Thinking about the past helps us define ourselves. And understanding how we locate ourselves in time and how we create connections between our perceptions of the past, our experience in the present, and our expectations of the future, can provide insights on the social and political dynamics of the food system, as well as in their lived and affective aspects.
Time helps us make sense of our reality. It provides us with a framework to understand what changes and what remains the same. We often look for stability in moments of trouble by projecting the present into the past, imagining that what we experience today has been around for long, possibly exactly as we see it now. Other times, instead, we become so oblivious of what has preceded that everything looks and feels new, and we convince ourselves that our experiences have no comparison with anything that has ever taken place. Quite interestingly, thanks to daring denials of contradiction, we are able to hold both positions at the same time.
At any rate, thinking about the past helps us define ourselves. And understanding how we locate ourselves in time and how we create connections between our perceptions of the past, our experience in the present, and our expectations of the future, can provide insights on the social and political dynamics of the food system, as well as in their lived and affective aspects.
So here we are, trying to make sense of how we produce, distribute, consume, experience, and think of food. A lot feels overwhelming new. But is it so? Granted, there are phenomena that are absolutely novel, mostly connected with advancement in technology and efficiency, which in turn has allowed for the increasingly fast movement of things, people, ideas, and money. The financialization of the global food system is also quite unprecedented in terms of its pervasiveness and the actors involved.
However, other aspects of our food system have roots in both the remote and the recent past. And the debates that are shaping our public conversation on the topic may not be so different from the past as they seem. That is the main argument of Food Fights: How History Matters to Contemporary Food Debates, a new collection of essays edited by CHarles Ludington and Matthew Morse Booker. Using clear arguments and an accessible language, a group of scholars – historians but also anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers – provide a historical context to some of the most heated food-related debate of our time, from modernization and industrial agriculture to GMOs, and from activism to regulations. They do not forget to address cultural and social aspects of the food system such as ideas about health and nutrition, taste and preferences, gender, and pleasure. In their essays, they identify continuities while highlighting important breaks. As the editors point out, “There are no simple solutions to today’s food problems, but an awareness that today’s proiblems grew out of yesterday’s solutions, and that today’s solutions may contribute to tomorrow’s problems, can bring greater perspective and humility to everyone who cares about food both now and in the future.”
The authors often offer different perspectives and positions regarding the issues they discuss, at times even clashing ones. This variety brings freshness to the book, which does not try to convince readers about one “correct” point of view, but questions received wisdom and stimulates us to think more deeply. The abundance of mass-produced food, often calorie-rich and nutrient-poor, may well be connected with public health issues that need to be addressed but at the same time is the result of decades to attempts aimed at making food safer, more affordable and accessible. GMOs may be perceived as dangerous, but they responded to a desire to produce more and more efficiently – an effort that was nevertheless hijacked by large private orporations and their need to secure their income through intellectual property (maybe one of the themes less explored in the book). There are no straightforward solutions, but it is important to understand how the tensions we experience came to be and how they are shaping up. After all, what we are really interested in is what’s coming next.
Such discussions about the future of the global food system are not new, but are rather the last incarnations of debates about agriculture, commodities, technology, and the market that surfaced together with capitalist accumulation and the theorization about agriculture productivity and its role in the economy, starting from the physiocratic theories in eighteenth century France. The clash of connected with food commodities production already expressed itself in the positions of the theorists that in his masterful Meals to Come: The History of the Future of Food Warren Belasco describes as cornucopians and malthusians, exemplified in the contrast that developed in the 1790s between the Enlightenment philosopher Marquis de Condorcet and the conservative economist Robert Malthus (Belasco 2006). While for the former the new scientific advancements demonstrated man’s infinite creative capacity, indicating that new technologies would always emerge that could increase agricultural yields and ensure humankind’s future, the latter argued instead that the world population was growing at a much faster pace than its capacity to produce enough to feed everybody. Such positions expressed divergent takes on humanity’s past, its present, and its future, shaping debates about productivity, the role of innovation, as well as the functions of politics and the government.
Food Fights definitely wants to dispel any illusions about the past and undermine any hint of nostalgia: there is no ideal, pastoral past to go back to. Food production and procurement had not been easy for centuries: growing crops was tough, natural disasters and wars could destroy harvests and cause famines, exploitation was rampant. Not that today the system is particularly equitable, but certainly more food is available, even if not always where is needed. A problem that several authors notice is that the so-called “food movement” not always has justice among its goals. Moreover, the impact of climate change is becoming increasingly visible. It would have been interesting to have historical comparisons with other periods in time when shifts climate patterns had profound consequences on food production. As the focus of the collection is mostly the United States, it is understandable that the book lacks in global outlook. That may be the task for a companion volume that could apply the same approach to other locations around the world, and to the processes of globalization that, one way or another, have been in place since the beginning of agriculture (let’s not forget that, for example, wheat was domesticated in the Middle East but it is already present in China’s earliest written texts). It is a difficult perspective to embrace, because we are always situated somewhere, and it is hard to look beyond what is familiar. I struggled with that myself while writing my book Food. Nevertheless, it is an important step to take. Or we should try our very best…