2005; Proctor 1996). But agnotology need not

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only refer to ignorance induced by lies, deceptions, and distortions. More generally, agnotology serves to alienate us from other ways of knowing that may challenge conventional patterns of social organization. Let’s apply this concept to how we think about “livestock” – a word that itself seems to reduce animals to a mere resource (see Box 6.3). In the book Chicken World, Profitable Poultry Production, published back in 1910, M. G. Kains tells the reader to think of the hen as another piece of machinery. When calculating production costs, one must “not only [think of] the cost of the egg as a market commodity, but the cost of making the machine, the hen, which is to manufacture the egg” (Kains 1910: 18, as quoted in Squier 2006: 76). A  non-chicken example in which the machine trope is used to describe livestock can be found in the book Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm, which explains that “the breeding sow should be thought of as, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine” (Coats 1989: 32). Is it not reasonable to assume that in thinking of animals as machines we will eventually start treating them as such?

Box 6.3  Commodifying Animal Welfare How has animal welfare turned into a thing that can be measured, standardized, and ultimately sold? That is a question Henry Buller and Ema Roe (2012) attempt to answer. They are interested, in other words, “in the politics of knowledge surrounding farm animal welfare: who says what welfare is and why and where, how do they say it and who are they saying it to?” (p. 131). After all, it is unlikely to have animal welfare standards adopted wholesale by industry that will unduly slow the agricultural treadmill of production; indeed, those adopted are often adopted the premise that a healthy animal is a productive one. I hear this often from those, for example, in the dairy industry – think happy cows. Buller and Roe also note the risks that come with focusing on specific production practices, even those with a legitimate claim to improving animal welfare conditions. On the one hand, it is important to ask what those practices mean in terms of actual farm management practices. Take “free-range” eggs. The USDA’s definition for “free range” is that birds must have “outdoor access” or “access to the outdoors.” (As “full-body access” to the outdoors is not specified some egg farms have interpreted the USDA’s definition narrowly to mean small openings to the outside are sufficient.) On the other hand, we must be careful not to fetishize animal welfare. In the words of Buller and Roe (2012: 135), “Marx introduced the idea of ‘commodity fetishism’ by which he meant that if one focuses too much on the saleable commodity, one tends to forget or obscure the social relations (be they exclusively human or more than human) that lie behind its production.” Put in terms that relate to animal welfare, we must be careful not to lose sight of the forest (the varied impacts of a globalized, corporate-controlled food system) for the trees (whether Practice X is followed on Farmer Y’s farm). In other words, happy cows do not, in themselves, make for a just, equitable, and sustainable foodscape.

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Meat on the menu Why is meat consumption so prized in an increasing number of countries around the world? And how, in those countries that currently eat a lot of meat, do people understand and perceive actions related to livestock production and meat consumption? Those questions are the focus of this section. A number of cultural analyses have identified meat as the food with the highest status in the hierarchy of foods, a finding that appears to hold for high-income (Twigg 1984) and lower-income (Lokuruka 2006) countries alike. Douglas and Nicod (1974) conducted a seminal study of meals among Britons and found meat to be at the center of practically every meal. Its cultural dominance can be seen by the fact that its presence signifies the dish, even when it is just one ingredient of many, whether salads (chicken Cobb salad), soups (beef stew), or casseroles (tuna casserole). The dominant position of meat in Western cuisine is even reflected in Western vegetarian culture, as non-animal products are made to appear as much like meat as possible (veggie hotdogs, soy hamburgers, etc.) (GvionRosenberg 1990; see Box 6.4). There is some debate, however, over whether meat continues to hold the same privileged position as it once did. One study of meat consumption among residents of Copenhagen, for example, suggests meat’s place atop the food hierarchy has reached its end (Holm and Mohl 2000). The researchers note that, if true, some of the factors behind this trend include recent BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) scares, the sizable ecological footprint of industrial livestock production, a growing awareness of animal rights/ welfare, and human/public health issues related to the high levels of saturated fat found in certain animal products. I make note of this while acknowledging that meat consumption continues to rise in certain countries, like in Vietnam, which has seen its consumption increase more than fourfold since the early-1960s. The reasons for this increase include not only rising affluence and growing household disposable incomes but also, for instance, more people eating out, foreign direct investment, and changes to the job market, which, in turn, has caused individuals to eat out more due to longer work days and commutes while pulling both adults outside the home as they both must earn an income (Hansen 2018). What makes meat  – and “red” meat in particular  – so symbolically powerful? One important early study on the subject contends that its deep cultural significance lies in the fact that it comes from animals (Twigg 1984). To a certain degree, then, it is blood that makes red meat so prized, as blood has long been associated with virility, strength, and sexuality. In many indigenous cultures, to consume meat is to consume the animal and its vitality. But there are boundaries within the act of meat eating that most cultures say cannot be transgressed, like eating other humans and consuming meat raw. The cultural significance of cooking cannot be understated. Cooking, and cooking meat in particular, is one of the many things that humans do to symbolically separate themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom. The human, like any animal, needs to eat. This need is a constant reminder that we are animals too. Cooking thus acts to separate ourselves from the animal kingdom and appear more “civilized.” Cooking, you could say, works to symbolically remove artifacts from the realm of “nature” and place them in the realm of “culture” (Lévi-Strauss 1969). The “discovery” of the calorie has also given meat (and red meat in particular) cultural significance. Europeans first measured the calorie in 1883. Yet whereas in Europe the

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calorie attracted little attention, it quickly established itself in the US as a major guiding policy principle (Cullather 2007). The calorie allowed food to be talked about without reference, context, or form. Taste, culture, culinary tradition, and variety became secondary qualities when compared to their shared status as carriers of energy. The calorie also allowed for a seemingly “objective” ranking of foods. Grains, meat, and dairy goods ranked very well compared to fruits, leafy vegetables, and fish. Some items in the latter group possessed so few calories that, during the early twentieth century, “they could scarcely be classified as food” (Cullather 2007: 345). The calorie also washed away cultural differences in diet. Scientists argued that, for example, the potatoes and cheese that made up so much of the Irish diet were identical, except perhaps in quantity consumed, to the rice and ghee eaten by those from India and Southeast Asia (Cullather 2007). With this understanding of food in tow, officials began rethinking the provisioning of armies, prisons, and schools. The intent of these reforms was to maximize money spent on foods high in calories while deemphasizing diets with low caloric values. In terms of improving national diets, it was believed the people of Asia had the most to gain from this new knowledge, as their diet lacked the type of energy-dense foods – most noticeably red meat – common to North Americans. The imperial army and navy of Japan began reforming rations in the 1920s, adding “Western” recipes that utilized beef, pork, wheat, and fried batter (tempura) to boost the caloric intake of soldiers while cutting costs (Cullather 2007). The later discovery of vitamins and minerals eventually undermined the calorie’s identity as the single variable upon which all food is to be measured and greatly helped rehabilitate the value of fruits and vegetables. Yet the legacy of the calorie remains. The calorie, for a while at least, seemed to objectively solidify meat’s place atop the food hierarchy. Food, including meat, is also gendered. In most Western post-industrial societies masculine foods have tended to include things like steak, hamburgers, baked potatoes, and beer, while feminine foods have historically included salads, yogurt, and fruit (Lupton 1996; Sobal 2005). There is also evidence that men attach special cultural significance to meat by believing a meal is not “real” without meat as the main dish – a finding replicated in such divergent countries as Czechoslovakia (Kiliánová et al. 2004), South Korea (Lappé 1971), and the US (Sobal 2005). The perceived masculinity of red meat might explain why, historically speaking (as this belief is clearly changing), women have tended to either avoid meat entirely (Lupton 1996) or eat seafood or poultry (Dixon 2002). While cooking has historically been located within the realm of the feminine, barbecuing has been a masculine exercise, which is perhaps why it’s never called “cooking.” Smoking and barbecuing contests, in which red meat is the star attraction, are dominated by men, as are eating competitions, which also often involve the consumption of large quantities of meat. The consumption of meat can be still further masculinized by eating it rare (bloody), with minimal cooking, and with no sauces, as they risk feminizing an otherwise masculine dish (Sobal 2005). It has also been argued that men demonstrate their masculinity by dominating other species through hunting and trapping (Lockie and Collie 2018). Men are often characterized by their suppression of emotions, which some scholars claim to be a useful attribute when hunting, killing, and slaughtering animals (Sobal 2005). There are, of course, exceptions to everything said in the previous paragraphs. When discussing whether or not meat is masculine, we need to be careful not to universalize gender or the masculinity of meat. As gender scholars point out, such singular thinking

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reduces masculinity and femininity to monolithic normative concepts, causing everyone to be judged against fixed gender standards of a society. Yet gender is not fixed. There are multiple ways of expressing masculinity and femininity that go beyond idealized gender types. The same thinking applies to the gendering of food choices. As others have pointed out, it is not universally accurate to equate meat with the male gender just like it is not appropriate to argue that one must eat meat in order to convey masculinity (Probyn 1999).

Transition. . . Culture can be expressed, practiced, and thought about in many different ways. The following chapter picks up where this one leaves off, discussing elements with clear symbolic underpinnings, like gender and ethnicity. The chapter then pivots to tackle the broader subjects of justice, poverty and inequality, as it is hard to talk about gender and ethnicity without also addressing topics related to power, inequities, and neoliberalism.

Discussion questions 1 How have our tastes as they relate to food changed over the years? Can these changes be explained using the concept “cultural capital”? 2 The first research into meal structure happened back in the 1970s. What still holds true today? What has changed? Did you grow up following a clear meal structure? 3 Given the interrelationship between food and memory, what are some ways that food firms seek to turn this relationship to their advantage – hint: think McDonald’s PlayPlace, though this is but one very obvious example.

Suggested readings: introductory level Byrd, K.M., and W.C. Byrd. 2017. We Eat to Live, We Live to Eat: Thoughts on the Sociological Study of Food, Culture, and Inequality, Humanity and Society, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0160597617733600. Laakso, S. 2017. Creating New Food Practices: A Case Study on Leftover Lunch Service, Food, Culture & Society 20(4): 631–650. O’Neill, K., and D. Silver. 2017. From Hungry to Healthy: Simmel, Self-Cultivation and the Transformative Experience of Eating for Beauty, Food, Culture & Society 20(1): 101–132.

Suggested readings: advanced level Alonso, E.B., L. Cockx, and J. Swinnen. 2018. Culture and Food Security, Global Food Security 17: 113–127. Hansen, A. 2018. Meat Consumption and Capitalist Development: The Meatification of Food Provision and Practice in Vietnam, Geoforum 93: 57–68. Hegnes, A.W. 2019. The Map and the Terroir: Adapting Geographical Boundaries for PDO and PGI in Norway`, British Food Journal 121(12): 3024–3042.

References Allen, Gary, and Ken Albala. 2007. The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. Barham, Elizabeth. 2007. The Lamb That Roared: Origin-Labeled Products as Place-Making Strategy in Charlevoix, Quebec, In Remaking the North American Food System, edited by C. Hinrich and T. Lyson, Pp. 277–297. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

126  Community, culture, and knowledge Beardsworth, A., and T. Keilt. 1997. Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. London: Routledge. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Blay-Palmer, Alison. 2008. Food Fears: From Industrial to Sustainable Food Systems. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Boas, F. 1921. Ethnology of the Kwakiutl. Washington, DC: US GPO. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buller, H., and E. Roe. 2012. Commodifying Animal Welfare, Animal Welfare 21(S1): 131–135. Caldwell, Melissa. 2009. Introduction, In Food and Everyday Life in the Post-Socialist World, edited by Melissa Caldwell, Pp. 1–28. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Carolan, Michael. 2006. Do You See What I  See? Examining the Epistemic Barriers to Sustainable Agriculture, Rural Sociology 71(2): 232–260. Carolan, Michael. 2011. Embodied Food Politics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Carolan, Michael. 2015. Affective Sustainable Landscapes and Care Ecologies: Getting a Real Feel for Alternative Food Communities, Sustainability Science 10(2): 317–329. Charters, Stephen. 2006. Wine and Society: The Social and Cultural Context of a Drink. Woburn, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann. Coats, C. David. 1989. Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm. New York: Continuum. Codere, H. 1957. Kwakiutl Society: Rank and Class, American Anthropologist 59(3): 473–486. Cullather, N. 2007. The Foreign Policy of the Calorie. The American Historical Review 112(2): 337–364. Dixon, J. 2002. The Changing Chicken: Chooks, Cooks and Culinary Culture. Randwick: UNSW Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. 1972. Deciphering a Meal. Daedalus (Winter): 61–81. Douglas, Mary, and Michael Nicod. 1974. Taking the Biscuit: The Structure of British Meals, New Society 30(637): 744–747. Elias, Norbert. 2000 (1939). The Civilizing Process. New York: Wiley. Freidberg, Susanne. 2009. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gething, Anna. 2010. Menstrual Metamorphosis and ‘The Foreign Country of Femaleness’, In Rites of Passage: In Postcolonial Women’s Writing, edited by Pauline Dodgon-Katiyo and Gina Wisker, Pp. 267– 282. New York: Rodopi. Goodman, M. 2011. Towards Visceral Entanglements: Knowing and Growing the Economic Geographies of Food, In The SAGE Handbook of Economic Geography, edited by R. Lee, A. Leyshon, L. McDowell, and P. Sunley, Pp. 242–257. London: Sage. Giovannucci, D., T. Josling, W. Kerr, B. O’Connor, and M. Yeung. 2009. Guide to Geographical Indications: Linking Products and Their Origins. Geneva: International Trade Center. Gvion-Rosenberg, L. 1990. Why Do Vegetarian Restaurants Serve Hamburgers? Toward an Understanding of a Cuisine, Semiotica 80: 61–79. Guthman, J. 2003. Fast Food/Organic Food: Reflexive Tastes and the Making of ‘Yuppie Chow’, Social and Cultural Geography 4(1): 45–58. Hansen, A. 2018. Meat Consumption and Capitalist Development: The Meatification of Food Provision and Practice in Vietnam, Geoforum 93: 57–68. Hayes-Conroy, Allison, and Jessica Hayes-Conroy. 2008. Taking Back Taste: Feminism, Food, and Visceral Politics, Gender, Place and Culture 15(5): 461–473. Hegnes, A.W. 2019. The Map and the Terroir: Adapting Geographical Boundaries for PDO and PGI in Norway, British Food Journal 121(12): 3024–3042. Holm, L., and M. Møhl. 2000. The Role of Meat in Everyday Food Culture: An Analysis of an Interview Study in Copenhagen. Appetite 34(3): 277–283. Huysmans, M., and J. Swinnen. 2019. No Terroir in the Cold? A Note on the Geography of Geographical Indications, Journal of Agricultural Economics 70(2): 550–559. Kains, M.G. 1910. Chicken World: Profitable Poultry Production. New York: Orange Judd Company.

Food and culture 127 Kiliánová, G., G. Kiliánová, O.G. Danglova, and M. Kanovsky (eds.). 2004. Communities in Transformation: Central and Eastern Europe, Vol. 12. Münster: LIT Verlag Münster. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1999. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lappé, F.M. 1971. Diet for a Small Planet: The Book That Started a Revolution in the Way Americans Eat. New York: Ballantine Books. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (No. 340). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Levi-Strauss, C. 1996 (1966). The Culinary Triangle, New Society, December 22, 937–940. Lockie, S., and L. Collie. 2018. “Feed the Man Meat”: Gendered Food and Theories of Consumption, In Restructuring Global and Regional Agricultures, edited by David Burch, Jasper Goss, Geoffrey Lawrence, Pp. 255–273. London: Routledge. Lokuruka, M. 2006. Meat Is the Meal and Status Is by Meat, Food and Foodways 14(3–4): 201–229. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body, and the Self. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mallery, G. 1888. Manners and Meals, American Anthropologist 1(3): 193–207. Messer, E. 1984. Anthropological Perspectives on Diet, Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 205–249. Michaels, David, and Celeste Monforton. 2005. Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contested Science and the Protection of the Public’s Health and Environment, American Journal of Public Health 95: S39–S48. Mintz, S., and C. DuBois. 2002. The Anthropology of Food and Eating, Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 99–119. Murcott, Anne. 1982. On the Social Significance of the ‘Cooked Dinner’ in South Wales, Social Science Information 21: 677–696. Philo, Chris. 1995. Animals, Geography, and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 655–681. Probyn, E. 1999. Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Ethics of Existence. Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 215–228. Proctor, Robert. 1996. Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know. New York: Basic Books. Rippon, M. 2014. What Is the Geography of Geographical Indications? Place, Production Methods and Protected Food Names, Area 46(2): 154–162. Sobal, J. 2005. Men, Meat, and Marriage: Models of Masculinity, Food and Foodways 13: 135–158. Squier, Susan. 2006. Chicken Auguries, Configurations 14: 69–86. Twigg, J. 1984. Vegetarianism and the Meanings of Meat, In The Sociology of Food and Eating, edited by A. Murcott, Pp. 18–30. Aldershot: Gower Publishing. Zwart, H. 1997. What Is an Animal? A Philosophical Reflection on the Possibility of a Moral Relationship with Animals. Environmental Values 6(4): 377–392.

7 Gender, ethnicity, and poverty

The subject of gender began to appear with increasing frequency alongside agrarian political economy approaches by the early 1990s (see, e.g., Symes 1991; Whatmore 1991), though its roots extend back earlier (see, e.g., Sachs 1983). This chapter discusses some of the ways that gender has made its way into agrifood scholarship, including interesting cross-pollinations with the subfield of masculinity studies. This is followed by the more recent “turn” in the literature whereby race and ethnicity are theorized and studied in an agrifood context. The chapter concludes by discussing the interrelationship between inequality, social justice, and poverty, as they, too, cannot be unpacked and understood without thinking about the intersectionality of race, class, and gender. The growth of local and regional food markets, the popularity of the “food miles” concept, and the increasing demand for organic food all indicate a rising awareness among consumers, food activists, and policy makers of issues relating to the ecological sustainability of our food system. Generally speaking, these are all encouraging trends. Yet, curiously, equally admirable social justice outcomes are getting lost in the debate. Occasionally, social justice is even scarified as other goals are doggedly pursued, like when social justice standards were dropped during the formation of the US National Organic Program back in the 1990s. Even when a tacit goal, social justice outcomes can be undermined by other socio-economic factors. For instance, even when community-supported agriculture schemes (CSAs) and farmers’ markets are originally organized to help low-income minority groups, too often they end up serving groups who already have access to fresh, locally/regionally produced foods – namely, affluent, educated, European-American consumers (see, e.g., Coulson and Milbourne 2020).

Studying gender The earliest research looking at gender in the context of rural sociology focused primarily (if not exclusively) on unequal gender divisions of labor in agricultural production. This research points especially to the importance of farm wives’ economic contribution to the rural household and rural economy more generally, even though the labor tended to be undervalued and invisible (see, e.g., Alston 1995; Buttel and Gillepsie 1984; Sachs 1983). For evidence of the thoroughly gendered nature of this type of labor – when was the last time that, for instance, you heard the term “farm husband”? – Monsanto continued to give the National Farm Mom of the Year award until 2018, when it was acquired by Bayer, though there are plenty of Farmer of the Year awards still given out, which are overwhelmingly won by men. What does all this say about contemporary gender role expectations in agriculture?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-9

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Looking at the US, from 2012 to 2017, the number of male farmers decreased, while the number of women rose. Female producers, according to the last Census of Agriculture (2017), make up 36 percent of farmers – a 27 percent increase from 2012. Fifty-six percent of farms now have at least one female producer, although only 38 percent have a female primary producer, which refers to the person who makes the most decisions on the farm. These figures vary considerably from country to country. It has been calculated that women account for nearly half of the world’s smallholder farmers and produce 70 percent of the food raised in Africa. Yet less than 20 percent of land in the world is owned by women. In countries such as Kenya, more than 65 percent of the land is governed by laws that explicitly discriminate against women by limiting their rights to land and property. In practical terms, this means most women farmers in Kenya have to access land through either their husbands or sons. If those males move to the cities, the women often stay behind and farm the land but still have no right to it (Abass 2018). Changes to the structure of agriculture in affluent countries over the last quarter of a century are making it increasingly difficult for farms to survive without a supplemental (read: off-farm) income. Often women are the ones supplying this off-farm income, for not only the cash but also for necessary retirement and health care benefits. This fact seems to have bolstered the position of women in (at least some) farm families. There is some research indicating that the financial independence wives feel when working offfarm positively impacts their psychological well-being (Rogers and DeBoer 2001). Furthermore, O’Hara (1998), studying farm families in Ireland, concludes that off-farm work empowers women to play a larger role in the decision-making process when it comes to household and farm-related matters. Other research presents a different picture, describing women’s off-farm employment as far from empowering. They point out that the off-farm work taken by women is often low paying (Mammen and Paxson 2000). Working off the farm also further marginalizes women’s role on the farm, reducing their involvement to tending animals and other tasks deemed menial (Saugeres 2002). Others point out “that it is women’s off-farm work that keeps farming male” (Shortall 2002: 171). Moreover, women working off the farm continue to be responsible for child care and most household work while contributing to farm chores and administrative work. In this context, off-farm work, rather than emboldening, is yet another job that women are expected to do. Women in these situations are said to work three shifts  – off-farm, household work, and farm chores (Gallagher and Delworth 1993). Others note that the historically gendered nature of farming and control over resources greatly mediates (and typically negates) the emancipatory effect of women’s off-farm income (Kelly and Shortall 2002; Shortall 2002). Female-headed farms earn, on average, less than male-headed farms in affluent countries (e.g., Djurfeldt et al. 2013). There is also evidence that women have trouble establishing themselves in conventional agriculture and its associated male-dominated social networks (Carolan 2005; Carter 2019; see Box 7.1). Female farmers (unlike their male counterparts) are also responsible for child and household care, while many times also needing to work off of the farm, as female-operated farms are on average considerably smaller than maleoperated farms. Not surprisingly, then, female farmers have been found to have less leisure time and get less sleep than male farmers (Gallagher and Delworth 1993; Medagbe et al. 2020). Gendered stereotypes also influence views of who should do certain types of farm labor based on so-called inherent traits. Research drawing on in-depth interviews among Norwegian farmers, for instance, indicates men were believed to be better with machinery whereas women are believed to be better at caring for animals (Heggem 2014).

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Box 7.1  Climate Change in Australia’s Food Bowl and Changing Agricultural Gender Relations Margaret Alston and Kerri Whittenbury (2013), conducting research in the MurrayDarling Basin area of Australia, asked, “Does extreme hardship/climate crises change highly inequitable gender relations in agriculture?” (p. 115). The question reflects ongoing structural changes occurring throughout the agricultural sector in countries like Australia, where women are increasingly working off the farm for family income to help keep alive not only the farm but the male’s identity often attached to this way of life. The researchers found that “income generation has not necessarily increased women’s power within the farm family unit to make critical decisions” (p. 127). The men interviewed showed a “commitment to a traditional gender ideology [. . .] making them resistant to change” (p. 125). While they were aware that their wives were bringing into the household important income, they tended to focus on, and thus placed greatest value on, what women “should” (p. 127, emphasis in original) do as farm wives. Thus, the women studied “juggle a complex set of tasks including off-farm income generation that supports men to stay in farming [. . .] in a system that is dismissive of their economic contributions, subsuming it as [a] farmer survival strategy.” This is not to paint a picture of women as passive and without agency. The women studied recognized that they can “comply, voice opposition or leave” (p. 127). As the authors go on to explain, “Many have already made the mental if not the physical shift, removing themselves from the ‘farm wife’ role. While many women in our study are physically moving away from their farms for work, we also note that they are mentally moving away from a commitment to family farming and are beginning to give some priority to their own health and well-being” (p. 127). The authors also take a “sympathetic view of male farmers.” In their words: Their long-held traditional position leaves them in a highly distressing situation now that their role has been so significantly destabilized by circumstances, women’s economic contribution, water shortages and an uncertain policy environment. Hegemonic masculinity that has dominated agriculture, positioning men as ‘farmers,’ giving them influence and prestige and a preeminent position in gender negotiations has not served men well. In tough circumstances this construction is unhelpful and unhealthy. (p. 126)

Allen and Sachs wrote back in 2007 that “gender analysis remains on the margins of the sociology of agriculture” (Allen and Sachs 2007: 4). The omission reflects, at least in part, the discipline’s long-standing interest in the production “end” of the food system, a focus that dates back to its rural sociological roots. As women have traditionally made decisions about the “inside” (the home), whereas decisions about the “outside” (the farm) are left to men (Rickson et al. 2006: 126), social scientists have historically restricted their gaze to those whose role included “farmer” – namely, the men.

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Today, the landscape of scholarship looks different. Gender analyses are making significant inroads into the literature. For one thing, especially with the rise of regenerative, smaller-scale forms of agriculture, more women than in recent decades past are selfdescribed “farmers” in affluent countries. Similarly, food and agriculture scholars and practitioners are becoming wise to the fact that the majority of farm labor conducted in less affluent nations is being (and has long been) done by women. A changing structure of agriculture in affluent countries, which has been discussed extensively earlier in this book, means also that an increasing percentage of farm land is being rented. In the US, for instance, close to 50 percent of private agricultural land is being utilized by someone other than the landowner. And a growing number of these landowners are women, with very interesting sociological consequences (e.g., Petrzelka and Marquart-Pyatt 2011; Sklenicka et al. 2020).

Studying masculinities The beginning of rural masculinity studies has been traced to 1995 (Coldwell 2009), with Brandth’s (1995) pioneering research of masculinities and farming practices in Norway. Another memorable moment for this literature is 2000, when a special issue on rural masculinities in the journal Rural Sociology (co-edited by Campbell and Bell) was published. The publication of rural masculinities research increased substantially after this special issue. Masculinity research should not be viewed as a departure from earlier gender studies but rather an extension of it. Gender research seeks to understand gender relations, specifically unequal distributions of power between men and women which lead to the latter becoming marginalized. This marginality – this otherness – is relational in nature (Cloke and Little 1997), which means there is nothing “natural” about it. As a sociological artifact, all involved parties and practices need to be studied – the subordinate as well as the dominant position. Understanding this otherness of traditional gender studies requires an investigation into how and why some identities have become legitimate while others have not, which inevitably has led researchers to look more closely at men. Tying this insight back to food and agriculture scholarship, we might say that “if some identities get to be legitimate, stable and natural whereas others are marginalised and devalued, then it is likely that farming practices might also be organised in a similar way” (Coldwell 2009: 175). The categories “masculine in the rural” and “rural in the masculine” come from Campbell and Bell (2000). While ultimately an analytic distinction (which means the categories are admittedly artificial), it is a useful reminder that “masculinity” and “rurality” are identities that individuals work at performing. The “masculine in the rural” refers to the different ways in which masculinity is produced, maintained, and contested in those spaces rural social scientists deem “rural.” Putting it another way: “masculinity” might mean different things depending on whether you are in a small rural community or in a large urban center. The “rural in the masculine,” in contrast, refers to those symbolic codes embedded in our collective understanding of “rural” that also constitute masculinities. There are, in other words, a number of things associated with rurality that are also deemed masculine, like pickup trucks, tractors, guns, cowboy hats, chewing tobacco, and the like. The concept the “rural in the masculine” allows us to talk about how “rural” itself has become coded with particular masculine signifiers. Thus, by evoking those codes one can simultaneously perform both “rurality” and “masculinity” (see Box 7.2).

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Box 7.2  Household Food Procurement, Gender, and COVID-19 The following details data collected just prior to the COVID-19 outbreak (late 2019) and data collected just after the outbreak, when much of the world was under lockdown. Specifically, stage one of data collection (late 2019) involved forty-one households – seventy respondents – from three Colorado localities, two rural and one located in a metropolitan county. Baseline interviews, which lasted approximately 45 minutes, were then followed by a thirty-day tracking period, where respondents had their macro-mobilities tracked using a GPS tracking app – Prey – that was loaded onto their mobile phones. Stage one concluded with follow-up interviews that lasted roughly two hours. During stage two (April and May 2020), sixty-one of the original seventy participants – or thirty-six households – agreed to participate, which involved a combination of virtual interviews and having their movements tracked using Prey for two weeks. All respondents had reduced their travel during T2 (Time 2) relative to T1 (Time 1): twenty-seven respondents reduced their travel by 81  percent to 100  percent; fourteen respondents by 61 percent to 80 percent; five respondents by 41 percent to 60 percent; five respondents by 21 percent to 40 percent; and eleven respondents by 1 percent to 20 percent. Filtering for food procurement–related trips for each household, however, reveals a very different picture. This is especially apparent by the fact that, for some individuals, trips to grocery stores increased. Gender proved a significant variable for explaining this variation. Men made up every instance (n  =  7) in which the tracking data reported an increase in food procurement–related travel recorded from T1 to T2. In addition, for the remainder of participants, where travel reductions where recorded, men on average recorded lower percent changes than women, at least when the trip involved purchasing food for the household. This finding is significant because the data also point to evidence of gendered expectations linked to what it means to be a good parent and how so-called good mothers and fathers were expected to do different things. One father, for instance, talked about putting his “extra time to work” during lockdown by learning to bake because his wife “just can’t do it anymore” due to all of her other new household responsibilities – homeschooling, extra at-home meals, additional house cleaning now that everyone was home 24/7. This aligns with scholarship that notes how men tend to “help” with housework during times of crises and stress rather than assume a leading role in feeding the family (e.g., DeVault 1994). So why the uptick among some men choosing to take up grocery shopping in the middle of a global pandemic? I suspect some of this has to do with established links between gender and responses to the pandemic, specifically, the finding that men are more likely to downplay the seriousness of the virus. A number of polls find that men in the US are less likely to wear masks compared to women (e.g., Brenan 2020). The idea that “real” men respond in a particular way to the pandemic came out during the interviews. To quote one father talking about the stay-at-home order and the public health risks associated with the virus: “I’m not going to let some little ol’ virus keep me from making sure my family is fed. Not now, not ever.”

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While minimizing risks associated with COVID-19, some of the fathers interviewed also played on those heightened risks to justify engaging in practices that were previously not their responsibility. The virus, you could say, helped to defeminize – or perhaps even masculinize – particular tasks, which in turn provided men symbolic cover to participate more directly in feeding the family because of the dangers involved rather than despite them. I also witnessed some of this hegemonic masculinity on display among some of the women – rural women especially. One of these rural mothers, for instance, talked about how rurality to some degrees requires women to be “risk takers” if they and their children wish to succeed in this environment. “Living out here you got to be a risk taker,” she said. Blizzards. Forest fires. COVID is just another thing you learn to deal with. . . . I’ve got a family. You got to be fearless, for them – to take care of them but also to show my kids that you’ve got to be tough. Life throws you a curve, you have to suck it up. This adds another twist to how we think about gendered expectations within the home and around issues of food procurement in particular: namely, that ideas about what it means to be a “good” mother hinge not only on identities tied to race, class, and gender but also, perhaps, on issues relating to attachments to place and the symbolic codes associated with inhabiting those spaces. Adapted from Carolan (2020, 2021a, 2021b).

Studying race and ethnicity Issues related to race and ethnicity have added important nuances to how we think about food and agriculture literature. For example, some arguments surrounding “fat acceptance” assert that representations disparaging large bodies must reject this universalizing (white/privileged) discourse and allow for a diversity of body sizes (and ethnicities, class positions, etc.) (Sanders 2019). Others look at how race has been portrayed in food advertisements, cookbooks, and ethnic dishes. Note, for instance, the evolution of the Aunt Jemima image on the pancake box (Zafar 1999), which eventually resulted in it being removed entirely (“rebranded” is what the company called the process) in 2020. Food also helps feed racial identity. “Eating black” (Slocum 2011: 305) remains a source of connection for some African Americans as their ethnic and cultural identities become more diverse. Consuming soul food has been found to be, at least for some African Americans, an expression of racial pride and solidarity, as its roots trace back to slavery (Bailey 2007; Garth and Reese 2020). For others, particularly younger African Americans, connections to Black history through food appear to be on the decline, as soul food is railed against by some health professionals as being too high in saturated fats and sodium (Zafar 1999). Elsewhere it has been noted how Black Muslims of the 1970s condemned soul food, as it represented “the diet of a slave mentality” (Wit’s 1999: 260), while the Black Panther Party celebrated it (Slocum 2011: 305). There is also some evidence that people

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of color who reject vegetarianism and veganism do so because those lifestyles represent food choices of the privileged (Garth and Reese 2020). Race/ethnicity also comes into play when discussing the issue of food access. People of color, for instance, are disproportionately located in food deserts (e.g., Reese 2019. Research also suggests that people of color – and African Americans in particular – are less likely to participate in things like farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA). While sociologists of food and agriculture have a lengthy track record examining issues related to class, race/ethnicity remains underexplored in this literature. The most comprehensive study of farmers’ markets to look at race was conducted by the Agricultural Marketing Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (Payne 2002). This nationwide study – now roughly twenty years old – found that on average 74 percent of farmers’ market attendees were white, 14 percent African American, 5 percent Asian, and 6 percent Hispanic. Slocum provides us with important seminal research on the interrelationships between alternative food provisioning spaces (like farmers’ markets) and racial identities. In a 2006 article, for example, she discusses how and why local-food movements have been slow to tackle issues of white privilege (Slocum 2006). She argues that this failing is the result of the invisibility of whiteness; lest we forget, “whiteness” too is a racial – and cultural – category. Think about the foods found in these spaces and how their presence reflects ethnic and cultural categories. If, for example, the vast majority of the foods for sale at a given farmer’s market or CSA are fruits, vegetables, and spices that constitute standard fair in European diets (and recipes), and little is available for, say, the preparation of soul food, an argument could be made that this space is shaped by an underlying ideology of “whiteness.” Slocum also notes that there is resistance within the local movement to talk explicitly about race out of fear of sounding racist (see Box 7.3).

Box 7.3  Colorblind Ideology Let’s face facts: we have a hard time talking about race, which, at least in part, is due to the idea that we are supposed to see the person and not the color of their skin, especially in a post–civil rights, post–Obama presidency era. Yet what this colorblindness also provides is a discursive device that can be used to defend the status quo by denying that racism persists while presenting outcomes in ways that are themselves colorblind (Beaman and Petts 2020). Examples of this include justifying residential and school segregation patterns as matters of individual choice, explaining education, employment, and incarceration inequities between whites and nonwhites as matters relating to differences in familial structure (e.g., single mothers vs. two-parent families) or culture, or opposing affirmative action on the grounds that it goes against the American principles of treating everyone the same. Examples of colorblindness, while often subtle, abound. Democrat 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg made headlines in 2018 after video emerged, from 2011, of him explaining educational underperformance in “minority communities” by saying, “There isn’t somebody they know personally who testifies to the value of education.” He was swiftly criticized, and rightly, for casting those education gaps as being about cultural deficits versus systematic racism.

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This language works at multiple levels. To begin with, we are horrible at talking about and engaging with difference. We have that small-l liberal ethos to thank for this, a political philosophy that celebrates merit and demands we treat everyone the same – i.e., We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. . . . So, at one level, even the well-intentioned risk repeating racist tropes without even knowing it thanks to this language. The other way colorblindness operates is by giving the not-so-well-intentioned cover, by providing outright racists with an avenue to moderate and mainstream their language. Elsewhere, in a study of a Minneapolis farmers’ market, Slocum (2008) highlights how a politics of racial identity – and middle-class “whiteness” in particular – is continually played out within this space as definitions about local consumption are shaped predominately by individuals from white, middle-class communities. To put it simply (and greatly over-simplifying the dynamic): white, affluent consumers attend farmers’ markets, purchase certain foods, and thus send signals to farmers about what to grow, which in turn slowly restricts the availability of alternative foods for minority groups. Supply in these spaces does not just reflect demand. Supply also reshapes demand by ignoring certain populations and privileging others. Similar arguments are found in Guthman’s (2008) analysis of food justice projects, where growing, donating, and educating African American communities about food production and consumption were found to reflect the “white desires” of the volunteers more than the actual needs of the communities they sought to serve.

Women, poverty, and vulnerability: low-income countries Gender inequality is of serious consequence to the food security of women and girls the world over (see Box 7.4). A study of the eating habits of more than 2,000 teenagers aged between 13 and 17 years in the south of Ethiopia revealed that the girls suffered more from general weakness and pathologies due to gender-based insecurity (Sasson 2012). Pietr Van Dooren, of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, is quoted as stating that “in an Ethiopian family, the boy is often perceived as having a more important economic and religious role to play; people tend to believe that he will be more productive and more able to manage the household in case of crisis” (Sasson 2012: 5). A nutritionist working for UNICEF in West Africa gives a similarly bleak assessment of the foodscape faced by women in rural Ethiopia: “In a context of food insecurity, the social status of women raises many problems. Men [it is believed] should receive the best food, while women eat leftovers, and generally food of lesser quality” (Sasson 2012: 5).

Box 7.4  Women in Development, Women and Development, and Women, Environment, and Sustainable Development While arguably not part of the sociology of food and agriculture literature per se, there is a rich research tradition that explores the links between gender and agriculture in the field of international development. Three of the most popular

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frameworks operating within this tradition include women in development (WID), women and development (WAD), and women, environment, and sustainable development (WED). The oldest and arguably still most dominant tradition is WID. Its programs are informed by modernization theory, which casts traditional societies as authoritarian and male dominated and modern societies as democratic and market driven. WID is therefore sensitive to the oppression faced by women in less affluent nations and works toward the full integration of women into these societies as workers and producers. WID is most interested in opening up the formal economy to women and pays less attention to the informal economy (e.g., inside the home), believing the democratization of the former will naturally result in the democratization of the latter. WAD emerged as a critique of modernization theory and the WID approach. WAD argues for the need to also focus on the private sphere within the home and highlight women’s role as unpaid domestic laborers. WAD proponents argue that without paying attention to the domestic sphere and valuing the work done there, women will not achieve true equity to men. WED argues women must be taken into consideration when initiating and planning sustainable development programs. The rationale for this is simple, as women have a close working relationship with the natural resources in developing countries. Women do most of the farming and water and wood gathering for their households in these societies. Women must therefore be centrally involved in the process of developing and implementing strategies that produce development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising future generations’ ability to meet theirs.

Women workers are also more dependent on agriculture for survival than male workers. Among women in least developed countries who report being economically active, roughly 80  percent report agriculture as their primary economic activity. Among all economically active women in the world, close to half report their primary activity is agriculture (Duckett 2019). As international food policy, and trade and global investment policies more generally, have sought to eliminate peasant agriculture, those that remain in this space tend to be the individuals with the fewest options for education, credit, and skilled jobs – an agrarian transition that has been highly gendered. Then there is the issue of land ownership. Throughout much of South Asia, few women own land, and most have no access to credit (Duckett 2019). Yet ownership is just part of the battle; owning something and having control over it, particularly when that something is land and the owner is a woman, are frequently two separate issues. Related to this are the well-documented gendered inequalities relating to access to technical information, credit, extension services, inputs such as fertilizers and water, and market outlets (Duckett 2019; World Bank 2009). Women owning land have been found to be at significantly lower risk of facing domestic violence, which in turn has been found to improve the food security of the women and children in those households, as such violence tends to have a negative effect on the nutritional health of those individuals (Agarwal and Panda 2007). A study examining household-level food-procurement and dietary patterns in Honduras

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found that women with access to credit have higher dietary diversity and lower levels of food insecurity (Larson et al. 2019). In sum, a considerable body of evidence supports the pro–food security consequences that would accompany the reduction of gender inequalities, particularly those pertaining to access to land (and land rights more generally), support systems, credit, and markets (e.g., Clement at al. 2019). This all speaks to the highly problematic – indeed, sometimes deadly – interrelationship between gender and vulnerability, especially once you throw climate change into the mix. A classic piece from 1991 on women’s work in tribal India highlights the following major areas of work in poor rural areas that are overwhelmingly performed by women: food procurement, such as food gathering and production; the protection of life and property, including the procurement of water, energy (e.g., firewood, charcoal, and so on), and fodder; and childbearing and rearing, including the maintenance of health standards for the household, like securing clean water and collecting medicinal plants (Menon 1991). Note how, for example, climate change has the ability to touch on all these areas. Floods, droughts, wildfires, and higher- or colder-than-average temperatures all impact the lives of those responsible for the well-being of the household, which continues to be (especially in less affluent nations) women (see Figure 7.1). Which is why scholars repeatedly call out looming threats like climate change as representing a particularly significant hazard to the livelihoods of female-headed households the world over (e.g., Eastin 2018; Glazebrook et al. 2020).

Poverty, hunger, and welfare regimes In 2013 Texas Representative Louis Gohmert made news as he shared a story on the House floor: the tale of an irritated constituent who watched someone use food stamps to purchase king crab legs. “He looks at the king crab legs and looks at his ground meat and realizes because he does pay income tax, he doesn’t get more back than he pays in. He is actually helping pay for the king crab legs when he can’t pay for them for himself,” Gohmert said (quoted in Abrams 2013). I am sure you have come across similar stories, such as the able-bodied college student and political activist blogging about the relative ease by which she obtained an EBT (electric benefit transfer) card, which is how SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits (also known as “food stamps”) are now distributed (Phillips n.d.). Or the 29-year-old San Diego surfer who in an interview for Fox News unapologetically used his $200 food stamp allotment, with cameras rolling, to buy lobster while saying “It’s free food; it’s awesome” and instantly becoming the new face of SNAP, and not in a good way (Halloran 2013). Those stories are tough to stomach, especially once you realize that every time someone games (or makes a game out of) these programs they are undermining the integrity of safety nets keeping thousands of other households from falling headlong into a very deep and dark abyss. As a social scientist, however, I would prefer if our policies were based on evidence, not anecdotes. So what do the data say on the subject? The following data pertain specifically to the US because I know this case the best. Stories vary from country to country based in part on the goals of the safety net in question. The US is fairly conservative relative to, say, Scandinavian countries when it comes to social safety nets. While the US tries really hard to stamp out abuse, to the point of making it really hard for people who actually need the support to get it, some countries are more forgiving in their policies. For them, the goal is to ensure that everyone who needs the assistance has it, even if that gives room for a handful of bad actors to game the system. Remember, there are trade-offs to all policies.

138  Community, culture, and knowledge Threats

Climate Change

Vulnerability of women

Crop failure

Household food provision; increased agricultural work

Fuel shortage

Household fuel provision; food-fuel conflicts

Shortage of safe, clean water

Household water provision; exposure to contaminated sources

Resource scarcity

Economic drawbacks; school dropouts, early marriage

Civil war/conflict

Loss of livelihoods and lives; sexual violence and trauma

Natural disasters

Greater incidence of mortality; reduction of life expectancy

Disease

Displacement

Lack of access to healthcare; increased burden of caring for young, sick, and elderly Loss of livelihoods; lack of adequate shelter; conflicts

Figure 7.1  Gender and vulnerability to climate change Source: Adapted from Alhassan et al. 2019; Balikoowa et al. 2019.

Instances of food stamp abuse are low

In testimony before a congressional subcommittee in 2018, USDA Assistant Inspector General Ann Coffey said that in the past five years, her office had recovered $463 million in improper payments, fines, and penalties and secured 2,335 criminal convictions. This was in regard to a $60 billion per year program (Cohn 2019). The USDA announced in 2019 that its official error rate for SNAP payments – so-called food stamps – was in the 6 percent range, though it is important to realize that the “error rate” includes both overpayments and underpayments, so it is not a measure of fraud. According to a report by the USDA Inspector General, the agency was responsible for 239 separate high-dollar overpayments with a total value of US$20.3 million across all its programs during the 2012 fiscal year (USDA 2013a). (High-dollar overpayments are payments that are 50 percent or more above the correct amount and totaling at least US$5,000 to an individual or US$25,000 to an organization.) The vast majority of this misspent taxpayer money went to federal crop insurance payments totaling US$14.6, while programs providing conservation resources to farmers made fifty-three overpayments accounting for the remaining US$2.7 million. SNAP and four other anti-hunger aid programs targeting poor populations made zero high-dollar overpayments. For a point of comparison, overpayments for crop insurance cost taxpayers 4.7 cents for each dollar extended (USDA 2013b). The subject of farm subsidies brings up particularly cruel irony

Gender, ethnicity, and poverty 139

in all of this. A number of those in Congress working tirelessly to slash funding for food stamps are themselves excepting millions in government handouts by way of various farm programs (as many of these politicians are rural landowners) (Carr 2013). Recipients waste their benefits on stuff they don’t need

Residents of many low-income neighborhoods do not even have access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables, let alone something like king crab legs. I have taken the so-called food stamp challenge, where one attempts to eat on a SNAP budget (see Box 7.5). The SNAP challenge (also known as the food stamp challenge) involves purchasing food using only the monetary equivalent of what one would receive if they qualified for the government benefit. The average monthly payment for one person is around $126, which means the “challenge” part centers on trying to eat healthily on about $4.20 a day. If a person eats three meals a day, that translates to a little over a buck a meal if a day includes eating three squares. Forget about dining on lobster or filet minion, I could not even afford fresh fruits and vegetables on that budget. Even brand-name items were generally out of my budget.

Box 7.5  SNAP Benefits SNAP eligibility in the US varies by state. In my state of Colorado, to give you a sense of the income levels we are talking about, a one-person household annual income cannot exceed $16,237 – add $6,000 for each additional person. (A onebedroom apartment where I  live, Fort Collins, rents for an average of $1,287 a month, and two-bedroom apartment rents for, on average, $1,461, which ought to put that income level into some perspective.) You will be notified of your eligibility within thirty days of submitting your application. During that waiting period, applicants will complete an eligibility interview – conducted over the phone or in person – and give proof of any financial information provided. People can receive SNAP benefits within seven days if they meet additional requirements, such as if their household has less than $100 in liquid resources and $150 in monthly gross income or if the household’s combined monthly gross income and liquid resources are less than what is paid monthly for rent/mortgage and utilities. Those who qualify receive an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, which works like a debit card. Benefits are automatically transferred each month.

These programs actually save taxpayers money

Studies reveal WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) participation to be associated with improved birth outcomes. The benefit-to-cost ratios have been shown to range from US$1.77 to US$3.13 in Medicaid costs saved for each US$1 spent on WIC (Devaney et  al. 1992). This aligns with broader economic research looking at health outcomes and costs. There is broad consensus that the US spends too much on health care, but a driver beyond this is that the US does not spend enough in social services – a “savings”

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we’re paying for as a result of people not having desirable health outcomes (Papanicolas et  al. 2019). Research also shows that food programs targeted at children in learning environments, such as the School Breakfast Program, which provides federally subsidized breakfasts to children at schools and childcare facilities, reduces absenteeism, increases learning outcomes, and improves behavior among recipients (Basch 2011). Given the highly formative nature of the ages targeted these positive outcomes ripple out, resulting in an incalculable multiplier effect, not only for those benefiting directly from these programs but for society at large. If only we paid people a livable wage

There is one thing people on the political left and right can agree on. Wouldn’t it be great if people made enough so they wouldn’t need those social safety nets? Yes, it would! But as you can guess, even this point is rife with politically contentious obstacles. Having a job and having a job that pays a livable wage are not the same thing for millions, or billions if we’re talking globally. And that’s a whole other debate – a whole other textbook. But realize this: hunger is not going to go away until we take a hard look at and then fundamentally change how the economy is structured. Welfare programs actually act as safety nets: evidence from around the world

While not surprising, it is worth making the point: social welfare nets actually do mitigate the effects of economic and dietary turbulence. One study looking at twentyone EU countries looked at the link between food prices, wages, and food insecurity (Reeves et al. 2017). On the whole, they found a 1 percent rise in food prices to be associated with an increase in self-reported food deprivation. In Mediterranean countries  – specifically, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain  – this increase was the greatest, which the authors attributed to the more restrictive structure of the welfare policies of those nations. However, among what they called “Social Democratic welfare regimes,” namely, the countries of Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, there was no change in selfreported depravations. The study’s conclusion, then: “Rising prices of food coupled with stagnating wages are a major factor driving food deprivation, especially in deprived groups; however, our evidence indicates that more generous welfare systems can mitigate this impact” (p. 1414). But of course, social safety nets do not represent long-term solutions to food security, and neither do, for instance, food banks, though they have also become a common intervention for food insecurity in affluent countries. Researchers also note, for instance, the stigma people feel using food banks, which further complicates the value of such places (Loopstra 2018). Alternatively, organizations and community groups are now looking at replacements to the traditional food bank that provide no-cost or low-cost food to people while also offering additional services that you would not find at a typical food bank. These might be referred to as “community food security activities” (Loopstra 2018). Along these lines, places in the UK, Canada, and the US are popping up and offering programing where people not only come to receive no/low-cost food but also no/lowcost services like family, individual and/or debt counselling, cooking classes, access to a community garden, or other lifelong learning opportunities. Thus, in addition to getting food, community members in these spaces find the opportunity to build community while also enriching themselves.

Gender, ethnicity, and poverty 141

Transition. . . Launching from this chapter, the following section, Food Justice and the Environment, elaborates on larger social movements and actions that have attempted to alleviate many of the injustices and inequities mentioned earlier.

Discussion questions 1 If gender and rurality are to some degree performed, what does it mean to “do” rural masculinity? On a related note, do performances of femininity also vary depending on whether one has affiliations with rural (vs. urban/cosmopolitan) identities? 2 Rachel Slocum argues that local food movements often forget about issues related to race due to the “invisibility of whiteness.” What do you think she means by this? 3 The literature suggests hegemonic forms of rural masculinity are also unhealthy for men. In what ways do men lose out in agriculture as they try to live up to certain conventional stereotypes?

Suggested readings: introductory level Global Hunger Index. 2019. Global Hunger Index: The Challenge of Hunger and Climate Change. Dublin, Bonn: Helvets, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2019%20Global%20 Hunger%20Index.pdf. Godoy, M. 2017. Why the Story of Southern Food Is as Much About People as Dishes. NPR, June  11, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/06/11/532086897/grappling-with- race-class-andsouthern-foods-great-debt-of-pleasure. United Nations. 20190. World Survey on the Role of Women in Development: Why Addressing Women’s Income and Time Poverty Matters for Sustainable Development, www.unwomen.org/en/ digital-library/publications/2019/06/world-survey-on- the-role-of-women-in-development-2019.

Suggested readings: advanced level Annes, A., W. Wright, and M. Larkins. 2020. ‘A Woman in Charge of a Farm’: French Women Farmers Challenge Hegemonic Femininity, Sociologia Ruralis, https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12308. Garth, H., and A.M. Reese (eds.). 2020. Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice. Minneapolis, MA: University of Minnesota Press. Ramírez, Margaret Marietta. 2015. The Elusive Inclusive: Black Food Geographies and Racialized Food Spaces, Antipode 47(3): 748–769.

References Abass, J. 2018. Women Grow 70% of Africa’s Food. But Have Few Rights Over the Land They Tend. World Economic Forum, March  21, www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/women- farmers-food-pro duction-land-rights/. Abrams, Nick. 2013. Louie Gohmert Argues Against Food Stamps, Claiming People Buy King Crab Legs with Benefits. Huffington Post, June 21, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/louie-gohmertfood- stamps_n_3478832.html. Agarwal, B., and P. Panda. 2007. Toward Freedom from Domestic Violence: The Neglected Obvious, Journal of Human Development 8(3): 359–388. Alhassan, S.I., J.K. Kuwornu, and Y.B. Osei-Asare. 2019. Gender dimension of vulnerability to climate change and variability. International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, https://www. emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJCCSM-10-2016-0156/full/html.

142  Community, culture, and knowledge Allen, P., and C. Sachs. 2007. Women and Food Chains: The Gendered Politics of Food, International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture 15(1): 1–23. Alston, Margaret. 1995. Women on the Land: The Hidden Heart of Rural Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Alston, Margaret, and Kerri Whittenbury. 2013. Does Climatic Crisis in Australia’s Food Bowl Create a Basis for Change in Agricultural Gender Relations? Agriculture and Human Values 30: 115–128. Bailey, C. 2007. We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity, Hypatia 22(2): 39–59. Balikoowa, K., G. Nabanoga, D.M. Tumusiime, and M.S. Mbogga. 2019. Gender differentiated vulnerability to climate change in Eastern Uganda. Climate and Development, 11(10), 839-849. Basch, Charles. 2011. Breakfast and the Achievement Gap Among Urban Minority Youth, Journal of School Health 81(10): 635–640. Beaman, J., and A. Petts. 2020. Towards a Global Theory of Colorblindness: Comparing Colorblind Racial Ideology in France and the United States, Sociology Compass 14(4), DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12774. Brandth, B. 1995. Rural Masculinity in Transition: Gender Images in Tractor Advertisements, Journal of Rural Studies 11(2): 121–133. Brenan, M. 2020. Americans’ Face Mask Usage Varies Greatly by Demographics. Gallup, July 13, https:// news.gallup.com/poll/315590/americans-face-mask-usage-varies-greatly- demographics.aspx. Buttel, F., and G. Gillepsie/ 1984. The Sexual Division of Farm Household Labour: An Exploratory Study of the Structure of On-Farm and Off-Farm Labour Allocation Among Farm Men and Women, Rural Sociology 49(2): 183–209. Campbell, H., and M. Bell. 2000. Special Issue on Rural Masculinities, Rural Sociology 65(4): 532–547. Carolan, M. 2005. Barriers to the Adoption of Sustainable Agriculture on Rented Land: An Examination of Contesting Social Fields, Rural Sociology 70: 387–413. Carolan, M. 2020. Putting Food Access in Its Topological Place: Thinking in Terms of Relational Becomings When Mapping Space, Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460020-10149-y. Carolan, M. 2021a. Household Food Practices: Eating and Feeding as Expressions of Competencies, Moralities, and Mobilities, Sociological Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2020.1870415. Carolan, M. 2021b. Household Food Procurement, Gender, and COVID-19. Footnotes: American Sociological Association 49(1). https://www.asanet.org/news-events/footnotes/jan-feb-mar-2021/features/ household-food-procurement-gender-and-covid-19. Carr, Donald. 2013. Members of Congress Receive $238K in Farm Subsidies. Washington, DC: Environmental Working Group, www.ewg.org/release/members-congress- received-238k-farm-sub sidies#overlay-context=news. Carter, A. 2019. “We Don’t Equal Even Just One Man”: Gender and Social Control in Conservation Adoption, Society and Natural Resources 32(8): 893–910. Census of Agriculture. 2017. Census of Agriculture 2017. Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture. Cohn, S. 2019. Trump Proposal to Crack Down on Food Stamp Fraud Reignites a Heated Debate. CNBC, August  30, www.cnbc.com/2019/08/30/trump-plan-to-crack-down-on- food-stampfraud-reignites-heated-debate.html. Clement, F., M.C. Buisson, S. Leder, S. Balasubramanya, P. Saikia, R. Bastakoti, E. Karki, and B. van Koppen. 2019. From Women’s Empowerment to Food Security: Revisiting Global Discourses Through a Cross-Country Analysis, Global Food Security 23: 160–172. Cloke, P., and J. Little (eds.). 1997. Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation, and Rurality. London: Psychology Press. Coldwell, Ian. 2009. Masculinities in the Rural and the Agricultural: A Literature Review, Sociologia Ruralis 50(2): 171–197. Coulson, H., and P. Milbourne. 2020. Food Justice for All? Searching for the ‘Justice Multiple’ in UK Food Movements, Agriculture and Human Values, 1–16. Devaney, Barbara, Linda Bilheimer, and Jennifer Schore. 1992. Medicaid Costs and Birth Outcomes: The Effects of Prenatal WIC Participation and the Use of Prenatal Care, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 11(4): 573–592.

Gender, ethnicity, and poverty 143 DeVault, M.L. 1994. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Djurfeldt, A.A., G. Djurfeldt, and J.B. Lodin. 2013. Geography of Gender Gaps: Regional Patterns of Income and Farm – Nonfarm Interaction Among Male-and Female-Headed Households in Eight African Countries, World Development 48: 32–47. Duckett, M. 2019. Empowering Female Farmers to Feed the World. National Geographic, March, www. nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/03/partner-content-empowering- female-farmers/. Eastin, J. 2018. Climate Change and Gender Equality in Developing States, World Development 107: 289–305. Gallagher, E., and U. Delworth. 1993. The Third Shift: Juggling Employment, Family, and the Farm, Journal of Rural Community Psychology 12(2): 21–36. Garth, H., and A.M. Reese (eds.). 2020. Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice. Minneapolis, MA: University of Minnesota Press. Glazebrook, T., S. Noll, and E. Opoku. 2020. Gender Matters: Climate Change, Gender Bias, and Women’s Farming in the Global South and North, Agriculture 10(7), https://doi.org/10.3390/ agriculture10070267. Guthman, J. 2008. Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice, Cultural Geographies 15(4): 431–447. Halloran, Liz. 2013. Lobster Boy Looms Large in Food Stamp Debate. NPR, September 19, www.npr. org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/09/19/223796325/lobster-boy-looms-large-in-food-stamp-debate. Heggem, Reidun. 2014. Exclusion and Inclusion of Women in Norwegian Agriculture: Exploring Different Outcomes of the ‘Tractor Gene’, Journal of Rural Studies 34: 263–271. Kelly, R., and S. Shortall. 2002. “Farmers’ Wives”: Women Who Are Off-Farm Breadwinners and the Implications for On-Farm Gender Relations, Journal of Sociology 38(4): 327–343. Larson, J.B., P. Castellanos, and L. Jensen. 2019. Gender, Household Food Security, and Dietary Diversity in Western Honduras, Global Food Security 20: 170–179. Loopstra, R. 2018. Interventions to Address Household Food Insecurity in High-Income Countries, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 77(3): 270–281. Mammen, K., and C. Paxson. 2000. Women’s Work and Economic Development, The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14(4): 141–164. Medagbe, F.M.K., S. Komatsu, G. Mujawamariya, and K. Saito. 2020. Men and Women in Rice Farming in Africa: A Cross-Country Investigation of Labor and Its Determinants, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.00117. Menon, G. 1991. Ecological Transition and the Changing Context of Women’s Work in Tribal India, Purusartha 14: 291–314. O’ Hara, P. 1998. Partners in Production? Women, Farm and Family in Ireland. New York: Berghahn Books. Papanicolas, I., L.R. Woskie, D. Orlander, E.J. Orav, and A.K. Jha. 2019. The Relationship Between Health Spending and Social Spending in High-Income Countries: How Does the US Compare? Health Affairs 38(9): 1567–1575. Payne, Tim. 2002. US Farmers’ Markets 2000: A  Study of Emerging Trends. Washington, DC: USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service, http://agmarketing.extension.psu.edu/ComFarmMkt/PDFs/ emerg_trend_frm_mrkt.pdf. Petrzelka, P., and S. Marquart-Pyatt. 2011. Land Tenure in the US: Power, Gender, and Consequences for Conservation Decision Making, Agriculture and Human Values 28: 549–560. Phillips, Sydney. n.d. http://thecollegeconservative.com/2012/01/16/i-got-food-stamps-and-so- can-you/. Reese, A.M. 2019. Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, DC. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press Books. Reeves, A.M., R. Loopstra, and D. Stuckler. 2017. The Growing Disconnect Between Food Prices and Wages in Europe: Cross-National Analysis of Food Deprivation and Welfare Regimes in Twenty-One EU Countries, 2004–2012, Public Health Nutrition 20(8): 1414–1422. Rickson, S.T., R.E. Rickson, and D. Burch. 2006. Women and Sustainable Agriculture. In Rural Gender Relations: Issues, Case Studies, edited by B. Beck and S. Shortall, Pp.119−135. Cambridge, MA: CABI. Rogers, S., and D. DeBoer. 2001. Changes in Wives’ Income: Effects on Marital Happiness, Psychological Well-Being, and the Risk of Divorce, Journal of Marriage and Family 63: 473–479.

144  Community, culture, and knowledge Sachs, C. 1983. The Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Allanheld. Sanders, R. 2019. The Color of Fat: Racializing Obesity, Recuperating Whiteness, and Reproducing Injustice, Politics, Groups, and Identities 7(2): 287–304. Sasson, A. 2012. Food Security for Africa: An Urgent Global Challenge, Agriculture and Food Security 1(2): 1–16. Saugeres, L. 2002. “She’s Not Really a Woman, She’s Half a Man”: Gendered Discourses of Embodiment in a French Farming Community. Women’s Studies International Forum 25(6): 641–650. Shortall, S. 2002. Gendered Agricultural and Rural Restructuring: A Case Study of Northern Ireland, Sociologia Ruralis 42(2): 160–175. Sklenicka, P., J. Zouhar, K.J. Molnarova, J. Vlasak, B. Kottova, P. Petrzelka, M. Gebhart, and A. Walmsley. 2020. Trends of Soil Degradation: Does the Socio-Economic Status of Land Owners and Land Users Matter? Land Use Policy 95, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.05.011. Slocum, R. 2006. Anti-Racist Practice and the Work of Community Food Organizations, Antipode 38(2): 327–349. Slocum, R. 2008. Thinking Race Through Feminist Corporeal Theory: Divisions and Intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market, Social and Cultural Geography 9(8): 849–869. Slocum, R. 2011. Race in the Study of Food, Progress in Human Geography 35(3): 303–327. Symes, D. 1991. Changing Gender Roles in Productivist and Post-Productivist Capitalist Agriculture, Journal of Rural Studies 7(1/2): 85–90. United States Department of Agriculture. 2013a. Executive Order 1350, Reducing Improper Payments, USDA, Washington, DC, www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/50024-0003- 11.pdf. United States Department of Agriculture. 2013b. Fraud, USDA, Washington, DC, www.fns.usda.gov/ snap/fraud/fraud_2.htm. Whatmore, S. 1991. Home Farm: Women, Work and Family Enterprise. London: Macmillan. Wit, D. 1999. Black Hunger: Soul Food and America. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. World Bank. 2009. Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTGENA GRLIVSOUBOOK/Resources/CompleteBook. pdf. Zafar, R. 1999. The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women’s Cookbooks, Feminist Studies 25(2): 449–469.

Part III

Food justice and the environment

8 Agro-ecosystems and the nature of “natures”

I regularly get asked by the initiated, upon discovering my research interests, about whether sociologists pay attention to things like ecology. My response usually goes something like, “Yes, sociologists of food and agriculture are interested in the natural world; but we’re also careful not to draw too thick a line between ‘society’ and ‘nature.’ ” The sociology of food and agriculture literature is actually quite diverse in terms of how scholars have dealt with the material realm, as this chapter makes clear.

Agroecology: a brief introduction The term “agroecology” dates back to at least the late 1920s (see, e.g., Klages 1928), although it is not difficult to find antecedents that spoke of agroecological processes without actually using the term (King 1911). Initially, the term referenced the coming together of two disciplines, agronomy and ecology. Later, other disciplines were brought into the fold as the scope and scale of agroecology evolved (see Figure 8.1), such as zoology, botany/plant physiology, animal science, pest ecology, and sociology. As the website Agroecology (www.agroecology.org) explains, “Agroecology is: •

The application of ecology to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems [and increasingly aquatic agroecosystems, see Box 8.1]. • A whole-systems approach to agriculture and food systems development based on traditional knowledge, alternative agriculture, and local food system experiences. • Linking ecology, culture, economics, and society to sustain agricultural production, healthy environments, and viable food and farming communities.” To understand the broadening of the term over the twentieth century, it is helpful to understand the ultimate purpose agroecology seeks to serve. Buttel (2002: 4–5) concisely sums this up by noting that “agroecology is both a critique of productivism, molecularization, and privatization as well as a set of responses to their shortcomings” (emphasis in original). Productivism refers to the strong consensus that emerged during the twentieth century among agricultural scientists, government officials, and agribusiness making increased productivity and/or output the principal goal of agricultural research. Molecularization speaks to modern agriculture’s reductionist and thus highly abstract approach to the world – for instance, reducing soil fertility to NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium) levels. Another example of molecularization: monocultures. These are cast in a considerably more favorable light when cropping systems are abstracted from their ecological productive base. This abstraction helps mask the destruction monocultures bring

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-11

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Scale

Regenerative food systems/ Ecological political ecology/ Social movement Multifunctional landscapes Farm/ Agroecosystem Plot/Field

1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s…

Figure 8.1  Changes (and increasing diversity) in scale and scope of agroecology research Source: Author.

to that base in the form of, among other things, biodiversity loss and the various nefarious effects associated with pesticide use (as monocropping typically necessitates the use of pesticides). Finally, privatization makes it harder to think ecologically, as it encourages people to only “see” up to their property line.

Box 8.1  Wetland Agroecosystems: Fish-Rice Culture Practices The future viability of high-input, irrigated monoculture rice production is being questioned in many parts of the world due to the rising cost of inputs and the growing toll these systems are placing on the environment. Cultivating fish in rice fields is a traditional practice in China, Japan, and Indonesia. Incorporating fish into rice fields is a way to help close the loop in these systems by introducing internal controls (the fish eat pests and weeds) and sources of nutrients (via fish excrement). However, like most labor-intensive polycultures, fish-rice culture relies on not only different management strategies but also a specialized knowledge set that is lacked by most (monoculture) rice farmers (Ahmed et al. 2020).

To take the narrowest definition, as a method of agricultural production agroecology is highly efficient and, yes, even productive (see, e.g., Altieri 1995; Altieri and Nicholls 2020; Gliessman 1998). It is well documented that small, highly diverse farms that raise grains, fruits, vegetables, and livestock can easily out-produce, in terms of harvestable products per unit area, large, specialized (monoculture) operations by between 20 and 60  percent (Altieri and Nicholls 2008). A  five-year study in rural Malawi looking at 514 agroecology-practicing farming households and 400 non-agroecology households

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uncovered “a positive treatment effect of agroecology on both production diversity and [household level] dietary diversity” (Kansanga et  al. 2021: 1). Gliessman (1998) notes that a 1.73-hectare plot of land in Mexico planted in corn produces as much food as a 1-hectare plot planted with a mixture of corn, squash, and beans. In Brazil, fields planted in both corn (at 12,500 plants per hectare) and soybeans (at 150,000 plants per hectare) exhibited a 28 percent yield advantage over a comparable soybean monoculture (Altieri 1999). This inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has been attributed to a more efficient use of land, water, biodiversity (e.g., keeping intact internal ecological pest controls, thus eliminating the need for pesticides), and other agricultural resources by small farmers. Small, diverse farms are also less vulnerable to catastrophic loss due to environment events, an attribute of growing importance in light of climate change–related weather risks (FAO 2020). Agroecological principles also lie at the center of many organic farms, which explains, when managed properly, their favorable comparison to conventional methods of food production. Countless reviews of the agroecological literature confirm that these principles hold the potential to feed the world while combating phenomena such as climate change and global pandemics (e.g., Aguilera et al. 2020; Altieri and Nicholls 2020; Badgley et al. 2007; FAO 2020). As noted in Figure 8.1, the term “agroecology” today can refer to any number of scales and involve any number of disciplines. In their review of the earliest work published on the concept, Wezel and colleagues (2009) note that agroecology initially focused on the plot or field scale (1930s to 1960s). The scope and scale of research notably expanded in 1970s to landscape agroecosystems, expanding still further in recent years to food systems scales (though plot and field scale approaches persist up to the present). They further note in their review that the term can refer, at least in some circles, to a social movement, often subsumed within the larger umbrella term “sustainable rural development.” The Brazilian Association of Agroecology (ABA), for example, was created in 2004. For the ABA, agroecology is the ecology of food systems and a social movement (Wezel et al. 2009). “Higher” scale conceptions of agroecology clearly allow for a greater role for the sociologist. Nevertheless, even traditional approaches leave space for the social scientist. While the sociologist would not be directly involved in the analysis of, say, a test plot they could provide invaluable insight into understanding the challenges/barriers farmers experience, thus keeping them from adopting agroecological principles. Moreover, agroecological principles work because they are context based. To put it another way, they work with natural, ecological principles rather than by trying to bend those principles to fit the needs of the mass-produced commodities associated with the green revolution. Agroecology thus puts the farmer, to refer to a subject discussed previously, first. Figure 8.1 also references, following Buttel (2002: 5), the “third most longstanding form of agroecology,” what “can be referred to as ecological political economy.” The principal focus of this tradition of agroecology is a political-economic critique of conventional agriculture, while also paying close attention to its ecological shortcomings. The dashed line in the figure indicates early research in sociology of agriculture providing such a focus, without directly referencing the term “agroecology,” like the Mann-Dickinson Thesis and, later, looking beyond the farm-gate, the food regime approach. This tradition remains strong within the sociology of food and agriculture literature. Finally, the figure also references multifunctional landscapes. The central point of this approach is its denial of the primacy of the farm and the agricultural enterprise as the basic unit of production and thus of analysis. It views agriculture and the food systems

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more generally as embedded in landscapes and a broader socio-institutional complex. Multifunctionality explains that, in addition to the production of food and fiber, agriculture produces/maintains a number of other, mostly non-commodity, “outputs,” like flood control, the maintenance of ecosystem services, rural development, and agricultural heritage and culture (see Box 8.2).

Box 8.2  Agroecology: “Growing” More Than Food and Fiber When we think about agriculture we tend to view it as exclusively a site of food and fiber production. This is a terribly (and perhaps even dangerously) narrow view of all that is provided by this sector. Agriculture is important to us in such additional ways as:

Diet • •

Enhancement of nutritional quality and the cycling of trace elements; Food security/sovereignty;

Public health • •

Protection of the health of farm workers and consumers; Suppression of vectors of human disease (e.g., mosquitoes, snails, ticks);

Environmental sustainability • • • • • •

Preservation of biodiversity; Protection of wildlife; Preservation of our productive capacity against erosion, salinization, acidification, compaction; Maintenance of an ecological community of natural enemies of pests and diseases of crops; Protection of the general environment against runoff, eutrophication, volatization of nitrites, and dust in atmosphere; Protection of water resources and quality;

Rural development • •

Supporting employment, farm income, and rural life; Support for the economic independence of women;

National development/sovereignty • • •

Contribute to the international balance of payments; Defense of national sovereignty against possible dumping or political blackmail backed up by economic blockade; Food sovereignty.

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Regenerative food systems Regenerative agriculture, or even more importantly, regenerative food systems, foster agro-bio-socio-economic diversity (Duncan et al. 2020). This concept could be viewed as an outgrowth of agroecology, as indicated by my insertion of the term in the earlier figure. The term “regenerative” is growing in popularity because whereas, say, sustainability implies maintaining and sustaining (in other words, keeping what we have), regeneration implies building practices and systems that have the capacity to self-heal and self-enhance – to become more than as opposed to maintaining/sustaining. A recent survey of the literature (Duncan et al. 2020) highlights five key overarching practices and ideas that look to be key to advancing regenerative food systems. The five principles are: (1) acknowledging and including diverse forms of knowing and being; (2) taking care of people, animals, and the planet; (3) moving beyond free-market approaches; (4) promoting accountable innovations; and (5) long-term planning and rural–urban relations. I will now briefly review each of these five principles. Acknowledge and include diverse forms of knowing

For reasons already highlighted, it is important to embrace diverse approaches when it comes to matters relating to food and agriculture, including traditional ecological knowledges and the need for practices that are culturally appropriate (to avoid, for instance, eating whiteness). This principle applies throughout the food system, including how we think about and practice policy-making and governance processes. Toward that end, regenerative food systems need to be participatory and co-produced by a diversity of stakeholders so as to avoid unintentionally reinforcing the status quo (e.g., the Washington Consensus). Taking care of people, animals, and the environment

A regenerative food system is also driven by commitments to justice. This means, among other things, being mindful that people have different needs and different capacities to have those needs met. So, for instance, just saying people have a “right to X” does not mean much to those lacking the capabilities to realize those rights, perhaps due to a lack of educational opportunities or gender discrimination or racism. Food and/or agricultural policy through a “regenerative” lens thus must take on matters not captured by supply chain thinking, including topics like education, discrimination, inequality, health care, etc. Regenerative food systems also force critical reflection about what it means to care for non-human animals. Does “health,” when thinking about animal health, just mean “the absence of disease,” or should it mean something else, something more (see Box 8.3)?

Box 8.3  Soil Health Movement The soil health movement is a farming philosophy focusing on four main principles: reduce or eliminate tillage; keep plant residues on the soil surface; keep living roots in the ground; and maximize diversity of plants and animals. A number of farmers associated with this movement have achieved near-celebrity status in the

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agricultural community due to their embracing of these principles. Their notoriety is due to their ability to outproduce many conventional farmers while reducing (sometimes drastically) their use of inputs such as herbicides and fertilizers. Increasingly, farmers of all stripes are now talking about “soil health.” Not surprisingly, the USDA recently announced a $72.3 million “soil health investment” to help farmers adapt to and mitigate climate change. Another example of such support: a pledge of $4 million from the Midwest Row Crop Collaborative (founded by Cargill, the Environmental Defense Fund, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Monsanto, PepsiCo, the Nature Conservancy, Walmart, and the World Wildlife Fund) will help support an on-farm study and demonstration effort of soil health practices. Thinking about the “movement” sociologically, a recent study of soil health devotees farming in Colorado shows that members of this group tend to inhabit different social spaces than more conventional farmers. To quote the authors of the study: The soil health practitioners identified nationally recognized leaders in the soil health movement as sources of information, including other farmers and several independent agricultural consultants and soil scientists. This differs from the information sources of other inhabitants in the field of sustainable agriculture, and also those practicing conventional agriculture, who tended to receive their information from neighboring farmers, sales agronomists working for agribusiness, and mainstream research institutions like local land grant universities and the USDA Agricultural Research Service. (Rosenzweig et al. 2020: 550) Those associated with the soil health movement also had different understandings of what it meant to run a “profitable” operation. While they expressed a desire to have their farms make money, they were generally resistant to principles of profit maximization. Specifically, respondents believed there to be a distinction between making “enough” and taking steps to maximize on-farm revenue that would undoubtedly come at the expense of something else, like soil health (Rosenzweig et al. 2020).

Rethinking markets and economies

Regenerative food systems foster pro-social attitudes and behaviors as opposed to focusing exclusively on profit maximization. Remember, while everyone needs to make a living, that claim is not the same as saying people need to engage in practices that squeeze out every ounce of profit at the expense of other opportunities. Elements of regeneration, for instance, are also on display through some sharing economy arrangements, premised on the idea that people’s needs can sometimes be met by exchanges that take place outside of the market. On the whole, if the goal is truly about improving livelihoods and well-being, then people need to be more open to the idea of diverse economies. This is the idea that there are different ways to practice and do exchange relationships rather than thinking there is just one, monolithic way to do it – this also helps us get beyond the ridiculous dichotomy between capitalism and socialism (see Box 8.4).

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Box 8.4  The Dark Side of the Marketization of Everyday Life There’s a lot of research out there that ought to make us nervous about those wanting to find a market-based (or money-based) solution to our problems. Markets slash transaction costs for certain activities. What I mean is that you do not have to be friendly, or even have trust in, people you engage with in markets thanks to regulations and contract law. Heck, you do not even need to speak the same language in the marketplace. Have you ridden Uber? This celebrated example of the “sharing” economy requires absolutely no personal interaction between driver and rider. None whatsoever. Yet this has come with its own costs. Several prominent economists are beginning to ponder the limits of markets, not because we cannot place a price on everything but because of what happens when we do (e.g., Besley 2013; Kaczmarek 2021; Sandel 2012). The earliest studies to explore this phenomenon in a systematic way date to the 1980s. Psychologists Gerald Marwell and Ruth Ames gave (Marwell and Ames 1981) students tokens, which could be placed into either a hypothetical individual investment (a private good) or a collective investment (a public good). For every token invested in the private good, each participant received a small amount of money. Each token invested in the public good was awarded a larger amount of money. These awards were then pooled and equally shared among all participants, including those who had not invested in the public good. Economic theory explains why people should not want to voluntarily contribute to a public good. Nobody wants to contribute if it helps people who do not, the “free riders.” Running through numerous samples of students, Marwell and Ames found consistency in the fact that roughly 49 percent were willing to place their tokens into the collective investment. Curiously, the economists in the group proved a consistent outlier. They averaged investing only 24 percent of their tokens in the public good. There are thousands of examples of how markets leave their mark on social norms, resulting in, to use economist-speak, the crowding out of nonmarket (e.g., pro-social, we-focused) motivations (for a review of some of this literature see, e.g., Sandel 2012). One frequently cited example of this comes from Israel and involved a childcare center that struggled with getting parents to pick their children up on time (Gneezy and Rustichini 2000). Adults were arriving late, which required that the center pay staff to stay after hours. To resolve the issue, the center imposed a fine for tardy pickups. Expecting this solution to work, the administrators were surprised to discover that it had the opposite effect. Parents’ lateness increased. What happened? The fine changed the norm. Parents who previously felt guilt and who mostly tried to arrive on time started to view the fine as a fee. As a fee, the extra childcare began to be understood as a service which parents were entitled to if they chose to pay.

Promoting accountable innovations

In this context, “innovation” refers to new forms of social practice and organization in addition to new or improved technological products and processes, while “accountability” speaks to innovation and design systems that are inclusive in the sense of ensuring end

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users have a place at the table when thinking up solutions to social problems. Innovation, therefore, isn’t just something that engineers or marketing professionals do but a collective effort that includes end users. This also connects up with the first principle, of acknowledging and including diverse forms of knowing. Doing this helps to ensure that innovations are created that account for social, ecological, economic impacts, as opposed to merely focusing on maximizing profitability, which always occurs at the expense of something (or someone) else. To “innovate” can also mean thinking up and creating entirely new models through which to organize society. An example of such an innovation among regenerative food system proponents builds on principles from circular economy. The circular economy is based on a number of key principles: resources need to circulate in closed loops; renewable energy should be used where possible; and diversity should be celebrated. This thinking seems especially well suited for food production and consumption given the interrelationship between food and waste, where waste in one context – e.g., manure – is food in another (e.g., plant and fungi “food”). Another example of a social innovation might include how communities are thinking beyond the food bank, noted in the prior chapter. These spaces are rethinking what it means to tackle hunger and poverty, motivated by more than the idea that people have a right to food, realizing that empowering people (i.e., building their capabilities – see the prior principle “Taking care of people, animals, and the environment”) offers a far more powerful avenue for long-term livelihood improvement. Re-peasantization: regenerative practices in practice

For much of the twentieth century, as detailed earlier, “peasant” was equated with “backward,” “poverty,” and “inefficient.” There is a growing call to abandon this view. If anything, these labels say more about those casting aspersions than they do about peasants and peasant agriculture. The assumptions that have turned peasant into a pejorative term in the West are base more in ideology than empirical fact. McMichael (2009: 142) puts this point succinctly: Colonizers and developers routinely conflate “frugality” with “modernized poverty,” by projecting the latter onto the non-European world. Naturalizing the African woman as a baseline for a “development ladder” is as misleading as implying that agro-industrialization is inevitable, and desirable, at a time when low-carbon livelihoods are often more appropriate and possibly more just. The poverty trope informs, and legitimates, the development trajectory with which the [World] Bank works. But times are changing. Thanks to, among other things, the growing interest in regenerative principles and the rise of such peasantry movements as La Via Campesina we are witnessing a reversal of this trend, toward what van der Ploeg (2008) and more recently others (e.g., Pérez et al. 2020), call re-peasantization. This is happening not a moment too soon for the millions of the world’s rural poor. For instance, there is considerable evidence that this process of re-peasantization  – a transition to diversified regenerative farming systems – reduces gender inequities inside peasant families, a fact that goes against the commonly held view that peasant families are highly patriarchal. As described by one peasant woman, in conventional agriculture “the man is the king. [. . .] [The] crop belongs to the man. He drives the tractor, plants, applies chemicals, harvests and sells the crop. And all the money goes to him” (quoted in Rosset et al. 2011: 183). In more

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diversified, peasant-style modes of production, the roles and income-earning opportunities are equally as diverse. While men may still manage the row crops, the animals and medicinal plants are the responsibility of the woman, and she in turn receives the income from these activities (Rosset et al. 2011). Peasant agriculture may in fact turn out to be what saves us from future food systems collapse, as climate change in particular causes us to redefine understandings of “resiliency.” Scholars and practitioners have long known that peasant agriculture is highly adaptable to climate change and therefore more resilient to extreme climate events than conventional agriculture (Altieri and Koohafkan 2008; Mercer and Perales 2010). Research comparing the farms of peasants utilizing regenerative principles with those farming more conventionally in Central America in the wake of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 found that the non-conventional farms suffered considerably less erosion and fewer landslides as a result of the hurricane (Holt- Giménez 2002). In another study, the effects of Hurricane Ike in 2008 on Central American provinces revealed far higher levels of crop loss in areas of industrial monoculture compared to the diverse peasant farms with multi-storied agroforestry farming systems (Rosset et al. 2011). In the peasant farms, lower-story annual and perennial crops were compensating for any losses with exuberant growth, thus “taking,” in the words of the researchers, “advantage of the added sunlight when upper stories were tumbled or lost leaves and branches” (p. 182). The research team “also saw tremendous new leaf growth on branches that had been stripped. And perhaps most impressive of all, a substantial portion of the trees that had been blown down had been saved by peasant families who stood them back up and covered their roots the first morning after the storm” (p. 182). And in the shadow of COVID-19, regenerative, diverse farming systems have been a lifesaver for peasant and lower-income households the world over (e.g., Jumba et al. 2020; Loker and Francis 2020).

Community capitals framework As should be clear, it is essential that we not divorce human communities from any talk about regenerative or agroecosystems. As Flora (2001a: 5) explains: Agriculture and forestry represent attempts of human communities to use the perceived potential of a local landscape to extract value and maintain human communities: rural, suburban, and urban. The systems by which agriculture and forestry transform the ecosystem into an agroecosystem are varied. Some systems deplete the natural capital of place, whereas others replenish it. The agroecosystems that emerge are not simply natural outgrowths of humans and landscapes with productive potential but the product of human communities mediated by culture and technology. Ecosystem health is thus the product of what is often called a triple bottom line, involving economic, social, and environmental accountability (Flora 2008). These three sustainability pillars come together when a variety of capitals are present in sufficient degree. Those include natural, built, financial, political, social, human, and cultural capitals (see Figure 8.2). Though equally important in the achievement of the aforementioned triple bottom line, research looking at the interactions of these capitals shows some to be better starting points toward this end than others (e.g., Berchoux et al. 2020; Stone and Nyaupane 2018). This “community capitals” research, as it is called, points to social and human

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Figure 8.2  The seven capitals that constitute ecological, social, and economic sustainability Source: Developed by Cornelia Flora and Jan Flora (reprinted with their permission).

capitals as the ideal entry points, leading eventually to a “spiraling up” effect whereby all capitals are enhanced over time (Emery and Flora 2006). Beyond analytically teasing apart the various capitals at play in rural development, this approach, as discussed in Table 8.1, focuses on the interaction among the seven capitals and how they build upon each other. Using this framework, for example, scholars have shown how investments in human capital at the community level through, say, leadership training can impact financial capital as those leaders employed their newly acquired skills to acquire new funds and better manage existing funds, all of which, in turn, bolstered political capital (improved access), social capital (as social networks expanded), and so forth (Flint 2010; Flora et al. 2007). A community capitals approach expands our understanding of “return on investment,” noting that it should be measured in terms of an increase in all capitals, not just financial. Furthermore, community capitals research firmly believes in involving people so they can direct change from within a community (see Box 8.5).

Box 8.5  Community Capitals and Obesity Community capitals promotes thinking about obesity through a lens that rejects individualism – the idea that it is purely due to individual attributes. Elaborating on this, research has set out to explain how excess food intake (often in the form of calorically dense foods) and low levels of physical activity are products of one’s community environment and the capitals therein implied (e.g., Flora and Gillespie 2009; Greene et al. 2020). Doing this allows us to talk about how choice architecture helps perpetuate and exacerbate obesity, referring to those structures that enhance or inhibit healthy choices (in terms of both caloric intake and energy expenditure). This architecture varies from community to community, noting that

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among inner-city families, this “choice” is much more constrained when compared to that available to suburban families. According to this research, market, state, and civil-society actors need to invest in the seven capitals to reconfigure that architecture, thereby making it easier for institutions, families, and individuals to make healthier choices. At the community level, people need to organize to open those “choices” up. A community capitals framework has thus been used to help focus mobilization efforts by providing a tool for identifying local capitals that can be invested in to reduce the rates of childhood obesity. Examples of how this framework can be put to work from the standpoint of informing policy include the following: •

Built capital that provides opportunities for recreation (e.g., community soccer fields, bike and hiking trails, etc.) cannot happen without local social capital influencing political capital, which together would enhance financial capital. • A number of community initiatives have successfully utilized social capital to impact built capital (e.g., the construction of a playground) or to change a local school district’s policies related to the availability and sale of unhealthy foods. These organizations may be temporary, but because they are built on existing social capital, they leave a solid base to take effective action to change political capital for a healthier environment for children. • Getting healthier food into schools requires the mobilization of social capital to get decision makers to redefine “good value” from being about cost minimization to being about healthy food and healthy students. • Community efforts to reduce childhood obesity must also involve making healthy food, notably fruits and vegetables, affordable. This includes building cultural and social capital to convert natural capital to community gardens and increasing human capital in terms of increased knowledge of gardening and preparation of fresh fruits and vegetables.

There is considerable evidence linking social capital to equitable and sustainable solutions to local development problems (Berchoux et al. 2020). Social capital can lower the cost of working together, as it facilitates co-operation and reduces the likelihood of selfish action that comes at the expense of social and environmental well-being (Coleman 1988; Flora 1998). Investments in natural capital alone rarely seem to produce long-term attitudinal and behavioral change. Thus, while regulations, laws, and economic incentives are commonly used to encourage a change in behavior (e.g., adoption of practices to reduce soil erosion), there is little evidence suggesting that they also elicit a change in attitudes, which is why farmers, for example, tend to revert to less-than-best management practices when incentives disappear or regulations go unenforced (Mulema et al. 2020). These “deeper” attitudinal changes, while not occurring overnight, come from repeat participation in a social network with sufficient levels of mutual trust, bridging (“thin” relationships) and bonding (“thick” relationships) social capital, and opportunities for social learning. At the same time, we must be aware that not all forms of social capital enhance individual, community, or environmental well-being. Shared rules and norms can entrap people within non-optimal (and maybe even oppressive) arrangements, depleting human capital

158  Food justice and the environment Table 8.1  Seven capitals and their role in creating sustainable agroecosystems and communities Capital

Definition

Role sustainable agro-ecosystems and communities

Natural

The natural biophysical assets of any given locale – can include natural resources (e.g., water, soil, air, minerals), amenities (e.g., trout streams and sandy beaches), and natural beauty Institutionalized (widely shared) cultural symbols – attitudes, preferences, beliefs – that shape how we see the world, what we take for granted, and possible alternatives for social change Includes the skills, knowledge, and abilities of the people within a community to enhance local as well as access outside resources The social glue of a community – includes levels of mutual trust, reciprocity, and a sense of shared identity and future

These assets, when utilized in a manner cognizant of ecological limits, represent the ecological productive base for the long-term growth of other capitals.

Cultural

Human

Social

Political

Financial Built

Access to structures of power and power brokers as well as the ability to influence the rules and regulations that shape access to resources The financial resources available to invest in things like community capacity building and social entrepreneurship Infrastructure (also includes built “natural” areas, like reconstituted wetlands, ski runs, and artificial coral reefs)

By investing in cultural diversity (and including those who are traditionally excluded) biodiversity and different ways of approaching change can be utilized to the enhancement of all capitals. Increasing the knowledge base of a community will help that community bolster is other capitals. A social lubricant in that it makes the enhancement of the other capitals considerably easier (see forthcoming discussion) This access greatly enhances a community’s ability to bolster other capitals These resources can help pay for the maintenance and accumulation of other capitals. This infrastructure supports other capitals.

Source: Developed by author.

and all other capitals in the process. Too much homogeneity within a community has also been associated with xenophobic tendencies, groupthink, and the general exclusion of anyone not thought of as “one of us” (Daly and Silver 2008). The mafia, for example, is held together by, among other things, very high levels of social capital. Yet I would not hold this organization up as the ideal model for rural economic and agroecological development. Social capital is also gendered, “as men and women often have different networks and different ways of building and generating trust, due to their different material and cultural position” (Flora 2001b: 43). Indeed, it is quite fair to say that all capitals are gendered, as distribution and access to each varies, on average, considerably between men and women (Mulema et al. 2020). The case has been repeatedly made that this gendered asymmetry in capitals must be redressed in the context of sustainable rural development. For example, research found that women in the Siquijor and Leyte providences of the Philippines were significantly more inclined to protect common resources than men, as those resources represented the base for their domestic and market activities (e.g., women used local rivers when washing their families’ clothes). Yet if those resources were not equally important to men they were repeatedly under-valued and thus undermined in the name of economic growth, the developmental trajectory typically favored by those in positions of power (who continue to be overwhelmingly men).

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The subjective turn: from nature to “nature” Before New Rural Sociology, in the words of Buttel and colleagues (1990: 44), the “social psychological-behaviorist era” ruled rural sociology. Beginning in the 1940s, this research tradition “would remain unchallenged in rural sociological studies of agriculture until the early to mid-1970s” (p. 46). The 1980s brought with them a turn away from individual experience as approaches rooted in agrarian political economy dominated the literature. As Wilson notes (2001: 85), the prevalence of the agrarian political economy approach in the 1980s and 1990s produced a wealth of research with “a heavy emphasis on the importance of the state and policies, a strong focus on the importance of macroeconomic factors in actor decision-making.” By the early 1990s, despite close to two decades of theorizing social change in agriculture, we still knew very little about how and what farmers’ thought. It is therefore no surprise that a growing literature began to emerge during this period to fill that gap  – a “turn,” you might say, to subjective experience. The social construction of nature

A significant literature has been assembled looking into how people (most notably farmers) understand nature, a process known as the social construction of nature. As early as the 1970s, Newby and colleagues (1978) made clear that the roots of these different understandings were derived, at least in part, from the experience of farmers in their daily interaction with the land. Given farmers’ diminishing presence in the countryside, it might not seem relevant to focus on how they socially construct the term “nature.” Yet remember, while a small minority of the population, farmers have significant influence over the “look” (and touch, smell, etc.) of the countryside. And given the symbolic significance of the countryside for populations at large (such as its role in shaping national identity in some countries [Lowenthal 1991]), we must not be too quick to dismiss the perceptions of farmers. What they think matters. The term “social construction” is a bit of a misnomer, or at least it can be easily misunderstood. To speak of the social construction of nature (or the social construction of anything) is not to deny the existence of a material world. The material phenomena we call “wetlands” or “corn” (to give just two examples) would still exist, for the social constructivist, if humanity suddenly vanished from the face of the earth. The point, rather, is that the meaning we give to those biophysical artifacts would cease to exist in the event of our extinction. To speak of the social construction of nature is to remind ourselves that the meaning we give to artifacts we deem “natural” is a sociological expression, which is why different people, groups, and cultures often perceive the same physical thing in different ways. As meaning-making animals, we all confer meaning onto, which is to say we all socially construct, the material world around us. We also know that perception is a reflection of material circumstances, though just how far we take this statement is a topic of debate among social theorists. Greider and Garkovich (1994) point out that many times there are power struggles between groups about whose construction of nature will be held as “true.” In other words, knowledge does not have to be objectively true to have influence (McHenry 1997; see Box 8.6). What matters is power, as getting people and organizations to perceive your knowledge claims as representing the truth is often what really matters.

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Box 8.6  Four “Myths” of Nature Understanding assumptions about nature also helps us better understand why individuals do what they do in terms of perceived links between those actions and ecosystems. Some scholars have categorized our understandings of “nature” into one of four conceptual “boxes” – what are called the four “myths of nature” (Schwarz and Thompson 1990). Using the movement of a ball in a landscape as an analogy for relations between human activity and the broader environment, it quickly becomes clear that what “myth” one ascribes to will drastically shape the perceived ecological consequences of their actions (see Figure 8.3). Nature benign: This is when nature is viewed as being capable of recovering quickly from significant disturbances (e.g., a large pollution event). It is a robust view of nature. Adherents to this myth often come to rely on technocratic and managerial approaches for speeding up or assisting nature’s recovery. This view also encourages economic growth with little care for environmental consequences, as nature’s self-renewal capabilities are thought to be strong enough to withstand most of what humanity can throw at it. Nature ephemeral: Emphasizes the vulnerability of natural systems, where practically any human ecological footprint is regarded as potentially damaging to the integrity of natural systems. This view has close links with the “deep green” environmentalists. It is also consistent with advocacy of the precautionary principle – a better-safe-than-sorry regulatory approach that takes a guilty-until-proven-innocent view of technology (in contrast to risk analysis, which takes an innocent-untilproven-guilty stance).

Nature capricious

Nature benign

Figure 8.3  The four “myths of nature” Source: Based on Schwarz and Thompson (1990).

Nature perverse/tolerant

Nature ephemeral

Agro-ecosystems and the nature of “natures” 161

Nature perverse/tolerant: Recognition of both nature’s vulnerability and its resilience is incorporated in this myth. This view of nature places a premium on expert knowledge to ensure that natural limits are not exceeded. With this myth, it is acceptable to place pressure on natural ecosystems as long as those systems are not overly abused. Nature capricious: Gives credence to views of nature that emphasize its unpredictability. According to this myth, we have no way to predict the consequences of our actions on natural ecosystems. Nature is not law abiding; instead, randomness rules. As with nature benign, nature capricious discourages government regulations, yet for different reasons. The former favors no regulation because nature is viewed as immensely robust. Nature capricious, conversely, favors no regulation for the simple reason that we cannot regulate what we cannot understand.

Conservation and the “good farmer”

The good farmer literature refers to a nearly twenty-year research tradition, beginning with Burton’s (2004) seminal article, though scholarship highlighting the symbolic nature of farmer practice and identity extends back into the 1990s (e.g., McHenry 1997). During that period, an impressive literature has accrued that addresses the more-than-economic nature of the farming lifestyle (Burton et al. 2020). In doing this, the concept of “good farmer” is unpacked and shown to be a complex interplay between social, cultural, and material forces that both unite and divide farmers within fluid but identifiable communities. In short, the concept reminds us that farmers are so much more than the homo economicus characterized in neoclassical economics. Such insights can help us understand, for example, why agroforestry approaches that encourage farmers to also become foresters and recreation providers have faced resistance, even when shown to be profitable. That is because they ask farmers to become something they are not, namely, foresters and recreation providers; identities that do not align with how they and their peers define what constitutes a “good” farmer (Allison 1996; Lloyd et al. 1995). Research thus indicates farmers are more open to conservation practices if those practices align with their farmer-as-food-producer identity (Burgess et  al. 2000). Animals, insects, and plants, then, that do not threaten that identity are generally pointed to as examples of “biodiversity” – barn owls, pheasants, deer, songbirds, honeybees, etc. – and are welcome. Alternatively, non-human entities that threaten a “good” farmer’s identity – foxes, out-of-place plants (i.e., “weeds”) and insects (i.e., “pests”) – are sought out and eradicated. However, if one’s peer community includes individuals and organizations who embrace organic, regenerative, and/or agroecological practices, then one group’s “weeds” might be viewed by this network as “wildflowers” (Carolan 2006; McHenry 1997). Cary (1993) speaks of “symbolic conservation” to describe that while many surveyed farmers attributed environmental benefits to their behaviors, those actions were primarily the result of more instrumental motives. In other words, conservation was only done when it was profitable and when it “fit” with already-held conceptions of what it meant to do “good farming.” The concept “symbolic conservation” is useful because it reminds us that farmers negotiate the concept of “conservation.” As farmers have become increasingly aware of needing to minimize their ecological footprint, at least when such activities do not cut into profits, they have begun to impute conservation motives to many activities

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that they would have previously done under the guise of “good farming” (McHenry 1997). This finding is important because it reminds us that farmers are motivated by more than just a need to be good stewards. Not surprisingly, farmers are also motivated by profit, which means conservation practices must be properly incentivized in order to achieve their wide-scale adoption. Also, as conceptions of being a “good farmer” shape what practices are considered acceptable within social networks, attempts could also be made to redraw the parameters of this concept, thereby making room for previously unacceptable practices, like forestry. More recently, scholars have explored the non-static nature of cultural capital – those aforementioned social/cultural rewards. This helps us understand why and how understandings of a “good farmer” can change over time. Lee-Ann Sutherland and Ika Darnhofer (2012), for instance, looking at farmers who converted to organic practices in rural England, note “that the cultural values associated with conventional farming had to be devalued before conversion to organic farming became a conceivable option for many farmers” (p. 239). In other words, the stigmatization of conventional farming is enhancing the social and cultural legitimacy of those farmers who are doing something different. Now they are the “good farmers,” while large-scale commodity producers are seeing their identities and standing in the community blemished. While often implied, as many of the individuals studied in this literature tend to be white males, it is worth bringing to the discursive surface the roles played by masculinity and whiteness in shaping the political subjectivities of good farmers, even among female farmers given that they, too, must contend with the hegemonic femininity and masculinity prevalent within agriculture (e.g., Wright and Annes 2020). This aligns with decades of research noting how dominant rural imaginaries situate whiteness and the performance of certain middle-class masculinities and femininities as “in place” while those that fall outside of the hegemonic standard in terms of gender, race and sexuality become rural “others” (e.g., Abelson 2016; Carolan 2020). As noted, masculinity and whiteness has not been interrogated as extensively in the good farmer literature as other variables, though Yuka Suzuki’s (2018) study of white farmers in Zimbabwe offers a welcome intervention in this regard. In particular, she notes how this group of farmers leverage their whiteness and their use of techno-scientific farming practices (i.e., green revolution principles), and the symbolic, social, and political capital therein implied, “to escape the political” (Suzuki 2018: 12) and thus elevate their claims-making to a position that is beyond reproach. Suzuki importantly extends the concept of good farming into conceptions of good citizenship, though without evoking the latter term. As she writes, “In white farmers’ eyes, local black communities recognized them as figures of authority and respect by drawing them into webs of local moral economy,” which situates these self-identified good farmers as catalysts for “nation-building, citizenship, and belonging” (Suzuki 2018: 13). Before writing off this link as unique to Zimbabwe, remember that there is a long tradition in the US that roots principles of citizenship within agrarian ideals (Gilbert 2015). This is all to say, the concept of what it means to be a “good farmer” not only tells us about the subjectivities in rural spaces. It is also good to think with when it comes to understanding broader concepts related to who is a good citizen . . . and who isn’t.

Transition. . . This chapter hints strongly at an ecological critique of conventional agriculture and the related global system of food provisioning more generally. We hear repeatedly about how

Agro-ecosystems and the nature of “natures” 163

the current way of doing things – food/agriculture-wise – is unsustainable. Even proponents of the conventional system recognize that there are glaring environmental inefficiencies in how the world is presently fed. The next chapter will further illuminate the subject of our ecological foodprint.

Discussion questions 1 Can you think of a scenario in which social capital actually hinders rural development, at least for a certain segment of a community’s population? How do you differentiate between “good” and “bad” social capital? 2 Recall the various myths of nature. How might they shape the way a farmer manages her/his land? 3 In what ways is a “regenerative” lens a departure from so-called conventional food systems?

Suggested readings: introductory level United Nations. 2019. Last Call for a Food Systems Revolution. United Nations, New York, July 19, www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/last-call-food-systems- revolution. White, C. 2020. Why Regenerative Agriculture? American Journal of Economics and Sociology 79(3): 799–812.

Suggested readings: advanced level Altieri, M.A., and C.I. Nicholls. 2020. Agroecology and the Reconstruction of a Post-COVID-19 Agriculture, The Journal of Peasant Studies 47(5): 881–898. Burton, R.J., J. Forney, P. Stock, and L.A. Sutherland. 2020. The Good Farmer: Culture and Identity in Food and Agriculture. New York: Routledge. Duncan, J., M. Carolan, and J.S. Wiskerke (eds.). 2020. Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems. New York: Routledge.

References Abelson, M.J. 2016. ‘You Aren’t from Around Here’: Race, Masculinity, and Rural Transgender Men, Gender, Place & Culture 23(11): 1535–1546. Aguilera, E., C. Díaz-Gaona, R. García-Laureano, C. Reyes-Palomo, G.I. Guzmán, L. Ortolani, M. Sánchez-Rodríguez, and V. Rodríguez-Estévez. 2020. Agroecology for Adaptation to Climate Change and Resource Depletion in the Mediterranean Region. A Review, Agricultural Systems 181, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2020.102809. Ahmed, N., S. Thompson, B. Hardy, and G.M. Turchini. 2020. An Ecosystem Approach to Wild RiceFish Cultivation, Reviews in Fisheries Science & Aquaculture, https://doi.org/10.1080/23308249.2020 .1833833. Allison, L. 1996. On Planning a Forest: Theoretical Issues and Practical Problems, Town Planning Review 67(2): 131–143. Altieri, Miguel. 1999. Applying Agroecology to Enhance the Productivity of Peasant Farming Systems in Latin America, Environment, Development and Sustainability 1: 197–217. Altieri, M.A. 1995 (1987). Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Altieri, M.A., and P. Koohafkan. 2008. Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities. Malaysia: Third World Network Penang. Altieri, M.A., and C.I. Nicholls. 2020. Agroecology and the Reconstruction of a Post-COVID-19 Agriculture, The Journal of Peasant Studies 47(5): 881–898.

164  Food justice and the environment Badgley, C., J. Moghtader, E. Quintero, E. Zakem, M. Chappell, K. Aviles-Vazquez, A. Samulon, and I. Perfecto. 2007. Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22: 86–108. Berchoux, T., G.R. Watmough, F.A. Johnson, C.W. Hutton, and P.M. Atkinson. 2020. Collective Influence of Household and Community Capitals on Agricultural Employment as a Measure of Rural Poverty in the Mahanadi Delta, India, Ambio 49(1): 281–298. Besley, T. 2013. What’s the Good of the Market? An Essay on Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy, Journal of Economic Literature 51(2): 478–495. Burgess, J., J. Clark, and C. Harrison. 2000. Knowledges in Action: An Actor Network Analysis of a Wetland Agri-environment Scheme, Ecological Economics 35: 119–132. Burton, R.J. 2004. See Through the “Good Farmer’s” Eyes, Sociologia Ruralis 44(2): 195–215. Burton, R.J., J. Forney, P. Stock, and L.A. Sutherland. 2020. The Good Farmer: Culture and Identity in Food and Agriculture. New York: Routledge. Buttel, Fredrick. 2002. Envisioning the Future Development of Farming in the USA: Agroecology Between Extinction and Multifunctionality? Paper developed for workshop titled, The Many Meanings and Potential of Agroecology Research and Teaching, May 29–30, Madison, WI, www.agroeco logy.wisc.edu/downloads/buttel.pdf. Buttel, Fredrick, Olaf Larson, and Gilbert Gillespie. 1990. The Sociology of Agriculture. New York: Greenwood Press. Carolan, M. 2006. Do You See What I See? Examining the Epistemic Barriers to Sustainable Agriculture, Rural Sociology 71(2): 232–260. Carolan, M. 2020. ‘They Say They Don’t See Color, but Maybe They Should!’ Authoritarian Populism and Colorblind Liberal Political Culture, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–25. Cary, J. 1993. The Nature of Symbolic Beliefs and Environmental Behavior in a Rural Setting. Environment and Behavior 25(4): 555–576. Coleman, J. 1988. Social Capital and the Creation of Human Capital, American Journal of Sociology 94: S95–S120. Daly, M., and H. Silver. 2008. Social Exclusion and Social Capital: A Comparison and Critique, Theory and Society 37(6): 537–566. Duncan, J., M. Carolan, and J.S. Wiskerke (eds.). 2020. Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems. New York: Routledge. Emery, M., and C. Flora. 2006. Spiraling-Up: Mapping Community Transformation with Community Capitals Framework, Community Development 37(1): 19–35. FAO. 2020. The Potential of Agroecology to Build Climate-Resilient Livelihoods and Food Systems. Roma, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Flint, R.W. 2010. Seeking Resiliency in the Development of Sustainable Communities, Human Ecology 17(1): 44–57. Flora, C. 2001a. Interactions Between Agroecosystems and Rural Communities. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Flora, C. 2001b. Access and Control of Resources: Lessons from SANREM CRSP, Agriculture and Human Values 18: 41–48. Flora, C. 2008. Social Capital and Community Problem Solving Combining Local and Scientific Knowledge to Fight Invasive Species, Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts 2: 30–39. Flora, C., C. Bregendahl, and S. Fey. 2007. Mobilizing Internal and External Resources for Rural Community Development, In Perspectives on 21st Century Agriculture: A Tribute to Walter J. Armbruster, edited by R. Knutson, S. Knutson, and D. Ernstes, Pp. 210–220. Chicago, IL: The Farm Foundation. Flora, C., and A. Gillespie. 2009. Making Healthy Choices to Reduce Childhood Obesity: Community Capitals and Food and Fitness, Community Development 40(2): 114–122. Flora, J. 1998. Social Capital and Communities of Place, Rural Sociology 63(4): 481–506. Gerald, M., and R. Ames. 1981. Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else? Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods, IV, Journal of Public Economics 15(3): 295–310. Gilbert, J. 2015. Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Agro-ecosystems and the nature of “natures” 165 Gliessman, Stephen. 1998. Agroecology: Ecological Process in Sustainable Agriculture. Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Press. Gneezy, U., and A. Rustichini. 2000. A Fine Is a Price, The Journal of Legal Studies 29(1): 1–17. Greene, M., J. Stroope, and D. Holston. 2020. The Louisiana Healthy Communities Initiative: A  Community-Participatory Model for Obesity Prevention, Current Developments in Nutrition 4(Supplement 2): 196–196. Greider, T., and L. Garkovich. 1994. Landscapes: The Social Construction of Nature and the Environment, Rural Sociology 59: 1–24. Holt-Giménez, E. 2002. Measuring Farmers’ Agroecological Resistance After Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua: A Case Study in Participatory, Sustainable Land Management Impact monitoring. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 93(1–3): 87–105. Jumba, F.R., T. Tibasiima, E. Byaruhanga, J. Aijuka, H. Pabst, J.M. Nakalanda, and C. Kabaseke. 2020. COVID 19: Lets Act Now: The Urgent Need for Upscaling Agroecology in Uganda (2020). International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 18(6): 449–455. Kaczmarek, E. 2021. What Does Pricelessness Mean? The Journal of Value Inquiry, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10790-020-09785-8. Kansanga, M.M., J. Kangmennaang, R.B. Kerr, E. Lupafya, L. Dakishoni, and I. Luginaah. 2020. Agroecology and Household Production Diversity and Dietary Diversity: Evidence from a Five-Year Agroecological Intervention in Rural Malawi, Social Science & Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2020.113550. King, F.H. 1911. Farmers of Forty Centuries. Madison, WI: Mrs. F. H. King. Klages, K.H.W. 1928. Crop Ecology and Ecological Crop Geography in the Agronomic Curriculum, Journal of the American Society of Agronomy 20: 336–353. Lloyd, T., C. Watkins, and D. Williams. 1995. Turning Farmers into Foresters via Market Liberalization, Journal of Agricultural Economics 46(3): 361–370. Loker, A., and C. Francis. 2020. Urban Food Sovereignty: Urgent Need for Agroecology and Systems Thinking in a Post-COVID-19 Future, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 44(9): 1118–1123. Lowenthal, D. 1991. British National Identity and the English Landscape, Rural History 2: 205–230. McHenry, H. 1997. Wild Flowers in the Wrong Field Are Weeds: Examining Farmers Constructions of Conservation, Environment and Planning A 29: 1039–1053. McMichael, P. 2009. A Food Regime Genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies 36(1): 139–169. Mercer, K.L., and H.R. Perales. 2010. Evolutionary Response of Landraces to Climate Change in Centers of Crop Diversity. Evolutionary Applications 3(5–6): 480–493. Mulema, A.A., B. Boonabaana, L. Debevec, L. Nigussie, M. Alemu, and S. Kaaria. 2020. Spiraling Up and Down: Mapping Women’s Empowerment Through Agricultural Interventions Using the Community Capitals Framework in Rural Ethiopia, Community Development, https://doi.org/10.1080/15 575330.2020.1838589. Newby, H., C. Bell, D. Rose, and P. Saunders. 1978. Property, Paternalism and Power: Class und Control in Rural England. London: Hutchinson. Pérez, R.D.G., M.J.M. Sendra, and F. López-i-Gelats. 2020. Strategies and Drivers Determining the Incorporation of Young Farmers into the Livestock Sector, Journal of Rural Studies 78: 131–148. Rosenzweig, S.T., M.S. Carolan, and M.E. Schipanski. 2020. A Dryland Cropping Revolution? Linking an Emerging Soil Health Paradigm with Shifting Social Fields Among Wheat Growers of the High Plains, Rural Sociology 85(2): 545–574. Rosset, P.M., B. Machín Sosa, A.M. Roque Jaime, and D.R. Ávila Lozano. 2011. The Campesino- toCampesino Agroecology Movement of ANAP in Cuba: Social Process Methodology in the Construction of Sustainable Peasant Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1): 161–191. Sandel, Michael. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Schwarz, M., and M. Thompson. 1990. Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology and Social Choice. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

166  Food justice and the environment Stone, M.T., and G.P. Nyaupane. 2018. Protected Areas, Wildlife-Based Community Tourism and Community Livelihoods Dynamics: Spiraling Up and Down of Community Capitals, Journal of Sustainable Tourism 26(2): 307–324. Sutherland, Lee-Ann, and Ika Darnhofer. 2012. Of Organic Farmers and ‘Good Farmers’: Changing Habitus in Rural England, Journal of Rural Studies 28: 232–240. Suzuki, Y. 2018. The Good Farmer: Morality, Expertise, and Articulations of Whiteness in Zimbabwe, Anthropological Forum 28(1): 74–88. van der Ploeg, J. D. 2008. The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization. London: Earthscan. Wezel, A., S. Bellon, T. Dore, C. Francis, D. Vallod, and C. David. 2009. Agroecology as a Science, a Movement, and a Practice: A Review, Agronomy for Sustainable Development 29(4): 503–515. Wilson, G. 2001. From Productivism to Post-productivism . . . and Back Again? Exploring the (Un) changed Natural and Mental Landscapes of European Agriculture, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26(1): 77–102. Wright, W., and A. Annes. 2020. FASTing in the Mid-west?: A Theoretical Assessment of “Feminist Agrifoods Systems Theory.” Agriculture and Human Values 37(2): 371–382.

9 Food, agriculture, and the environment

The retail price of our food comes nowhere close to approximating its real cost (Carolan 2018). That being said, and to the best of my knowledge, there are not many recent attempts at placing a price tag on the cost of all agriculturally related externalities (no doubt because such a task is more than a little daunting), though a number of scholars in the early 2000s did attempt this. One calculation places the annual external costs of agriculture (to say nothing of the broader food system’s ecological footprint) in Germany at US$2 billion, in the UK that figure is US$3.8 billion, and in the US the total is US$34.7 billion. These average out to an additional cost of approximately US$81 to US$343 per hectare of arable land and pasture (Pretty et al. 2001; see also Tegtmeier and Duffy 2004). One notable recent attempt (or more accurately attempts) at placing a total dollar value upon the externalized costs of global agriculture comes from the FAO. The studies date back to 2014 and 2015. The 2014 study’s methodology included not only the value of wasted food – we waste a lot of food, as we’ll discuss later – but also all the environmental and social costs involved in the production of the food (FAO 2014a). The grant total of estimated hidden costs associated with the global food system was USD $ 2.1 trillion in environmental damage and USD $2.7 trillion in social costs – USD $4.8 trillion in total. The follow-up study, in 2015, largely confirmed the number for environmental damage, estimating the total environmental costs of global agriculture to be roughly USD $ 2.33 trillion per year (FAO 2015a). Table 9.1 provides a breakdown of some of those costs for select commodities, noting also the countries that are most responsible for harming our natural capital stocks. Other analyses concentrate on specific components of production agriculture by calculating, for instance, the real cost of pesticides. Two highly cited estimates, summarized in Table  9.2, come from Leach and Mumford (2008) and Pimentel (2005). Note the considerable costs these estimates attribute to pesticide use in agriculture, which Pimentel places (for the US case alone) at a staggering US$9.6 billion annually. Complicating matters further is the fact that we cannot just add up the costs and benefits of any given food regime (e.g., conventional vs. agroecological) to tell us which one is “better.” Value judgments inevitably have to be made in this process. Let’s go back to the subject of pesticides to tease this point out. I have been told on more than one occasion that each US dollar invested in pesticide control returns about US$4 in protected crops. But remember, what that means is this: that is the return on investment as long as those costs described in Table 9.2 remain externalized. This calculates out to a net gain of roughly US$40  billion per year in favor of pesticides. Throw any of the currently externalized costs into the bottom line, however, and pesticides fare less well (throw

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-12

168  Food justice and the environment Table 9.1  Top contributors to the natural capital costs for select crop sectors (US$ billion) Crop

1st place total cost (percent of total)

2nd place total cost (percent of total)

3rd place total cost (percent of total)

Corn

China $129.6 (35%) China $113.7 (22%) Brazil $102.3 (58%) China $84.6 (19%)

USA $89.7 (24%) India $113.3 (22%) USA $52.1 (30%) India $69.4 (16%)

Brazil $57.3 (16%) Indonesia $62.6 (12%) Argentina $21.7 (12%) Germany $61.6 (14%)

Rice Soybeans Wheat

Source: Adapted from FAO 2015a.

Table 9.2 Estimates on the real costs of pesticides from Leach and Mumford (2008) and Pimentel (2005), in US$ Costs

UK

US

Germany

------------------------------(Adapted from Leach and Mumford 2008)-----------------------------Pesticides in sources of 287,444,066 1,126,337,798 180,522,199 drinking water Pollution incidents, 20,360,620 161,720,798 51,355,453 fish deaths, & monitoring costs Biodiversity/wildlife 29,942,089 207,383,142 6,224,903 losses Cultural, landscape, 118,570,678 insufficient data insufficient data tourism, etc. Bee colony losses 2,395,367 144,597,420 1,556,225 Acute effects of 2,395,367 167,428,591 28,012,065 pesticides to human health Total 461,108,190 1,807,467,750 267,670,848 ------------------------------------(Adapted from Pimentel 2005)-----------------------------------Public health impacts not calculated 1,140,000,000 not calculated Domestic animals not calculated 30,000,000 not calculated deaths and contaminations Cost of pesticide not calculated 2,020,000,000 not calculated resistance and loss of natural enemies Honeybee and not calculated 334,000,000 not calculated pollination losses Crop losses not calculated 1,391,000,000 not calculated Bird and fishery losses not calculated 2,260,000,000 not calculated Groundwater not calculated 2,000,000,000 not calculated contamination Government not calculated 470,000,000 not calculated regulations to prevent damage Total not calculated 9,645,000,000 not calculated

Food, agriculture, and the environment 169

them all in and pesticides fare really poorly). Next, consider further that some things just don’t translate nicely into a dollar figure, like a human life. Pimentel (2005: 246) captures this tension nicely when he explains, “assuming that pesticide-induced cancers numbered more than 10,000 cases year and that pesticides returned a net agricultural benefit of $32 billion year, each case of cancer is ‘worth’ $3.2 million in pest control.” Is US$3.2 million in pesticide benefits worth one person dying from cancer? But even this question is not entirely accurate, as it fails to ask if similar ends can be achieved without the use of these chemicals. If we can successfully substitute, say, agroecological controls for pesticides, then one cancer death for each US$3.2 million in pesticide benefits seems an unnecessary price to pay.

Food miles (kilometers) The concept of food miles has a simple elegance to it: food that travels great distances obviously consumes more energy during transportation than food grown locally. It has been calculated that every calorie of food produced ends up consuming, over its entire life cycle, about 10 calories of fossil fuel (Frey and Barrett 2007). According to data obtained from the author from the Japan Ministry of the Environment, Japan not only imports more food by volume than the US, UK, South Korea, Germany, and France, but that imported food also travels, on average, farther than food coming into those other nations (see Figure 9.1). When assessing the ecological benefits of local food we need to first have a discussion about trade-offs. For as long as we choose to eat foods out of season and/or that are non-native to local agroecological conditions, we will be continually presented with uncomfortable choices. Do we want, for example, to incur the ecological cost associated with food miles, or would we rather produce something locally, even if doing so consumes copious levels of energy and water  – levels far higher than what would be required to produce the commodity in a non-local region with conditions better suited for its production? It is also important to bear in mind that fruits and vegetables account 18000 16000

Japan

14000

South Korea

12000

Average distance (km) 10000 8000

United States

6000

United Kingdom

France

4000

Germany

2000 0

0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

70000

Imported food volume (thousand tons)

Figure 9.1  Food imports by volume and average distance traveled by food for select countries Source: Based on data obtained from the Japan Ministry of the Environment.

170  Food justice and the environment Table 9.3  Energy and emissions intensities for different modes of freight transportation Transportation type

Energy consumption (KJ/ton-km)

Total emissions (g/ton-km)

CO2 Hydrocarbons

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs)

Oxides of nitrogen (NOx)

Carbon monoxide (CO)

Water Rail Road Air

423 677 2,890 15,839

30.00 41.00 207 1,260

0.04 0.06 0.30 2.00

0.10 0.08 1.10 3.00

0.40 0.20 3.60 5.50

0.12 0.05 2.40 1.40

Source: Carolan 2018.

for roughly a quarter of exports in some developing countries. And undoubtedly some of those producers are peasants and other smallholder farmers. How, then, would a shift over to an entirely local diet in affluent nations impact the developmental trajectories of less developed countries? It’s a question many local food advocates rarely bother to ask. Another point to keep in mind is that the “conclusions” of any food-miles analyses hinge on how the concept is operationalized. For example, there are “vehicle miles”: the distance traveled by vehicles carrying food regardless of the amount transported. There are also “tons per miles traveled”: the distance multiplied by load. Let us say there is a large container ship transporting 1 million mandarin tangerines from Japan (where onequarter of the world’s crop is grown) to San Francisco. The trip is roughly 8,200 kilometers (5,100 miles). How one chooses to operationalize food miles drastically changes the outcome of the analysis. Using vehicle miles, to each tangerine is attributed 5,100 miles upon arriving in San Francisco. Alternatively, utilizing tons per miles traveled, you might attribute to each tangerine a paltry 0.0000051 food miles. Complicating matters further is that not all forms of transportation are equal. Table 9.3 lists the energy and emissions intensities for different modes of freight transportation. As illustrated, air transport requires the most energy to move 1 ton of food 1 kilometer – 15,839 KJ (kilojoules) to be exact. It also emits the most greenhouse gases (among other noxious gases) per ton-kilometer traveled, which explains why air transport accounts for 11 percent of Britain’s CO2 emission even though only 1 percent of the country’s food arrives via airplane. Yet even these transportation categories are too general. As illustrated in Table 9.4, the utilization of highly efficient trucks does not necessarily signify an ecologically efficient distribution operation, because fuel efficiency can be offset by either a poor utilization of vehicle capacity or an overall low hauling capacity. This is why some suggest that a better measure of energy efficiency in food distribution is “energy intensity,” which is an expression of fuel consumption on a pallet-kilometer or ton-kilometer basis. There are energy economies of scale that come from being able to transport large amounts of food in a single haul. This no doubt helps explain why cargo ships fare so well in Table 10.2, as each ship has the capacity to carry thousands of tons of food. These economies of scale can be so great that they can even offset a vehicle’s poor performance when assessed on a kilometer-per-liter (or miles-per-gallon) basis. That is in fact what we see in Table 9.4; that the carrying capacity of large semi-trailers can, if fully loaded when on the road, offset their engines’ poor fuel efficiency. Looking at energy demands of transportation in aggregate, compared to other sectors of the food system, reveals that the real ecological problem lies someplace other than in

Food, agriculture, and the environment 171 Table 9.4  Average energy efficiency and intensity by vehicle type Vehicle type

Average fuel efficiency (km/ liter)

Average load (pallets)

7.5- to 18-ton truck Truck greater than 18 ton 32-ton semitrailer 38- to 44-ton semi-trailer

3.87

5.78

2.91

Average payload (tones)

Average energy intensity by volume (ml/ pallet-km)

Average energy intensity by weight (ml/ton-km)

2.25

33.0

83.8

8.69

7.41

31.8

37.1

3.35

14.38

10.37

19.1

26.4

2.79

17.11

11.83

18.0

26.0

Source: Carolan 2018.

food miles. The research is pretty clear: greenhouse gas emissions associated with food can be attributed significantly to the production phase. In other words, what is produced matters more than how far food travels after leaving the farm gate (see Box 9.1). One analysis found that transportation represents only 11 percent of life-cycle greenhouse emissions for food (Weber and Matthews 2008: 3508). The authors also note that food groups vary considerably in terms of the greenhouse gas intensity, where, for example, red meat is about 150 percent more intensive than either chicken or fish. A change in diet, according to this research, would thus be a considerably more effective means of lowering one’s greenhouse gas footprint than buying local. They explain that “[s]hifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG [greenhouse gas] reduction than buying all locally sourced food” (Weber and Matthews 2008: 3508).

Box 9.1  The Growing Realization That How Food Is Packaged Matters Immensely For too long, life-cycle analyses of packaging only focused on packing materials, ignoring what was inside and how the package itself affected the life cycle of food. Scholars thus started calling for analyses of the indirect environmental impacts of packaging. These indirect impacts include, for instance, how packaging impacts the amount of food wasted and the possibilities of recovering food waste, its impact on transport efficiency (wine is an example in which the use of more transportefficient packaging solutions – the wine box – results in a significant environmental improvement over traditional bottles), and its impact on consumers’ behavior from the standpoint of private food transport, storage and preparation in households (e.g., packaging attributes have been shown to influence how consumers sort their recycling, which suggests we can do a lot better with our life-cycle modeling than by assuming “average” recycling rates of packaging materials) (e.g., Molina-Besch et al. 2019; Wikström et al. 2016).

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A study looking at the US food sector finds that freight transportation accounts for just 6 percent of the total carbon emissions for the food categories analyzed (Wakeland et  al. 2012). This figure is supported by more recent research looking how the global food system contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions (Poore and Nemecek 2018). According to this study, the global food system accounts for roughly 26 percent of total emissions – see Figure 9.2. Note how the majority of those emissions come from agriculture, whereas activity along the supply chain accounts for less than a fifth of total emissions. Finally, while concerns for the environment are employed in these discussions, occasionally the food miles concept is used to strengthen the position of certain industry actors, especially those interested in protecting domestic sectors of a country’s food system. The British-based think tank the Africa Research Institute released a report on Kenya’s horticulture industry, where it is explain how a push by UK supermarkets for local food labels is the direct result of intense lobbying from European farm groups (Gikunju 2009). The hope among these groups was that by presenting air-freighted produce from countries like Kenya as environmentally unsustainable they would be able to increase the consumption of domestically raised food. The Africa Research Institute’s report show just

Figure 9.2  Global greenhouse gas emissions from food production

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how counterintuitive food miles, as an indicator of sustainability, can be. According to this report, certain foods flown from Kenya into Britain can actually be produced with a smaller energy footprint than if they were raised domestically. Average annual temperatures in Kenya, which hover between 20 and 25 Celsius year round, eliminate the need for energy-intensive greenhouses, while the small-scale nature of Kenya farms (on average 2 acres) eliminates the need for tractors. In other words, food miles aside, certain food can be produced with considerable ecological efficiency in Kenya. As the report goes on to note, the government buildings alone in Britain emit more CO2 than all of Kenya.

The life-cycle analysis Traditional approaches to environmental impacts tend to focus on a single plant or link in the commodity chain and on one or two pollutants. Doing this, however, can lead to “footprint shifting,” where ecological efficiencies might be achieved at one stage of the life cycle only to increase environmental impacts in another. Examining the entire lifecycle of a product also allows “hot spots” – links where impacts are high and where reductions can be achieved at minimal cost and effort – to be identified. The life-cycle analysis (LCA), which crept into the discussion in the previous section, is a tool to assess overall ecological footprints. It has been utilized to inform our understanding of many different aspects of the food system. The first LCAs were performed in the 1970s by Coca-Cola while assessing the impacts of switching from glass bottles to plastic bottles. By the 1990s, the approach was beginning to be used to model food systems. From 1992 to 2018, the number of peer-reviewed English-language articles using LCA to model food systems rose from roughly 1 to 1,040 per year (van der Werf et al. 2020). Take, for example, the LCA that evaluates and compares the environmental performance of five different vegetable oils – palm oil, soybean oil, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, and peanut oil (Schmidt 2015). I mention this study in particular because it highlights just how tricky LCA can be, not just in terms of their implementation but also in how their findings often create more questions than answers. Allow me to explain. With respect to global warming, the study concludes by noting “rapeseed oil and sunflower oil are the best performing, followed by soybean oil and palm oil, and with peanut oil as the least good performing” (p. 130). As for land use: “palm oil and soybean oil are the oils associated with the smallest contribution, followed by rapeseed oil, and with sunflower oil and peanut oil as the oils with the largest net occupation of land” (p. 130). On the subject of net water consumption: “sunflower oil had the smallest impact, followed by rapeseed oil, palm oil and soybean oil, and with peanut oil as the oil with the largest contribution” (p. 130). Do you see the conundrum? Depending upon the impact you look at you get a slightly different view of what’s the most “sustainable” oil – save for peanut, which performs poorly according to every indicator. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this study neglects entirely social impacts. But what if it turned out that peanut oil was the most socially sustainable? What do you do with that information as a consumer? Alternatively, LCA can also provide “big-picture” views of the food system that go beyond specific commodities (as evidenced in the previous section when talking about food miles). A report by the USDA offers some insight into the amount of energy that goes into making food in the US – more than 17,000 calories on a per-capita daily basis – and the allocation of that energy (Canning et al. 2010). More than half of those 17,000+ calories are consumed to make highly processed – “junk” – food (see Figure 9.3). A third goes into the making of animal products like meat, eggs, and milk. A sixth goes to grains,

174  Food justice and the environment

Oils, sugars and other processed foods 5,500 calories

Meat and eggs 4,000 calories

Beverages 3,500 calories

Dairy 1,500 calories

Fruits and vegetables 1,900 calories

Cereal grains 800 calories

Figure 9.3  Breakdown of the 17,000+ calories (daily per capita) consumed by US food system Source: Based on Canning et al. (2010) and Bomford (2011).

fruits, and vegetables. In short, our energy investments go into the production of the opposite of what we should be eating. Eating well, it turns out, appears to be less energy intensive than eating poorly. As we experiment with trying to develop models that support regenerative food systems – a concept from the last chapter – LCAs allow us to assess the costs and benefits of our efforts as we plot paths forward. An example of this comes from Milan, Italy, through the development of an innovative food hub. These innovative supply chains were assessed by an LCA approach based on primary data collected from the involved start-ups. Energy requirements and associated global warming potential indicators were assessed and coupled with productivity indicators. The results show that the impacts related to the practices implemented (i.e., organic agriculture, including intercropping, agroforestry, ancient grains, etc.) decrease by an average of 55 percent in energy consumption and 65 percent on global warming potential when compared to conventional supply chains (Caputo et al. 2020). LCA: yet another tool to help us imagine different ways to produce, distribute, and consume food.

Virtual water and water footprint The United Nations predicts water scarcity (rather than arable land) will be the numberone constraint on food security for many years to come (United Nations 2019; see Box 9.2). A report released by Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research warns of an impending “perfect storm” (Merrill Lynch 2014). The analysts note that 768 million people around the world have no access to clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion are without adequate sanitation. The analysts warn that half of the world’s population will be

Food, agriculture, and the environment 175

dealing with peak water conditions (when demand exceeds the rate at which fresh water supplies can be replenished) by 2030. In financial terms, the report estimates that by 2050 as much as 45  percent of global projected GDP could be at risk, as approximately 50 nations are expected to be involved in conflicts over water.

Box 9.2  China’s Water Woes China’s water problems are well known. Eighty percent of the country’s water lies in southern China, beyond the reach of twelve Chinese provinces representing 41 percent of its total population, 38 percent of its farms, 46 percent of its industry, and 50 percent of its power generation. Eight of these twelve provinces are currently experiencing “acute water scarcity,” in four provinces water is merely “scarce,” and two provinces are mostly desert. And the problem is only getting worse, as 28,000 rivers in China have dried up over the past 25 years (Davies and Westgate 2018). Compounding matters is the fact that coal mining is a water-intensive industry and 85 percent of coal reserves in China are located in provinces where water is scarce and must be shared with a large agriculture industry. Twenty percent of all water used in China is for mining, processing, or consumption of coal, and another 70 percent is for agricultural purposes, leaving very little for anything else (Davies and Westgate 2018).

The concept of virtual water was first introduced by Allan (1998) as a way to describe total volume of water embedded in agricultural products, often in the context of trade to quantify how much of the blue stuff water-poor regions import through water intensive agricultural products. The water footprint is a closely related concept – identical in many respects except it is centrally a sustainability indicator (whereas virtual water is often used in the context of trade). Hoekstra and Hung (2002) introduced the water footprint, building upon the concept “ecological footprint.” A food’s water footprint is often broken down into green, blue, and grey water. The green water footprint refers to the use of water resources (such as rainwater that does not become runoff) that go toward the growing of crops. A blue water footprint denotes the utilization of water resources – surface and groundwater – along the supply chain of a product. And the grey water footprint represents the volume of freshwater required to assimilate and adequately dilute the load of pollutants that resulted from the production and processing of commodities. Table 9.5 lists the top twenty-five water footprints of national production (in million cubic meters of water per year). India, China, and the US make up the top three countries (in that order), each possessing a total water footprint that is at least twice the size of any other country, including even fourth-placed Brazil. Looking only at total national water footprints tends to disadvantage large, populous nations that by nature of their size and population consume a lot of water (China, India, and the US are the world’s top three populated countries, in that order). An arguably fairer comparison would be to rank countries according to their per-capita national production water footprints. This brings us to Table 9.6, which lists the top twenty-five per-capita water footprints of national production (again in million cubic meters of water per year). The outcome of this ranking is significantly different from that contained in the previous

176  Food justice and the environment Table 9.5  Top 25 water food-prints of national production (Mm3/yr)* Country

India China USA Brazil Russian Federation Indonesia Nigeria Argentina Pakistan Canada Thailand Mexico Australia Philippines Ukraine Turkey Iran Viet Nam Malaysia Bangladesh Spain France Myanmar Ethiopia Kazakhstan

Water footprint of crop production

Water footprint of grazing

Water footprint of animal water supply

Green

Blue

Grey

Green

Blue

Total

716004 623881 611971 303743 304839 285654 190600 157605 40561 120340 109585 83105 81255 104860 98614 75697 43027 65706 81131 62919 51561 62700 74939 56485 54175

231428 118941 95905 8934 10358 11468 1087 4306 74272 1607 17003 13885 13363 3150 2573 15236 39823 6528 1344 7825 14136 2849 2272 1173 8527

99429 223761 118160 15917 11609 20778 605 4958 21805 18165 7227 11382 7372 3717 5161 9449 8826 9620 3001 10138 8292 8018 1133 327 387

42644 81782 120996 132223 15447 6693 5265 18589 34113 5502 5194 25916 32240 3886 4562 8158 13212 4425 400 3342 5530 5672 650 18858 4417

4707 9848 3361 3158 912 470 455 773 907 558 221 995 1024 279 378 334 415 444 71 434 750 778 273 638 162

1094212 1058212 950393 463974 343164 325062 198012 186230 171656 146171 139230 135283 135254 115892 111288 108874 105303 86723 85948 84658 80269 80017 79265 77481 67668

Source: Hoekstra (2015, 2019); Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2020). Mm3/yr = Million cubic meters of water per year

*

table – China and India, for example, do not even make an appearance. At the top of this ranking is Australia. Its agricultural sector consumes the equivalent of 6,630 cubic meters of (“green,” “blue,” and “grey”) water per person. Allow me to put that figure into some perspective. The UN argues that humans have a fundamental right to between 20 and 40 liters per person per day, considerably more than the amount to which millions around the world presently have access (Cunha 2009). There are 1,000 liters in one cubic meter of water. You do the math. To put it plainly: the agricultural sector in Australia uses much more than its fair share of water. Not all foods, as revealed in Table  9.7, are equal when assessed according to their respective water footprints. The relative thirstiness of ground beef (“bovine meat” in the table) is due in large part to the beef cow’s consumption of grains. Even after factoring in nutritional value, the (global average) confined beef cow requires 10.16 liters of water for every kcal produced. As a protein source, it fares better than only nuts and fruits on a liter-per-gram-of-protein basis (Hoekstra 2015). Nuts also require copious amounts of water. Compared to other products mentioned in the table they are especially large users of blue water. Why do you think that is?

Table 9.6 Top 25 per-capita water footprints of national production (Mm3/yr)* Country

Total

Australia Paraguay Argentina Canada Kazakhstan New Zealand Uruguay Bolivia Niger Malaysia Guinea-Bissau USA Mongolia Belarus Lithuania Belize Hungary Papua New Guinea Brazil Russian Federation Ukraine Ecuador Estonia Thailand Bulgaria

0.0066 0.0057 0.0048 0.0045 0.0045 0.0040 0.0038 0.0035 0.0035 0.0034 0.0032 0.0032 0.0031 0.0028 0.0028 0.0026 0.0026 0.0025 0.0025 0.0024 0.0024 0.0022 0.0022 0.0022 0.0022

Source: Hoekstra (2015, 2019); Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2020). * Mm3/yr = Million cubic meters of water per year

Table 9.7 The global average water footprint of crop and animal products in relation to their nutritional value Food item

Water footprint per unit of weight (L/kg)

Nutritional Content

Green

Blue Grey Total

Calorie Protein Fat Calorie (kcal/kg) (g/kg) (g/kg) (L/kcal)

Protein Fat (L/g protein) (L/g fat)

52 43 16 147 228 220 141 1367 86 244 313 465 459 457

285 240 827 460 3208 2908 3412 2500 560 1425 1440 7692 2786 2059

.69 1.34 .47 2.09 .51 .81 1.19 3.63 1.82 2.29 3 .72 2.15 4.25

0 26 31 180 21 16 19 139 31 29 34 0 57 63

0 154 226 348 112 11 180 47 33 33 43 6.4 23 54

10.19

112

153

Sugar crops 130 Vegetables 194 Starchy roots 327 Fruits 726 Cereals 1232 Oil crops 2023 Pulses 3180 Nuts 7016 Milk 863 Eggs 2592 Chicken meat 3545 Butter 4695 Pig meat 4907 Sheep/goat 8253 meat Bovine meat 14414 Source: Hoekstra 2015.

15 85 43 89 184 121 734 680 72 429 467 393 622 53

197 322 387 962 1644 2364 4055 9063 1020 3265 4325 5553 5988 8763

550 451 15415 1513

0 12 13 5.3 80 149 215 65 33 111 127 0 105 139

0 2.1 1.7 2.8 15 209 23 193 31 100 100 872 259 163

138

101

Water footprint per unit of nutritional value

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How crops are watered also matters. The efficiency of traditional gravity irrigation, a method used widely in the developing world, is about 40 percent. Sprinkler systems have an efficiency range of between 60 and 70 percent, and drip irrigation systems are between 80 and 90 percent efficient (Seckler 1996). There are very good reasons farmers in less affluent countries rely upon the less expensive, albeit highly inefficient, gravity method. Most lack access to credit to make the necessary capital investments (for reasons tied to, as discussed in earlier chapters, macroeconomic policies imposed upon these countries by entities like the World Bank). And often the governments of these countries are just as strapped for cash, making massive public-sector investments to infrastructure impossible.

Water: to privatize or not Diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day – that’s more deaths than from AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Diarrheal diseases account for 1 in 9 child deaths worldwide, making it the second-leading cause of death among children under the age of 5 (CDC 2015). An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than a typical person in a developing country slum uses over an entire day (United Nations 2014). People living in the slums often pay five to ten times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city (United Nations 2014). As more countries dump untreated household and industrial water into their rivers and lakes (as in the aforementioned case of China), that sewage inevitably makes its way into the food system. An estimated one-tenth of the world’s population consumes foods produced using wastewater, the result of at least 20 million hectares in 50 countries being irrigated with raw or partially treated sewage (Murtaza et al. 2010). Wastewater treatment varies greatly by region. In Latin America, 14 percent of wastewater is treated, while in Asia, Europe, and North America, the figures are 35 percent, 66 percent, and 90 percent, respectively (Murtaza et al. 2010). Eighty percent of the world’s wastewater is released into the environment without adequate treatment. That is not only unsafe from a public health perspective, it is a waste of nutrients and other resources that could be recovered (World Bank 2020). These statistics become all the more remarkable when one realizes the impressive returns on investments that can be realized when a country puts money towards its water infrastructure. According to a report by the United Nations (2014), safe drinking water, proper sanitation, and efficient irrigation systems contribute to economic growth while also saving governments money. Each US$1 invested in clean water produces a fourfold return on investment (United Nations 2014). The reasons that have gotten us to this state are many. In the case of agriculture, the green revolution certainly has not helped things along. Seventy percent of the freshwater taken out of rivers, lakes, and aquifers goes towards growing food and raising animals (while 22 percent goes toward industry and 8 percent toward domestic use) (IFAD 2015). This helps contextualize why many of the world’s major rivers can no longer be counted on to reach the sea, like the Colorado in the US and Australia’s Murray River. The lower reaches of the Nile used to carry 32 billion cubic meters of water annually; that figure is now down to less than 2 billion. It’s a similar story with the Indus river in Pakistan (a.k.a. “Asia’s Nile”), which has lost 90 percent of its volume over the last 60 years. Besides the green revolution, there is a broader political economic context in which water use must be situated. For example, many less affluent countries are exporting vast sums of water in the form of thirsty commodities like grain, fruit, vegetables, coffee, and cut flowers. Their indebtedness to such entities as the World Bank and International

Food, agriculture, and the environment 179

Monetary Fund (IMF), both briefly discussed earlier, requires the production of these high-value commodities to pay down the country’s debt. There has also been a tremendous push by international monetary organizations like the World Bank in recent decades to privatize water. (Water privatization describes the practice of having the private sector versus the government participate in the provision of water services and sanitation.) The practice of privatizing water, however, has its critics. As some argue, it is absurd at its face to take a free liquid that falls from the sky and sell it for as much as four times what we pay for gas. There must be sound logic driving this push to privatize. So what is it? The thinking goes something like this: incorrectly priced water causes people to use that resource irresponsibly. The choice, however, is not between free or privatized water but between government-subsidized or privatized water. The latter scenario, however, cares nothing about affordability, as the goal under privatization scenarios is cost recovery of the investment plus a little more – namely, profit. Never mind that most affluent countries have public water services and would never dream of handing control of them over to a profit-seeking corporation. Also never mind that water is no less “incorrectly priced” in affluent nations. The cost recovery for US Bureau of Reclamation irrigation projects averages around 10 to 20 percent total costs. Irrigation subsidies for the semi-arid states west of the Missouri River exceed US$500 million a year (Peterson 2009; see also Toan 2016). And let’s not forget, much of this subsidized water in the US is used to raise subsidized crops like corn, rice, wheat, oats, and soybeans – a double subsidy. To ensure this shift toward water privatization within developing countries these nations are now unable to borrow from the World Bank or IMF without having in place a domestic water privatization policy. Consequently, most public utility privatization deals in the Global South are the result of the direct participation of these international monetary institutions. As Michael Goldman (2007: 794) explains: That participation comes in the form of a threat, since every government official knows that the Bank/IMF capital spigots can always be shut off for those governments refusing to conform to their loan conditions. As overwhelming debt burdens have put tremendous pressure on borrowing-country governments and created dire social conditions in their countries [. . .] the Bank and IMF are using the carrot of debt relief to foist water policy reform on borrowing country governments. Unfortunately, the promises of privatization have proven largely hollow. No profitseeking firm can expect to expand their services to a population that cannot pay. So the water situation for the poor remains deplorable in many countries (e.g., Twum and Abubakari 2020). It is also worth asking if water is comparable to, for example, telecommunications or transportation. While one could live with poor phone service or intermittent delays at the bus station, could the same be said of the life-giving material of water? I am thinking especially of those living on the margins where diseases like diarrhea are killers rather than just inconveniences. Water is also different because it requires such enormous infrastructure investments, at the beginning as well as in the form of maintenance. It is estimated that 75 percent of the costs of running a water utility are for infrastructure alone (Lappé 2014). Profit-seeking firms are interested in cutting costs in order to maximize profits, which is precisely what you see happening among private water firms – cuts to spending on infrastructure. This is, not uncoincidentally, what happened when the private sector in different countries

180  Food justice and the environment

around the world took over “public” transportation, from Argentina (Ramamurti 1997) to Pakistan (Imran 2009) and Australia (Mees 2005). Funding to maintain the infrastructure that made the service efficient, dependable, and reliable was cut drastically.

Metabolic rift To offer a more explicitly theoretical approach to thinking about the ecological footprint of food systems I turn now to the metabolic rift thesis. The writings of Karl Marx inform this framework. Within this growing body of literature, scholars elaborate on Marx’s argument that the development of capitalism alienates humans from the natural environment while disrupting traditional practices (see, e.g., Clark and York 2008; Foster 1999). Mid-nineteenth-century environmental crises  – from declining agricultural soil fertility to rising levels of sewage in cities – and the equally deplorable living conditions of urban workers were linked, according to Marx, to a disruption (a “rift”) in a previously sustainable socio-ecological metabolism. This rift, for Marx, is tied to the expansion of capitalist modes of production and urbanization (the latter being made possible because of the rise of former and in particular the displacement of small-scale agriculture). This process created a rift in ecological systems leading to environmental degradation at points of production and consumption. Let’s make this argument more concrete with the problem of what was called “soil exhaustion.” Concerns over soil exhaustion began in the early 1800s in Britain and later in North America and continental Europe in parallel with their emerging capitalist economies. John Bellamy Foster (1999) provides a thorough account of early market responses to this phenomenon. Loss of natural soil fertility resulted in exponential increases in bone and Peruvian guano imports. Over time, however, inputs such as bone and the dung of sea birds gave way to artificial fertilizers. Initially, these fertilizer inputs remained in short supply. Yet once a process to produce synthetic nitrogen was developed in 1913 artificial inputs became abundant. Early disruptions to the soil nutrient cycle were of great concern to Marx. Marx (1963: 1962–3) notes that “every moment the modern application of chemistry is changing the nature of the soil [. . .]. Fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time.” Drawing inspiration from famed German chemist Justus von Liebig and his (later in life) ecological critique of “modern” agricultural methods, Marx (1981: 949) notes how the expansion of capital “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Soil exhaustion during this period has been linked to the expansion of capitalism, which drew people into the cities, forced specialization, and increasingly made individuals dependent upon the (low) wages garnered by the selling of their labor (Foster 1999). Disconnecting people from the land caused major disruptions in the soil nutrient cycle in the form of too few nutrients in the countryside and far too much in the cities, often in the form of sewage – the summer of 1858 in London was famously known as the summer of the Big Stink, as the Thames’s smell was so foul (from excess “nutrients”) that lawmakers were forced to flee Parliament for the countryside. Such disruptions reeked ecological and social havoc, a point Marx witnessed firsthand in London, where “they can do nothing better with the excrement produced by 4½ million people than pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense” (Marx 1981: 195). And the “solution” to this problem – was it to repair the rift by bringing agricultural practices in line with ecological

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limits? No; the solution was to exacerbate the rift through artificial fertilizers. This solution may have relieved certain tensions in the short term, but it failed to deal with the root of the rift – namely, producing food in ways that ignore ecological limits. In Marx’s (1976: 638) words: [A]ll processes in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. [. . .] Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker. We are living with the consequences of this rift. The first European Nitrogen Assessment (ENA) was released in 2011. It documents that nitrogen pollution is costing each person in Europe around £130 to £650 (€150 to €740) annually. The ENA represents the first time that the multiple threats of nitrogen pollution, including its impact on climate change and biodiversity, have been valued in economic terms at a continental scale. The study, carried out by 200 experts from twenty-one countries and eighty-nine organizations, calculates that the annual cost of damage caused by nitrogen throughout Europe is £60 to £280 billion (€70 to €320 billion); a figure that is more than double the income gained from using nitrogen fertilizers in European agriculture (Sutton et al. 2011). Likewise, global agriculture has applied phosphorus over the last century with near abandon. This has resulted in, among other things, the eutrophication (over-fertilization) of many watersheds. This occurs when excess phosphorus leaches into freshwater stores and feeds algal blooms that in turn starve fish of oxygen and produce “dead zones” (the Gulf of Mexico is a famous dead zone). The production process of the material itself comes with a sizeable ecological footprint, as each ton of phosphate processed from phosphate rock generates 5 tons of phosphogypsum (which is radioactive). Just as troubling is the fact that our phosphorus reserves appear to be running out, though there is debate over just how much remains (Grossman 2019). The International Geological Correlation Program estimated in 1987 that there could be as much as 163,000 million metric tons of phosphate rock remaining in the planet. This represents more than 13,000 million metric tons of phosphorus, which, at the time, at 1987 rates of consumption, suggested a supply that would last hundreds of years. There are two problems with this calculation, however. First: we use drastically more phosphate today than we did back in the 1980s. Second: the estimate includes types of rocks that are either impractical to mine or that lie in environmentally sensitive areas. A study published in 2013 contains two models, a best- and worse-case scenario (Mohr and Evans 2013). In both, peak phosphorous – when demand exceeds supply – is expected to occur in the next fifteen years. To be clear, that is not to say we are going to run out of this resource in fifteen years. It does suggest, however, that phosphorous will become increasingly viewed as a strategic geopolitical resource in the years ahead. But in some ways, the exact amount left in the Earth is less important than where those reserves are located. It is becoming a geopolitical resource, as countries realize they need it if they hope to keep their citizens fed. COVID-19 drove this point home. Hubei province in China was at the epicenter of the virus for most of early 2020. That province has more than 30 percent of China’s phosphate capacity, and China is easily the world’s largest producer, consumer, and exporter of phosphorous. Significant phosphorous supply chain disruptions were also recorded in India in 2020, which, too, is a large phosphate producer and importer. These supply chain

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shocks pushed up the global price of phosphorous through the duration of the global pandemic (Williams 2021). A number of solutions have been explored in regards to repairing the metabolic rift created through modern agricultural techniques – in many ways, this is exactly where the aforementioned regenerative agriculture comes into the picture. Suggestions include leaving the inedible biomass in the field, to be returned to the soil. Another option is to make better use of animal waste, as both manure and animal bones are phosphorus sources. Or human waste: half the phosphorus humans excrete is in their urine (it is also a rich source of nitrogen). Recovering that phosphorus, however, is more difficult than it sounds. In cities around the world, urban planners decided to develop infrastructures that mix human excreta with industrial wastewater streams. Unfortunately, because the latter carry contaminants not fit for food systems, this essentially nullifies the value of the entire wastewater stream. Those systems would therefore need to be reconfigured. If urine is not mixed with fecal matter in the toilet, the urine (as an essentially sterile compound) can be used safely with simple storage. An illustrative case of this involves two towns in Sweden. They have mandated that all new toilets be urine-diverting, sending the phosphorus-rich liquid to either a communal urine storage tank or separate tanks under each house. Local farmers then collect the urine and apply it on their fields.

Climate change Climate change poses a tremendous threat to food security. The FAO (e.g., FAO 2019) has highlighted the following populations as warranting special attention due to their heightened food-related vulnerabilities due to climate change. •

Low-income groups in drought- and flood-prone areas with poor food distribution infrastructure and limited access to emergency response. • Low- to middle-income groups in flood-prone areas that may lose homes, stored food, personal possessions, and means of obtaining an adequate income. • Farmers whose land risks becoming submerged or damaged due to sea level rise or saltwater intrusions. • Farmers that lack sufficient capital that would allow them to adjust to changing temperature and rainfall conditions. • Low-income livestock keepers in dry lands where changes in rainfall patterns will affect forage availability and quality. • Low-income livestock keepers who, due to heat waves, will lose animals from excessive heat. • Fishers whose infrastructure for fishing activities (e.g., port, landing, and storage facilities, fish ponds, and processing areas) becomes submerged or damaged by sealevel rise, flooding, or other extreme weather events. • Fishing communities whose livelihoods depend on the presence of healthy coral reefs for food and protection from significant weather events. • Fishers and aqua-farmers whose catch suffers from shifts in fish distribution and the productivity of aquatic ecosystems due to changes in ocean currents and temperatures and/or because of increased discharge of freshwater into oceans. While climate change is particularly harmful to the world’s poor – who, coincidently, also bear the least responsibility for it – its presence will be felt by all as it impacts agricultural systems around the world. Specialized monocultures are bred to grow (and thrive)

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within a narrowly defined window of optimal conditions. As those conditions change the yield of “high-performance” crops will suffer terribly. Climate change also increases the risk of significant weather events that could lead to crop failures and massive unemployment among landless rural peasants whose main source of income is field labor. Areas where precipitation is expected to increase face more frequent and severe floods as well as increased erosion and reservoir sedimentation, whereas areas expecting decreases in rainfall face decreased water availability and increased droughts. Though future precipitation is notoriously difficult to predict with a high degree of certainty, models agree that increases in precipitation are mainly expected at high latitudes, while decreases will be recorded in subtropical and lower-latitude regions (FAO 2019). Climate change will also have a significant impact on livestock and fisheries, particularly for producers in poorer nations that lack the capital and credit to adapt to inevitable environmental changes. Climate variability will negatively impact livestock productivity due to the stress placed on rangelands and to the animals themselves. As for the impact of climate change on fisheries, this represents a perfect storm of sorts thanks to predicted increases in water temperature and oxygen demand, decreases in pH, water quality, and volume, and a higher frequency of disease (FAO 2015b). Agricultural systems are not only negatively impacted by climate change. FAO (2014b) estimates of greenhouse gas data show that global emissions from agriculture, forestry, and fisheries have nearly doubled over the past fifty years and are poised to increase an additional 30 percent by 2050 if steps are not immediately taken to reduce them. Digging further down, we see that global emissions from energy use in the agricultural sector have increased a whopping 75 percent since 1990. The above data are not just referencing the emissions linked to tractors and other forms of heavy equipment. In fact, on-farm fossil fuel consumption is responsible for a relatively small percentage of farms’ GHG emissions, especially compared to the significant N2O footprint from the production of fertilizer and methane emissions from livestock, which is an energy-intensive process and points to some of those emissions increases in the energy sector of agriculture. For instance, major GHG emissions associated with nitrogen-containing fertilizer production are CO2, emitted when natural gas is combusted as part of ammonia synthesis, and N2O, emitted during nitric acid production. As this is a social science textbook, let me close this section by talking about farmer perception of climate change. There is a rich literature looking at the subject, which I will only briefly review. We know, for instance, that so-called climate science literacy (e.g., Azeiteiro et  al. 2018) is poorly correlated with a belief in, and support for action toward, global warming (Arbuckle et al. 2015). Dietz et al. (2007), for example, report no relationship between self-rated knowledge about climate change and support for climate change policy. Zahran et al. (2006), conversely, found a correlation between climate change policy support and knowledge about the greenhouse effect. Another study examines survey data of (1) the US public, (2) scientists who were actively publishing on energy technologies, and (3) congressional policy advisors (Bolsen et al. 2015). The authors found “evidence that the ideological divide about global warming gets significantly larger according to respondents’ knowledge about politics, energy, and science” (p. 271). The following quote gives the authors’ conclusion further context and force. We plot [.  .  .] the predicted probability of expressing a belief among liberals and conservatives that global warming is happening and human induced, as knowledge increases from its minimum to its maximum value, holding all other covariates at their

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means. The predicted value for the belief global warming is happening on a 7-point scale among the least knowledgeable conservative in the public sample is 5.32 (where 1 = definitely not happening and 7 = definitely happening); however, the predicted value for the most knowledgeable conservative on this question drops to 3.72. (p. 284) Put simply: among the conservative sample more knowledge led to an increased likelihood of climate change denial. While public polls tend to employ straightforward measures of beliefs about climate change (e.g., “Do you believe climate change is real?” [Penrod 2017]), scholars rarely use them as predictors of policy support or behavior (Arbuckle et al. 2015). One reason for this is rooted in a genuine methodological concern, namely, we know responses can vary depending on the words used in the survey instrument. In a study of Midwestern farmers, Arbuckle et al. (2014) report respondents were more likely to acknowledge a changing climate if terms like “extreme weather” and “weather variability” are used instead of “climate change.” It is also important to remember that policies and behaviors directed at a changing climate are themselves divergent and tied intimately to numerous value judgments (Gardiner and Weisbach 2016). There is evidence indicating, for example, that farmers who most trust and received climate change information from traditional agricultural organizations (e.g., Farm Bureau), as opposed to environmentally leaning organizations (e.g., Sierra Club), are less likely to believe in climate change and thus express less support for mitigation policies (Arbuckle et al. 2015). It is also important to understand that asking questions about climate change in the context of adaptation strategies may not be received the same as questions asked in the context of mitigation. While adaptation is often initiated at the local level by individuals, households, and/or communities in reaction to specific threats and climatic events, mitigation is generally framed as requiring action at state, national, and/or international levels (Eriksen et al. 2015). In one study, farmers who did not believe in climate change expressed little support for mitigation efforts and yet voiced a general willingness to adapt (Arbuckle et al. 2015; see Box 9.3).

Box 9.3  Cultural Values: Sometimes Problems Cannot Be Solved by Pointing to Facts Individualism–collectivism (also referred to as individualism–communitarianism) is a widely investigated construct in the social and social psychological sciences (e.g., Santos et al. 2017). Individualism is generally conceptualized as an outlook that promotes individual liberties and freedoms and that sees personal fulfillment as something accomplished by self-directed, autonomous, and separate agents. Conversely, collectivism fosters an interconnected view of the self, an outlook that believes personal fulfillment is achieved by collaborations with others and often in concert with institutes that are expressions of this collective will – i.e., government. Another well-studied dimension refers to hierarchy–egalitarianism values, which speaks to individuals’ attitudes toward social orderings and authority  – e.g., those falling near the “hierarchy” end of the continuum see value in inequality and difference

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and subscribe to survival-of-the-fittest types of attitudes (e.g., Kahan et al. 2011). Research finds that individuals holding individualistic values often hold hierarchical values, and those with collectivist values tend to also express egalitarian values (e.g., Lacroix and Gifford 2018; Pepermans and Maeseele 2016). These outlooks also tell us a lot about how people see the world and its problems. Take the example of climate change denial. When trying to communicate climate science to individuals holding hierarchical and individualist values it would be unwise to point to the scientific consensus that exists around the topic given this group’s general unease with communal institutions. For this group, “consensus” might be viewed as groupthink or some other nefarious influence (Douglas 2015). This also helps give context to the study finding that more knowledge about climate change made some more skeptical about it – we need to look people’s cultural values to help us understand what that information means to them.

Evidence suggests adaptation has become routinized into best management practices; as something any “good” farmer (Morton et  al. 2017) ought to do regardless of their beliefs about climate change. A  survey of Utah ranchers found that 61  percent of the respondents were preparing for future droughts by implementing conservation planning, reducing their stocking rates, diversifying their ranch’s income, and participating in insurance programs (Coppock 2011). A study of Wyoming ranchers likewise found widespread adoption of adaptation strategies for drought, like reducing herd size (Kachergis et  al. 2014). A  study of Colorado ranchers, similarly, identified widespread implementation of adaptation practices, from changes to herd and pasture management practices to storing hay, sharing assets with neighbors, and acquiring insurance as regularly implemented adaptation strategies to anticipate future droughts (Knapp 2013).

Transition. . . The next chapter tackles subjects that I have been thus far subtly addressing: food security and food sovereignty. Their importance, however, is too great to be relegated to a few points scattered here and there. In what follows, I provide a historical review of both concepts, noting where they overlap as well as where they do not. The following chapter also builds on topics from this chapter. After all, any conception of food security/sovereignty ought to imply ecological sustainability.

Discussion questions 1 What can be gleaned from research looking at farmers’ perception of climate change to help us understand why the subject has become so politicized across society as a whole? 2 Why has “food miles” become such a popular metric for grasping (correctly or incorrectly) food sustainability? 3 Earlier I mentioned that the metabolic rift perpetuates, and is perpetuated by, a false dichotomy between “humans” and “nature.” How is capitalism’s survival predicated on the continuation of these dichotomies?

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Suggested readings: introductory level FAO. 2019. FAO Framework Methodology for Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments of Forests and Forest Dependent People. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization, UN, www.fao.org/3/ca7064en/ CA7064EN.pdf. UN News. 2020. Address Water Scarcity ‘Immediately and Boldly’, Urges UN Agriculture Agency Chief. United Nations, November 20, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1078592.

Suggested readings: advanced level Carolan, M. 2020. Filtering Perceptions of Climate Change and Biotechnology: Values and Views Among Colorado Farmers and Ranchers, Climatic Change 159(1): 121–139. Foster, J.B. 1999. Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology, American Journal of Sociology 105(2): 366–405. Stevenson, E.G. 2019. Water Access Transformations: Metrics, Infrastructure, and Inequities, Water Security 8, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasec.2019.100047.

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Food, agriculture, and the environment 187 Douglas, H. 2015. Politics and Science: Untangling Values, Ideologies, and Reasons, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 658(1): 296–306. Eriksen, S.H., A.J. Nightingale, and H. Eakin. 2015. Reframing Adaptation: The Political Nature of Climate Change Adaptation, Global Environmental Change 35: 523–533. FAO. 2014a. Food Wastage Footprint: Full Cost Accounting. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, www.fao.org/3/a-i3991e.pdf. FAO. 2014b. Agriculture’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the Rise. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, April 11, www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/216137/icode/. FAO. 2015a. Natural Capital Impacts in Agriculture. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/nr/sustainability_pathways/docs/Natural_ Cap ital_Impacts_in_Agriculture_final.pdf. FAO. 2015b. FAO Assessing Climate Change Vulnerability in Fisheries and Aquaculture. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization, UN, www.fao.org/3/a-i5109e.pdf. FAO. 2019. FAO Framework Methodology for Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments of Forests and Forest Dependent People. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization, UN, www.fao.org/3/ca7064en/ CA7064EN.pdf. Foster, J.B. 1999. Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology, American Journal of Sociology 105(2): 366–405. Frey, Sibylle, and J. John Barrett. 2007. Our Health, Our Environment: The Ecological Footprint of What We Eat, Paper prepared for the International Ecological Footprint Conference, Cardiff, May 8–10, www.brass.cf.ac.uk/uploads/Frey_A33.pdf. Gardiner, S., and D. Weisbach. 2016. Debating Climate Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Gikunju, J. 2009. Kenya’s Flying Vegetables. Africa Research Institute, London, www.africaresearch institute.org/files/policy-voices/docs/Kenyas-Flying- Vegetables-Small-farmers-and-the-food-milesdebate-0V6S400WZM.pdf. Goldman, Michael. 2007. How ‘What for All’ Policy Become Hegemonic: The Power of the World Bank and Its Transnational Policy Networks, Geoforum 38: 786–800. Grossman, D. 2019. Are We Reaching Peak Phosphorus? Maybe. Popular Science, November 4, www. popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a29391215/phosphorus- shortage/. Hoekstra, A.Y. 2015. The Water Footprint: The Relation Between Human Consumption and Water Use, In The Water We Eat: Combining Virtual Water and Water Footprints, edited by M. Antonelli and F. Greco, Pp. 35–50. Switzerland: Springer. Hoekstra, A.Y. 2019. Green-Blue Water Accounting in a Soil Water Balance, Advances in Water Resources 129: 112–117. Hoekstra, A.Y., and P. Hung. 2002. Virtual Water Trade: A  Quantification of Virtual Water Flows Between Nations in Relation to International Crop Trade, In Value of Water Research Report Series, edited by UNESCO- IHE, Pp. 22–40. Delft: Institute for Water Education. IFAD. 2015. Water Facts and Figures. Rome, Italy: International Fund for Agricultural Development, www.ifad.org/english/water/key.htm. Imran, M. 2009. Public Transport in Pakistan: A Critical Overview, Journal of Public Transportation 12(2), http://doi.org/10.5038/2375-0901.12.2.4. Kachergis, E., J.D. Derner, B.B. Cutts, L.M. Roche, V.T. Eviner, M.N. Lubell, and K.W. Tate. 2014. Increasing Flexibility in Rangeland Management During Drought, Ecosphere 5, https://doi. org/10.1890/ES13-00402.1. Kahan, D.M., H. Jenkins-Smith, and D. Braman. 2011. Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus, Journal of Risk Research 14(2): 147–174. Knapp, C. 2013. Engaging Local Perspectives for Improved Conservation and Climate Change Adaptation, PhD Thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK. Lacroix, K., and R. Gifford. 2018. Psychological Barriers to Energy Conservation Behavior: The Role of Worldviews and Climate Change Risk Perception. Environmental Behavior 50(7): 749–780. Lappé, Anna. 2014. World Bank Wants Water Privatized, Despite Risks. American Aljazeera, April 17, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/water- managementprivatizationworldbankgroupifc. html.

188  Food justice and the environment Leach, A., and J. Mumford. 2008. Pesticide Environmental Accounting: A Method for Assessing the External Costs of Individual Pesticide Applications, Environmental Pollution 151: 139–147. Marx, K. 1963 (1847). The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International. Marx, K. 1976 (1867). Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage. Marx, K. 1981 (1863–65). Capital, Vol. 3. New York: Vintage. Mekonnen, M.M., and A.Y. Hoekstra. 2020. Sustainability of the Blue Water Footprint of Crops, Advances in Water Resources 143: 103679. Merrill Lynch. 2014. A  Transforming World, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, April  30, http:// corp.bankofamerica.com/documents/16303/855792/The_Thundering_Word_Ma croThemes_ Report_043014.pdf. Mees, P. 2005. Privatization of Rail and Tram Services in Melbourne: What Went Wrong? Transport Reviews 25(4): 433–449. Molina-Besch, K., F. Wikström, and H. Williams. 2019. The Environmental Impact of Packaging in Food Supply Chains – Does Life Cycle Assessment of Food Provide the Full Picture? The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 24(1): 37–50. Mohr, S., and G. Evans. 2013. Projections of Future Phosphorus Production, PHILICA No. 380, www. philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=380. Morton, L.W., J.M. McGuire, and A.D. Cast. 2017. A Good Farmer Pays Attention to the Weather, Climate Risk Management 15: 18–31. Murtaza, Ghulam, A. Ghafoor, Manzoor Qadir, G. Owens, M. Aziz, and M. Zia. 2010. Disposal and Use of Sewage on Agricultural Lands in Pakistan: A Review, Pedosphere 20(1): 23–34. Penrod, E. 2017. Are You a Utahn Who Believes in Climate Change? You’re Not Alone. The Salt Lake Tribune, October 31, www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2017/10/28/are-you- a-utahn-who-believesin-climate-change-youre-not-alone/. Pepermans, Y., and P. Maeseele. 2016. The Politicization of Climate Change: Problem or Solution? Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change 7(4): 478–485. Peterson, E. Wesley. 2009. A Billion Dollars a Day: The Economics and Politics of Agricultural Subsides. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Pimentel, David. 2005. Environmental and Economic Costs of the Application of Pesticides Primarily in the United States, Environment, Development and Sustainability 7: 229–252. Poore, J., and T. Nemecek. 2018. Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts Through Producers and Consumers, Science 360(6392): 987–992. Pretty, Jules, Craig Brett, David Gee, Rachel Hine, Chris Mason, James Morison, Matthew Rayment, Gert Van Der Bijl, and Thomas Dobbs. 2001. Policy Challenges and Priorities for Internalizing the Externalities of Modern Agriculture, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 44(2): 263–283. Ramamurti, R. 1997. Testing the Limits of Privatization: Argentine Railroads, World Development 25(12): 1973–1993. Santos, H.C., M.E. Varnum, and I. Grossmann. 2017. Global Increases in Individualism, Psychological Science 28(9): 1228–1239. Schmidt, Jannick. 2015. Life Cycle Assessment of Five Vegetable Oils, Journal of Cleaner Production 87: 130–138. Seckler, D. 1996. The New Era of Water Resources Management: From ‘Dry’ to ‘Wet’ Water Savings, Research Report, International Irrigation Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka, www.iwmi. cgiar.org/Publications/IWMI_Research_Reports/PDF/pub001/REPORT 01.PDF. Sutton, M., C. Howard, J. Erisman, G. Billen, A. Bleeker, P. Grennfelt, H. van Grinsven, and B. Grizzetti. 2011. The European Nitrogen Assessment: Sources, Effects and Policy Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tegtmeier, Erin, and Michael Duffy. 2004. External Costs of Agricultural Production in the United States, International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 2(1): 1–20. Toan, T.D. 2016. Water Pricing Policy and Subsidies to Irrigation: A Review, Environmental Processes 3(4): 1081–1098. Twum, K.O., and M. Abubakari. 2020. Drops in the City: The Puzzle of Water Privatization and Consumption Deficiencies in Urban Ghana, Water Policy, https://doi.org/10.2166/wp.2020.175.

Food, agriculture, and the environment 189 United Nations. 2014. Every Dollar Invested in Water, Sanitation Brings Four-Fold Return in Costs – UN. New York: United Nations, https://news.un.org/en/story/2014/11/484032-every- dollar-investedwater-sanitation-brings-four-fold-return-costs-un. United Nations. 2019. Leaving no One Behind. New York: United Nations, https://www.unwater.org/ publications/world-water-development-report-2019/. van der Werf, H.M., M.T. Knudsen, and C. Cederberg. 2020. Towards Better Representation of Organic Agriculture in Life Cycle Assessment, Nature Sustainability, 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41893-020-0489-6. Wakeland, Wayne, Susan Cholette, and Kumar Venkat. 2012. Food Transportation Issues and Reducing Carbon Footprint, In Green Technologies in Food Production and Processing, edited by J. Boyce and Y. Arcand, Pp. 211–236. The Netherlands: Springer. Weber, Christopher, and H. Scott Matthews. 2008. Food Miles and Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States, Environment, Science and Technology 42: 3508–3513. Wikström, F., H. Williams, and G. Venkatesh. 2016. The Influence of Packaging Attributes on Recycling and Food Waste Behaviour – An Environmental Comparison of Two Packaging Alternatives, Journal of Cleaner Production 137: 895–902. Williams, G. 2021. Phosphate Outlook 2021: Price Rally Expected to Continue. Investigating News, January  20, https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/agriculture-investing/phosphateinvesting/phosphate-outlook/. World Bank. 2020. From Waste to Resource: Shifting Paradigms for Smarter Wastewater Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington, DC: World Bank, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/ handle/10986/33436. Zahran, S., S.D. Brody, H. Grover, and A. Vedlitz. 2006. Climate Change Vulnerability and Policy Support, Society and Natural Resources 19(9): 771–789.

10 Food sovereignty – beyond food security

There are hundreds of definitions of food security scattered throughout the literature – a review from approximately twenty-five years ago, the last of its kind to be conducted, yielded almost two hundred (Smith et al. 1992). In a policy context, however, the concept has been more narrowly defined. It is fair to argue that food security, since its first use as a policy concept in the 1974 World Food Congress, has been understood by the international community (and Western nations in particular) through the lens of the calorie – the calorization of food security (Carolan 2013). This framing has effectively reduced the concept to a problem of production and insufficient technology utilization. The means and subsequently the ends under this framing are fairly straightforward and can be summed up in one word: more – more bushels per hectare, liters of milk per dairy cow, eggs per chicken, and the like. When assessed according to this frame, world agriculture has proven remarkably successful; after all, the global food system produced 17 percent more calories per person at the dawn of the new millennium than it did thirty years prior, even after factoring in for a 70 percent population increase. Yet what are we to make of the precise type of calories being produced? In light of the so-called obesity epidemic as well as conventional food systems’ threats to environmental and public health, is it not fair to ask whether these productivity and efficiency “gains” have occurred at the expense of food security? No wonder people are abandoning the term – if that’s what it means – and turning to the concept of food sovereignty instead.

Food security: the future that we are facing According to the United Nations and other estimates, global agricultural production will need to be at between 59 and 98 percent between now and 2050 in order to keep up with demand (e.g., Elferink and Schierhorn 2016; FAO 2020). Admittedly, this is a smaller increase than the agriculture sector has achieved over the past century. But before we let out a collective sigh of relief, it is questionable whether these increases can be achieved . . . to say nothing about whether those productivity gains can be achieved sustainably and justly. The ecological and social trade-offs of clearing more land for agriculture are very high, a point worth emphasizing given that crop yields are not increasingly nearly fast enough to meet the forecasted demand for food. A study that examined yields of four key staple crops – maize, rice, wheat, and soybeans – notes that yields are increasing by only about 0.9 percent to 1.6 percent a year (Ray et al. 2013). That translates into an overall yield increase of somewhere between 38 percent and 67 percent by 2050 – nowhere near the top-end projections of needs to be produced by 2050. DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-13

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If yield increases fall closer to the low end of that study – 38 percent yield increases by 2050 – we are going to need anywhere between 200 million and 750 million additional hectares of land by 2050. Much needs to be accomplished, however, before land can be brought into production – land rights have to be settled, credit must be available, and infrastructure and markets must be in place. These constraints explain why arable land worldwide has grown by a net average of 5 million hectares per year over the last two decades. It also means it will be decades more until a sizable amount of arable land is prepared for agriculture. More problematic still is the projected slowdown in the annual growth of arable land, as potential arable land becomes increasingly marginal (the land easiest to convert has already been brought into production). The annual growth of arable land will slow from 0.30 percent between 1961 and 2005 to 0.10 percent between 2005 and 2050. This calculates out to an average annual net increase of arable area of 2.75 million hectares per year between 2005 and 2050. That is 120 million additional hectares, which is well below the most optimistic estimates that claim only 200 million hectares will be needed by mid-century to satisfy global food demand. And with land must come water. Yet a recent study estimated that “globally, approximately 11 percent and 10 percent of current crop- and grass-lands could be vulnerable to reduction in water availability and may lose some productive capacity, with Africa and the Middle East, China, Europe and Asia particularly at risk” (Fitton et al. 2020: 1). Keeping up with current rates of demand – there’s a sociologically interesting phrase. Just what exactly does it mean? We talk as if we need to keep up with these rates. Do we? I am often asked, “How much food do we need to feed future world populations?” The question is not an easy one to answer. Before anyone can answer that question, we need to define certain things, like “food,” “we,” “feed,” and “future world populations.” Too often, and to my great frustration, people try answering the question without any thought to the assumptions underlying it. For instance, depending upon whether we are expecting future generations to eat largely grain-based diets, versus, say, diets centered on red meat will greatly alter one’s answer to the question. Similarly, are we assuming, when talking about feeding future “populations,” that cars (biofuels) are part of the equation? Know, too, that multiple other factors, ranging from climate change to urbanization to a lack of investment, will also make it challenging to produce enough food, though again, much hinges on what we mean by “enough food.” We know, for instance, that climate change – driven by water scarcity, rising global temperatures, and extreme weather – will have enormous long-term effects on farm yields, though precisely what those effects will be are known right now through educated guesses based on modeling. The Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, for instance, is expected to face an 18 percent to 23 percent reduction in soy and corn output by 2050 because of climate change, a fate the Midwestern US and Eastern Australia may also see due to extreme heat (Elferink and Schierhorn 2016). Planning for the future in light of all this uncertainty is a daunting task, even for governments with the resources. The agricultural sector also needs significant long-term investment from public and private sectors, which would be a welcomed turn of events given that investment in agriculture in most lower-income countries has declined over the last thirty years. This is in part due to the fact that the banking sectors in these countries are reluctant to provide credit to farmers and smaller-scale food entrepreneurs, which stifles innovation across the food system. Regulators need to change those policies that limit credit to smaller-scale, rural (and especially female) farmers, while also providing greater public spending on infrastructure (e.g., roads, electricity, water).

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Food security: some history The term “food security” was first used in a policy context at the 1974 World Food Congress. Later that year the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) came up with the following definition, in which food security was said to involve “ensuring, to the utmost, the availability at all times of adequate world supplies of basic food stuffs, primarily cereals, so as to avoid acute food shortages in the event of widespread crop failures or national disasters, sustain a steady expansion of production and consumption, and reduce fluctuation in production and prices” (quoted in Shaw 2007: 150; my emphasis). I will pick up on this definition momentarily, as there is plenty to question in a policy position that reduces “food security” to an “adequate” supply of rice, wheat, millet, and maze (cereals). Its “spirit,” if you will, can be traced back to at least the 1940s. For example, the Health Division of the League of Nations was charged in the 1930s with assessing the food situation among represented countries. The resulting publication, Nutrition and Public Health, released in 1935, represents arguably the first account of hunger in an international context. The report offered a stark reminder that the modern age, in terms of sheer numbers, was ushered in with as many hungry bodies (perhaps more) as any that had preceded it. A few years later, in 1941, US President Roosevelt gave arguably the most consequential State of the Union Address of the twentieth century. In this speech, Roosevelt identifies “four essential freedoms” that are shared “everywhere in the world”: freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. The founding conference of the FAO of the United Nations in 1943 took Roosevelt’s call to heart as it looked specifically “to consider the goal of freedom from want in relation to food and agriculture” (FAO 1943: 1). One could locate the original spirit of food security within these four essential freedoms. In doing this, it is understood to be but a means to even more profound ends, namely, the enhancement of individual and societal freedom, prosperity, and well-being. Food security, as currently conceived, operationalized, and measured in policy circles, leaves too much unquestioned and too many problems ignored. For example, the FAO and World Health Organization (WHO) compile food security indicator statistics on things like the prevalence of underweight children under the age of five and the proportion of population below minimal levels of dietary energy consumption. Yet these data tell us absolutely nothing about the state of food security in high-income nations and at a minimum merely reinforce something we have long known: that incredibly impoverished countries are terribly food insecure. Or take comments made in a UN-sponsored book titled Food Security, which remarks that “the extent of hunger and food insecurity [in the US] is much less severe than in the developing world” (Dutta and Gundersen 2007: 44). In the space of a single sentence, the affluent US is valorized while the entire “developing” world is condemned on the basis of their respective levels of food security. Perhaps such pronouncements are empirically justified when food security is narrowly defined as, say, calories produced per capita. But would the statement still hold if food security were viewed through a lens more in tune with the “spirit” mentioned earlier, where the aim is lifting societal well-being and not just global cereal yields? Dominant food security discourse also shields certain actors from criticism. Again, take the case of the US – frequently extoled as the most food-secure nation in the world (at least if you spend any time listening to US politicians). More than 41 percent of its adults are defined as obese  – up from 30  percent just twenty years prior (CDC n.d.). Meanwhile, food waste is estimated at between 30 and 40 percent of the food supply,

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which corresponds to more than 130  billion pounds and $160  billion worth of food (FDA 2020). And take a quick look at any number of quality-of-life indicators – like the Happy Planet Index – and you will quickly see that the systems in place in the US are far from being effective at putting all that wealth and power to end that generate well-being (see Box 10.1). I could go on, showing you additional data, but I think you get my point. If the plan is to emulate globally what is going on in the US, we need to reevaluate our priorities.

La Via Campesina and food sovereignty As mentioned, the peasantry was targeted for extinction in the twentieth century. I do not mean to imply that peasants themselves were literally targeted for elimination. But their way of life was placed in the crosshairs of international development policy. La Via Campesina emerged as a direct response to the perceived injustices borne by the world’s peasants. La Via Campesina is viewed by many as the world’s most important transnational social movement (e.g., Desmarais 2008; Meek 2015; Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010), even though most of the general public – at least in affluent nations – have never heard of the organization. As explained on their website (www.viacampesina.org/en/): La Via Campesina is the international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. It defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It

Box 10.1  The Happy Planet Index – “More” Isn’t Always Better The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an indicator of a country’s ecological efficiency at producing well-being among its citizens. In essence, the HPI is an efficiency measure: the degree to which long and happy lives (life satisfaction and life expectancy are multiplied together to calculate happy life years) are achieved per unit of environmental impact as measured using the ecological footprint analysis. The HPI assumes that health (as measured by life expectancy) and a positive experience of life (as measured by life satisfaction surveys and inequality scores) are universal human goals whose fulfillment require healthy ecological base (as measured by a country’s ecological footprint). In short, according to the HPI, the most prosperous nations are those that support long and happy lives without unduly costing the Earth. Figure 10.1 shows the most recent (as of 2021) ranking of countries according to their respective HPI scores while also showing their scores according to those four aforementioned indices (i.e., life expectancy, well-being scores, inequality, and ecological footprint). Note how scores do not correspond perfectly to a country’s wealth (i.e., GDP per capita), as evidenced by who is in first place (Costa Rica) and who is in 115th place (the US).

Source: http://happyplanetindex.org/countries.

Figure 10.1 2021 ranking of high-performing countries according to their respective HPI scores

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Food sovereignty – beyond food security 195

Figure 10.1 (Continued)

strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature. La Via Campesina (as of early 2021) is made up of 182 local and national organizations in eighty-one countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas and collectively represents well over 200 million peasant families. The movement is founded on the belief that for far too long rural and food policies have been developed in the absence of those most affected, noting that peasants (including rural women) have a unique place and critical role in shaping agricultural policies. The class profile of La Via Campesina is estimated as follows: landless peasants, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and rural workers largely in Latin America and Asia; small and part-time farms in Europe, North America, Japan, and South Korea; peasant farms and pastoralists in Africa; small family farms in Mexico and Brazil; middle-class (and some affluent) farmers in India; and poor urban (and urbanfringe) dwellers in countries like Brazil and South Africa.

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La Via Campesina seeks to recast the term “peasant” as an identity to be embraced, as do other organizations, like the Federation of Indonesian Peasant Unions and the Peasant Movement of the Philippines. This is opposite to the dominant English use of the term, in which “peasant” has long been linked with feudalism, thus giving it a pejorative meaning. Perhaps this explains why delegates from the UK, when seeking to name the movement, initially resisted the term La Via Campesina – which literally translates into Peasant Way – out of concern about the derogatory connotations attached to the term “peasant” (and especially in light of England’s feudalistic past). The delegate instead preferred the term “farmer.” However, as Saturnino Borras, a founding member of the movement, recalls, many outside the UK delegation preferred the term “peasant,” noting that “farmer” also had connotations “that did not capture the nature and character of the farm sector we do represent” (as quoted in Desmarais 2008: 140). A compromise was reached: keep the name La Via Campesina but do not translate it into English (Desmarais 2008). Others also suggest that the title pays homage to Latin America’s founding role in the movement. Long a hotbed of peasant discontent, this region of the world has been plagued with grossly unequal distributions of land and income as well as a sharp decline in standards of living in the 1980s – the so called “lost decade” – due to failed neoliberal policies (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010). The term “peasant” – as opposed to, say, “farmer” – is meant to imply a distinct way of life that is shared by many, in both developed and developing countries. Take the following quote from Nettie Wiebe, who at the time of the interview was regional coordinator of a Canadian branch of the organization: If you actually look at what “peasant” means, it means “people of the land.” [. . .] We too are peasants and it’s the land and our relationship to the land and food production that distinguishes us. We’re not part of the industrial machine. We’re much more closely linked to the places where we grow food and how we grow food, and what the weather is there. [. . .] It begins to make us understand that “people of the land” – peasantry everywhere, the millions of small subsistence peasants with whom we think we have so little in common – identifies them and it identifies us. They’re being evicted from their land, and that decimates their identity and their community. And we’re also being relocated in our society. [. . .] As long as you keep us in separate categories and we’re the highly industrialized farmers who are sort of quasi-business entrepreneurs and they’re the subsistence peasants, then we can’t see how closely we and all our issues are linked. (as quoted in Edelman 2003: 187) Tired of being spoken for, La Via Campesina emerged to give peasants themselves a voice. The movement therefore does not allow for the joining up of groups that are not actual, grassroots-based peasant organizations. This link to the peasant identity has been a source of tremendous strength, a common glue, as indicated in the above quote of Nettie Wiebe, that holds millions of people (from different countries, of different religions, speaking different languages) together (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010). La Via Campesina is also responsible for making the issue of food sovereignty a topic around which activists within and outside the movement are rallying. The term was first injected into the international public debate during the World Food Summit in 1996 (though its genealogy dates back to a Mexican government program in the early 1980s

Food sovereignty – beyond food security 197 Table 10.1  Dominant regime versus Food Sovereignty Models Issue

Dominant Model

Food Sovereignty Model

Free trade

Everything ought to be governed by the market Agro-exports

Except food from trade agreements, as it is fundamentally different from, say, cars National and local markets

Claims to favor market logics yet relies heavily on government subsidies for the largest farms A commodity to be traded (fundamentally no different from any other commodity) Increasingly an occupation for those with access to significant amounts of credit, capital, land, and labor A technological/production problem Achieve through trade and by adopting Green Revolution principles Can be privatized (like land); a commodity with no cultural significance Good (leads to cheap food) A holdover from feudalism (which no one wishes to return to); a pejorative term

Subsidies okay if they level the playing field and do not unduly harm small scale farms in developing economies A unique commodity that every person has a right to

Production priorities Subsidies Food Agriculture

Hunger Food security Seeds Overproduction Peasantry

A right of rural peoples

A problem of access (of food and of land to produce food) Improved by enabling the hungriest to produce food and by embracing Rainbow Evolution policies (see Chapter 12) Common heritage of humankind that everyone has a right to; an artifact that allows for the reproduction of culture Bad (erodes food security around the world) “People of the land”; a proud identity for hundreds of millions around the world

Source: Developed by author.

[Edelman 2013]). Used to encapsulate an alternative paradigm to food and food production, food sovereignty has become part of the popular lexicon among actors within nongovernmental organizations, academia, and the peasant community. As detailed in Table 10.1, food sovereignty speaks to a way of life that is in many ways diametrically opposed to the dominant view that presently dictates conventional food and agricultural policy. The centrality of food sovereignty is reflected, for example, in a unique ritual practiced by the organization. The group engages in seed exchanges at many of their gatherings, where representatives will bring seeds from their homeland to share with others. This practice not only signifies the importance of seed in the production of food but also in the very reproduction of culture itself (see Figure 10.2). Food sovereignty movement in Ecuador

Following sustained pressure from Indigenous and peasant movements in the country, the concept of food sovereignty was enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution in 2008. The Ecuadorian constitution declared food sovereignty a strategic goal and a government obligation, embracing many of the proposals put forth by Ecuadorian federations linked to La Via Campesina (for a detailed analysis of this process see Giunta 2014). For example,

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Figure 10.2 Food sovereignty activists protest outside a closed corporate seed conference convened by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), March 23, 2015. Source: Flickr images.

Article 13 of the Ecuadoran constitution states: “Individuals and communities have the right to safe and permanent access to healthy, sufficient and nutritious food, preferably produced locally and in accordance with their different identities and cultural traditions.” Regarding food sovereignty, Article 281 explains: “Food sovereignty is a strategic objective and an obligation of the State to guarantee that individuals, communities, towns and nationalities achieve permanent self-sufficiency with foods that are healthy and culturally appropriate.” Though many in the peasant community viewed the constitutional language as weak, it did also create the Food Sovereignty Commission (COPISA) with the mandate to write laws that would make food sovereignty even more of a reality in the country. The COPISA, however, immediately faced obstacles, as it lacked the funding to carry out its mandate. To quote a former delegate involved in the process, Roberto Gortaire, COPISA became “just another public institution with no power,” as not one of

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COPISA’s nine draft laws the Commission did end up writing was adopted by the state (quoted in O’Connell 2020). The president of Ecuador, who had initially supported peasant farmers, later began to criticize. Eventually, after his re-election in 2013, he began supporting more conventional forms of production agriculture, prioritizing agroindustry, national and global supply chains, and agrochemical-based farming. The political landscape un Ecuador has change, however, in the wake of COVID-19, as the global pandemic has caused conventional food systems to collapse due to, among other things, imports drying up, international trade coming to a halt, and processing plants closing due to outbreaks and curfews (see Box 10.2). In this environment, scholars, activists, and small-scale farmers and peasants from around the world are pointing to food sovereignty as the best defense against food insecurity and economic shock in a post-outbreak world.

Box 10.2  La Via Campesina, Women’s Rights, and COVID-19 The following is a “call to action” released by La Via Campesina on November 25, 2020, which, for those do who not know, is International Day for the Elimination of all Forms of Violence Against Women. I provide this to emphasize not only that the movement targets patriarchal systems of oppression but that it uses food as an entry point to fight against a host of social injustices. The following is a direct quote from a much larger press release. La Via Campesina calls to affirm Food Sovereignty as a concrete measure of the States to put an end to violence against women in the countryside and in the cities, just as it is stated in the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants in its Art. 4. LVC denounces the structural violence of extractive capitalism and patriarchy, especially during this crisis that hits women and LGBTQ communities the hardest, as well as the working class as a whole, increasing the levels of exploitation with double and even triple working days, worsening their living conditions and with severe setbacks in matter of rights, even in the midst of this pandemic. Not only has COVID 19 caused a horrifying number of deaths worldwide, it has also led to a spike in the rates of femicide as a result of lock down measures that left millions of women and children with no escape from their aggressors. This is one of the worst aspects of this crisis. COVID 19 is also increasing the workload for women as a result of remote schooling and the needs associated with the care taking of family members, such as the elderly and ill. During the pandemic, the rates of sexual and physical violence against women and children have risen horrifically. Pregnant little girls forced to give birth, assassinations of leaders, advocates and defenders of territories. Millions of women in rural and urban areas have entered the escalating figures of poverty, sub employment, unemployment and hunger. From La Via Campesina (2020)

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The following is an example of how the movement is making a difference in Ecuador during a global pandemic. From daily interactions with marginalized communities, it became quickly apparent that rampant food speculation was taking place in local markets after the COVID outbreak, as prices of basic staples would triple in just a day. As a result, peasant activists, following the principles of food sovereignty, began setting up their own distribution centers outside major cities to sell produce at far lower prices. In addition, they developed their own transportation networks to help distribute food among those households who either lived too far from an urban center or who could not physically travel themselves. It has also been noted that through savvy social media campaigns these groups are essentially able to shame the government into securing against food speculation and to help marginal communities have access to affordable food (O’Connell 2020). Rethinking dichotomies

This is not to suggest that the food sovereignty movement is beyond critique. While scholars are often quick to embrace the movement precisely because of its critical orientation toward Big Food and Big Agriculture, there is a tendency to think less critically about the movement itself (Soper 2020). The issue is that the term “peasant” is not monolithic, even among those who selfidentify with the label. Moreover, social science research also disputes the romantic image that all peasants engage in agroecology/regenerative agriculture. As Soper (2020: 270) argues, writing about her ethnographic field research on peasant agriculture in Ecuador, “Portraying peasants as resisting capitalism ignores capitalism from below and ‘neglects how smallholders actively seek participation in commodity chains” (Jansen 2015: 219) to be “able to compete in wider national and international markets” (228). Other scholars also note that a more accurate reading of the movement would be to say that it is not against capitalism per se, “but rather the market advantage currently enjoyed by large agribusiness enterprises” (Brass 2015: 196); after all, global trade, as other food sovereignty scholars note (Burnett and Murphy 2014; Soper 2020), is an important livelihood strategy for millions of peasant farmers around the world. The point, then, is to recognize that there are peasantries (plural), which means needing to rethink dichotomies – even some of those presented earlier where I talked about differences between food security and food sovereignty, as if either category was indeed monolithic. As others note (e.g., Edelman and Borras 2016; Soper 2020), there are diverse, you might even say competing strategies, within La Via Campesina. These competing strategies depend on, for instance, regional differences by continent, type of peasant (e.g., landless or landowning, coastal or highland), and class (see Box 10.3).

Rejecting the “Left Behind” Discourse – the Case of China A lot has been written about China’s recent market-oriented reforms resulting in the outmigration of peasants to urban areas in search of jobs in industry, construction, and various service sectors (e.g., Day and Schneider 2018). As the working-age rural population in China migrates in search of urban employment, elders, children, and women responsible for their care are being “left behind,” to

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use language frequently evoked by those studying these demographic trends (e.g., Wu and Ye 2016; Ye et al. 2016). While such scholarship is important, as it brings much-needed attention to issues related to rural–urban inequities in China, it is important to understand, too, how this language of being “left behind” perpetuates a rather passive picture of this group. Who this tends to depict as passive are often women, reproducing a discourse of victimization that renders their agency invisible and their activism unimportant. As Zhang (2020: 1112) notes: Women are the pillar of “left behind” populations, as they are “left behind” precisely because they are considered to be responsible for taking care of children who cannot advance their education at the urban centers, and elders who are not capable of migrating to work in new factories and social services. Moreover, since women generally live longer than men, most of the “left-behind elderly” are also women. From a food standpoint, it is also important to recognize that the movement of bodies from rural communities into urban areas results in the feminization of agriculture, in which an increasing share of all types of agricultural labor and other rural work is done by women. It might be easy to assume that China does not have social movements or active food sovereignty networks due to the authoritarian nature of its state, its limited space for civil society, and its oppressive treatment of dissent and control over social media platforms. Yet, as scholars have highlighted, there remains space for bottomup initiatives that are animated by food sovereignty principles (e.g., Gaudreau 2019; Zhang 2020). Research looking at these left-behind bodies shows them to be sources of rural empowerment and influential bottom-up initiatives in China – activists who support, for instance, heritage seed saving initiatives, social entrepreneurialism, and knowledge sharing. Moreover, these activities give the female children in these areas an opportunity to see women involved in community roles that were historically reserved for men, though the pressure to conform to tradition remains. To quote one woman from research in the Guangxi and Henan provinces, when asked to talk about her rise as a community leader and the struggles she faces juggling competing role expectations: I got married when I was only 17 years old, and came from another poorer village. [. . .] I have to be very cautious to do anything, even to be excellent, because my husband belongs to the biggest clan in this village. There are more eyes on my behavior. When I  began to engage in the village management affairs, my husband and his relatives did not believe that I  could do well as a woman who came from outside [the village]. So I had to try very hard to convince them that I can take charge the village even though I am an “outside woman.” Now I became very busy with my work, so I do not have time to cook for the family and to take care of my grandchildren. So sometimes my husband, my sons, especially my two daughters-in-law complain with me about this. Have to sacrifice the time with them to help more the others. (Zhang 2020: 1120)

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For a good example of the incredible diversity in how “food sovereignty” is practiced and actualized, let us look briefly at Canada. While the food sovereignty movement embraces agroecology as one of its principle tenets, the concept is usually not sufficiently politicized to address links between environmental stewardship and private property ownership, which is important in Canada as Indigenous groups push against the country’s colonial legacy. The sanctity of land ownership is often not quick to be challenged, at least in Western interpretations of food sovereignty. Just look, for example, at how the lack of affordable farmland for individual purchase is often held up as one of the principle barriers to beginning (and especially first-time) farmers wanting to practice alternative farming principles (e.g., Weingarten 2019). As Kepkiewicz and Dale (2019: 991) note in their research on the food sovereignty movement in Canada, Settler Canadian proposals for alternative land arrangements are often compatible with Locke’s view, articulated in the seventeenth century, that alienable property rights are essential to “improve” land and resources. This argument suggests that if people profit directly from such improvements, only then will they expend the labour necessary to realize them. Yet this outlook does nothing to address the fact that private property ownership is incompatible with the cosmology of Indigenous groups in Canada. For this group, food sovereignty ought to be incompatible with any ideas that assume and sanctify the concept of private property. In addition, agroecology as a central strategy of food sovereignty may not be as appropriate in Canada, noting that agroecological principles are relatively silent with regard to the Indigenous food systems that exist there, which often center on hunting, gathering, and fishing. Moreover, while agroecology has been discussed from the very beginning by farmers’ organizations and food sovereignty proponents in Canada, it has typically been interpreted through a largely productivist lens (e.g., emphasis is placed on how well it compares, yield-wise, to conventional systems) (Kepkiewicz and Dale 2019). The concern, then, is that conventional views of food sovereignty, with their emphasis on agroecology, where issues of productivity and farmer livelihoods are privileged, coupled with a blind spot to issues relating to property ownership, “may perpetuate traditional agrarian views of land stewardship including settler rights to produce food on Indigenous lands” (Kepkiewicz and Dale 2019: 991).

Transition. . . This chapter begins a pivot that is amplified by the next section. The three remaining chapters take more forward-looking, solutions-oriented – though still critical – stances. With that, let’s now turn to unpacking concepts related to the ideas, principles, and practices of sustainable diets and ethical consumption.

Discussion questions 1 Is a country like the United States, with arguably the cheapest food in the world, food secure in your opinion? Why or why not? 2 La Via Campesina is at the forefront of popularizing food sovereignty. Why does the concept of food sovereignty resonate so strongly among the world’s peasants?

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3 How can the food sovereignty movement be so large and yet so invisible, at least among the general population in the Western world? Have you heard of the movement before? If yes, how did you learn about it?

Suggested readings: introductory level Forbes, K. 2020. Caribbean Food Sovereignty During Covid-19. NACLA, August 20, https://nacla. org/news/2020/08/14/caribbean-food-sovereignty-covid. https://viacampesina.org/en/. Jones, E. 2020. With the Grain: Food Sovereignty in Europe in the Age of COVID-19. Europe Now, November  9, www.europenowjournal.org/2020/11/09/with-the-grain-food- sovereigntyin-europe-in-the-age-of-covid-19/.

Suggested readings: advanced level Edelman, Marc, and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. 2016. Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements. Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. Kepkiewicz, L., and B. Dale. 2019. Keeping ‘Our’ Land: Property, Agriculture and Tensions Between Indigenous and Settler Visions of Food Sovereignty in Canada, The Journal of Peasant Studies 46(5): 983–1002. Zhang, L. 2020. From Left Behind to Leader: Gender, Agency, and Food Sovereignty in China, Agriculture and Human Values 37: 1111–1123, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020- 10114-9.

References Brass, T. 2015. Peasants, Academics, Populists: Forward to the Past? Critique of Anthropology 35(2): 187–204. Burnett, K., and S. Murphy. 2014. What Place for International Trade in Food Sovereignty? The Journal of Peasant Studies 41(6): 1065–1084. Carolan, Michael. 2013. Reclaiming Food Security. New York; London: Earthscan/Routledge. CDC. n.d. Adult Obesity Facts, www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html. Day, A.F., and M. Schneider. 2018. The End of Alternatives? Capitalist Transformation, Rural Activism and the Politics of Possibility in China, The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(7): 1221–1246. Desmarais, A. 2008. The Power of Peasants: Reflections on the Meanings of La Vía Campesina, Journal of Rural Studies 24: 138–149. Dutta, Indranil, and Craig Gundersen. 2007. Measures of Food Insecurity at the Household Level, In Food Security, edited by Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Shabd Acharya, and Benjamin Davis, Pp. 42–61. New York: Oxford University Press. Edelman, Mark. 2003. Transnational Peasant and Farmer Movements and Networks, In Global Civil Society Yearbook 2003, edited by M. Kaldor, H. Anheier, and M. Glasius, Pp. 185–220. London: London School of Economics, Centre for the Study of Global Governance. Edelman, Mark. 2013. Food Sovereignty: Forgotten Genealogies and Future Regulatory Challenges, Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, International Conference, September 14–15, Yale University, New Haven, CT, www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/foodsovereignty/pprs/72_Edelman_2013.pdf. Edelman, Marc, and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. 2016. Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements. Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. Elferink, M., and F. Schierhorn. 2016. Global Demand for Food Is Rising. Can We Meet It? Harvard Business Review, April 7, https://hbr.org/2016/04/global-demand-for-food- is-rising-can-we-meet-it. FAO. 1943. United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture: Hot Springs, VA, May 18–June 3, Final Acts and Section Reports, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. Rome, Italy, ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/003/Y6265E/Y6265E.pdf.

204  Food justice and the environment FAO. 2020. Food and Agriculture Projections to 2050. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, www.fao.org/global-perspectives- studies/food-agriculture-projections-to-2050/en/. FDA. 2020. Food Loss and Waste. Food and Drug Agency, USA, Washington, DC, October 26, www. fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-andwaste#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20 food,worth%20of%20food%2 0in%202010. Fitton, N., P. Alexander, N. Arnell, B. Bajzelj, K. Calvin, J. Doelman, J.S. Gerber, P. Havlik, T. Hasegawa, M. Herrero, and T. Krisztin. 2020. The Vulnerabilities of Agricultural Land and Food Production to Future Water Scarcity, Global Environmental Change 58, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. gloenvcha.2019.101944. Gaudreau, M. 2019. State Food Security and People’s Food Sovereignty: Competing Visions of Agriculture in China, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement 40(1): 12–28. Giunta, Isabella. 2014. Food Sovereignty in Ecuador: Peasant Struggles and the Challenge of Institutionalization, The Journal of Peasant Studies 41: 1201–1224. Jansen, Kees. 2015. The Debate on Food Sovereignty Theory: Agrarian Capitalism, Dispossession and Agroecology, The Journal of Peasant Studies 42(1): 213–232. Kepkiewicz, L., and B. Dale. 2019. Keeping ‘Our’ Land: Property, Agriculture and Tensions Between Indigenous and Settler Visions of Food Sovereignty in Canada, The Journal of Peasant Studies 46(5): 983–1002. La Via Campesina. 2020. #Nov25: Peasants in the Struggle for our Rights, Against the Virus of Capital and Patriarchy! CADMT, October  29, www.cadtm.org/Nov25-Peasants-in- the-Struggle-for-ourRights-against-the-Virus-of-Capital-and. Martínez-Torres, M., and P. Rosset. 2010. La Vía Campesina: The Birth and Evolution of a Transnational Social Movement, Journal of Peasant Studies 37: 149–175. Meek, David. 2015. Counter-Summitry: La Via Campesina, the People’s Summit, and Rio+ 20, Global Environmental Politics 15(2): 11–18. O’Connell, C. 2020. Ecuador Grapples with Food Sovereignty. NACLA, May 28, https://nacla.org/ news/2020/05/28/ecuador-grapples-food-sovereignty. Ray, Deepak, Nathaniel Mueller, Paul West, and Jonathan A. Foley. 2013. Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050, PLOS 8(6): e66428, DOI: 10.1371/journal. pone.0066428. Shaw, D.J. 2007. World Food Security: A History Since 1945. New York: Palgrave. Smith, M., J. Pointing, and S. Maxwell. 1992. Household Food Security, Concepts and Definitions: An Annotated Bibliography, Development Bibliography No. 8. Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton. Soper, R. 2020. From Protecting Peasant Livelihoods to Essentializing Peasant Agriculture: Problematic Trends in Food Sovereignty Discourse, The Journal of Peasant Studies 47(2): 265–285. Weingarten, D. 2019. Farming’s Next Generation Has Nowhere to Grow. Talk Poverty, February  8, https://talkpoverty.org/2019/02/08/farming-generation-nowhere-grow/. Wu, H.F., and J.Z. Ye. 2016. Hollow Lives: Women Left Behind in Rural China, Journal of Agrarian Change 16(1): 50–69. Ye, J.Z., H.F. Wu, J. Rao, B.Y. Ding, and K.Y. Zhang. 2016. Left Behind Women: Gender Exclusion and Inequality in Rural-Urban Migration in China, Journal of Peasant Studies 43(4): 910–941. Zhang, L. 2020. From Left Behind to Leader: Gender, Agency, and Food Sovereignty in China, Agriculture and Human Values 37: 1111–1123, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020- 10114-9.

Part IV

Agrifood futures Solutions, trade-offs, and opportunities

11 Sustainable diets and ethical consumption

“Bread, it is bread that the Revolution needs!” (Kropotkin 2011). These words come from Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), written at the turn of the twentieth century. Our daily interaction with food, at such an intimate level (we literally put it into us), makes food inherently political. Kropotkin’s point: little stirs one’s heart and mind like an empty stomach. Yet I would read still further into Kropotkin’s comments. Not just empty stomachs but food itself drives people, as evidenced by the growing interest to reconfigure foodscapes to make them more sustainable and just. This chapter reviews various challenges to the food and agriculture status quo, from their drivers and motivations to their consequences.

The values and assumptions underlying “good” food Readers might be surprised by this chapter. If I were a nutritionist or, say, a crop scientist, I might have made this chapter more prescriptive, telling you how to eat and grow crops sustainably and ethically. But as a sociologist, I cannot help but unpack those concepts, knowing that “sustainable” and “ethical” are social constructs. They are political, too. How they end up being defined shapes identities and creates divisions between “us” and “them,” as you will see. Though all food has ethical implications, some acquire the normative weight of being more ethical than others. Who among us has not used language where we have identified something as being “good food” or, alternatively, as “bad food”? When talking about ethical food, I am not implying that foods are inherently more ethical than others. What I am saying, rather, is that we act and talk as if such categories actually exist; as if, in other words, they are self-evident. As a sociologist, however, I want to know how some foods become “good,” who gets to make these decisions, and what are the effects once those decisions are made. Most will recognize the vocabulary attached to so-called ethical (“good”) food, evoking terms like “organic,” “local,” “free range,” and “GMO-free” – concepts often meant to signify support for a system other than global conventional supply chains that produce what others have called “food from nowhere” (Campbell 2009). Yet as we also know, many of these ethical foods come from supply chains involving some of the largest corporate players in the food system, as evidenced by, for instance, Walmart’s presence as the largest organic retailer in North America (Carolan 2018). This explains Guthman’s (2003: 45) pointed criticism of what she calls the “facile dichotomies between fast and slow, reflexive and compulsive, fat and thin, and, hence, good and bad eaters.” A careful analysis will show, she continues, “slippage and instability in these [ethical] categories” (p. 45).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-15

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The ethical consumer research tradition is especially tuned in to how these ethical choices connect up with markers of distinction and status. Yet this picture is a complicated one, as both low- and high-status groups are known to participate in some of the same consumption practices. We know, for example, that lower-income households practice a variety of forms of ethical consumption, especially now that organic, local, and humanely raised labels penetrate traditional supply chains (Beagan et al. 2016) and as farmers markets and community support agriculture platforms become more accessible (Wang et al. 2014). Alternatively, those inhabiting high-status social networks have been shown to engage with lower-status food culture, as evidence by, for example, the quest in some of these circles to eat at out-of-the-way “dives” and to consume state fair cuisine (e.g., deepfried butter/Oreos/Pickle Dawgs) (Naccarato and LeBesco 2012). While this research complicates the connection between ethical eating and status it does not mean status is an unimportant variable in this story. Drawing from 828 completed surveys of food shoppers in Toronto, Canada, Huddart Kennedy and colleagues (2018) conduct a cluster analysis and arrive at four meaningful clusters. They describe those groupings as follows: “Those who held neither a foodie nor an ethical orientation (Cluster 1), foodies (Cluster 2), ethical consumers (Cluster 3), and those oriented towards both – ethical foodies (Cluster 4)” (p. 13). Further, Huddart Kennedy et al. report finding “strong and compelling evidence” (p. 13) that that latter cluster possesses the highest socioeconomic status as defined by income, occupation, and educational attainment. Ethical foodies were therefore found to be more likely than any other groups to purchase food from boutique, specialized stores and from gardens or directly from smaller-scale growers while being least likely to shop at large discount stores and eat at fast-food establishments. Talking about “good” food also opens the door to talk about food’s long history of providing touchstones for everyday politics and symbolic boundaries. We know that attempts to position family meals as solutions to today’s social ills place a disproportionate burden on working class families and, in particular, mothers – a point I’ll come back to shortly (e.g., Cairns and Johnston 2018). Just as food has the ability to bring people together and positively change attitudes, it is also used to push citizens apart – a way of signaling either approbation or disdain about others’ choices. There is a level of judginess associated with food that does not exist for most other things we consume. And even that is not consistent. There are more than a hundred recipes for deep-fried Twinkies on Pinterest – yes, they are now a thing in certain foodie circles. But when the dessert is eaten at a state fair by an overall-wearing Midwesterner, it is often coded as low-brow and gluttonous. I am especially disheartened when food becomes weaponized, as it often does in welfare debates. While middle-class families might be able to afford more than a bag of Cheetos to help their kids feel special, as sociologist Priya Fielding-Singh (2017: 434) points out, “food serves as a symbolic antidote to a context of deprivation” among parents in low-socio-economic households. Put another way, inexpensive food – read: junk food – is often these parents’ sole avenue for obliging their children’s requests. And yet, parents using food stamps to purchase, say, a cake – lest we forget that poor kids have birthdays, too – report getting the stink eye and receiving snide comments from judgmental cashiers and bystanders. Talk of good food thus implies other food is bad, right? So, what about those who raise this so-called bad food? In a recent study, I (Carolan 2020) studied urban stakeholders, those responsible for procuring and sourcing “good” food for area schools and other organizations, and area farmers engaged in conventional commodity production, raising many of those foods deemed bad – i.e., conventional food destined for far-away markets. All were located in the US state of Colorado. What I found was that farmers not raising

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good food felt stigmatized due in part to those ethical narratives. The findings are actually a lot more complex than that, so to give you a taste of some of the empirical nuance, I will show you one quote from a farmer who had expressed frustration to me about policy decisions made in Denver that put in place a mileage radius around the city. For food to be considered “local” – one of the markers of good food, according to the city of Denver (and many others) – it had to come from a farm within 100 miles of the city. The following is in reference to that 100-mile decision. Somehow my farm, my animals, my livelihood isn’t as deserving. I  shouldn’t have access to markets in Denver because some bureaucrat picked a number from thin air – those within that number [within 100 miles] produce good food and those who don’t are what . . . bad farmers? (Carolan 2020: 13, emphasis in original) Connected to this ethical consumption literature, though an important body of scholarship in itself, is the “good mother” literature (e.g., Atkinson 2014; Cairns and Johnston 2018; Cairns et al. 2013). Broadly speaking, this scholarship speaks to the “intersecting ideals of motherhood and ethical food discourse, whereby ‘good’ mothers are those who preserve their children’s purity and protect the environment through conscientious food purchases” (Cairns et al. 2013: 97). This outlook not only places an asymmetrical burden on women by making it their responsibility to procure “good food” for the household. It also reinforces neoliberal worldviews by emphasizing mothers’ individual responsibility for securing their children’s well-being. Elsewhere, these morally animated practices have been referred to through the concept of circuits of intimacy, “which refers to the way ideas of intimacy and caring practices circulate through [.  .  .] food-related activities that take place in a range of spaces, in and beyond the kitchen” (Meah 2017: 1146). While these circuits are said to be shaped by gendered expectations, they also highlight that doing gender of any form is premised on notions of “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “bad.” Think about mothers (and fathers) who say they do “X” to be a good parent and how these expectations vary depending on whether we are talking about mothers or fathers. Like how “good” fathers are those who “help out” in the kitchen or with cooking; to which gender scholars note, men tend to “help” rather than assume a leading role in feeding the family – that’s still the role of a “good” mother (DeVault 1994).

Organic agriculture Organic agriculture is often traced to the beginning of the last century. Early luminaries to promote organic farming methods include Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (who, as discussed shortly, is also linked closely with biodynamic agriculture), Sir Albert Howard and Lady Eve Balfour (who led to the founding of the British Soil Association), the Swiss couple Maria and Dr. Hans Müller, and the German physician H. P. Rusch. Despite some differences between the approaches, the main aim of organic farming – its spirit, you might say  – is to create a low-impact, sustainable agricultural production system. “Sustainable” here defined in a broader sense than just economic sustainability, including also environmental and social sustainability (see Box 11.1). It is also worth mentioning that while “organic” to biochemists refers simply to anything containing carbon, to early-twentieth-century thinkers it held a different meaning. Organic, in this other sense, compelled farmers to think of their farm as an organism, that is, as a self-regulating whole that must be managed accordingly (as opposed to a bunch of substitutable parts).

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Box 11.1  The Sociology of “Sustainability” Sustainability (like in the context of “sustainable” agriculture) is often likened to a stool, held up by the three legs of social, environmental, and economic sustainability. I have found this an effective metaphor, as it emphasizes the equal value that must be placed on each of the three “legs” – ignore, say, social variables and the chair of sustainability invariably will tip over. True sustainability can thus only be attained with social, environmental, and economic sustainability. But what, precisely, does that mean? The problem with “sustainability,” even the three-legged type, is that it is a terribly vague term. Social, environmental, and economic sustainability are hotly contested terms. What they mean depends on who you ask. When talking about social sustainability, for example, are we talking about improving social capital or social justice? Or environmental sustainability: do we mean striving for zero ecological impact or minimal impact (and if the latter, who decides what “minimal impact” means)? Or economic sustainability: does this mean simply that firms and farms need to be profitable, or does it also suggest a desire to reduce, say, economic inequalities. And what scale are we talking about: the farm/firm, the community, or the entire food system (and who decides this)? In the end, talk of the science of sustainability puts the cart before the horse. We can use science to help us figure out how best to reach certain ends we define as “sustainable.” How we determine those ends, however, is a process best left for a little thing called democracy.

The following are some highlights from a global survey of organic agriculture (FIBL 2015). • A total of 43.1 million hectares of agricultural land are managed organically. • The region with the most organic agricultural land is Oceania, with 17.3  million hectares, followed by Europe (11.5  million hectares), Latin American (6.6  million hectares), Asia (3.4 million hectares), North America (3 million hectares), and Africa (1.2 million hectares). • Australia has experienced the greatest growth in organic land since 2011. It is also the country with the most organic agricultural land (17.2 hectares) – 97 percent of it is extensive grazing area. Argentina has the second most organic land of any country (3.2 hectares), followed by the United States (2.2 hectares) and China (2.1 hectares). The ten countries with the largest organic agricultural areas have a combined total of 30.5 million hectares and constitute more than 70 percent of the world’s organic agricultural land. • There are almost 2 million organic producers in the world. More than three-quarters of them are located in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The country with the most producers is India (650,000), followed by Uganda (189,610), Mexico (169,703), Tanzania (148,610), and Ethiopia (134,626). • The country with the most organic land (a whopping 17.2 million hectares), Australia, has relatively few organic producers – 1,707. That’s more than 10,076 hectares (or 24,898 acres) per producer!

Sustainable diets and ethical consumption 211 Who produces organic food

What attitudes and background information correlate positively (and strongly) with organic farmers? Early research looking at the attributes of organic farmers in higherincome countries found these individuals to have an urban background, to have higher levels of academic education, and to be younger (see, e.g., Burton et al. 1999; Lockeretz 1997; Tovey 1997). Yet these demographics are slowly changing as organic is becoming more widespread and conventionalized, in the sense of conventional growers shifting over to organic management practices, a point I return to momentarily. It has also become clear that organic farmers are driven by a multitude of different motivations, aspirations, and goals. For example, a survey of more than 100 Danish dairy farmers found they could be clustered into one of four trait improvement boxes, namely, health and fertility, production and udder health, survival, and fertility and production (Slagboom et  al. 2016). The survey data indicate that farmers valued traits that reflect areas of concern within their own herds. This makes at least this group of farmers similar to conventional dairy farmers in that both groups value those traits that are currently the most problematic for them and in need of improving. Quoting from the study, We found a higher proportion of organic farmers in the production-based clusters. When we analyzed organic and conventional data separately, we found that organic farmers ranked production traits higher than conventional farmers. The herds of organic farmers had lower milk yields and lower disease incidences, which might explain the high ranking of milk production and the low ranking of disease traits. (Slagboom et al. 2016: 9845) Such research also aligns with other studies indicating that organic farmers today, on average, describe attitudes and values more like those of conventional growers – which is itself a heterogeneous group – and less like those of the earlier and often more radical organic farmers studied in the 1990s (e.g., Lehtimäki and Virtanen 2020). For instance, a study of organic grain farmers in the US shows that young and older alike are engaged in organic grain production. However, younger farmers were found to be more likely motivated by environmental and lifestyle goals than older producers (Peterson et  al. 2012). Though, again, given the growth in this sector, we have to be increasingly careful about overgeneralizing. A recent survey of 262 Polish organic farmers reveal that Polish organic growers attach greater importance to economic factors than to non-economic ones (Łuczka and Kalinowski 2020). Most farmers surveyed say they intend to continue their organic production activity only if financial support is provided, and nearly one in five farms (18.3 percent) want to discontinue organic production in future. This focus on economic factors stands in contrast to other research that finds, for instance, that organic growers express higher levels of care for the environment and animal welfare than their conventional counterparts (Lockie et al. 2006; Padel 2001; Zhang 2020). In short, unlike perhaps in the 1990s, organic growers are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, making it impossible to make overarching statements anymore about their underlying motivations. It should also be noted that the emancipatory potential of organic agriculture is limited, in the absence of larger structural changes. For instance, a study of female organic farmers in India shows that, although organic farming has positive impacts on women through improvements in health and food security, there were also costs associated with these practices, such as the additional workload placed on women, who still experienced gendered expectations when it came to child and elderly care and other

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household expectations (Altenbuchner et al. 2017). Moreover, the women interviewed were also excluded from most business decisions in organic farming, as the organic initiative they associated with followed traditional gender patterns and the biases therein embedded. Knowing that certain attitudes and demographic variables correlate strongly with the adoption of organic farming methods still tells us little about the decision process itself that causes a farmer to choose to convert to organic. A study of farmers in northeastern Austria gives some insight into this process (Darnhofer et al. 2005). Specifically, the researchers sought to understand why farmers choose to either keep their operations conventional or to convert them to organic. What’s novel about this research is its focus on both organic and conventional farmers. Focusing solely on organic growers can lead one (falsely) to believe that those farmers who have not converted do not share the motives, attitudes, and sentiments expressed by organic farmers. Including conventional farmers illuminates both rationale and constraints associated with conventional farmers who have considered organic farming but decided to not make the switch. This research culminated in a “decision map” showing the various decision criteria respondents went through to decide whether organic farming was for them (see Figure 11.1). The research team was also able to categorize farmers into different “conventional” and “organic” agriculture types by the motivations that lie behind their farming practices. As illustrated, the figure differentiates between five farming types: committed conventional, committed organic, environmental-conscious but not organic, pragmatic organic, and pragmatic conventional. “Committed conventional” farmers are characterized by giving no thought to organic farming. They do not view it as more environmentally friendly than conventional production methods, nor do they believe the health claims made about organic foods or perceive that organic production is technically and/or economically feasible. Their attitudes and values also reflect minimal levels of concern for the environment. “Pragmatic conventional” farmers do not oppose organic farming per se. Their concern lies in the amount of risk/uncertainty associated with the conversion to organic, which they are unwilling to confront unless they can expect certain financial rewards. They are therefore open to conversion but only after these uncertainties have been resolved and a market for organic products better established. “Environmentconscious but not organic” farmers are committed to environmentally friendly farming practices but are not currently operating organically certified farms, though some were operating self-declared organic farms. Some of these farmers are choosing to retain the flexibility of not being certified (e.g., to use some synthetic inputs on crops based on need), while others might be following the organic standards but choose to not involve themselves in the bureaucracy and paperwork that is involved in certification. The costs of running a formally certified operation – including certification and the associated recordkeeping – were also a factor for some of these farmers. And since they have an established clientele willing to pay a premium without a formal organic label (perhaps trust between grower and consumer makes the label unnecessary), they do not see the need to go this extra step. Among “pragmatic organic” farmers, the ability to obtain a premium price in the market outweighed health, ethical, or sustainability concerns. Of the sample included in the study, most farmers of this type have been involved in organic agriculture less than ten years. This lends support to the earlier-mentioned finding that the profile of organic growers is becoming less distinct from conventional growers. Lastly: the “committed organic” farmers. These individuals are deeply committed to the founding philosophy of

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Figure 11.1 Decision tree depicting the criteria considered in the choice between organic and conventional farm management in northeast Austria Source: Based on Darnhofer et al. 2005 (with help from Ika Darnhofer).

organic farming and are therefore willing to forego some of their income to live by these commitments. Seventy-six percent of the organic farmers who have been farming longer than ten years are “committed organic.” For them, organic farming cannot be reduced to a set of processes but requires that one embrace a distinct way of life.

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Who consumes organic food A considerable amount of research has been conducted looking at variables that correlate with organic food consumption, some of which has already been addressed under the guise of ethical consumption. To review this literature efficiently, the following discussion is organized around themes that are common in studies with this focus. These themes are health, taste/sensory experience, green/universal values, income, gender, family/children, age, education, and socio-structural. • •

•

•

•

Health: Care for one’s health and the health of one’s family has repeatedly been shown to be a strong motive for purchasing organic food (see, e.g., Aertsens et  al. 2009; Carolan 2017; Chen 2009; Aschemann-Witze 2013; Nasir and Karakaya 2014). Taste/Sensory Experience: A study of Swedish consumers finds taste to be the primary reason for the consumption of organics (Magnusson et al. 2001). Similar results were obtained in studies examining consumers in Ireland (Roddy et al. 1996), the Netherlands (Schifferstein and Oude Ophuis 1998), Scotland (McEachern and McClean 2002), Greece (Fotopoulos et al. 2003), Italy (Asioli et al. 2014), Germany (Asioli et al. 2014), and the US (Carolan 2017). In an analysis of factors influencing food choice among Australian consumers who had consumed at least some organic food in the preceding twelve months, the researchers found that “concern with the naturalness of food and the sensory and emotional experience of eating were the major determinants of increasing levels of organic consumption” (Lockie et al. 2004: 135). Green/Universal Values: In one study, respondents who possess high levels of understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all living things also expressed positive sentiments towards organic food (Dreezens et al. 2005). Strong “green” attitudes have repeatedly been shown to be a strong predictor of pro-organic food beliefs (see, e.g., Aertsens et al. 2009; Padel and Foster 2005). Organic purchases have also been linked to consumers’ desires to engage in socially responsible consumption (Nasir and Karakaya 2014), though the literature is mixed on this subject. In a study out of Greece, expressions of care for the environment were not statistically linked to organic food consumption (Chryssohoidis and Krystallis 2005). Elsewhere, among sampled UK consumers, there was no connection between pro-organic food attitudes and pro-environmental attitudes, while among Germans sampled such a link existed (Baker et al. 2004). A study of organic food consumers in Romania, meanwhile, showed green values to play a role in shaping buying intention but not to the same extent that, say, health concerns play (Fleşeriu et al. 2020). Income: The link between income and consumption of organic food is mixed, dispelling a common myth about organic food, namely, that it is only for the wealthy. To quote from a recent study looking at organic food consumption in Brazil, “organic consumption does not follow specific socioeconomic and demographic features” (Feil et al. 2020: 1). Part of the reason for these mixed results is that organic food is appearing throughout the retail sector. As organic becomes more conventionalized – that is, as it appears in places like Walmart, convenient stores, and so-called dollar stores – it becomes cheaper and more affordable to all. That being said, it is still not unusual to find recent research concluding that “higher income and higher education levels were found to be associated with increased purchasing intentions and actual purchases of organic food products” (Hansmann et al. 2020: 1) Gender: Women are consistently more likely to hold greater levels of pro-organic attitudes – and report buying more organic food – than men (Aertsens et al. 2009;

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•

•

•

•

Arbindra et al. 2005; Hughner et al. 2007; Lockie et al. 2004; Tung et al. 2015). Of course, we have to think about this contextually, too – e.g., think about those aforementioned gendered expectations around being a “good mother” (e.g., Cairns and Johnston 2018; Cairns et al. 2013) that might be driving some of this. Family/Children: Families with children are more likely to buy organics (Hughner et al. 2007; Lockie et al. 2004; Tung et al. 2015). A number of studies also report that following a childbirth experience mothers changed their purchasing patterns, buying more organic products not only for their child but often for the whole family (Aertsens et al. 2009). Age: Here too findings are mixed (Aertsens et  al. 2009; Feil et  al. 2020). Some research, for example, finds UK organic consumers to be older than the average population (Geen and Firth 2006). Another study, examining Chinese markets, finds that consumers aged thirty-six and over are more likely to buy certified organic food (McCarthy et al. 2015). Other research, conversely, notes that younger respondents are more likely to purchase organic foods and have higher levels of pro-organic sentiments (Arbindra et al. 2005; Magnusson et al. 2001). Still other studies find no relationship between age and levels of organic consumption and pro-organic sentiments (Feil et al. 2020; O’Donovan and McCarthy 2002). Education: More mixed results, though more research finds a link between education and organic consumption than does not. Some studies have found a clear positive relationship between education and organic food consumption and pro-organic attitudes (see, e.g., Lockie et al. 2002). Other studies conclude that the link is minimal (Feil et al. 2020; Lea and Worsley 2005) or nonexistent (Arbindra et al. 2005). Lockie and colleagues (2002) also find organic food consumption and science education to be positively correlated. In their own words: “Contrary to yet another stereotype of organic consumers – as possessed by an irrational fear, or inability to understand, technological development – it seems that the more training people have in the critical evaluation of knowledge claims the more likely they are to consume organic food” (p. 36). Socio-structural: Other studies remind us that pro-organic attitudes do little good if the food is not available (Henryks and Pearson 2014). In one study, for instance, “convenience” was highlighted as an important factor shaping organic purchasing decisions (Hjelmar 2011). Admittedly, it is difficult to know, in hindsight, which came first – sentiments or market availability – though undoubtedly the two grew together. As one researcher explains in their study of organic food consumption in Europe: [T]he three countries with the highest organic market shares in Europe, and in the World, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark, all benefited from large retailers making organic food available and affordable to broad segments of consumers early in the development of the organic market. (Thøgersen 2010: 182)

“Local” versus “organic”

There is some evidence that the increase in popularity of local food, among other things (see Box 11.2), reflects a growing discontent toward “organic” food as currently defined by national, process-based standards. To quote one food activist following the release of the USDA’s final rules on organic certification in the US: “When we said organic we

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meant local. We meant healthful. We meant being true to the ecologies of the region. We meant mutually respectful growers and eaters. We meant social justice and community. In other words, industrial organic farming isn’t really organic” (quoted in Adams and Salois 2010: 332).

Box 11.2  Biodynamic Agriculture The roots of biodynamic farming can be traced back to a series of lectures given in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian writer and philosopher. Biodynamic agriculture can be likened to, one might say, “organic plus” (whereas conventionalized organic systems have been called by critics “organic lite” [Guthman 2004]). As one sourcebook explains: “Biodynamic farming is a combination of biological and dynamic practices; it also involves animal manures, crop rotations, care for animal welfare, looking at the farm entity and local distribution systems” (Padmavathy and Poyyamoli 2011: 387). The term “dynamic practices” in that definition is a bit controversial, at least in the scientific community, which perhaps is why it was not defined in any detail. The Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association write of this dynamism as follows: “[Biodynamics is a] type of organic farming that incorporates an understanding of ‘dynamic’ forces in nature not yet fully understood by science. By working creatively with these subtle energies, farmers are able to significantly enhance the health of their farms and the quality and flavor of food” (www.biodynamics.com/ biodynamics). The “biodynamic” label is trademarked by Demeter International, the largest certification organization for biodynamic agriculture in the world. This is not to suggest that consumers no longer desire organic food. Clearly they do. In the United States, sales jumped to US$35.1 billion in 2013, up 11.5 percent from the previous year’s US$31.5 billion (PRN 2014). By 2019, according to the 2020 Organic Industry Survey released by the Organic Trade Association, organic food sales in the US hit $50.1 billion, up 4.6 percent from the previous year (IFT 2020). And during the first half of 2020, to draw on the latest data available at the time of this writing, the COVID19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on the organic sector. US organic produce sales jumped by more than 50 percent during the early days of the pandemic. Other categories experiencing slower growth in 2019 saw big boosts in demand in 2020, as with milk and eggs. Packaged and frozen organic foods, meanwhile, saw double-digit growth as consumers increased at-home meal preparation (IFT 2020). Yet consumers also seem to want something more than what the organic label currently offers, as evidenced by the growth of farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, and other local/regional food-based initiatives occurring around the world. There is also some evidence that consumers with a “high preference” to (which is to say they prioritize the buying of) organic food also show a preference for local food. Curiously, however, this relationship does not exist in the reverse. Consumers with a “high preference” to local food, at least in one Danish study, failed to express a strong desire to buy organic food (Denver and Jensen 2014); evidence, perhaps, that local food proponents really are interested in going “beyond organic.” Large firms have entered the organic market by way of either acquiring old organic brands or introducing new ones. As detailed in one study, the acquisition strategy happened

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early on, when there were still small organic brands to acquire (Howard 2009). From here, top food processors began developing their own organic lines, such as M&M Mars’ Dove Organic, which was created specifically for retail giant Walmart as they worked to increase their organic offerings in 2006. These trends have only intensified in the last decade, and now nearly all of the thirty largest processors in North America have acquired organic brands. The scale of transactions has also increased, as evidenced by, for instance, the acquisition of natural/organic foods giant WhiteWave by Danone for $12.5 billion (July  2016) and the $21  billion acquisition of Keurig Green Mountain by Dr. Pepper (January  2018) (Howard 2020). For a visual depiction of this consolidation, see Figure 11.2 – this image, too, is a further reflection of the conventionalization of organics noted earlier in the book. Local food, however, does not appear immune to the forces of conventionalization, as more and more big brand names are attempting to cash in on the label. In 2009, for instance, Frito-Lay launched their Lay’s Local campaign. The chips are made utilizing potatoes grown near their factories. Consumers can even go to the company’s website (to their “Chip Tracker”), enter the first three digits of the product code on the bag and their ZIP code, and, presto, out pops the location of the plant that made the snack. Then there is the case of Chipotle, the celebrated restaurant chain that has said “No!” to genetically modified food (being the first national restaurant chain to cook with only non-GMO

Figure 11.2  Organic industry structure as of August 2020 Source: Philip Howard. See https://philhowardnet.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/organicjuly20small.png.

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ingredients) and “Yes!” to local sourcing for many of its ingredients. But wait. Chipotle doesn’t do all of its own cooking, even though its website proudly states “fresh cooking.” Two processing companies in Chicago, OSI and Miniat Holdings, braise the carnitas and barbacoa, cut and trim the steaks, cook the beans, and make the bases for its salsas (OSI also supplies McDonald’s with its burgers and nuggets, among other things). So while a store’s ingredients might have originally come from a farm just a short distance away (the company isn’t lying when it says it sources many things locally), those products then need to first travel to Chicago to get processed before coming back to that store. The chain notes this is done for quality control and consistency purposes (Shanker 2014; see Box 11.3).

Box 11.3  Just What Do We Mean by “Local”? The Case of Hawaiian Milk Clare Gupta and Tamar Makov (2017) evaluated the “localness” of milk produced in Hawaii by applying an approach that resembles the Made in America standard. Following similar criteria, two dairies were assessed by the share of their expenses coming from within the state. To qualify for the Made in America (or in this case Made in Hawaii) designation, that figure would need to be at 51 percent or higher. In addition to this economic measurement there is a physical one, where material inputs – labor, feed, etc. – are assessed according to their source location. Again, this figure would need to be 51 percent or higher to meet a Made in Hawaii standard. The authors find that milk from these two Hawaiian dairies failed to be “local” according to the economic criteria, as the majority of their expenditures go to paying for materials from outside the state (i.e., fertilizer, feed), while one dairy met the other criteria, as 71 percent of their physical organic mass – namely, the feed (by weight) used – came from local sources. We need to, as this study does, problematize the concept of “local.” Often, the term is operationalized by looking at how far a food product was raised from the consumer. Why not also look at, for instance, the distant that inputs (feed, fertilizers, machinery, etc.) traveled to the farm using them. What about labor? If a farm relies on migrant/immigrant labor, should those miles be logged too?

Slow food The slow food movement was launched in 1987 by a group of Italian writers and journalists with the aim of preserving traditional and regional cuisine at the points of production (e.g., farming), preparation (e.g., cooking), and consumption (e.g., taste). The term “slow” still evokes quizzical looks, though there is a lot of talk of late around the concept by social and political theorists, journalists, and activists – a backlash, arguably, against the ever-quickening pace of everyday life (Wolin 1997; Connolly 2002). Slow food, slow living, slow knowledge, slow politics: just a few examples of where “slowness” is being evoked with an eye toward social change. The slow food movement is an international phenomenon, which today spans more than 150 nations in Europe, North, South, and Central America, Asia, Oceania, and

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Africa. This translates into more than 100,000 members, joined in 1,600 convivia (local chapters). The Slow Food organization also has an influential lobbying presence in the European Union (EU) on matters of trade and agricultural policy. A publishing collaboration between Slow Food and the popular UK-based Ecologist magazine in 2004 marks a strategic move to broaden the movement’s rhetoric to include environmental issues. Other accomplishments of Slow Food include the promotion of more than 500 initiatives annually, giving support to 10,000 small producers, the promotion and conservation (e.g., through the Ark of Taste catalog) of 903 products at risk of extinction, and 1,300 food education activities and 350 school gardens in 100 countries. Take the example of Tuscarora White Corn, also known as Iroquois White Corn. Tuscarora is an heirloom variety long prized as the staple food crop of the Iroquois Nation (Native Americans who originally resided largely in upstate New York). The corn is famous for its large white kernels that are of the perfect consistency for grinding into cornmeal for breads and soups. Tuscarora White Corn is an important material medium through which the Iroquois are able to practice their culture. And it was disappearing at an alarming rate. Prior to its inclusion in the Ark of Taste, fewer than 100 acres of this corn were in cultivation in the US. The cry “Give me Tuscarora or give me death!” might sound a bit over the top until you understand the truly existential nature of Tuscarora White Corn. Without it, aspects of the Iroquois culture will die, literally. Critics of the food system status quo have a lot to like about slow food, as its theoretical underpinnings seem to compliment what critics of capitalism have been saying since Karl Marx (Meneley 2004). The movement’s symbol is, of all things, a snail. This rejection of speed has a long lineage in social thought, as critical theorists have for over a century lambasted the wage labor structures of capitalism that regulate the bodies of the workers at neck-breaking speeds; a pace becoming matched gastronomically, as we turn increasingly to fast, convenient, portable food. Sidney Mintz (1986) has famously written about the centrality of sugar in working-class diets due to its “fit” with the ever-quickening pace of factory life. A food ideally suited for the working class, energy-dense sugar replaced foods that were more nutritionally sound but which required too much time to prepare and therefore did not fit with capitalist work schedules. The last couple centuries have made life a blur, slow food advocates argue. It is time we slowed down. The slow food project has also been dubbed by some of its founders as representing “virtuous globalization,” in that it “promotes itself as providing a model for imagining alternative modes of global connectedness, in which members of minority cultures – including niche-food producers – are encouraged to network and thrive” (Leitch 2009: 45). This term could easily be passed over, mistaken for hollow marketing jargon. Besides, as a student once asked me, “Isn’t ‘virtuous globalization’ a contradiction in terms?” If we spend just a little time unpacking the term our effort will yield something interesting. This talk of virtuous globalization tells us that slow food is less interested in food revolution than it is in food reform. What this suggests, then, is that slow food is seeking, at least in part, to utilize some of the same pathways employed by conventional agriculture to gain support and grow (Lotti 2010). Michael Pollan (2003) attempts to champion virtuous globalization when he writes: “Paradoxically, sometimes the best way to rescue the most idiosyncratic local products and practices is to find a global market for them. This is what Slow Food means by ‘virtuous globalization,’ a simple but powerful idea that throws a wrench of complexity into the usual black-or-white arguments over free trade.” Globalization scholar and anti-corporate activist Starr (2010: 486) even wrote about the potential

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virtues of globalization (though she never used the term “virtuous”) when talking about alternative food movements: Anticapitalists generally spurn market projects as ideologically inadequate pragmatism. [. . .] But anticapitalists have innovated precious few strategies engaging to the alienated, individualistic, fearful consumer culture we find ourselves organizing in. If the market is where society increasingly spends its time and attention, then we need to learn to organize in the market, keen to identify its fissures and expand them into new worlds. This is not reformism or apologism, it is recognizing the historical political-cultural reality in which we find ourselves and those with whom we would like to make revolution. Yet let us not forget the costs that movements must pay when they seek, in Starr’s words, to “take place in the market.” The article “The Commoditization of Products and Taste” gives some good examples of these costs (Lotti 2010). In this article, the author argues “that commoditization makes the endeavors of Slow Food resemble the conventional agricultural system it is trying to oppose, as well as undermining the very agrobiodiversity the organization seeks to protect” (p. 71). One example of slow food given is Pélardon (a cheese). Producers of this slow cheese are expected to produce their particular Pélardon according to very specific standards, resulting in a high level of uniformity in their product. There are therefore enormous asymmetries in the incentive structure between slow Pélardon and non-slow Pélardon. Those select few in the former camp receive a premium price and considerable support from the Slow Food organization for the marketing of their product, while the rest struggle to make a living. Thus, as the author points out: Unless there are equal incentives elsewhere for the continued production of the whole variety of Pélardon cheeses, the actions of Slow Food actually risk having two negative effects. First, they risk eliminating biodiversity at the local scale. The eleven other Pélardon cheeses may cease to be produced, resulting in a decrease in biodiversity because where there were twelve different cheeses, there remains only one. (p. 79) Biodiversity is further reduced by the movement’s emphasis on maintaining the genetic “purity” of the heritage variety. The article talks specifically of a pig farmer – Pedro – who maintains a breed included in the Ark of Taste: Pedro cannot cross his pigs with other breeds; this would ruin the purity of an autochthonous breed. It is this crossing between breeds and varieties, however, that maintains and creates the agrobiodiversity at the local level and upon which Slow Food depends to create the products it has identified. Pedro’s pigs are preserved but the process from which future breeds might originate – that of crossing the Euskal Txerria with other breeds – has been stopped. (p. 79) Thus, while slow food may be seeking to preserve agrobiodiversity at the international level, it, somewhat paradoxically, is reducing it at the local level. Elsewhere, criticism toward slow food has been more pointed. Some have labeled the movement as embracing a type of culinary romanticism, in that it fails to

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appreciate the democratization of food choice – maybe people actually want to eat fast food! – that has taken place over the last half of a century (Laudan 2001). Slow food has also been criticized for merely replacing global tyranny (by multinational food companies and retail firms) with a more regional form (by local elites) (Lauden 2004). Earlier I mentioned how slow food implores us to slow down. Saying this, however, does nothing to change the socio-economic structures that make life for so many so fast. Until the economy is significantly altered many people will simply not have the time to do food (or much of anything) slowly. And who, if we suddenly started slowing down, would be burdened with this time-consuming activity? Presumably, unless gender roles and expectations were to suddenly change too, women would be expected to engage in the majority of hidden domestic labor that makes slow food possible. Meneley (2004: 174), quoting from a newspaper article on slow food dishes, describes the delicacy, capòn magro: “The dish consists of layers of mixed seafood, salsa verde, potato and smoked tuna. With all the boning, shelling, cleaning and chopping, it takes three people five hours to make a real capòn magro. It is worth every minute though [. . .].” Who – especially among the working class – has time for this? Finally, there is concern that the movement does not aid small producers as much as its publications claim. A study of a Slow Food–sponsored project to recreate and promote Serpa Velho (a hard aged cheese historically produced in the Alentejo region of Portugal) examines the historical forces behind three changes that the project sought to reverse: (1) the abandonment by cheese makers of the Merino breed; (2) the move away from aging the cheese on straw mats in the cheese room rafters to aging in refrigerated stores; and (3) the sale of younger, softer cheeses (West and Domingos 2012). The authors argue that this project’s aims contradict Slow Food’s overarching goals of fostering the production of food that is “good, clean and fair.” That is because there are locally, culturally, and historically-specific reasons cheese makers in this region have shifted production practices over the years. Trying to revert “back” to “traditional” practices in this case suggests elitism, as it indicates that the movement organizers “know better” than the region’s producers.

Transition. . . This chapter reviewed a number of alternatives/challenges to the current dominant food system. The following chapter continues this theme while digging even deeper into many of the concepts introduced in this one.

Discussion questions 1 What does “organic” food mean to you? To your friends and family? How does that understanding square with the USDA’s process-based standard? 2 In your own experience, how has the concept of “good food” been used to create in-groups (“us”) and out-groups (“them”)? 3 Does the slow food movement seem to be concerned about food sovereignty?

Suggested readings: introductory level Cairns, K., and J. Johnston. 2018. On (Not) Knowing Where Your Food Comes from: Meat, Mothering and Ethical Eating, Agriculture and Human Values 35(3): 569–580, www.slowfood.com/.

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Suggested readings: advanced level Carolan, M. 2020. Ethical Eating as Experienced by Consumers and Producers: When Good Food Meets Good Farmers, Journal of Consumer Culture, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1469540519899967. Feil, A.A., C.C. da Silva Cyrne, F.C.W. Sindelar, J.E. Barden, and M. Dalmoro. 2020. Profiles of Sustainable Food Consumption: Consumer Behavior Toward Organic Food in Southern Region of Brazil, Journal of Cleaner Production, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.120690. Lehtimäki, T., and M.J. Virtanen. 2020. Shaping Values and Economics: Tensions and Compromises in the Institutionalization of Organic Agriculture in Finland (1991–2015), Journal of Rural Studies 80: 149–159.

References Adams, D., and M. Salois. 2010. Local Versus Organic: A Turn in Consumer Preferences and Willingnessto-Pay, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 25(4): 331–341. Aertsens, J., W. Verbeke, K. Mondelaers, and G. Van Huylenbroeck. 2009. Personal Determinants of Organic Food Consumption: A Review, British Food Journal 111(10): 1140–1167. Altenbuchner, C., S. Vogel, and M. Larcher. 2017. Effects of Organic Farming on the Empowerment of Women: A Case Study on the Perception of Female Farmers in Odisha, India, Women’s Studies International Forum 64 (September): 28–33. Arbindra, P., W. Moon, and S. Balasubramanian. 2005. Agro-Biotechnology and Organic Food Purchase in the United Kingdom, British Food Journal 107(2): 84–97. Aschemann-Witzel, Jessica, Nicole Maroscheck, and Ulrich Hamm. 2013. Are Organic Consumers Preferring or Avoiding Foods with Nutrition and Health Claims? Food Quality and Preference 30(1): 68–76. Asioli, Daniele, Maurizio Canavari, Erika Pignatti, Tim Obermowe, Katia Laura Sidali, Christine Vogt, and Achim Spiller. 2014. Sensory Experiences and Expectations of Italian and German Organic Consumers, Journal of International Food & Agribusiness Marketing 26(1): 13–27. Atkinson, L. 2014. Green Moms: The Social Construction of a Green Mothering Identity Via Environmental Advertising Appeals, Consumption Markets & Culture 17(6): 553–572. Baker, S., K. Thompson, J. Engelken, and K. Huntley. 2004. Mapping the Values Driving Organic Food Choice: Germany vs. the UK, European Journal of Marketing 38(8): 995–1012. Beagan, Brenda L., Chapman Gwen E., and Power Elaine M. 2016. Cultural and Symbolic Capital with and Without Economic Constraint Food Shopping in Low-Income and High-Income Canadian Families, Food, Culture & Society 19(1): 45–70. Burton, M., D. Rigby, and T. Young. 1999. Analysis of the Determinants of Adoption of Organic Horticultural Techniques in the UK, Journal of Agricultural Economics 50(1): 47–63. Cairns, K., and J. Johnston. 2018. On (Not) Knowing Where Your Food Comes From: Meat, Mothering and Ethical Eating, Agriculture and Human Values 35(3): 569–580. Cairns, K., J. Johnston, and N. MacKendrick. 2013. Feeding the ‘Organic Child’: Mothering Through Ethical Consumption, Journal of Consumer Culture 13(2): 97–118. Campbell, H. 2009. Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory, Agriculture and Human Values 26(4): 309–232. Carolan, M. 2017. More-Than-Active Food Citizens: A Longitudinal and Comparative Study of Alternative and Conventional Eaters, Rural Sociology 82(2): 197–225. Carolan, M. 2018. The Real Cost of Cheap Food, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Chen, M.F. 2009. Attitude Toward Organic Foods Among Taiwanese as Related to Health Consciousness, Environmental Attitudes, and the Mediating Effects of a Healthy Lifestyle, British Food Journal 111(2): 165–178. Chryssohoidis, G., and A. Krystallis. 2005. Organic Consumers’ Personal Values Research: Testing and Validating the List of Values (LOV) Scale and Implementing a Value-Based Segmentation Task, Food Quality and Preference 16(7): 585–599.

Sustainable diets and ethical consumption 223 Connolly, W.E. 2002. Identity, Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Darnhofer, I., W. Schneeberger, and B. Freyer. 2005. Converting or Not Converting to Organic Farming in Austria: Farmer Types and Their Rationale, Agriculture and Human Values 22: 39–52. Denver, Sigrid, and Jørgen Jensen. 2014. Consumer Preferences for Organically and Locally Produced Apples, Food Quality and Preference 31: 129–134. DeVault, M.L. 1994. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dreezens, E., C. Martijin, P. Tenbult, G. Kok, and N.K. Vries. 2005. Food and Values: An Examination of Values Underlying Attitudes Toward Genetically Modified and Organically Grown Food Products. Appetite 44: 115–122. Feil, A.A., C.C. da Silva Cyrne, F.C.W. Sindelar, J.E. Barden, and M. Dalmoro. 2020. Profiles of Sustainable Food Consumption: Consumer Behavior Toward Organic Food in Southern Region of Brazil, Journal of Cleaner Production, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.120690. FIBL. 2015. The World of Organic Agriculture: Statistics and Emerging Trends. Switzerland: Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, www.fibl.org/fileadmin/documents/shop/1663-organicworld-2015.pdf. Fielding-Singh, P.  2017. A  Taste of Inequality: Food’s Symbolic Value Across the Socioeconomic Spectrum, Sociological Science 4: 424–448. Fleşeriu, C., S.A. Cosma, and V. Bocăneţ. 2020. Values and Planned Behaviour of the Romanian Organic Food Consumer, Sustainability 12(5): 1722. Fotopoulos, C., A. Krystallis, and M. Ness. 2003. Wine Produced by Organic Grapes in Greece: Using Means-End Chains Analysis to Reveal Organic Buyers’ Purchasing Motives in Comparison to Nonbuyers, Food Quality and Preference 14: 549–566. Geen, N., and C. Firth. 2006. The Committed Organic Consumer. Denmark: Joint Organic Congress Odense. Gupta, C., and T. Makov. 2017. How Global Is My Local Milk? Evaluating the First-Order Inputs of “Local” Milk in Hawaii, Agriculture and Human Values 34(3): 619–630. Guthman, J. 2003. Fast Food/Organic Food, Social and Cultural Geography 4(1): 45–58. Guthman, J. 2004. The Trouble with ‘Organic Lite’ in California: A Rejoinder to the ‘Conventionalisation’ Debate, Sociologia Ruralis 44(3): 301–316. Hansmann, R., I. Baur, and C.R. Binder. 2020. Increasing Organic Food Consumption: An Integrating Model of Drivers and Barriers, Journal of Cleaner Production, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jclepro.2020.123058. Henryks, J., and D. Pearson. 2014. Investigating the Context of Purchase Choices to Further Understanding of Switching Behavior, Journal of Organic Systems 9(2): 38–48. Howard, P. 2009. Organic Industry Structure, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus 5(3), www. newmediacaucus.org/html/journal/issues.php?f=papers&time=2009_winte r&page=howard. Howard, P.  2020. Organic Processing Industry Structure 2020. September  24, https://philhoward. net/2020/09/24/organic-processing-industry-structure-2020/. Hjelmar, U. 2011. Consumers’ Purchase of Organic Food Products: A  Matter of Convenience and Reflexive Practices, Appetite 56: 336–344. Huddart Kennedy, E., S. Baumann, and J. Johnston. 2018. Eating for Taste and Eating for Change, Social Forces, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soy113. Hughner, R., P. McDonagh, A. Prothero, C. Schultz, and J. Stanton. 2007. Who Are Organic Food Consumers? A Compilation and Review of Why People Purchase Organic Food, Journal of Consumer Behavior 6: 94–110. IFT. 2020. Organic Food Sales Hit $50 Billion in 2019. IFT, June 10, www.ift.org/news- and-publications/ news/2020/june/10/organic-food-sales-hit-$50-billion-in-2019. Kropotkin, P.  2011. The Conquest of Bread. Chapter  5, http://libcom.org/library/conquestofbread 1906peterkropotkin5.

224  Agrifood futures Laudan, R. 2001. A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food, Gastronomica 1: 36–44. Lauden, R. 2004. Slow Food, the French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism, Food, Culture and Society 7(2): 133–144. Lea, E., and T. Worsley. 2005. Australians’ Organic Food Beliefs, Demographics and Values, British Food Journal 107(11): 855–869. Lehtimäki, T., and M.J. Virtanen. 2020. Shaping Values and Economics: Tensions and Compromises in the Institutionalization of Organic Agriculture in Finland (1991–2015), Journal of Rural Studies 80: 149–159. Leitch, A. 2009. Slow Food and the Politics of “Virtuous Globalization,” In The Globalization of Food, edited by D. Inglis and D. Gimlin, Pp. 45–64. New York: Berg. Lockeretz, W. 1997. Diversity of Personal and Farm Characteristics Among Organic Growers in the Northeastern United States, Biological Agriculture and Horticulture 14(1): 13–24. Lockie, S., K. Lyons, G. Lawrence, and J. Grice. 2004. Choosing Organics: A Path Analysis of Factors Underlying the Selection of Organic Food Among Australian Consumers, Appetite 43(2): 135–146. Lockie, S., K. Lyons, G. Lawrence, and D. Halpin. 2006. Going Organic: Mobilizing Networks for Environmentally Responsible Food Production. Wallingford, UK: CABI. Lockie, S., K. Lyons, G. Lawrence, and K. Mummery. 2002. Eating ‘Green’: Motivations Behind Organic Food Consumption in Australia, Sociologia Ruralis 42(1): 23–40. Lotti, A. 2010. The Commoditization of Products and Taste: Slow Food and the Conservation of Agrobiodiversity, Agriculture and Human Values 27: 71–83. Łuczka, W., and S. Kalinowski. 2020. Barriers to the Development of Organic Farming: A Polish Case Study, Agriculture 10(11), https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture10110536. Magnusson, M., A. Arvola, U. Koivisto Hursti, L. Aberg, and P. Sjödén. 2001. Attitudes Towards Organic Foods Among Swedish Consumers, British Food Journal 103(3): 209–226. McCarthy, Breda, Hong-Bo Liu, and Tingzhen Chen. 2015. Trends in Organic and Green Food Consumption in China: Opportunities and Challenges for Regional Australian Exporters, Journal of Economic and Social Policy 17(1), http://epubs.scu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1323&context=jesp. McEachern, M., and P. McClean. 2002. Organic Purchasing Motivations and Attitudes: Are They Ethical? International Journal of Consumer Studies 26(2): 85–92. Meah, A. 2017. Fathers, Food Practices and the Circuits of Intimacy in Families in Northern England, Gender, Place & Culture 24(8): 1145–1164. Meneley, A. 2004. Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Slow Food, Anthropologica 46(2): 165–176. Mintz, S. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. Naccarato, Peter, and LeBesco Kathleen. 2012. Culinary Capital. New York: Berg. Nasir, V., and F. Karakaya. 2014. Underlying Motivations of Organic Food Purchase Intentions, Agribusiness 30(3): 290–308. O’Donovan, P., and M. McCarthy. 2002. Irish Consumer Preference for Organic Meat, British Food Journal 104: 353–370. Padel, S. 2001. Conversion to Organic Farming: A Typical Example of the Diffusion of an Innovation? Sociologia Ruralis 41(1): 40–61. Padel, S., and C. Foster. 2005. Exploring the Gap Between Attitudes and Behaviour: Understanding why Consumers Buy or Do Not Buy Organic Food, British Food Journal 107(8): 606–625. Padmavathy, K., and G. Poyyamoli. 2011. Alternative Farming Techniques for Sustainable Food Production, In Genetics, Biofuels and Local Farming Systems, edited by Eric Lichtfouse. New York: Springer. Peterson, Hikaru, Andrew Barkley, Adriana Chacon-Cascante, and Terry L. Kastens. 2012. The Motivation for Organic Grain Farming in the United States: Profits, Lifestyle, or the Environment? Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 44(2): 137–155. Pollan, M. 2003. Cruising on the Ark of Taste, Mother Jones, May–June, http://motherjones.com/ politics/2003/05/michael-pollan-turkey. PRN. 2014. American Appetite for Organic Products Breaks Through $35  Billion Mark. PRNewswire, May 15, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-appetite- for-organic-products-breaksthrough-35-billion-mark-259327061.html.

Sustainable diets and ethical consumption 225 Roddy, G., C. Cowan, and G. Hutchinson. 1996. Consumer Attitudes and Behaviour to Organic Foods in Ireland, Journal of International Consumer Marketing 9(2): 1–19. Schifferstein, H., and P. Oude Ophuis. 1998. Health-Related Determinants of Organic Food Consumption in the Netherlands, Food Quality and Preference 9: 119–133. Shanker, Deena. 2014. Nine Disappointing Facts About Chipotle. Buzzfeed, June 25, www.buzzfeed. com/deenashanker/disappointed-in-chipotle#.ovpROVXLw, last accessed June 9, 2015. Slagboom, M., M. Kargo, D. Edwards, A.C. Sørensen, J.R. Thomasen, and L. Hjortø. 2016. Organic Dairy Farmers Put More Emphasis on Production Traits Than Conventional Farmers, Journal of Dairy Science 99(12): 9845–9856. Starr, A. 2010. Local Food: A Social Movement? Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 10(6): 479–490. Thøgersen, J. 2010. Country Differences in Sustainable Consumption: The Case of Organic Food, Journal of Macromarketing 30(2): 171–185. Tovey, H. 1997. Food, Environmentalism and Rural Sociology: On the Organic Farming Movement in Ireland, Sociologica Ruralis 37(1): 22–37. Tung, Shih-Jui, Jenner Charng-Jiuan Tsay, and Meng-Chu Lin. 2015. Life Course, Diet-Related Identity and Consumer Choice of Organic Food in Taiwan, British Food Journal 117(2). Wang, H., F. Qiu, and B. Swallow. 2014. Can Community Gardens and Farmers’ Markets Relieve Food Desert Problems? Applied Geography 55: 127–137. West, Harry, and Nuno Domingos. 2012. Gourmandizing Poverty Food: The Serpa Cheese Slow Food Presidium, Journal of Agrarian Change 12(1): 120–143. Wolin, S.S. 1997. What Time Is It? Theory & Event 1(1), https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.1991.0003. Zhang, L. 2020. From Left Behind to Leader: Gender, Agency, and Food Sovereignty in China, Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10114-9.

12 The “traps” in agrifood studies . . . and beyond

A good sociologist never lets particular practices off the hook, even those dressed up as “solutions.” The local, in conventional food-speak, has in many instances come to mean a more sustainable, just, equitable solution to the global. The chapter beings by reviewing literature that critically investigates this claim, leading some scholars to famously caution against falling into the “local trap” – speaking of the local as an objective state with inherent worth when in fact it is a social construction (Born and Purcell 2006). The fondness with which foodies, food activists, and food writers tend to speak of the local is often only matched by their disdain for the global. Yet if there is a local trap, is there not also a global trap? That is, if “the local” has multiple meanings and is open to contestation, should not we expect the same to apply to the categorical box we refer to as “the global”? After discussing the problems associated with the uncritical adoption of “local” and “global” terminology attention shifts to highlighting how we might avoid these traps. I  then interrogate the concept of “free markets,” which opens the door to talk about something known as fair trade.

The local trap and unreflexive localism The last thirty years have given rise to some highly engaging, exceedingly thoughtful arguments in support of more local food systems, like Jack Kloppenburg and colleagues’ (1996) seminal essay “Coming to the Foodshed.” In this article, we find a compelling case to support the creation of food systems analogous to the watershed. The foodshed: “a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land and from the land in a place that we can call home” (P. 33). The literature published between this article’s release and the first years of the new millennium represents the high water mark of pro-local food scholarship (see, e.g., Hassanein 1999; Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002; Murdoch et al. 2000; Norberg-Hodge et al. 2002). The message, which continues to be parroted by many food writers and food activists today, is that local food is not just generally better than its global alternative but inherently so. Yet that’s an empirical statement. What, then, do the data say on the subject? The data are clear: there is nothing inherently good (or bad) about local food. Issues of social justice, sustainability, and the like depend on a lot more than whether or not the system is local. And besides, just what does “local food” mean anyway? Unwavering proponents of local food are said to have fallen into the “local trap,” which they would do well to climb out of given that they are promoting what does not exist in any objectively real way (Born and Purcell 2006). As Born and Purcell (2006), the first to make the local trap argument, explain: “the local trap is the assumption that local is

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-16

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Figure 12.1  Walmart’s commitment to local food Source: Flickr images.

inherently good” (p. 195). The data, however, say otherwise: “No matter what its scale, the outcomes produced by a food system are contextual: they depend on the actors and agendas that are empowered by the particular social relations in a given food system” (p. 195–196). For instance, local food movements often fail “to address more intractable issues such as labor concerns, inequality, migration, [and] systemic patterns of social injustice, to name just a few” (Blue 2009: 69) (Figure 12.1). Starr’s (2010) following account with a local food cooperative is a stark reminder that local food organizations can be as egregiously unjust as any global multinational firm: I had offered to help them identify local producers. They ignored me. They had also suppressed labor organizing and fired two workers, triggering concerns about racism. The board rebuffed members organizing on these issues. (p. 486; see also Box 12.1)

Box 12.1  The “Trappings” of Farm-to-School Programs Farm-to-school (FTS) programs seek to bring fresh, local produce to schools. At its face, it is a win-win: farmers win by selling directly to schools, receiving a higher premium price for their labors; schools and school-aged children win by receiving seemingly safe, fresh, high-quality products. Not so fast. While not suggesting we campaign against FTS programs, scholarship on the subject (e.g., Allen and

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Guthman 2006; O’Hara and Benson 2019) does highlight a need to give these programs a more critical second look. Some points highlighted include: • FTS programs have emerged as public resources are being slashed following a shift in governance toward neoliberalism (e.g., where private profit-seeking firms are providing for things previously supplied by the state). Adapting to this economic climate, FTS organizers must find ways to make these programs profitable and competitive with other alternatives like the trend that began in the 1990s of allowing vending machines and restaurant chains into schools, arrangements that pay handsomely. • FTS programs also have substantial start-up costs compared to conventional school food that is made to “heat and serve” (and compared to vending machines, which require no up-front capital investments). To deal with this problem, some schools have asked FTS programs to make available processed food in an attempt to save on labor and equipment costs associated with preparing whole foods. • FTS programs do not necessarily help small farms. Large school districts often need to deal in volume, which privileges larger-scale producers. • As local initiatives, FTS programs have greatest success in schools located in areas where capital (human, financial, natural, social, etc.) is greatest. In other words, they tend to benefit schools and communities in least need of additional resources. By pushing feeding responsibilities “down” to the level of the local, such initiatives also fit well with neoliberal philosophy, which seeks the devolution of the state in exchange for an emergence of local forms of governance. In the case of FTS programs, this trend is particularly disturbing, as school food programs have historically been the responsibility of the state, which has helped guarantee their implemented for purposes of nationwide poverty alleviation (recognizing also the influence that agribusiness interests have had on these policies). Admittedly, in the absence of the state stepping in to properly support lunch programs, we absolutely do need action at the local level. And as other research indicates (e.g., Bisceglia et al. 2020; Stapleton 2020), parents, and mothers especially, have created meaningful social change at the local level and brought improvements to school lunch programs.

Calls by local food advocates to buy and grow local food, while well-intentioned, can also gloss over real constraints keeping people from adopting these prescriptions – like what if you don’t have the time or money to follow the prescriptions of food writers telling you to cook more and buy fresh fruits and veggies? Without calls for and actions directed at broader structural changes, the ability of people to practice localism will be concentrated in the hands of the more privileged, leaving entire segments of the population out of the movement. Similarly, any shift toward local, in-season, home-produced foods necessitates an increase in work by households’ primary food providers, who continue to be women. A study of Canadian farmwomen notes that women were unable to fully engage in preferred local and self-provisioned food activities without the aid of

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children and extended family, as existing role expectations made them also responsible for house cleaning, child care, and food-preparation activities (McIntyre and Rondeau 2011). The authors then proceed to critique Michael Pollan’s unhelpful and terribly nonsociologically informed “solution” to eating better. According to Pollan, “If we decide cooking is important to our health and our family life, we’ll find the time to do it” (as quoted in McIntyre and Rondeau 2011: 121). Easier said than done, Mr. Pollan. So as not to diminish the path-breaking nature of prior research, literature dating back to the late 1990s has been warning us of the dangers of conflating local with ecologically sound and socially just (see, e.g., DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs et al. 1998; Hinrichs 2000, 2003; Winter 2003). Yet just because “local” (like any scalar category) is political and therefore socially constructed, does this therefore mean the term must be jettisoned from all future discussions about food and agriculture? Might there be such a thing as, say, a local-trap trap? There may well be (Carolan 2011; DuPuis et al. 2011). To unpack this argument, let us begin with a distinction that first appears in DuPuis and Goodman’s 2005 important article “Should we Go ‘Home’ to Eat?,” between what they call “unreflexive localism” and “reflexive localism.” Their point (or at least one of them): unfailingly pro-local food stances not only reflect poor scholarship but can be downright dangerous. According to these scholars, unreflexive localism comes with the following two negative consequences: “First, it can deny the politics of the local, with potentially problematic social justice consequences. Second, it can lead to proposed solutions, based on alternative standards of purity and perfection, that are vulnerable to corporate cooptation” (p. 360). Local, in the absence of critical reflection, risks being used as an ideological tool for reactionary politics, nativist sentiment, and corporate greenwashing (like Walmart’s hijacking of the term in its push to be a major supplier of local food). I leave the concept of reflexive localism for later in the chapter, when I attempt to say something about how we can talk about the global and local without falling into any traps. The remainder of this section will discuss the trappings of unreflexive localism. Let us start with the more obvious trappings, like who gets to define what local means. These definitions can vary significantly by corporation. For example, Walmart’s definition of “local” means food produced in the same state. So: if you live near your state’s border, food produced a mile away but just outside the state would not be local, while food produced hundreds of miles away within the state would (California stretches 770 miles/1,239 km from north to south). Or, for a point of comparison, take Whole Foods Market’s definition, which explains that “we generally define local as those products that are produced, grown or harvested in the same state as a store location.” However, they quickly qualify that definition by also saying: “Occasionally, we may choose to include products from suppliers in neighboring states in this definition” (Whole Foods 2019). Let us not forget, too, that who answers the “What is local?” question can shape the ethnic character of available food, thus determining such things as whether consumers can engage in, say, “eating black” (Slocum 2011: 303). As a concept, “the local” is inherently political, in that it necessitates the creation of boundaries that only some people, places, and ways of life fall within. This is why localtalk is at its worst when it is unreflexive, acritical, and non-democratic. When practiced as such, calls for the construction of regional/local food systems can be a backhanded way of lobbying for a “defensive politics of localization,” leading to an elitist and reactionary movement that appeals through nativist sentiments (Hinrichs 2003: 37). This process has also been called “defensive localism,” where the people, places, and ways of life defined as “not local” are cast in a negative light, if not outright demonized (Winter 2003). Further

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examples of defensive localism have been documented by fair trade scholars, who note consumers that resist the fair trade label occasionally do so as it signifies helping “foreign” farmers (Long and Murray 2013). As Buller and Morris (2004: 1078) observe, “once territoriality becomes a component of value, it also becomes a commodity in itself, to protect and exploit.” Under defensive localism only certain territories and people are valued, to the detriment of others. It has also been argued that the sub-national and global scalar levels are gaining prominence in recent decades at the expense of the nation-state. This has led some to view the resurgence of the local as a response toward the hollowing out of the state – the substitution of government for governance. When viewed in this more critical light, local talk is recast from representing a case of resistance to neoliberal globalization to an intrinsic part of it (DuPuis and Goodman 2005). This is in recognition that, like neoliberal reforms, local forms of governance ultimately endorse and foster “the self regulation of individuals and communities which, at the regional level, equates to the acceptance of programs, techniques and procedures that support market rule, productivism and global competition” (Lawrence 2004: 9).

The global trap and unreflexive globalism It is hard to locate the historical origins of globalization. There are a number of alleged starting points. Some locate its origins – of the full-blown spread of global capital – to as recently as the 1990s, after the fall of communism and the rise of the information revolution (e.g., Freidmand 2000). Marxists tend to prefer an earlier date, usually sometime during the nineteenth century, when global imperialism began to merge with Western industrial might (e.g., Brown 2009). Still others see a world-system of sorts going back 5,000 years, with the beginning of trade across Eurasia (Frank and Gills 1994). Regardless of when it started, we all can agree that the globalizations of food are well underway. Yes, I wrote globalizations of food. The literature is quite clear on the trappings associated with talk of globalization in the singular – of globalization as if it were a monolithic, unequivocal process. There is also a tendency to get so caught up on what stays the same with this process that we sometimes miss its complexity, nuance, and indeed even creative novelty (see Box 12.2).

Box 12.2  The Glocalization of SPAM While a lowbrow staple in the US, SPAM has become a delicacy in the Philippines among the growing middle class (SPAM is short for SPiced-hAM). As Ty Matejowsky (2007: 38) explains, “SPAM personifies America in all of its perceived grandeur [. . .] [due to] its associations with the US military, its efficient packaging, and use as pasalubong (homecoming gifts), SPAM reflects an idealized version of American that many everyday Filipinos hold to be true.” While studying Filipino cuisine, Matejowsky (2017) describes being frequently invited to dinner in Filipino households to be served fried SPAM. The hosts hoped to make their guest feel at home, the assumption being that all Americans eat SPAM. Matejowsky (2017) goes on to describe the confusion experienced when the hosts learn that many in the

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US go their entire lives never having eaten this product. Nevertheless, the vision of SPAM as an all-American food was successfully capitalized on by the founders of SPAMJAM: an all-SPAM Philippine fast food restaurant. SPAMJAM claims to offer Filipinos an “authentic” American eating experience, even though it involves a food that many in the US never eat. SPAMJAM represents a clear example of how elongated food networks rarely (if ever) result in the exportation of unequivocal “sameness.” Though clearly connected to the US, SPAMJAM reflects locally rooted understandings and applications of this spiced ham.

When talking about global similarities we must be careful not to overemphasize the degree to which globalizations homogenize. “Similarity” is not equal to “sameness” when talking about food globalizations. To say otherwise is to succumb to yet another trap. Take the case of McDonald’s. On the one hand, there are undeniable similarities across this global restaurant chain – a point famously detailed in Ritzer’s (2020) McDonaldization of Society. Nevertheless, while having learned there are substantial cost savings through standardization, the food giant also knows the importance of being able to adapt to local socio-cultural environments for its long-term success. There are a number of instances in which McDonald’s altered its menu due to local laws and customs. In certain stores in Israel, for instance, Big Macs are served without cheese, which allows for the separation of meat and cheese required of kosher restaurants. In India, customers can order Vegetable McNugggets and a mutton-based Big Mac (called a Maharaja Mac), recognizing that Hindus and Muslins do not eat beef and pork, respectively, while other religious groups (like Jains) avoid meat entirely. Some other examples of Mcglocalization include beer in Germany, teriyaki burgers in Japan, cold pasta in Italy, McSpaghetti in Philippines, and McLaks (grilled salmon sandwich) in Norway. Richard Wilk (2009) argues that the categories “local” and “global” are actually part of the process of globalization itself. Historically, “when people are exposed to foreign goods, especially novel ones which challenge culturally important consumption practices, some will always react by inventing tradition” (p. 190–191). In other words, perceived external threats lead to certain practices being selected (usually by elites) and established as a cultural, local standard. In his study of Mayan ethnohistory, Wilk (1991) describes how tradition assumes a level of permanence during periods of cultural crisis when ways of life are viewed as under attack. The aforementioned defensive localism resembles something very similar to this phenomenon described by Wilk. Similarly, “national” cuisines have been shown to emerge (often through mass-produced and widely dispersed cookbooks) in response to globalization and in the accompaniment of nation building. This is evident, for example, throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, as national cuisine and national identity grew in lockstep fashion as levels of immigration and international integration increased (Appadurai 1988). There is also a tendency to talk about globalization in the context of motion and speed. Terms like fluid capital, information flows, and time-space compression – which are sprinkled throughout the food globalization literature – imply a world in which immobility is quickly being replaced with mobility. Yet this mobility presupposes structures of immobility. Lien (2009: 69), in her study of globally shipped salmon, states this point plainly: “Too often in globalization studies, the empirical attention drifts toward that

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which moves, at the expense of structures of immobility that, in fact, make movement possible.” Lien looks specifically at food standards and science that allows for the creation of “a ‘generalized’ knowledge of salmon ‘everywhere’: a notion of salmon as a universal biogenetic entity the qualities of which may be known through a set of scientifically informed and standardized techniques” (p. 69). As Lien highlights, structures of immobility can take many forms. They can be structures in the conventional sense, like landing strips and satellites (which make global air travel and GPS location technology possible). Yet structures of immobility also refer to “things” like international food standards, shared beliefs about how food ought to look, and standardized forms of knowledge. To the best of my knowledge, the term “unreflexive globalism” has never been used before. It is not my intention to create yet another neologism by using it here. I introduce the term only to provide some symmetry to the earlier-mentioned concept “unreflective localism.” For like “the local,” essentializing and monolithic treatments of “the global” massively understate the complexity of the world.

Reflexive glocalism Does this mean that we as social scientists ought to reject the terms “local” and “global”? Not necessarily. They remain meaningful analytic concepts; we just need to be mindful of their limits (and the “traps” that arise when we overstep those limits). The surest road to food security comes from having many options on the table, not fewer. It would be regretful if we stopped talking about local food just because it is a problematic term; after all, what term is not problematic? As others have argued, the key lies in reflexivity (see, e.g., DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Sharp 2019). Any effective food social movement “must be reflexive and critical, rather than be embraced as a panacea for global industrial agriculture” (McIntyre and Rondeau 2011: 122). Let’s look briefly at some examples of what it means to be more reflexive with our food. Thinking about food reflexively means remembering consumers do not exist in a vacuum

Although the local food movement attempts to move beyond an ideology of nutritionism – the tendency of reducing food to (and organizing eating patterns around) nutritional components – calls to buy local, while often well-intentioned, risk reducing discussions about food to matters of geography (e.g., where was it grown?). Doing this, however, disassociates food from, among other things, the broader context in which household gatekeepers make decisions about what foods to grow, purchase, prepare, and consume. When food writers like Michael Pollan (2008: 197) instruct readers to “cook and, if you can, plant a garden” they ignore (and unintentionally delegitimize) the very real sociological barriers that keep many individuals and households, especially the underprivileged living in food deserts, from purchasing (or growing) and preparing whole foods. Thinking about food reflexively means remembering that characteristics pertaining to the “quality” of food are sociologically produced

The move toward “the local” – and away from “the global” – has parallels with a turn toward “quality” among food and agriculture scholars (e.g., Goodman 2003; Scalco et al. 2020). This turn refers to a growing desire among people to eat “better” food, usually

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understood as fresher, safer, more local, and environmentally sustainable – so-called quality discourse leans heavily on, say, tradition, customs, history, place, and ecological practices. Rather than speaking of some inherent state, to talk about “quality” food sociologically is to look at what gives some foods this designation but not others. An excellent example of the complex nature of “quality” is offered by Friedberg (2009) through her term “industrial freshness” – a “mass-produced, nationally distributed, and constantly refrigerated” freshness (p. 2). Industrial freshness is a freshness made possible because of transportation and processing rather than in spite of it. Take the genetically engineered apple, approved by the FDA for consumption in the US (February  2015), that does not brown when exposed to air. “Quality” foods are often assumed by consumers to have a non-industrial (you might even say “natural”) quality to them. How do these beliefs square up with apples that look perfect but are made possible because of massive capital investments and genetic modification (Legun 2015)? Reflexivity does not favor any one scale or political practice

Falling for the local trap means subscribing to the mistaken belief that localism is the natural solution to the ills of the globalization (in the singular) of food. Reflexivity means selecting political strategies based upon the case in question rather than making a priori universal assertions about which solutions “work.” Doing this reveals the complexity of the problems at hand while privileging no specific scale, mode of production, or food system (and admitting that short chains are terribly problematic in some places – think Las Vegas!). For example, when striving for social justice, should we select bananas grown by smaller farmers in cooperatives in the Caribbean or those grown on plantations in Central America by unionized and politically empowered workers? Do not worry if you are having problems answering this question. You should. That is the point. Reflexive approaches emphasize means rather than predefined ends

Instead of proclaiming what an ideal food system/s looks like a reflexive approach chooses instead to focus on the processes used that will ultimately arrive at this end. A key term here is “inclusivity,” as one goal should be to include stakeholders beyond the commodity chain. In other words, while it’s admirable to want to put a farmer’s face on our food, we must not forget all the hands that feed us, from, for example, field laborers to processing plant employees, truck drivers, and those who stock the shelves at our stores. Beyond that, inclusivity among eaters is also key so as to, for example, allow people to eat in ways that enable them to reproduce their culture. Local food movement activists must also be cautious about making alliances with those not guided by principles of inclusivity (e.g., those who practice defensive localism) while similarly being mindful to include those who lack the resources to participated in localism. Reflexive approaches reject one-size-fits-all solutions

This goes for solutions aimed at any scale – see Box 12.3. The green revolution’s single magic bullet style has been handily critiqued on the grounds that it increased global food insecurity (Carolan 2018a). In 2002, then-UN secretary general Kofi Annan asked an appointed panel of experts from such countries as Brazil, China, Mexico, and South Africa how a green revolution could be achieved in Africa. A year later the group came

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back with their answer. Foremost, they questioned the one-size-fits-all approach to food security that underlies the green revolution ideology: “The diverse African situation implies that no single magic ‘technological bullet’ is available for radically improving African agriculture” (InterAcademy Council 2003: xviii). The panel’s strategic recommendations explain that “African agriculture is more likely to experience numerous ‘rainbow evolutions’ that differ in nature and extent among the many systems, rather than one Green Revolution as in Asia” (p. xviii). The term reframes the discussion away from looking for that magic bullet while also emphasizing how agricultural development cannot be divorced from the social, economic, and agroecological conditions of place.

Box 12.3  A Failed Case of Direct Marketing in Nairobi, Kenya The majority of research looking at shorter food supply chains remains narrow in its geographic scope, as much of it focuses on Europe, North America, and the wealthier parts of the Asia-Pacific. Are conditions similar enough to generalize from developed to developing countries? It could be argued that they are; after all, most certified fair trade networks source the majority of their materials from less affluent nations. Yet – and this brings us back to a point made earlier about the structures of immobility of globalization  – these networks depend upon a wide range of technologies and infrastructures that make fair trade commodities mobile. These structures of immobility, however, are not everywhere. For instance, no distance is “short” for farmers and consumers lacking easy access to motorized vehicles and/ or well-maintained roads. Friedberg and Goldstein (2011) make just this point in their study of a failed direct marketing initiative in Kenya (see also Smith [2014] for a broader analysis of agriculture-based livelihoods in Kenya). They note, among other things, how a community’s soil and water can be dangerously polluted (as in the case of Nairobi) and its public sanitation and infrastructure in disarray – points that ought to make people think twice about the virtues and viability of local food networks in some parts of the world. In the context of their case study, they found that getting the produce to the city of Nairobi was even costlier and more difficult than anticipated, as the vans used to transport produce often broke down. When this happened, more expensive buses and minibuses had to be used. Meeting customers’ quality standards was also a challenge, partly because of the rough roads and lack of refrigeration. But also this was partly because farmers lacked knowledge about the kind of quality their customers expected. As many of the small farmers had never even been to Nairobi, most had never seen the displays of uniform, unblemished produce in the supermarkets where many of their affluent customers shopped.

Social justice is especially hard to come by through magic-bullet prescriptions, as what’s “right” and “just” in one situation for one population is rarely generalizable to all situations and all people. In California, for example, workers’ compensation and labor law – shaped by both state and federal statutes – regulates the long-standing cultural practice, common among some ethnic minorities, of unpaid labor sharing among extended family members. Worker compensation insurance, for instance, which is required by law, is often cost

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prohibitive for these groups given that planting and harvest season only lasts a few weeks, whereas the terms of these policies last for much longer (Carolan 2018b). While I am totally in favor of strict labor laws to protect workers, we have to also realize that those same laws can create huge barriers for family-based “businesses” that operate according to cultural principles premised on reciprocity and sharing – sharing labor, for instance, sounds positive, but it’s actually illegal in a business context because it could be masking an exploitive relationship. When I interviewed a group of Hmong farmers in California – the Hmong are an Asian ethnic group from the mountainous regions of China – I was told about a list of labor and safety requirements they had to meet as an “employer,” even though all they were employing was fellow family members; actually, there was a lot of donating of labor happening, but don’t tell the authorities. And because they were unable to meet all the requirements, they lived in fear of being visited by a government inspector. Those violations could have included anything from using the labor of minors (their own children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews were helping, just as any kid growing up on a Midwest farm might) to not paying minimum wage (why bother when you’re talking about family members helping out?), not carrying workers’ compensation insurance, failing to provide gender-segregated toilets, not having a Cal/ OSHA approved Injury and Illness Prevention Program (Cal/OSHA is the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health), failing to put a Not Potable Water sign at the designated handwashing station, not having all the right posters carrying various regulatory messages, and not providing single-use water cups (Carolan 2018b). Now you know why big businesses like regulation in some instances, as it creates barriers to entry for small businesses just starting out.

Free trade and fair trade Any current and future discussions about food and agriculture must involve at least some talk about markets. Even alternative food networks do not operate outside conventional markets. So what are free markets? According to Google’s dictionary, free markets are “an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.” Unrestricted competition: that term alone ought to raise red flags. It might sound good, but you are not going to find it anywhere. As discussed repeatedly in the previous chapters, some economic actors have clear advantages over others in the food system – due to, among other things, subsidies and monopoly and monopsony conditions. Moreover, as long as we continue to value things like the environment, worker rights, and consumer welfare, we are going to continue to regulate business and demand certain standards when it comes to how food is produced and processed. This is not to suggest that regulation has been antithetical to agrifood corporate interests. As in the case of the organic label, regulations and standards have been incredibly profitable for some agribusinesses. But I ask you: do we even want unbridled “free” competition? Clearly, proponents of neoliberalism do (or at least they claim to want it). As David Harvey (2005: 2) explains in Brief History of Neoliberalism, “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” As opposed to individual liberties (the Holy Grail in classic liberalism), neoliberalism sees salvation only through free enterprise – and a no-holds-barred, dog-eat-dog approach to free enterprise at that. This explains, for example, the rapid push in recent decades to hollow out the state by eliminating regulations and privatizing anything and everything.

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To answer the question of whether totally unbridled competition is what we really want when we talk about “free markets” I would like to take a step back and ask the following question: What does “freedom” mean? After all, understandings of a free market fundamentally hinge, at least in part, on our collective understandings of this concept? I have found twentieth-century English philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s dual understanding of freedom extremely useful for making sense of this over-used, under-understood, concept. Conventional understandings of free markets are dangerously narrow, as evidenced by the simple fact that free markets are rarely ever fair (see Box 12.4). That is because most of this talk is heavily infused with, to draw from Berlin, “freedom from” rhetoric – freedom from domestic protectionist policies, freedom from other countries’ production-oriented subsidies, freedom from government regulation, freedom from the state, and so forth. Freedom from talk is especially pervasive in neoliberalism discourse. Isaiah Berlin (1969 [1958]: 127) describes this as “negative freedom,” which refers to the “absence of interference.” It seems as though when most people are asked about “freedom,” negative freedom is the freedom they have in mind – a freedom in which we are allowed to pursue actions unimpeded (see also Bell and Lowe 2000: 287–289).

Box 12.4  Fair (as Opposed to Free) Trade Fair trade represents a new producer–consumer relationship through a supply chain that attempts to distribute economic benefits more fairly between all stakeholders (Raynolds and Bennett 2015). This is in contrast to the conventional supply chain model, which primarily seeks the maximization of return somewhere in the middle of the food system hourglass, as noted in a prior chapter. Fair trade makes trade more fair through a number of practices. Some of these practices include the following (taken from Nicholls and Opal 2005: 6–7). •

•

• • •

Agreed-upon minimum prices that are often higher than those set by the market. This is in recognition that agricultural commodity market prices are rarely fair, thanks to things like subsidies and monopoly and monopsony conditions. Farmers are therefore given a living wage for their work. An additional social premium is paid on top of the fair trade price. This allows producers and farm laborers to collectively implement larger development projects  – like the building of new schools. How the money is spent is usually decided democratically, through co-operatives. Purchasing directly from producers. This reduces the number of profit-taking “middlemen” in the commodity chain and ensures that more of each dollar spent on goods returns to producers. Making credit available to producers. As importers from affluent countries typically have greater access to credit than developing-country producers, importers must pre-finance a significant portion of the year’s harvest. Farmers and workers are democratically organized. This helps minimize labor abuses (e.g., child and slave labor) and ensures socially responsible production practices.

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Yet in addition to its negative component freedom also has a positive side. “Positive freedom” – or freedom to – refers to the ability “to lead one prescribed form of life [. . .] that derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his [or her] own master” (Berlin 1969 [1958]: 127). Without the active pursuit of positive freedom most people would not – indeed could not – feel free. To explain what I mean by this I evoke the words of the old English aphorism, “freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.” Without the pursuit of positive freedom for all – pikes and minnows alike – the pikes of the world would be clearly advantaged. And how do we actively pursue positive freedom for all? This is where the concept of constraint comes into the picture. There must be some constraints if all minnows are to prosper. Positive freedom, in other words, allows us to talk about constraint in the context of freedom without any sense of paradox. Let’s now apply this thinking to free markets. In order for me to be and feel free (and trade freely) I need some assurances that the pikes of the world will not freely have their way with me. This is why freedom – and, yes, free markets – require some level of government intervention. What are some of the consequences of this understanding of free markets? First, it gives force to arguments that favor opening up the “middle” of the aforementioned hourglass figure (Chapter 2) so as to allow for greater competition between firms. Market monopoly, oligopoly, and monopsony conditions are an inevitable outcome of food policies overly influenced by one-sided understandings of freedom – namely, freedom from (Bell and Lowe 2000). A Berlinian understanding of free markets also gives justification to spending initiatives to build food security capabilities in less developed countries. To play upon an ancient Chinese proverb: rather than giving other countries fish (or more specifically grain, as the US does with food aid), so they can eat for a day, affluent nations can instead assist less affluent nations in building the capabilities to fish, which would allow them to eat for a lifetime. This is not, however, a call to dictate to developing nations what these capabilities ought to look like. They need to decide this path on their own. The rise of neoliberal forms of governance over the last decades has brought with it the transference of responsibility for food security from government to the market – a process some have called the “marketization of food security” (Zerbe 2009: 172). A Berlinian understanding of free market could act as a philosophical counterweight to neoliberalism. In doing this, it provides rational justification for the reversal of its policies. Ultimately, the so-called free market-versus-socialism dichotomy is entirely erroneous, as both concepts exist only philosophical texts  – you’ll find neither in the real world. As Dani Rodrik (1998: 997), professor of international political economy at Harvard University, explains in a highly cited paper (provocatively titled “Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?”), even after controlling for a host of variables, “there is a positive correlation between an economy’s exposure to international trade and the size of its government.” Think about it: International trade is incredibly risky. Governments must therefore grow in order to mitigate the risks that inevitably accompany it. In other words, without government intervention there could be no globalization or just about any market economy at all, for that matter – no contract enforcement, food-safety oversight, publicly funded roads and utilities, etc. That’s right, the world envisioned by free marketers is, in fact, dependent upon government.

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Transition. . . You’re almost to the end. I want to conclude on a hopeful note. In the following – and final – chapter, focus is placed on examples in which people are making a difference by fundamentally rethinking food production and consumption.

Discussion questions 1 Does the slow food movement fall into any “traps”? Is there such a thing as unreflexive slowness? 2 What do you think local ought to mean? What hidden assumptions are contained with that definition? Does it privilege certain ways of eating and/or certain ways of life? 3 What are some common misconceptions about free trade when people use the term?

Suggested readings: introductory level Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), www.iatp.org/. Sharp, E. 2019. The Role of Reflexivity in Care-Full Food Systems Transformations, Policy Futures in Education, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1478210319874256. Zimmerman, Heidi. 2015. Caring for the Middle Class Soul: Ambivalence, Ethical Eating and the Michael Pollan Phenomenon, Food, Culture & Society 18(1): 31–50.

Suggested readings: advanced level Bisceglia, A., J. Hauver, D. Berle, and J.J. Thompson. 2020. How the Collaborative Work of Farm to School Can Disrupt Neoliberalism in Public Schools, Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10460-020-10128-3. Blay-Palmer, A., G. Santini, M. Dubbeling, H. Renting, M. Taguchi, and T. Giordano. 2018. Validating the City Region Food System Approach: Enacting Inclusive, Transformational City Region Food Systems, Sustainability 10(5), https://doi.org/10.3390/su10051680. Scalco, A.R., G.M.D. Ganga, S.C. De Oliveira, and G. Baker. 2020. Development and Validation of a Scale for Identification of Quality Attributes of Agri-Food Products in Short Chains, Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.02.012.

References Allen, P., and J. Guthman. 2006. From “Old School” to “Farm to School”: Neoliberalization from the Ground Up, Agriculture and Human Values 23(4): 401–415. Appadurai, A. 1988. How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India, Comparative Studies of Society and History 30(1): 3–24. Bell, Michael, and Philip Lowe. 2000. Regulated Freedoms: The Market and the State, Agriculture and the Environment, Journal of Rural Studies 16: 285–294. Berlin, Isaiah. 1969 (1958). Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press. Bisceglia, A., J. Hauver, D. Berle, and J.J. Thompson. 2020. How the Collaborative Work of Farm to School Can Disrupt Neoliberalism in Public Schools, Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10460-020-10128-3. Blue, G. 2009. On the Politics and Possibilities of Locavores: Situating Food Sovereignty in the Turn from Government to Governance, Politics and Culture 9: 68–79. Born, Branden, and Mark Purcell. 2006. Avoiding the Local Trap: Scale and Food Systems in Planning Research, Journal of Planning Education and Research 26(2): 195–207.

The “traps” in agrifood studies 239 Brown, T. 2009. The Time of Globalization: Rethinking Primitive Accumulation, Rethinking Marxism 21(4): 571–584. Buller, H., and C. Morris. 2004. Growing Goods: The Market, the State, and Sustainable Food Production, Environment and Planning A 36: 1065–1084. Carolan, M. 2011. Embodied Food Politics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Carolan, M. 2018a. The Real Cost of Cheap Food, 2nd edition. London: Earthscan. Carolan, M. 2018b. The Food Sharing Revolution: How Start-ups, Pop-ups, and Co-ops Are Changing the Way We Eat. Washington DC: Island Press. DuPuis, E. Melanie, and David Goodman. 2005. Should We Go “Home” to Eat? Toward a Reflexive Politics of Localism, Journal of Rural Studies 21(3): 359–371. DuPuis, E. Melanie, J. Harrison, and D. Goodman. 2011. Just food? In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability, edited by A. Alkon and J. Agyeman, Pp. 283–308. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frank, A., and B. Gills. 1994. The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? London: Routledge. Freidman, T. 2000. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: HarperCollins. Friedberg, S. 2009. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friedberg, S., and L. Goldstein. 2011. Alternative Food in the Global South: Reflections on a Direct Marketing Initiative in Kenya, Journal of Rural Studies 27: 23–34. Goodman, David. 2003. Editorial: The Quality ‘Turn’ and Alternative Food Practices: Reflections and Agenda, Journal of Rural Studies 44: 1, 3–16. Harvey, D. 2005. Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hassanein, N. 1999. Changing the Way America Farms: Knowledge and Community in the Sustainable Agriculture Movement. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hendrickson, M., and W. Heffernan. 2002. Opening Spaces Through Relocalization: Locating Potential Resistance in the Weaknesses of the Global Food System, Sociologia Ruralis 42(4): 347–369. Hinrichs, Clare. 2000. Embeddedness and Local Food Systems: Notes on Two Types of Direct Agricultural Markets, Journal of Rural Studies 16(3): 295–303. Hinrichs, Clare. 2003. The Practice and Politics of Food System Localization, Journal of Rural Studies 19: 33–45. Hinrichs, Clare, Jack Kloppenburg, George Stevenson, Sharon Lezberg, John Hendrickson, and Kathryn DeMaster. 1998. Moving Beyond Global and Local. United States Department of Agriculture, Regional Research Project NE-185 working statement, October 2, www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/socio logy/ne185/global.html. InterAcademy Council. 2003. Realising the Promise and Potential of African Agriculture: Science and Technology Strategies for Improving Agricultural Productivity and Food Security in Africa, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, www.cgiar.org/pdf/agm04/agm04_iacpanel_execsumm.pdf. Kloppenburg, J., J. Hendrickson, and G. Stevenson. 1996. Coming to the Foodshed, Agriculture and Human Values 13(3): 33–42. Lawrence, G. 2004. Promoting Sustainable Development: The Question of Governance, Plenary Address, XI World Conference of Rural Sociology, Trondheim, Norway, July 26, www.irsa-world. org/prior/XI/program/Lawrence.pdf. Legun, Katharine A. 2015. Club Apples: A  Biology of Markets Built on the Social Life of Variety, Economy and Society Ahead-of-Print, 1–23. Lien, M. 2009. Standards, Science and Scale: The Case of Tasmanian Atlantic Salmon, In The Globalization of Food, edited by D. Inglis and D. Gimlin, Pp. 3–42. New York: Berg. Long, Michael, and Douglas Murray. 2013. Ethical Consumption, Values Convergence/Divergence and Community Development, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26(2): 351–375. Matejowsky, T. 2007. SPAM and Fast Food Globalization in the Philippines, Food, Culture and Society 10(1): 23–41. Matejowsky, T. 2017. Fast Food Globalization in the Provincial Philippines. New York: Lexington Books. McIntyre, L., and K. Rondeau. 2011. Individual Consumer Food Localism: A Review Anchored in Canadian Farmwomen’s Reflections, Journal of Rural Studies 27(2): 116–124.

240  Agrifood futures Murdoch, J., T. Marsden, and J. Banks. 2000. Quality, Nature and Embeddedness: Some Theoretical Considerations in the Context of the Food Sector, Economic Geography 72(6): 107–125. Nicholls, A., and C. Opal. 2005. Fair Trade: Market Drive Ethical Consumption. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Norberg-Hodge, H., T. Merrifield, S. Gorelick. 2002. Bringing the Food Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. O’Hara, J.K., and M.C. Benson. 2019. The Impact of Local Agricultural Production on Farm to School Expenditures, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 34(3): 216–225. Pollan, M. 2008. In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto. New York: Penguin. Raynolds, Laura, and Elizabeth Bennett (eds.). 2015. The Handbook of Research on Fair Trade. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Ritzer, G. 2020. McDonaldization of Society, 10th edition. Thousand Oak, CA: Pine Forge Press. Rodrik, D. 1998. Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments? Journal of Political Economy 106(5): 997–1032. Scalco, A.R., G.M.D. Ganga, S.C. De Oliveira, and G. Baker. 2020. Development and Validation of a Scale for Identification of Quality Attributes of Agri-Food Products in Short Chains, Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.02.012. Sharp, E. 2019. The Role of Reflexivity in Care-Full Food Systems Transformations, Policy Futures in Education, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1478210319874256. Slocum, R. 2011. Race in the Study of Food, Progress in Human Geography 35(3): 303–327. Smith, K. 2014. Ethical Trade, Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods: Women Smallholders and Ethicality in Kenya. New York: Routledge. Stapleton, S.R. 2020. Nevertheless, They Persisted: How a Group of ‘Noisy Moms’ Overcame Dismissal and Helped to Improve School Food in a US Small City School District, Gender, Place & Culture, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1710475. Starr, A. 2010. Local Food: A Social Movement, Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 10(6): 479–490. Whole Foods. 2019. Local at Whole Foods Market, http://carolinafarmstewards.org/wp- content/ uploads/2018/10/WFM-SO-Local-Supplier-Deck_Oct19.pdf. Wilk, R. 1991. Household Ecology: Economic Change and Domestic Life Among the Kekchi Maya of Belize. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Wilk, R. 2009. Difference on the Menu, In The Globalization of Food, edited by D. Inglis and D. Gimlin, Pp. 185–196. New York: Berg. Winter, Michael. 2003. Embeddedness, the New Food Economy and Defensive Localism, Journal of Rural Studies 19(1): 23–32. Zerbe, Noah. 2009. Setting the Global Dinner Table: Exploring the Limits of the Marketization of Food Security. In The Global Food Crisis: Governance Challenges and Opportunities, edited by Jennifer Clapp and Marc Cohen, Pp. 161–177. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid University Press.

13 Reimagining healthy eating

This might be the concluding chapter, but it should not be the end of the conversation. While I have made this point repeatedly, I will make it again: there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when talking about foodscapes. I will not, therefore, conclude this chapter with a bunch of “Do this!” and “Eat that!” pronouncements; the closest I can come to that is to say, “Whatever it is we do, we do it in the spirit of inclusivity and equity.” In what follows, I offer examples of what it means to build foodscapes in the image of that principle.

Enhancing biocultural diversity through community Many traditional cultures are oral, so you often will not find this so-called folk knowledge written down anywhere. Consequently, once it is lost there is a good chance it is gone forever. This is what DeLind (2006: 134) was getting at when she wrote, “knowledge that is not used, and information that is not felt, are indistinguishable from ignorance.” Less than 3 percent of the 250,000 plant varieties available to agriculture are currently in use (Vernooy and Song 2004: 55). This statistic, however, only tells part of the story. There may be a quarter of a million plant varieties housed in gene banks around the world. Yet how much do we really know about these seeds? In the absence of the cultural knowledge that allowed people for generations (perhaps centuries) to put these seeds to work, their value is regrettably diminished. As Pretty and colleagues (2009: 105) write, this loss comes at the expense of possible solutions to future global challenges: The combined loss of biodiversity and ecological knowledge has implications for human health in the future, as we stand to lose the opportunistic uses and future potential of species, for instance in curing human diseases or feeding growing populations. With this loss of knowledge, we are subsequently losing the adaptive management systems embedded in traditional cultures that have sustained natural resource pools through to the present day and may be a key tool in the future of global biodiversity protection. Take the impending agricultural challenges associated with climate change. Crop scientists are looking to traditional crop varieties and planting techniques as they try to find ways to help farmers keep up with climate variability. The tremendous genetic and cultural diversity associated with folk crop varieties, crop wild relatives, and traditional agricultural systems provide far more potential responses to climate change than the monocultures – biological and cultural – that define today’s commercial farming systems.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003133780-17

242  Agrifood futures Memory and heritage seed banks

Unlike the basic “passport data” collected for ex situ conservation  – involving, among other things, recording the sample’s species, subspecies, and/or variety and the place and date the material was collected – memory banking seeks to conserve an in-depth sociocultural record of the folk crop variety (see Box  13.1). The goal is to save more than the seed itself. By recording, for example, life-history interviews of those with working knowledge of the plants in question, repositories ensure that further generations will know as much about these plants as those growing them today.

Box 13.1  Svalbard Global Seed Vault Norway’s “doomsday” seed vault (the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) is an excellent example of ex situ conservation. Officially opening on February 26, 2008, the seed

Figure 13.1  Svalbard Global Seed Vault Source: Author.

Reimagining heathy eating 243

bank – designed to hold 4.5 million seed samples – is constructed 120 meters inside a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen Island roughly 1,300  kilometers from the North Pole. Its location is said to protect our genetic heritage even in a “doomsday” scenario, hence its namesake (see Figure 13.1). There are approximately 1,400 gene banks (in more than 100 countries) all over the world, such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru, and the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO.

This is where heritage seed banks – a type of memory bank – come into the picture, with their broad seed saving (and memory banking) agenda. An example of one such bank is the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), a US-based heritage seed bank in northeastern Iowa – I know it well, as I grew up a short distance from it (see www.seedsavers.org/). Founded in 1975, SSE is a nonprofit organization that both saves and sells heirloom fruit, vegetable, and flower seeds. On this 890-acre farm, which goes by the name of the Heritage Farm, there are more than 20,000 rare vegetable varieties (including about 4,000 traditional varieties from Eastern Europe and Russia), approximately 700 pre-1900 varieties of apples (which represents nearly every remaining pre-1900 variety left in existence out of the 8,000 that once existed), and a herd of the rare Ancient White Park Cattle (its estimated global population is below 2,000). SSE is clearly more than a “gene bank.” Visitors can learn in its visitors’ center about the seeds being saved, about their history, phenotypic characteristics, best planting practices, recipes, and, if you come at the right time of year, even how their fruit taste. You might even say SSE is more than just a memory bank – as “bank,” at least to me, is too passive to explain what goes on within this space. SSE also practices memory making; a point that separates it drastically from the earlier-mentioned “doomsday” seed bank in Norway (or any of the other 1,400 conventional seed/gene banks in the world today). SSE does not just serve as a repository of seeds and knowledge. Recognizing that some knowledge is inextricably wrapped in cultural practice – in actually doing the knowledge in question – SSE provides visitors the opportunity to put this knowledge to work (see Box 13.2).

Box 13.2  Interview With SSE Member: Excerpt From Carolan (2018: 93–95, emphasis in original) Later that day, I met Sarah. Claiming to be in her mid-sixties but looking a solid ten years younger, she had been coming to SSE events since the late 1990s. Sarah owned and operated a bed-and-breakfast in Milwaukee, raised chickens, and, not surprisingly, was an avid gardener. When she reached out her hand to shake mine, I was struck by the juxtaposition of well-manicured, painted nails and the dirt caked under some of them. Sarah spent a good deal of our conversation emphasizing, in her words, “how knowledge does not take a backseat to seed here; the two are inseparable.” [. . .] Seed requires know-how to be of any use. Sarah again: “You can’t just look at a seed and

244  Agrifood futures

know how deep it ought to be planted, or how much water it needs, or how much space between each is needed, or what soil type it works best in. Gardening is as much an art as it is a science. You have to do it before you really know what works in your garden.” You have to do it before you really know what works in your garden. If you are a gardener, you know what Sarah is talking about. Saving and sharing seed is like riding a bike, in that you have to do it to know it. Try telling someone how to ride a bike who has never ridden one before. It doesn’t work. Similarly, understanding seed requires in-person help, someone who can (sometimes literally) hold your hand as you get a feel for the process. Peer-to-peer sharing is one piece of this. But what we also need, especially when talking about food, is peer-to-peer mentoring. Sarah again: “The most successful food sharing platforms – and for me, I define ‘successful’ as those that improve food access and food sovereignty – the successful ones need to provide access to skills as much as goods.” For emphasis, she pointed two of those earth-encrusted, painted fingernails at my chest. Good point. Who cares if communities share seed, or whether or not seed libraries are legal, if no one knows how to garden or to prepare the produce once harvested? Sharing cannot be just about an exchange of idle stuff, though that is how it is typically framed by advocates – for example, “Got stuff lying around? Share it!” We need to recognize that wanting access to someone else’s idle stuff is predicated on knowing what to do with it once you have it.

Food hubs, solidarity purchasing groups, multi-stakeholder cooperatives. . . There has been a lot of talk and energy directed in recent years at what are known as food hubs, though the term can vary, as you’ll see. Food hubs are viewed by some as a hybrid distribution method, between, on the one hand, direct marketing, as found at, say, a farmers’ market, and, on the other hand, the global hubs found at most grocery stores (see Table 13.1). Not surprisingly, the definition of “food hub” can vary greatly, depending on whom you ask (see Box 13.3). Table 13.1 Local food hubs as hybrids between direct marketing and large-scale regional or global hubs. Some hypothetical comparisons based on a review of the literature Variable Major goals

Local direct marketing

Social & environmental sustainability Sales volume per entity Lowest Food miles Low Time between harvest and eating Lowest Flexibility of packing & grading standards Highest Gross price per unit received by farmer Highest Net price per unit received by farmer Intermediate (profit)

Hybrid local hubs

Large-scale regional/ global hubs

Hybrid

Economic profit

Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate Highest

Highest Highest Highest Lowest Lowest Lowest

Reimagining heathy eating 245 Price stability Information flow between eater and farmer Internationalization of negative externalities

Intermediate Highest

Highest Lowest Intermediate Lowest

High

High

Lowest

Source: Cleveland et al. 2014.

Box 13.3  Italy’s Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (GAS) – Solidarity Purchasing Groups From just one group in 1994, the movement – Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (GAS) – now has thousands of groups throughout Italy totaling well over 100,000 people. When a purchasing group puts people and environment before profit the group becomes a solidarity purchasing group. Such a network chooses the products and enrolls producers on the basis of respect for the environment and the solidarity between members of the group. Groups are typically set up by friends or neighbors who decide to pool their buying power and purchase collectively from local, organic, small-scale producers. Among these groups it is strongly believed that these guidelines lead to the choice of local products (to minimize food miles), Fairtrade goods (to respect all producers by promoting their human rights, in particular those of women, children, and indigenous groups), reusable or compostable goods (to promote sustainable lifestyles), seasonal foods (to, for example, reduce energy and water footprints that come with growing out-of-season foods in greenhouses), and organic goods produced without the use of such inputs as pesticides or herbicides. Some additional facts and figures relating to GAS: • • •

Size varies from 10 to 300 families in a group (average group size is 25 families); There are more groups in the affluent (and social-capital-rich) northern regions of the country; As well as food, some GAS groups in cities like Milan are working together to coordinate larger bulk purchases of things like PV cells, electricity, and “ethical finance.”

See, e.g., Barbera et al. 2020; Grasseni 2014.

Like most everything we have discussed, it would be incorrect to lump all food hubs together. Food hubs serve different purposes and are animated by different values, depending on the way they are organized (which is where the social sciences come into the picture, to unpack those situational realities). For a more instrumental definition of what food hubs do, informed by of the values and principles found on the right side of Table 13.1, see the quote: [A food hub is] a centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products. (Barham 2011)

246  Agrifood futures

For a definition informed by broader value-based commitments; principles common to the left side of the table, see this quote: [Food hubs are] networks and intersections of grassroots, community-based organizations and individuals that work together to build increasingly socially just, economically robust and ecologically sound food systems that connect farmers with consumers as directly as possible. Social justice dimensions include participatory, accessible, inclusive, culturally appropriate and health-based considerations. Economically robust means the food system keeps as much money as possible in local economies, provides a living to farmers and food that is economically accessible. Ecologically resilient implies regeneration and transformation. (Blay-Palmer et al. 2013: 524) For practitioners, activists, and scholars, one central question involving food hubs is: How can food hubs be economically viable within a system dominated by large-scale distribution networks and at the same time be successful in working for social and environmental goals that the status quo fails to value? Based on the current state of the literature, and drawing from an organizational frame offered by Cleveland et al. (2014: 35), we can begin to answer this important question. •

•

•

•

Scaling “up” seems to work better than scaling “down.” Growing already-established local alternative networks and the interpersonal relationships and well-established social and environmental goals therein implied is less problematic than trying to make nonconventional values important among networks previously fixated on profit maximization, which describes most global chains looking to scale down to the food hub level. Those interpersonal relationships and community-based values help temper understandings of profit, leading to a “good enough” understanding of profitability (versus profit maximization), as those involved in food hubs are “seeking not only non-conventional goods, but an entire non-conventional production and distribution system” (Rogers and Fraszczak 2014: 337). When scaling up it is important to make sure those alternative goals are not sacrificed. As hubs begin servicing institutions like restaurants, hotels, and cafeterias that might be guided by conventional values – profit maximization – there is a risk of value slippage. An example of this might be large-scale purchasers pressuring food hubs to prioritize things like “cheapness.” A successful example of scaling up can be found in Santa Barbara County, California, where a hub grew while maintaining its commitment to low-income residents (Cleveland et al. 2014). Incremental change has its benefits. Even so-called food alternatives emerge out of and have to largely work along with existing systems. For instance, unless they use entirely off-the-grid energy, including the fuel for their trucks, then food hubs are still part of and arguably dependent on certain larger hegemonic systems. As for consumers, getting eaters to change their tastes/preferences, habits, and knowledge on food is a slow process that takes a lot of work and time (see also Barbera et al. 2020). Grassroots passion is an important “fuel” and can make the difference between a successful and defunct food hub. It is questionable whether food hubs can outcompete conventional, large-scale networks that are designed specifically to produce the cheapest food possible, in part because the latter are so good at externalizing their costs. Those living in the communities serviced by these models and who thus witness their value firsthand

Reimagining heathy eating 247

(especially those values enriching more than bank accounts), can go a long way in ensuring the success of food hubs by making sure they are well supported and well staffed (see also Barbera et al. 2020; see Box 12.4). In addition, I would also like to remind readers that scaling out might be even more effective, in some instances, as scaling up. One widely used definition of scaling out and up has been given by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research NGO Committee, which refers to scaling out as the geographical spread of a practice, organization, or system-directed change over time. Scaling up, alternatively, refers to building institutional and capacity-building practices and platforms within and across organizations and networks at local to international levels (Pachico and Fujisaka 2004; see also e.g., Butler et al. 2020; Manganelli and Moulaert 2019). Both mechanisms are seen as essential to create and achieve sustained systems change. The conversation that needs to be had, then, involves figuring out those elements that require scaling up – e.g., do laws or regulations need to change in order to help facilitate a practice or platform? And figuring out those that might be best served that are scaled out? For instance, rather than simply assuming bigger is better, in which case the assumption might be, to go back to the topic of food hubs, “Let’s grow a community-based food hub into something bigger that serves the entire state!” But a scaling-out lens would approach the subject differently. Thus, rather than growing up one food hub, scaling out might lead to the conclusion, “Let’s build out laterally directed social networks to other communities that allow for a sharing and co-creation of, among other things, knowledge and allow those communities the opportunities to create their own food hubs.” This is not to say these platforms cannot in some way be coordinated. But they are most definitely not one in the same (because, again, one-size-fits-all is problematic!).

Sustainable livelihood approaches Sustainable livelihood (SL) approaches offer ways to focus explicitly on the livelihoods of lower-income people and households when grappling with the issue of development, realizing, too, that issues like food access and hunger cannot be abstracted from one’s socio-economic environment. AN SL approach zeros-in on the main factors that affect the livelihoods of marginalized communities as well as the interrelationships between these factors. They can be used in planning new development activities and in assessing the contribution that existing activities make in sustaining the well-being of households. Participatory approaches to development have highlighted a tremendous diversity in the goals to which people aspire and in the livelihood strategies they adopt to achieve them. Poverty analyses have highlighted the importance of assets, including social capital, in determining well-being. Community-level institutions and processes have therefore been a prominent feature of approaches to natural resource management and are strongly emphasized in SL approaches, though in SL the stress is on understanding and facilitating the link from the micro to the macro rather than working only at the community level. The SL framework places (often rural poor) people at the center of a web of interrelated influences that affect how they create a livelihood for themselves and their households, what are called livelihood strategies. Attention is especially given to the resources and livelihood assets that they have access to and use – natural resources, technologies, skills, knowledge, health, access to education, sources of credit, networks of social support, etc. Access to these resources is also influenced by the prevailing social, institutional,

248  Agrifood futures

and political environment, which ultimately affects the ways people are to use their assets to achieve their desired goals. SL approaches seek to identify the main constraints and opportunities faced by poor people, as identified by those individuals. Toward that end, the model is guided by principles. SL approaches, in other words, do not prescribe solutions but are intentionally vague so as to be flexible and adaptable to diverse local conditions. Those guiding principles include the following (adapted from Mallick et al. 2020; Serrat 2017). • • •

• • •

Be people centered. SL approaches begin by looking at people’s livelihoods and how they change over time. The people themselves actively participate throughout the project. Be holistic. SL approaches acknowledge that people adopt many strategies to secure their livelihoods involving many actors and institutions – the private sector, the state, ministries, community-based organizations, and international organizations. Be dynamic. SL approaches seek to understand the dynamic nature of livelihoods and what influences them. We must not forget that change – climatological, political, and economic – can radically alter how households conceptualize a “sustainable livelihood.” The term, therefore, cannot be understood as static and unchanging. Build on strengths. SL approaches build on people’s perceived strengths and opportunities rather than focusing on their problems and needs. It supports existing livelihood strategies. Promote micro–macro links.  SL approaches examine the influence of policies and institutions on livelihood options and highlights the need for policies to be informed by insights from and the priorities of the poor. Be sustainable.  There are four key dimensions to sustainability  – economic, institutional, social, and environmental sustainability. All are important, meaning that a balance must be found between them.

While used widely among scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers who are interested in poverty-reduction in an international context, SL approaches are also of great interest to agrifood scholars (see, e.g., Agula et al. 2018; Harcourt 2017). This should not be surprising, as agriculture sits at the crossroads for many livelihood strategies, especially among the rural poor (see Box  13.4). Agriculture helps “grow,” among other things, healthy bodies and households (by feeding them), economic enterprises (by generating income for households), sustainable landscapes (as farming, when done right, is about environmental stewardship), and communities (as peasants share seed, trade labor, interact at markets, etc.).

Box 13.4  Sustainable Intensification The concept “sustainable intensification,” while dating back to the 1990s (Garnett and Godfray 2012), began gathering significant steam following the publication of the UK Royal Society’s (Baulcombe et al. 2009) influential report, Reaping the Benefits, which explores the future of crop production. Sustainable intensification has been defined as a form of production wherein yields are increased without adverse

Reimagining heathy eating 249

environmental impact and without the cultivation of more land. The term, however, has proven quite controversial. Many ask: “Sustainable intensification – isn’t that an oxymoron?” “Sustainable intensification to me sounds weird [. . .] Is there not a danger that it will be used as a Trojan horse for those who want us to have lots more biotech and GM and so forth? [. . .] Is there a potential conflict between how this idea might be used and the future of small-scale farming?” ~ Caroline Lucas (2011), UK Green Member of Parliament The term is also tremendously vague, which leads, I believe, to some of the mentioned suspicions – like a Rorschach test (the one with the nondescript ink blots), in which everyone sees something a little different in the term. A study where thirty “agricultural experts” were interviewed to assess their perceptions of sustainable intensification revealed varied responses, for instance (Petersen and Snapp 2015: 1). As we have already discussed, agriculture produces so much more than food and fiber. Accordingly, should not sustainable intensification be about the production of not just food but also all these other things – social relationships, community, health and well-being, healthy ecosystems, and the like? Yet I cannot help but wonder how these other “outputs” square with the concept of intensification, which can easily be taken to mean a capital-intensive production style. How does sustainable intensification fit with the aforementioned sustainable livelihoods approach? It depends on how the former is defined. Those, for example, that grasp “intensification” in capital-intensive terms would arguably make the poor worse off, as those households lack access to credit or capital – all required if they hope to benefit from this style of sustainable intensification. However, peasant agriculture is, in other respects, incredibly intensive. Polyculture is by nature laborintensive. Take, for example, the One Acre Fund (see www.oneacrefund.org/). Established in 2006 in Western Kenya, the One Acre Fund uses a market-based system to enable one-acre subsistence farmers, called by this project the “forgotten poor,” to escape poverty. The model, which its proponents view as an example of sustainable intensification, is informed by five core (livelihood-sensitive) principles: • • • • •

Empowerment of local farmer groups, bringing them together to increase their negotiating power; Farm education provided by field officers; Capital access through the provision of certified and environmentally sensitive seeds as well as fertilizer; Market facilitation, specifically targeting post-harvest handling and storage; and Crop insurance.

This is not to imply that the livelihoods approach is by any means perfect. Importantly, the framework acknowledges the need to move beyond narrow sectoral perspectives (e.g., focusing only on, say, increasing farm productivity) while emphasizing how complexity is always a positive outcome. However, it is debatable whether the approach goes

250  Agrifood futures

far enough when it comes to thinking systematically about issues involving poverty and hunger, which has led some to argue that the approach “does not pay enough attention to inequalities of power” (Serrat 2017: 25). Also, we always have to think about the issue of trade-offs, which is as much an ethical question as it is a sociological one. For instance, how do we grapple with and try to understand the outcomes related to whether enhancing the livelihoods of one group, by doing X, undermines the livelihoods of other groups? Don’t get me wrong; the Jeff Bezoses (the owner of Amazon) of the world can afford to have some of their livelihoods reduced. But when do those trade-offs start becoming problematic? That’s not an easy question to answer.

Foodscapes as more than sources of food, fiber and jobs A lot has been written about the potential of alternative foodscapes – farmers’ markets, solidarity purchasing groups, community-supported agriculture (CSA) platforms, etc. – for promoting the “civic” health of communities and helping to alleviate food insecurity at the household and community levels (e.g., Reynolds and Cohen 2016; Siegner et al. 2018). The literature on these so-called civic platforms mostly focuses on people who are already enmeshed within these activities. This is a limitation, as it makes it difficult to separate reported behaviors, attitudes, and values that are due to participating in these spaces from those that were always there. Maybe certain values draw a particular type of person to these practices in the first place, like people with higher commitments to, say, community and civic behavior. So, rather than making people more pro-social these spaces attract individuals who are already like that. In other words, we just do not have a lot of data to tell us which came first, the chicken – the attitudes – or the egg – the experiences that then led to the emergence of those attitudes. And that question is precisely what led me to conduct a longitudinal study. I wanted to try to make sense of this. To be brief, I  tracked more than 100 people, over multiple years, who started the research project new to community-based food system platforms  – farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, and food coops (Carolan 2017). I also conducted 106 phone interviews of people who have never had experiences with these spaces  – this sample population was created to represent eaters embedded within more conventional foodscapes. The goal: to see if these spaces changed their attitudes and values to a host of phenomena. Table 13.2 provides a demographic overview of the sample. A point of clarification referencing the table: a “drop-off CSA” model refers to a membership in which the CSA delivers food to a prearranged drop-off site. Eaters may never set foot on the farm and may have limited interactions with those growing their food. A “volunteer CSA” model, alternatively, refers to an arrangement whereby eaters can work off some of their membership by means of planting, weeding, harvesting, etc. In addition to conducting participant observations and qualitative interviews at multiple points, participants were administered a survey at the beginning of the study and again a few years later at its conclusion (except for the “conventional” group, which was only surveyed once). The surveys contained the following questions. • Overall, how much impact do you think people like yourself can have in making your community a better place to live: a big impact, a moderate impact, a small impact, or no impact at all? • Overall, what value do you ascribe to regular participation in local events for creating healthy communities: 1 (most important ingredient) to 5 (not important)?

Reimagining heathy eating 251 Table 13.2  Final sample demographics Sample size

Age (%) Under 30 30–39 40–49 50–59 60 or older Education (%) High school or less Some college Bachelor’s degree Some grad training Graduate degree Household Income (%) < $50,000 $50,000-$75,000 $75,001-$100,000 $100,001-$125,000 > $125,000 Gender (%) Female Male Race (%) White non-Hispanic Non-white

Drop-off CSA

Volunteer CSA

Farmers’ market

Co-operative

Conventional

30

27

35

27

106

10 (n = 3) 30 (n = 9) 30 (n = 9) 20 (n = 6) 10 (n = 3)

  4 (n = 1) 37 (n = 10) 37 (n = 10) 22 (n = 6) 0 (n = 0)

28 (n = 10) 43 (n = 15) 23 (n = 8)   3.5 (n = 1)   3.5 (n = 1)

11 (n = 3) 30 (n = 8) 30 (n = 8) 22 (n = 6)   7 (n = 2)

15 (n = 16) 19 (n = 20) 31 (n = 33) 18 (n = 19) 17 (n = 18)

10 (n = 3) 20 (n = 6) 40 (n = 12) 10 (n = 3) 20 (n = 6)

  4 (n = 1) 37 (n = 10) 22 (n = 6) 22 (n = 6) 15 (n = 4)

3.5 (n = 1) 23 (n = 8) 40 (n = 14) 14 (n = 5) 17 (n = 6)

0 (n = 0) 22 (n = 6) 52 (n = 14) 19 (n = 5)   7 (n = 2)

13 (n = 14) 19 (n = 20) 38 (n = 40) 17 (n = 18) 13 (n = 14)

13 (n = 4) 40 (n = 12) 10 (n = 3) 30 (n = 9)   7 (n = 2)

15(n = 4) 37 (n = 10) 37 (n = 10)   7 (n = 2)   4 (n = 1)

17 (n = 6) 37 (n = 13) 40 (n = 14)   3.5 (n = 1)   3.5 (n = 1)

22 (n = 6) 19 (n = 5) 19 (n = 5) 22 (n = 6) 19 (n = 5)

19 (n = 20) 22 (n = 23) 18 (n = 19) 21 (n = 22) 21 (n = 22)

56 (n = 17) 44 (n = 13)

52 (n = 14) 48 (n = 13)

51 (n = 18) 49 (n = 17)

48 (n = 13) 52 (n = 14)

62 (n = 66) 38 (n = 40)

83 (n = 25) 17 (n = 5)

88 (n = 24) 11 (n = 3)

77 (n = 27) 23 (n = 8)

88 (n = 27) 11 (n = 11)

75 (n = 80) 25 (n = 26)

Source: Author.

• How many political acts have you engaged in over the previous year (examples include signing a petition, participating in a demonstration or protest, voting, writing a letter to a politician, or writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper)? • Have you volunteered for an organization in the past year? • Rank the reasons why you participate in [CSA, farmers’ market, or local cooperative], from 1 to 5 in order of their importance (conventional eaters were asked to rank reasons for buying local or organic food, or to speculate as to their rationale if they had never done this before): To support local growers and organizations; To get better-tasting food; To get healthier food; To support systems that are environmentally sustainable; To support systems that take care of their workers. • On a scale of 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum) please indicate your degree of interest in each of these activities: Volunteering your time at a community agency interested in helping those in need, like Big Brother/Big Sister or at a homeless shelter; Reading about social justice issues. • How much of a priority, on a scale of 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum), should we as a society give to issues broadly ascribed to the promotion of social justice? Table  13.3 reports survey findings for respondents attached to drop-off CSAs, volunteer CSAs, farmers’ markets, and food co-operatives. It also reports the findings of the phone survey. The results confirm findings from previous studies (e.g., Obach and

Time 2 (%)

Time 1 (%)

Farmers’ market Time 2 (%)

Time 1 (%)

Co-operative Time 2 (%)

Conventional/ Phone

Source: Author.

Impact in community Big impact 53 (n = 16) 57 (n = 17) 44 (n = 12) 63 (n = 17) 40 (n = 14) 51 (n = 18) 44 (n = 12) 48 (n = 13) 21 (n = 22) Moderate impact 27 (n = 8) 33 (n = 10) 33 (n = 9) 37 (n = 10) 29 (n = 10) 37 (n = 13) 44 (n = 12) 48 (n = 13) 39 (n = 41) Small impact 20 (n = 6) 10 (n = 3) 20 (n = 6)   0 (n = 0) 31 (n = 10) 11 (n = 4) 11 (n = 3)   3 (n = 1) 26 (n = 28) No impact   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   3 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0) 14 (n = 15) Value of regular participation 1) Most important 66 (n = 20) 80 (n = 24) 63 (n = 17) 89 (n = 24) 57 (n = 20) 66 (n = 23) 48 (n = 13) 66 (n = 15) 25 (n = 27) 2) 30 (n = 9) 20 (n = 6) 22 (n = 6) 11 (n = 3) 29 (n = 10) 31 (n = 11) 52 (n = 14) 44 (n = 12) 26 (n = 28) 3) Moderately important   3 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0) 15 (n = 4)   0 (n = 0) 14 (n = 5)   3 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0) 37 (n = 39) 4)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   9 (n = 10) 5) Not important   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   2 (n = 2) Political acts in previous year More than 10 23 (n = 7) 33 (n = 10) 26 (n = 7) 33 (n = 9) 17 (n = 6) 29 (n = 10) 26 (n = 7) 26 (n = 7) 14 (n = 15) 6-10 33 (n = 10) 37 (n = 11) 37 (n = 10) 48 (n = 13) 29 (n = 10) 37 (n = 13) 37 (n = 10) 37 (n = 10) 19 (n = 20) 3-5 20 (n = 6) 30 (n = 9) 33 (n = 9) 19 (n = 5) 17 (n = 6) 29 (n = 10) 23 (n = 8) 37 (n = 10) 39 (n = 41) 2 or less 23 (n = 7)   0 (n = 0)   4 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0) 37 (n = 13)   6 (n = 2)   7 (n = 2)   0 (n = 0) 28 (n = 30) Interest in local politics 1) Watch events very closely 50 (n = 15) 67 (n = 20) 37 (n = 10) 59 (n = 16) 29 (n = 10) 42 (n = 15) 40 (n = 11) 55 (n = 15) 19 (n = 20) 2) 33 (n = 10) 30 (n = 9) 33 (n = 9) 41 (n = 11) 42 (n = 15) 42 (n = 15) 55 (n = 15) 45 (n = 12) 26 (n = 28) 3) Try to stay current 17 (n = 5)   3 (n = 1) 19 (n = 5)   0 (n = 0) 26 (n = 9) 14 (n = 5)   4 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0) 44 (n = 47) 4)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0) 11 (n = 3)   0 (n = 0)   3 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   9 (n = 10) 5) Don’t care   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   1 (n = 1) Volunteered in the past year Yes 63 (n = 19) 73 (n = 22) 66 (n = 18) 85 (n = 23) 43 (n = 15) 54 (n = 19) 56 (n = 15) 59 (n = 16) 26 (n = 28) Ranked reasons for participation in [CSA, farmers’ market, or local co-operative; control group asked to rank reasons for buying local/organic] (% ranking most important) Support local growers/orgs 27 (n = 8) 40 (n = 12) 30 (n = 8) 41 (n = 11) 29 (n = 10) 37 (n = 13) 62 (n = 17) 81 (n = 22) 14 (n = 15) Better tasting 37 (n = 11) 27 (n = 8) 33 (n = 9)   4 (n = 1) 34 (n = 12) 23 (n = 8)   4 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0) 37 (n = 39) Healthier food 33 (n = 10) 27 (n = 8) 37 (n = 10)   4 (n = 1) 29 (n = 10) 22 (n = 8) 15 (n = 4)   4 (n = 1) 42 (n = 45) Environmental sustainability   0 (n = 0)   7 (n = 2)   0 (n = 0) 27 (n = 8)   9 (n = 3) 17 (n = 6) 11 (n = 3)   7 (n = 2)   7 (n = 7) Care for workers 10 (n = 1)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0) 22 (n = 6)   0 (n = 0)   0 (n = 0)   7 (n = 2)   7 (n = 2)   0 (n = 0) Degree of interest in doing each of the following: 1= Very high interest; 5 = No interest (% ranking very high interest): Volunteering for those in need 30 (n = 9) 30 (n = 9) 37 (n = 10) 44 (n = 12) 26 (n = 9) 29 (n = 10) 41 (n = 11) 52 (n = 14)   9 (n = 10) Reading about social justice 50 (n = 15) 57 (n = 17) 59 (n = 16) 78 (n = 21) 40 (n = 14) 47 (n = 16) 67 (n = 18) 70 (n = 19) 20 (n = 22) Social justice is: 1 (not a priority) through 5 (major priority) (% selecting 4 and 5) 67 (n = 20) 70 (n = 21) 63 (n = 17) 96 (n = 26) 46 (n = 16) 51 (n = 18) 70 (n = 19) 78 (n = 21) 39 (n = 42)

Time 1 (%)

Time 1 (%)

Time 2 (%)

Volunteer

Drop-off

Table 13.3  Survey results for all cases, T1 and T2, and phone survey

252  Agrifood futures

Reimagining heathy eating 253

Tobin 2014), namely, that individuals engaged in these alternative food spaces are more likely to report high levels of community attachment and civic engagement. Moreover, the data answer the aforementioned chicken-and-egg dilemma. Turns out, both answers are right. Looking at Table 13.3, we can see that these spaces tended to attract people who were more civically engaged and community-oriented than what was found in the “conventional” group. But also, those food-based encounters made people more civically engaged over time. Another interesting finding centers on what people valued from Time 1 to Time 2. In line with previous research (e.g., Paul and Rana 2012), qualities related to taste and health were pronounced motivational factors for some respondents, as noted by responses to the question “Rank the reasons why you participate in. . . .” Among conventional eaters, 79 percent listed “better-tasting” and “healthier food” as “most important” reasons for buying local foods. Among those participating in alternative foodscapes, taste and health were significant motivational factors when initially surveyed, especially among those involved with CSAs (70 percent for both drop-off and volunteer groups) and farmers’ markets (63 percent). Yet two years later these rates were significantly lower – 54 percent among those involved with drop-off CSAs and 45 percent among those involved with farmers’ markets. Among volunteer CSAs, the rate dropped from 70  percent to only 8 percent. Generally speaking, as respondents deemphasized taste and health, they emphasized either “support for local growers/organizations” or “environmental sustainability.” This was especially the case among those involved with drop-off CSAs and farmers’ markets. The following are some representative quotes explaining respondents’ rationale for why their rankings changed over time (taken from Carolan 2017: 216). “I still think the stuff tastes better. But now, having gotten to know some of the farmers, I place more importance on helping the local economy than before. [. . .] I didn’t appreciate just how hard farmers work, and for next to nothing. That’s something else I learned, just how little trickles back to growers through conventional distribution channels.” (Nancy, volunteer CSAs) “Maybe at first you come because you think the food’s better here. Before you know it you find yourself curious, finding yourself with questions. How was it grown? Were chemical used? How were the animals treated? And at places like farmers’ markets you get to ask those questions, to people who actually have answers for you. [. . .] Pretty soon you start caring more about things like sustainability than you might have before.” (Julian, farmers’ market) There are a lot more data to talk about from this study, but I’ve introduced enough to draw some conclusions. First, there is something to be said about the “value” of these spaces for the practices and understandings and values they provoke, which goes beyond the economic resources they generate. This research thus gives support for the old saying, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Thinking about these spaces only through the narrow lens of economic rationalism (e.g., How many jobs do these platforms create?) and other metrics (e.g., How many units of food are raised?) risk providing a distorted picture of the worth of these spaces, especially when compared to more conventional supply chains, which are specifically designed with an eye toward efficiencies directed at these outcomes. But once you start broadening your understanding of value – that is, broadening what “counts” – than these networks fare much better. In fact, as this study shows, it can be

254  Agrifood futures

demonstrated that some have the potential to generate tremendous value to civil society. After all, identifying practices that make us kinder, more empathetic and caring, and accepting of difference is something we are in serious short supply of at the moment . . . am I right?

What happens from here is up to you . . . working with others If you were looking for definitive answers on how to move forward, I am afraid you will leave this book empty-handed. If the green revolution taught us anything, it is that magic bullets only exit in works of fiction. The road ahead is going to require a lot of collective work. The reason for my reluctance to prescribe is because those answers should not come from any one person, organization, firm, or government, even a democratic one. At their core, many of the issues being debated around food and agriculture involve competing values. And as such, there is no independent authority – not science, not the law, not politicians – that can tell us which (and whose) values trump all the others. Sociology, like the other sciences, can help inform the debate. Yet in the end the path forward needs to be decided by stakeholders, which in this case is anyone that eats. But is that enough? Not so according to a number of prominent scholars who passionately argue for a praxis dimension in their work (e.g., Duncan et al. 2019; Friedland 2008; Lowe 2010). According to this argument, sociologists of food and agriculture need to do more than just help stakeholders understand the world better. We must actively work to change it, too, with an aim toward justice. Sociologist Douglas Constance (2008: 154), past president of Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, is quite firm on this point: As a community of critical agrifood scholars, we must embrace a praxis and volunteer in service of this movement. We must commit to a praxis of public social science that moves beyond the comfortable, conservative confines of the academy. Whatever the focus of our work, the long-term goal remains the same; emancipatory change to end injustice. Has the sociology of food and agriculture outgrown its sub-disciplinary title? I admit that my own discomfort with the title reveals itself in my writing through the occasional injection of such terms as “agrifood studies” and “critical food scholarship” when referring to this book’s literature base. I have justified using the term “sociological” throughout the book on the basis that while the scholarship presented may not be entirely by sociologists they nevertheless employ their sociological imaginations to investigate the complexities of our food system. The growing multi-disciplinarity of the literature might also be an artifact of its rural sociological roots (though, as Hinrichs [2008] notes, rural sociology’s radical turn in the 1970s arguably sidetracked this multi-disciplinary spirit for a time). William Freudenburg (2006: 3), in a paper based upon his presidential address to the Rural Sociological Society, notes the following: Rather than seeking ivory-tower isolation, members of the Rural Sociological Society have always been distinguished by a willingness to work with specialists from a broad range of disciplines, and to work on some of the world’s most challenging problems. What is less commonly recognized is that the willingness to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries can contribute not just to the solution of real-world problems, but also to the advancement of the discipline itself.

Reimagining heathy eating 255

He goes on to explain how this point is increasingly being illustrated in studies of environment–society relationships. Yet I think an equally illustrative case can be found in studies relating to food and agriculture. The vitality of the subdiscipline lies precisely in its willingness to be driven by the problems rather than disciplinary dogma, recognizing that a (sub-)disciplinary narrative only becomes dogmatic by failing to learn, change, and adapt. This book is testament to the field’s remarkable adaptability, something I have likened elsewhere to a rather undisciplined “wildness” (Carolan 2013). This wildness is one of the things that first attracted me to the field. And it is, among other things, what keeps me nourished as I continue to feed upon this dynamic field of study. It is important, therefore, to experiment and be intentional while doing it. That means trying out new ways of doing things and seeing what happens; to borrow ideas and practices from others and make them your community’s own; and, most importantly of all, we need to work together. Social change, real social change, can only come through our actions as citizen-eaters, which include but are not limited to acts of buying. Citizen-eaters? By this, I do not simply mean people with the legal status of citizenship, signifying membership in a state. I mean people who act as citizens, whose actions have the potential to make a real difference – it’s important to note that undocumented immigrants can be, and in many cases are, citizen-eaters. Elsewhere I have made the distinction between active and activist citizens (e.g., Carolan 2017). When people hear the term “citizenship” they usually think of activities such as voting, volunteering, donating money to charities and community organizations, writing letters to the editor, signing petitions, even shopping – acts, I also realize, that are made easier by financial means. Many of these acts support established social practices and conventions, even the status quo in many respects. While important from the standpoint of nurturing civic health, active citizenship is inherently conservative – about making improvements at the margins. Activist citizens, by contrast, challenge the status quo, which makes their endeavor political rather than about politics as usual, which, in my opinion, is what we need more of. More political participation, community action, and opportunities that make us uncomfortable. On that point of needing to be made uncomfortable: there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to talk about race, class, and gender, for instance. But darn it, those are conversations we have to have if we want to create just foodscapes. The choice is ours. We can choose more of the same. Or something radically different, which is less about settling on a predetermined endpoint than echoing an invitation to come together and plot out multiple pathways.

Discussion questions 1 Having gotten through the entire book, did you experience any deeply profound “a-ha!” moments? If so, what were they? 2 What are your thoughts about public sociology? Do you think sociologists of food and agriculture should just study the world or study and actively work to change it?

Suggested readings: introductory level Lemke, S., F. Yousefi, A.C. Eisermann, and A.C. Bellows. 2012. Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches for Exploring Smallholder Agricultural Programs Targeted at Women: Examples from South Africa, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 3(1): 25–41, http://dx.doi.org/10.5304/ jafscd.2012.031.001.

256  Agrifood futures Peres, S. 2016. Saving the Gene Pool for the Future: Seed Banks as Archives, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55: 96–104.

Suggested readings: advanced level Barbera, F., J. Dagnes, and R. Di Monaco. 2020. Participation for What? Organizational Roles, Quality Conventions and Purchasing Behaviors in Solidarity Purchasing Groups, Journal of Rural Studies 73: 243–251. Harcourt, W. 2017. Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods: Linking Gendered Experiences of Environment, Community and Self, Agriculture and Human Values 34(4): 1007–1019. Siegner, A., J. Sowerwine, and C. Acey. 2018. Does Urban Agriculture Improve Food Security? Examining the Nexus of Food Access and Distribution of Urban Produced Foods in the United States: A Systematic Review, Sustainability 10(9), https://doi.org/10.3390/su10092988.

References Agula, C., M.A. Akudugu, F.N. Mabe, and S. Dittoh. 2018. Promoting Ecosystem-Friendly Irrigation Farm Management Practices for Sustainable Livelihoods in Africa: The Ghanaian Experience, Agricultural and Food Economics 6(1), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40100-018-0109-1. Barbera, F., J. Dagnes, and R. Di Monaco. 2020. Participation for What? Organizational Roles, Quality Conventions and Purchasing Behaviors in Solidarity Purchasing Groups, Journal of Rural Studies 73: 243–251. Barham, J. 2011. Regional Food Hubs. Understanding the Scope and Scale of Food Hub Operations Preliminary Findings From a National Survey of Regional Food Hubs. Washington, DC: USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service, United States Department of Agriculture, https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/ media/Regional%20Food%20Hubs%20Understanding%20the%20Scope%20and%20Scale%20of%20 Food%20Hub%20Operations.pdf. Baulcombe, D., I. Crute, B. Davies, J. Dunwell, M. Gale, J. Jones, J. Pretty, W. Sutherland, and C. Toulmin. 2009. Reaping the Benefits: Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Global Agriculture. London: The Royal Society, https://royalsociety.org/topics- policy/publications/2009/reaping-benefits/. Blay-Palmer, A., K. Landma, I. Knezevic, and R. Hayhurst. 2013. Constructing Resilient, Transformative Communities Through Sustainable “Food Hubs”. Local Environment 18(5): 521–528. Butler, J.R., W. Rochester, T.D. Skewes, R.M. Wise, E.L. Bohensky, J. Katzfey, D.G. Kirono, N. Peterson, W. Suadnya, Y. Yanuartati, and T. Handayani. 2020. How Feasible Is the Scaling-Out of Livelihood and Food System Adaptation in Asia-Pacific Islands? Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 4, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.00043. Carolan, M. 2017. No One Eats Along: Food as a Social Enterprise. Washington, DC: Island Press. Carolan, M. 2018. The Food Sharing Revolution: How Start-Ups, Pop-Ups, and Co-Ops Are Changing the Way We Eat. Washington, DC: Island Press. Carolan, M.S. 2013. The Wild Side of Agro-Food Studies: On Co-Experimentation, Politics, Change, and Hope, Sociologia Ruralis 53(4): 413–431. Cleveland, David, Nora Muller, Alexander Tranovich, and D, Mazaroli. 2014. Local Food Hubs for Alternative Food Systems: A Case Study from Santa Barbara County, California, Journal of Rural Studies 35: 26–36. Constance, D. 2008. The Emancipatory Question: The Next Step in the Sociology of Agrifood Systems, Agriculture and Human Values 25: 151–155. Delind, L. 2006. Of Bodies, Place and Culture: Re-situating Local Food, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 19(1): 121–146. Duncan, J., P. Claeys, M.G. Rivera-Ferre, E. Oteros-Rozas, B. Van Dyck, C. Plank, and A.A. Desmarais. 2019. Scholar-Activists in an Expanding European Food Sovereignty Movement, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1675646.

Reimagining heathy eating 257 Freudenburg, W. 2006. Environmental Degradation, Disproportionality, and the Double Diversion: Reaching Out, Reaching Ahead, and Reaching Beyond, Rural Sociology 71(1): 3–32. Friedland, W. 2008. “Chasms” in Agrifood Systems: Rethinking How We Can Contribute, Agriculture and Human Values 25: 197–201. Garnett, T., and C. Godfray. 2012. Sustainable Intensification in Agriculture. Navigating a Course Through Competing Food System Priorities, Food Climate Research Network and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, University of Oxford, UK, http://futureoffood.ox.ac.uk/sites/ futureoffood.ox.ac.uk/files/SI%20report%20- %20final.pdf. Grasseni, C. 2014. Seeds of trust. Italy’s gruppi di acquisto solidale (solidarity purchase groups), Journal of Political Ecology 21(1): 178–192. Harcourt, W. 2017. Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods: Linking Gendered Experiences of Environment, Community and Self, Agriculture and Human Values 34(4): 1007–1019. Hinrichs, Clare. 2008. Interdisciplinarity and Boundary Work: Challenges and Opportunities for Agrifood Studies, Agriculture and Human Values 25: 209–213. Lowe, Philip. 2010. Enacting Rural Sociology: Or What Are the Creativity Claims of the Engaged Sciences? Sociologia Ruralis 50(4): 311–330. Lucas, Caroline. 2011. Oral Evidence, Take Before the Environmental Audit Committee, July  6, United Kingdom, http://sw1a.net/app/webroot/wordpress-mu/incommittee/category/hoc-selectcommittees/page/3/. Mallick, B., Z. Sultana, and C.M. Bennett. 2020. How Do Sustainable Livelihoods Influence Environmental (Non-) Migration Aspirations? Applied Geography 124, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog. 2020.102328. Manganelli, A., and F. Moulaert. 2019. Scaling Out Access to Land for Urban Agriculture. Governance Hybridities in the Brussels-Capital Region, Land Use Policy 82: 391–400. Obach, Brian, and Kathleen Tobin. 2014. Civic Agriculture and Community Engagement, Agriculture and Human Values 31(2): 307–322. Pachico, D., and S. Fujisaka (ed.). 2004. Scaling Up and Out: Achieving Widespread Impact Through Agricultural Research. CIAT Publication 340. Cali, Colombia: CIAT. Paul, Justin, and Jyoti Rana. 2012. Consumer Behavior and Purchase Intention for Organic Food, Journal of Consumer Marketing 29(6): 412–422. Petersen, B., and S. Snapp. 2015. What Is Sustainable Intensification? Views from Experts, Land Use Policy 46: 1–10. Pretty, J., B. Adams, F. Berkes, S.F. De Athayde, N. Dudley, E. Hunn, L. Maffi, K. Milton, D. Rapport, P. Robbins, and E. Sterling. 2009. The Intersections of Biological Diversity and Cultural Diversity: Towards Integration. Conservation and Society 7(2): 100–112. Reynolds, K., and N. Cohen. 2016. Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Rogers, J., and M. Fraszczak. 2014. “Like the Stem Connecting the Cherry to the Tree”: The Uncomfortable Place of Intermediaries in a Local Organic Food Chain. Sociologia Ruralis 54(3): 321–340. Serrat, O. 2017. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. In Knowledge Solutions, edited by O. Serrat, Pp. 21–26. Singapore: Springer. Siegner, A., J. Sowerwine, and C. Acey. 2018. Does Urban Agriculture Improve Food Security? Examining the Nexus of Food Access and Distribution of Urban Produced Foods in the United States: A Systematic Review, Sustainability 10(9), https://doi.org/10.3390/su10092988. Vernooy, Ronnie, and Yiching Song. 2004. New Approaches to Supporting the Agricultural Biodiversity Important for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods, International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 2(1): 55–66.

Index

actor network theory 39 adoption-diffusion 4, 101 Africa 40, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 75, 99 – 100, 129, 135, 154, 172, 191, 195, 210, 218 – 219, 233 – 234 African-American 3, 133 – 135 agnotology 121 – 122 agrarian question 14, 40; see also family farm(s), persistence of agrobiodiversity 220 agroecology 61, 101, 147 – 151, 200, 202 alternative food networks 235 apolitical ecologies 58 appropriationism 26 Ark of Taste 115, 219 – 220 Australia 12, 29, 40, 58 – 59, 69, 115, 119, 130, 176, 177, 178, 180, 191, 210, 214 automation 35 backwardation 81 bananas 54, 233 Bangladesh 46, 61, 101, 176 banks: gene 241; memory 242 – 244; seed 77, 242 – 244; see also conservation Bayer-Monsanto 29, 35 Bengal 46, 119 Benin 99 Berlin, Isaiah 236 – 237 Betty Crocker 117 big data 34 biocultural diversity 241 – 244 biodiesel 69 – 70, 73, 76 biofuels 69 – 78, 191 Black Panther Party 133 body mass index (BMI) 57, 139 Bourdieu, Pierre 113 – 114 bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) 123 Brazil 12, 28, 61, 67, 69, 70, 75, 99, 149, 168, 175, 176, 177, 191, 195, 214, 233 Brazilian Association of Agroecology (ABA) 149 built capital 157 bunge 35, 98

Campesino-to-Campesino 104 – 105 Canada 11, 40, 70, 140, 176, 177, 202, 208 capital see community capitals; cultural capital; financial capital; Mann-Dickenson thesis; Marx, Karl; political capital; social capital Cargill 81 – 83, 152 certification 18, 212, 215 – 216; see also labels, food Chile 40 China 11, 12, 40, 42, 61, 68, 69, 70, 98, 99, 148, 168, 175 – 176, 178, 181, 191, 200 – 201, 210, 233, 235 citizen science 103 climate change 2, 50, 55, 58, 72 – 73, 77 – 78, 100, 130, 137 – 138, 149, 152, 155, 181, 183 – 185, 192, 241; see also global warming Cochrane, Willard 8, 78 Cold War 41, 48, 51 commodity systems approach 37 – 39 community capitals 155 – 157 concentration, market 13, 25 – 31, 40, 61, 74 – 75; see also CR4 ratio; hourglass, the food system confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) 90 – 92, 97; acute respiratory symptoms, and 92, 98 – 99; community impact, and 90 – 92; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and 92 conservation 138, 161 – 162, 185, 219; ex situ 242 – 244; in situ 243 – 244; see also banks contract farming 27, 91 conventionalization of organic agriculture thesis 17 – 18 cooperatives 28, 233, 244 – 247 corn: agricultural treadmill 6, 8 – 10, 41; British Corn Laws 11; energy intensive of 52 – 53, 168; ethanol 72 – 74; genetically modified (Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)) 34; hybridization of 4, 30 – 31; mechanization of 6, 8 – 10, 31; seed industry 26; seed saving 10; subsidies 11 – 12, 179; syrup (high fructose) 26; Tuscarora White 219 COVID-19 49 – 50, 83, 101, 132 – 133, 155, 181, 199, 216 CR4 ratio 25 – 26; see also concentration, market; hourglass, the food system

260 Index crop wild relatives 241 culinary triangle 112 cultural capital 113 – 114, 155, 162 dairy: automation 35; COVID 3; industry (Brazil, in 28; concentration within 28; efficiency gains within 28; energy intensity within 171, 174, 218; human welfare concerns 122; New Zealand, in 13 – 14; organic 211); rBST 16; subsidies 12, 13 – 14 dead zones 181 defensive localism 229 – 231, 233 deforestation 11, 71, 72 democracy 46 – 47, 48, 51, 134, 136, 210, 221, 229, 236, 254 dependency, food (in international development) 10, 36 – 37, 47, 91; see also structural adjustment policies derivatives 82 – 83 Diamond v. Chakrabarty 33 dietary guidelines 58 – 59 digital agriculture 34 – 37 double squeeze in agriculture 9 Douglas, Mary 112, 120, 123, 185 DuBois, W.E.B. 3 Durkheim, Emile 4 Duvalier, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” 47 Ecuador 177, 197 – 200 Elias, Norbert 113 – 114 Engel’s Law 8 epistemic distance 121 ethical consumption 208 – 209, 214 Ethiopia 50, 79, 135, 176, 210 ethnicity in agrifood scholarship 38, 94 – 95, 99, 115, 128, 133 – 135 European Union (EU) 5, 119, 219 eutrophication 150, 181 exit power 27 expertise 101 – 104 fair trade 42, 226, 230, 234, 235 – 237 family farm(s): gender 130; persistence of 14 – 15, 41; restructuring of 5, 6; see also peasant agriculture famine 46 – 47 Farmer Field Schools 104 farmers market 18, 95, 128, 134 – 135, 208, 216, 244, 250 – 253 farm to school (FTS) programs 227 – 228 Federation of Indonesian Peasant Unions 196 fertilizer, synthetic 9 – 10, 11, 13 – 14, 29 – 30, 46, 48, 52, 73, 77, 121, 36, 152, 180 – 181, 183, 218, 249 filière approach 38 financial capital 113 – 114, 156 – 157 financialization of food 67 – 83

food aid 41, 47, 49, 50 – 52, 237; see also Public Law 480 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations 12, 54, 79, 82, 167, 182, 192 food bank 140 food crisis 47, 49, 83 food desert 60, 134, 232 food hubs 244 – 247 food miles 93, 128, 169 – 173, 244, 245 food regime 39 – 42, 149, 167 food scares/safety 28, 34, 47, 61 – 62, 237 food security 73, 77, 82 – 83, 98, 100 – 101, 135 – 137, 140, 150, 174, 182, 185, 190 – 193, 197, 200 – 202, 211, 232, 234, 237 foodshed 226 food sovereignty 101, 150, 190, 193–202, 244 footprint shifting 173 foreign direct investment (FDI) 67 – 69 Foucault, Michel 58 France 11, 14, 29, 69, 70, 93, 119, 169, 176 freedom from/to 236 – 237 free trade 197, 219, 235 – 237; see also freedom from/to Frito-Lay 217 futures, market 80 – 82 gender, in agrifood scholarship 94, 96, 124 – 125, 128 – 133, 135 – 138, 151, 154, 158, 162, 209, 211 – 212, 214 – 215, 221, 235 General Mills 81, 152 geographical indications (GI) of origin 117 – 120 global commodity chains 38 global trap, the 227, 230 – 232; see also local trap, the global warming 173, 174, 183 – 184; see also climate change glocalization 119, 230 – 231 gloves off economy 96 – 97 Golden Rice 56 Goldman and Sachs 82 Goldschmidt Thesis 3 – 4, 74, 89 – 93 good farmer/farming 161 – 162 good food 207 – 209 governance 38, 58, 151, 228, 230, 237 Greece 29, 71, 93, 140, 214 green revolution 5, 52 – 53, 56, 61, 68, 149, 162, 178, 197, 233 – 234, 254 Haiti 47 – 48 Happy Planet Index 193–195 Harvey, David 253 hedgers 81 hourglass, the food system 5, 25, 29 – 30, 39, 81, 236, 237; see also concentration, market; CR4 ratio Howard, Albert 209 Humphrey, Hubert 50

Index  261 hunger: COVID 49; food aid, and 51; hidden hunger/micronutrient malnutrition, and 49, 53 – 57, 60; justice, and 176 – 181, 137, 140; political economy of 47 – 49, 51, 192, 197, 247 India 12, 29, 47, 53, 61, 67 – 68, 70, 75, 76, 124, 137, 168, 175, 176, 181, 195, 210, 211, 231 integrated pest management (IPM) 104 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 47 – 49, 179 International Potato Center (CIP) 243 International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) 243 Italy 29, 70, 93, 140, 174, 214, 231, 243 Japan 4, 40, 124, 148, 169 – 170, 195, 231 jatropha 75 – 76 Jolly Green Giant 117 Kellogg, W.K. 116, 152 Kenya 50, 52, 76, 79, 101, 129, 172 – 173, 234, 249 Keynes, John Maynard 81 knowledge transfer in agriculture: extension model, classic 101 – 104; farmer first model 103 – 104 labels, food: biodynamic 216; early 117; fair trade 230, 235 – 237; geographical indications 117 – 120; local 172, 208, 217; organic 18, 208, 212, 216; slow food 220 – 221 labor, food system: child 71; forced 71, 236; gender divisions 128 – 133, 136, 221; health impacts 98 – 99; historical background (e.g., labor-saving transitions) 4, 5, 6, 14 – 16, 41 – 42, 48, 53, 70; “north”/“south” divisions 136, 227; peasant 99 – 101; wage inequalities 38, 60 – 61, 93 – 98, 183, 201, 219, 228, 234 – 235 land grab, global 77, 78 – 80 Latin America 40. 49, 52 – 53, 57, 75, 178, 195, 210 La Via Campesina 154, 193–200 Liebig, Justus von 180 lifecycle analysis 173 – 174 Lively, C.E. 3 livestock: automation 35 – 36; climate change 182 – 183; concentration, industry 10, 27; contract farming 27; human relationship with 120 – 125; labor 98; production/consumption trends 123 – 125; subsidies 12 local food 114 – 115, 117 – 119, 134 – 135, 147, 169 – 172, 198–200, 207, 209, 215 – 221, 226 – 234; see also local trap, the local trap, the 226 – 230; see also global trap, the Madagascar 79 Malawi 148 Mali 79 Mann-Dickenson thesis 15 – 17, 149 manners 111, 113

Marcos, Ferdinand 48 Marshall Plan 50 Marx, Karl 4, 14 – 17, 38, 122, 180 – 182, 219, 230; see also Mann-Dickenson thesis; metabolic rift masculinity(ies): agriculture, in 162; COVID 132 – 133; hegemonic 130; meat 112, 124 – 125; rural, in 131 McDonald’s 218, 231 mechanization revolution 5 – 6, 8, 17, 31, 37, 53, 79, 93 metabolic rift 180 – 182 Mills, C. Wright 5 minimum wage 95, 97, 235 Mintz, Sidney 219 modernization theory 136 molecularization 146 Mongolia 177 monoculture(s) 17 – 18, 182 – 183, 241 monopoly 27, 31, 102, 119, 235 – 237 monopsony 27, 35, 235 – 237 Monsanto 128, 152; see also Bayer-Monsanto Morton Salt Girl 117 multifunctionality 149 – 150 myths of nature 160 – 162 National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation 243 natural capital 155 – 157, 168 neoliberalism 14, 228, 235 – 237 Nepal 55 Netherlands, the 29, 61, 70, 214 New Zealand 13 – 14, 18, 29 – 30, 35, 177 Nigeria 49, 50, 176 nitrogen 13, 147, 180 – 182, 183 Norway 11, 131, 231, 242 – 243 nutritionism, ideology of 56, 60, 232 obesity: political economy of, the 57 – 58, 60 – 61; transition 57 organic: agriculture 17 – 18, 149, 161, 162, 212 – 213, 216 – 217, 245; food/consumption 114, 207, 209 – 210, 214 – 215, 251 – 252; industry structure 216 – 218; label/standards 18, 117, 128, 215 overproduction 8, 100, 197 Pakistan 80, 99, 176, 180 palm oil 54, 69, 70 – 71, 72, 75, 173 Papua New Guinea 177 patent law 30, 33 – 34 path dependency, policy 13 peasant agriculture: efficiency of 101, 249; exploitation/eradication of 100, 136; social movements 154 – 155 PepsiCo 67, 152 pesticide(s) 9, 13, 35, 50, 52, 60, 77, 98 – 99, 148 – 149, 167 – 169; resistance 99, 168

262 Index Philippines 48, 53, 158, 176, 196, 230, 231, 243 phosphorus 181 – 182 Plato 113 political capital 28, 75, 156 – 157, 162 Post, C.W. 116 poverty: globalization, due to 48, 52 – 53, 72, 75, 77, 79, 135, 154, 199, 247 – 250; hunger, and 53, 137 – 140; rural 4, 11, 90, 92 precision agriculture 34 – 37 price discovery 82, 114 product of nature doctrine 33 Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) 117 – 120 Protected Geographic Indication (PGI) 117 – 120 Public Law 480 49, 50 – 51 public sociology 5 Qatar 79 Quaker Oats Man 117 race to the bottom 96 rainbow evolution 197, 234 rBST 16 reflexive glocalism 232 – 235 reflexive localism 229 regenerative agriculture 36, 101, 151 – 155, 182, 200 regulation theory 41 re-peasantization 154 – 155 resiliency 155 rice: concentration, market 26; consumption 54, 124; fish, polyculture 148; genetically modified (Golden Rice 56); Haiti 47 – 48; land grabbing 78; production output 168; shortages 46, 47 – 48; subsidies 11 – 12, 179 risk society thesis 121 rural in the masculine 131 Russia 11, 69, 176, 177, 243 Saudi Arabia 80 scaling up 246 – 247 scaling out 247 seed: banks, heritage 242 – 243; industry 26, 29 – 34; patents 30 – 34; saving 77, 197, 201, 242 – 244; treadmill 10 Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) 243 Sen, Amartya 46 – 47 Sinclair, Upton 117 slow food 114 – 115, 218 – 221; see also Ark of Taste smart farming 34 – 37 social capital 113 – 114, 156 – 158, 210, 245, 247 social constructionism of nature 159 – 161 social justice 18, 128, 192, 210, 216, 226, 229, 233, 224, 246, 251 – 252 sociological imagination 1, 5, 18, 27, 254 soil health movement 151 – 152 South Africa 195, 233

South Korea 100, 124, 169, 195 soybean: biofuels 70; global warming 173; green revolution 52, 54 – 55, 190; Mexico 149; seed industry 26; seed saving 10; subsidies 12, 179 Spain 29, 69, 70, 93, 140, 176 specialization, on the farm 6 speculators 36, 79, 81, 83, 200 spot price 81 – 82 Sri Lanka 99 Steiner, Rudolf 209, 216 structural adjustment policies 47 Sub-Saharan Africa 52, 53, 57 subsidies, agricultural 9, 10 – 14, 16, 41, 47, 48 – 49, 73 – 74, 138, 140, 179, 197, 235 – 236 substantial equivalence 34 substitutionism 34 subsumption of nature, real and formal 17 Sudan 50, 79 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) 137 – 139 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 72, 76 – 77 sustainable intensification 248 – 249 sustainable livelihood approach 247 – 250 sustainable nutrition security 61 – 63 Svalbard Global Seed Vault 242 – 243 Sweden 29, 140, 182 “Sweetheart of Corn,” Kellogg 116 – 117 taste, the sociology of 112 – 114; biocultural diversity, and 116, 219 – 221, 243; memory, and 37, 114 – 116, 243; organic food, and 214, 253; status, and 113 – 114 Thailand 55, 70, 176, 177 trade liberalization 48 treadmills, agricultural (agricultural, pesticide, fertilizer, and seed) 8 – 10, 41, 122 trust 116 – 117, 153, 157, 158, 184 Turkey, the country of 40, 174 United Kingdom (UK) 1, 69, 102, 140, 167, 168, 169, 172, 196, 214, 215, 219, 248 – 249 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 135 United States of America (USA) 6, 8, 9, 10 – 12, 17, 25 – 26, 29 – 30, 33, 35 – 37, 40, 41, 47 – 49, 50 – 51, 58 – 59, 60, 62, 68 – 70, 134, 168, 169, 176, 177, 210, 216 unreflexive localism 226, 229 urban bias 100 vegetarianism 134 Vietnam 28, 29, 53, 124 virtual water 174 – 178 virtuous globalization 219 Walmart 28, 29, 67, 152, 207, 214, 217, 227, 229 Washington Consensus 100, 151

Index waste, food 63, 171, 192 water: green revolution 52 – 53; pollution 72, 97, 169, 181 – 182; privatization 136 – 138, 178 – 180; protection 77, 150; scarcity 76, 130, 169, 182 – 183; subsidies 13; use 174 – 178 welfare, animal 18, 42, 98, 122, 211, 216

Whole Foods Market 229 World Bank 47 – 49, 154, 178 – 179 World Health Organization (WHO) 60, 192 World Trade Organization (WTO) 38 World War II 41, 47 – 49, 50 – 51, 52, 100 Zimbabwe 50, 162

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