Food History and Food Politics
I’m writing this partly because I’ve now been blogging for about six months and it seemed time to take stock, partly because of Ji Young’s three long commentaries on posts some time back about the “food crisis.”
Very briefly, I think discussions of food politics that do not draw on some historical perspective tend to miss the mark. The world food scene changed dramatically in the 1880s-1914 period. Those of us who live in parts of the world where those changes were most forceful have little comprehension of what food was like prior to that period and how it still is for many people in different parts of the world. Few of us have traveled to those parts of the world. Much of what is written about food politics is well meaning but to my mind ill advised.
A few examples.
Sustainability. It’s up there with motherhood and apple pie, who could be against something so eminently desirable. Yet the fact is that we have no analysis of what is sustainable and what is not. Assuming that if it’s small and organic it’s sustainable won’t do. History is scattered with examples of small, organic enterprises that were anything but sustainable.
Farmers. I would ban this word unless it had an adjective attached. Lumping together a large sheep farmer in Australia, a tenant farmer with arable and dairy in England, a campesino with a small milpa in Mexico, a hobby farmer growing vegetables outside New York, and people with plots of sorghum and a few goats in Burundi sheds little light on anything. History shows just how variable farming is, just what the limits on subsistence farming are, which land tenure systems seem to work best for which kinds of crops, and how crop needs and the needs of those who work the land are often at odds.
Food. Farming does not produce food. We don’t eat corn. We don’t eat cattle. We eat tortillas or HFSC and hamburgers or sopa de medula (spinal cord soup). That is, farming produces raw materials for food as open pit mining of the Duluth iron ranges produced the raw materials for railroads. History shows that how we transform raw materials into food is one of the most important factors in human welfare that can be imagined.
I could go on. But my aim is to try to make the links that I see between food history and food politics in this blog more obvious. And to respond to many of your interesting commentaries bit by bit as I do so.
Nice post Rachel. What happened in 1880-1914 with respect to food history? Maybe you will cover this in your future posts?