The Food System (Ways of Talking about Food 2)
The term “food system” sounds comfortingly familiar and understandable.
System, in the sense of interacting parts, has been used for a long time. Sixteenth-century astronomers talked about systems of the heavens, eighteenth-century natural philosophers about systems of the earth, twentieth-century biologists about ecosystems. Now we talk about economic systems, political systems, digestive systems, transport systems, and computer systems.
There is even a field of study, systems theory, that considers systems in the abstract. Since the mid-twentieth century, following work by the biologist Ludwig van Bertalanffy, a small army of mathematicians, game theorists, sociologists, specialists in international relations and others have worked in this area.
So to use the term food system to identify the ways in which a society or institution procures, distributes and consumes food seems perfectly natural. It was in this sense that in the 1970s, hospital administrators talked about hospital food systems.
However, from the 1980s on, many have used “the food system” in a more theoretical, precise, global, critical and political sense. Be warned that although I lived through these years, I was never a participant in the very tangled history of debates and initiatives undertaken by those who used food system this way. This is simply my attempt at a brief retrospect.
One of the most important events precipitating the shift was the publication in 1974 by Immanuel Wallerstein of The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Then at McGill University, Wallerstein has gone on to hold positions at some of the world’s most prestigious universities, and to publish a prodigious amount, including three sequel volumes.
Wallerstein’s key thesis was that in the sixteenth century the world became divided into interdependent zones that he called center and periphery (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll leave out semi-periphery here) as a result of the market economy (capitalism) displacing feudalism in Europe. Independent peasant farmers disappeared. In the center, they were replaced by workers who were paid wages; on the periphery, forced labor, at its extreme slave labor became the norm. Resources extorted from the periphery were consumed in the center by laborers who paid with their wages. This balance of two forms of exploitation benefitted the powerful who controlled capital.
Like the author of any synthetic work, Wallerstein drew on others: among them, Marxist economists, dependency theorists particularly in Latin America who postulated that resources flowed from periphery to center, thus preventing the latter developing economically, and Fernand Braudel, who was just then finishing his massive Civilization and Capitalism, 1400-1800 (1967-1979).
Thus many, including neo-Marxist economists, world historians, and food activists found world-systems theory, as Wallerstein’s analysis was called, an attractive lens for viewing the modern world. Read more about it, including its extensive technical vocabulary, on Wikipedia or in this piece by co-authored by one of its main exponents, Christopher Chase-Dunn.
Since it’s easy to equate farming and food, world systems quickly led to food systems.
For example, the contrast, connection, and exploitation of two types of workers through food is the cornerstone of the last part of one of the most famous books in food history and anthropology, Sweetness and Power. Sidney Mintz published this in 1985, just a decade after Wallerstein’s Modern World-System. Mintz linked the misery of the enslaved who labored on the sugar plantations (the periphery) to the dreadful sugary diet of the working class who labored for wages in English factories (the center) by the medium of capitalism. (As an aside, I believe that Mintz’s brilliant thesis needs to be revisited in light of recent scholarship, but that’s for some future publication). Mintz mentions Wallerstein only a couple of times in Sweetness and Power so he may well have come to his thesis independently. He would, however, most certainly been party to discussions of the capitalist world/food system.
By the late 1980s and 1990s, scholars and activists found the technical sense of food system as a system of producers and consumers exploited by capital as a useful way to analyze contemporary food consumption and production. For a particularly systematic treatment, see Consumption in an Age of Affluence: The World of Food (1995) by University of London economics professor, Ben Fine, and others.
Food system became entrenched in the language. If you run a quick google search, you will note that it is usually first defined neutrally as the chain from farm to consumer. Quickly this shifts to a critique of the “conventional” (that is, capitalist) food system for its economic and environmental failings, and calls for alternatives. Related concepts such as food regimes, food chains, and the history of commodities became widely circulated.
Food system analysis thus points to a deep divide in thinking about food and food policy.
On the one hand are the multifarious alternative food movements, who unite behind the slogan “the [conventional] food system is broken” and work to replace it with something different.
Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (2008) is the most accessible cry for re-thinking food on a global scale. In it, he argues that it is the profit motive intrinsic to capitalism that causes consumers to become obese and the rural poor to have hunger pangs.
Perhaps because it’s a tall order to roll back capitalism, others in the alternative food movements concentrate on re-working local food systems, improving labor conditions in agriculture, promoting small-scale farming in the United States in the name of sustainability, or raising consumer awareness.
Many of the best known works in food studies draw on discussions, particularly lively at the University of California at Santa Cruz, about food systems. Food studies courses and departments and the mainstream media do also.
On the other hand, many, probably most development specialists, agricultural economists, food policy specialists, farmers, food scientists and technologists among others believe that for all its problems, the “conventional food system” as opponents call it, is not broken but has succeeded against all odds at feeding an increasing proportion of an exploding world population. They believe that contemporary agriculture, food processing, distribution, and development are best improved, not abandoned.
And me? Well, I think there’s no doubt that food systems have provided a fresh perspective on both the history and the current state of food. And many others, I find food system without theoretical baggage a very handy term. But I’m in the camp of improvers, count me out if you want to start over.
And I would welcome comments.
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Comments now come in on Facebook and Twitter as well as on my website. I am so fortunate that colleagues take the time, and I want to share some.
1. My friend, the anthropologist Gene Anderson, who identifies himself as a follower of Mintz and a Wallersteinian, said that he reveled in using the term “food system.” The reason he gives? That connecting production and consumption by the idea of a system was in itself quite a breakthrough. It was all too easy to deal with production in agricultural science, consumption in home economics, with the twain never meeting.
I’d not considered it this way. I think he may be right. But in the middle of the night my head is running through early twentieth-century studies of food.
2. Gene also points out that in real life, food is too complex to be squashed into a production to consumption model. I agree.
2. Another friend, Nadia Berenstein (wait for her book on the history of the flavor industry), suggests that an advantage of the systems model is that it allows connection to other systems, such as energy.
Very good and short analysis of Wallerstein! I have never been able to get very far into any of his works, although I have had them in my hands on occasion. There are some writers, I find, whom it is not necessary to read in their entirety (Hegel), or if at all. Once you get the gist of what they are saying from a summary like yours, you have it all.
Re your interest in “ways of talking about food,” the London Review of Books, January 5, 2017, issue has a review of a book by Wendy Wall, “Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen.” The reviewer mentions Wall’s use of the term “food work, … a subset of the care of the body,” the intertwining of which is “everywhere in the recipe culture Wall describes.”
Thank you for the reference to the review of Wall’s book in the London Review of Books. Food work, hmm. So many coined terms. I wonder how much some of them add.
I had never thought of “conventional” meaning “capitalist.” I had thought it referred to the method of production, ie, using synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. This would place many organic producers firmly in the conventional camp.
I think it’s ambiguous. Not all advocates of organic farming are anti-capitalist. Indeed the conservative wing, represented by Wendell Berry, wants traditional small farms worked by the family that owns them. Another wing, the New Left wing, wanted some form of collective ownership. And then back when the movement was growing in the 60s, there are those who signed up for environmental reasons or for health reasons. So there was a division on capitalism but pretty much unanimity about small farms and distrust of corporations. So, yes, conventional does refer to the method of production but it is a stand in for large scale and corporate. And so that is why alternative food movements resist large scale organic production.
Fascinating. I continue to glean so much from your writing. Thank you.
I think we should unpack what we mean here by “capitalism”. Even the neo-Marxists you’ve mentioned in this post would be in favor of capitalism-in-the-abstract, as meaning free exchange between equals. But capitalism-in-fact has instead often taken the form of more domineering relations, especially in the context of the history of colonization (and its spiritual successor, American military hegemony).
But posing capitalism vs. anti-capitalisms is not a very useful frame anyway. Even within conservative areas of the United States, non-capitalist institutions can operate perfectly well. For example, a neighborhood church is unobjectionable, even though it eschews the profit motive as its animating rationale. So even though questions of how to think about food are often answered along pre-drawn lines of political ideology, it’s hard to see why this would HAVE to be the case. But maybe that’s why the industry-skeptical “food movement” is able to draw from groups as disparate as Marxist academics, Tea Partiers, black nationalists, New Age-rs, conservative Catholics, etc.
The term “food systems” is a useful frame in this context, because it calls to mind the broader implications of food consumption. Where did the food come from? What kind of effects did producing/transporting it have on workers and the environment? Is everyone involved benefiting from this phenomenon, or are certain externalities offloaded onto marginalized groups? These are questions that defenders of industrial food must answer, which is perhaps why some of these defenders are inclined to view the “food systems” framing as nonsensical.
It is true that there are dimensions along which the “food system” has been a boon to humanity. But before we conclude that the food system doesn’t need a seriously overhaul we need to seriously consider the effects it is having on human health and the environment. Huge increases in maize yields are impressive in the abstract, but when they’re underwritten by an 80% reduction in Arctic sea ice over the past thirty years, and by skyrocketing global rates of heart disease and diabetes (with attendant sovereign fiscal crises tied to health spending), then it becomes a lot harder to call industrial food a “success”.
Robert, thanks for taking the time to write this long reply. Just a couple of points. First, I entirely agree that capitalism (and Marxism) are weasel words that mean many different things to many different people. I think, however, that the very general point that those who most assiduously critique the “food system” generally see it as capitalist and want to replace it. Then there are a host of others who simply use it without worrying about its ancestry. Second, I believe to blame everything from Arctic sea ice to national fiscal crises on “the food system”–well, let’s just say I find that a tad overblown. Finally, my point here is to engage in the academic, though I think, important exercise of asking where the term food system came from. In the cause of intellectual honesty I mention at the end where I stand. I do not, however, want to drift into a discussion here of the rights and wrongs of the “food system.” Far too big a topic.