Food and Environment Readings

Kloppenburg - Coming into the Foodshed

Kloppenburg describes the many factors that have led consumers to be increasingly distant from the food system. The global food market allows consumers to rely on food from far-away places, because transnational agribusinesses tend to concentrate money and resources in areas where wages are low and resources are rich. This creates a disconnect that can lead to irresponsible farming practices and ignorant consumption. The idea of a "foodshed" attempts to "encompass the physical, biological, social, and intellectual components of a multidimensional space in which we live and eat." He describes the concept of the commensal community, in which we take food from the land without damaging it, to preserve on our most vital connections to the earth. CSA's and food policy councils indicate a shift towards valiant efforts to maintain this relationship.

Marshall Sahlins - Stone Age Economics

(Zen Road to Affluence) how pastoralists and hunter gatherer's might in fact be more affluent then the most affluent parts of our modern society because our means are limited compared to our unlimited wants.

Wendell Berry - The Unsettling of America

Berry talks about modernization of agriculture and its consequential destruction of community and small-scale farming. This modernization, which has occurred either for supposed safety or economic reasons, has caused many small dairies and farms to go out of business. Industrialization has shifted the focus of consumers and policy from quality to quantity. He describes this shift as a cultural one -- one that transforms the culture of farming with care and attention to a culture of profits and business.

David Biello - Farmed Out: How will climate change effect affect global food supplies

Biello discusses the impacts of climate change on crop yields and its effects on world hunger. He claims that even if the effect of climate change is underplayed, the pressure of population growth will cause food prices to increase. A way to mitigate the effects would be to invest in drought-resistant crops varieties, and improvements to irrigation methods. Essentially, the main point of this article is that the effects of climate change are negative in many aspects, economically, ecologically, and agriculturally.

Crosby - Ecological Imperialsim

Commodification occurred as a result of the Columbian Exchange with the transfer of humans, plants, animals, and disease between the New World and Old World. He argues that the people migrated to America due to population increase and were able to successfully expand food production to provide for themselves, but the introduction of European "domesticated/adapted" plants and animals and the Europeans themselves resulted in native species' inability to adapt to the practices and diseases that they brought with them.

Steven Pyne - World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth

Describes human's history with anthropogenic fire and our desire to control it. We used it for agriculture. Today, humans seek to supress free burning (detrimental).

DeLind and Howard - Safe at Any Scale?

DeLind and Howard discuss the idea of a centralized distribution agency for agriculture in response to the 2006 E. Coli scare from bagged spinach. However, they argue that increased regulations would disproportionately disadvantage small farming operations that weren't even responsible for the scare, and decrease product diversity. Product diversity is necessary because of the implications on or health; if all food is standardized and sanitized, our immune systems will be unable to handle anything foreign to our bodies. The solution, they suggest, is scaled product management. Smaller operations do not have the resources to afford the pay fines if food safety laws are broken, and have continued to decrease in number, but a scaled solution would protect small farmers and still regulate the industry.

Skaggs - Prime Cut

Describes the conditions of the meatpacking industry in the late nineteenth century which came about as a result of greater urbanization and advancements in technology chiefly in the development of a railroad system. Ultimately, the meatpacking industry allows for ranchers to sell their steer to large monopolistic companies thousands of miles away, in a sense exploiting labor - from the raising of cows to processing of the meat - as well as, exploiting the market system and its consumers in order to make money, not feed people.

Sally Eden - The Politics of certification

Eden talks about ecolabeling and its power over consumers and markets. She first describes how providing traceability of a products from its ecolabel makes consumers feel as if their choices are better for the environment or people based on how it was produced. Its is thought that knowledge of a product's origins decreases the geographic and social distance between the consumer and the producer, but this is shrouded by alienation of workers from the value of their labor, and consumers are in turn, unaware of this relationship between industry and labor. Eden continues by discussing that consumers are often portrayed as weak, subject to the will of big industry, but in fact a path to ethical consumerism can reinvigorate and empower consumers. Ecolabels attempt to bridge the gap between products and people in the global food system.

Foster and Magdoff - Liebig, Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility

Foster and Magdoff discuss the loss of soil fertility and how this created a market for rich fertilizers as early as the 1830's. Justus Von Liebig, a German chemist, introduced his ideas of organic chemistry and its agricultural applications in Britain. There were many theorists hypothesizing the use of enriched fertilizers and were often at ends on whether the natural characteristics of the Earth or capitalist productivity were more important. Marx later reviewed these theories and built his concept of metabolic rift. There are areas where human interaction with the land breaks the cycling of nutrients back to the soil, like the application of nitrogen fertilizers decreased reliance on legume crops, and the navigation of different environmental laws in order to increase livestock and agricultural production. Environmental effects of these factors include more energy needed to ship and produce fertilizers, leaching of nutrients into ground water, contaminants affecting urban or rural communities, and other consequences.

Robin S. Reid, Kathleen A. Galvin and Russell S. Kruska - Global Significance of Extensive Grazing Lands and Pastoral Societies: An Introduction. In Fragmentation in Semi-Arid and Arid Landscapes: Consequences for Human and Natural Systems

Grasslands allow humans to use extreme, variable land to produce food. Focus on fragmentation of grasslands because of land ownership/tenure. Pastoralists/grazers have been moved from wet land to drier lands over time.

Guthman - Weighing In: Obesity, food Justice, and the limits of capitalism

Guthman begins her discussion by challenging the "energy-balance model" which claims that people are obese because they take in many more calories than they expend. She explains that we often search for answers to increasing obesity rates by analyzing genetics and race biologically, when they should be compared socially. She also discusses the role of obesogens as endocrine disruptors and the effect they have on increasing obesity rates and the evidence in both human and animal studies. These studies suggest that DES, as well as other endocrine disruptors had significant impacts on weight. She continues by talking about farm policy, over-subsidization, and how overproduction of commodities has contributed to obesity.

Norgaard, Reed, and Vanhorn - Institutional Racism, Hunger, and Nutritional Justice on the Klamath

Highlights food insecurity and food desserts as an "environmental justice" issue, involving many other social factors such as race. The Karuk tribe faced severe food insecurity as a result of the dams put in the Klamath River Basin and the hunting laws enforced by the US Forestry department. Aside from simply not having access to food, the Karuk tribe also doesn't have access to culturally appropriate.

Eric Holt-Gimenez - Food Security, Food Justice, or Food Sovereignty?

Holt Gimenez points out that high oil prices, low reserves, drought, and high production of agrofuels are proximate causes of the food crisis but not the root causes. Rather, our food system has allowed the number of hungry people to grow consistently because of industrialized agrifood complexes hat have made the southern hemisphere more vulnerable to poverty shocks and environmental degradation. He goes on to explain how the Green Revolution created big agricultural regimes by forcing smallholders off their land and out of the market, unable to compete with the rapid production of larger operations. He posits that to change the current food system, we must reform the practices and rules of our food system and countering large agricultural operations' privatization of public space.

Adam Smith - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Hunger and poverty is the result of market failure, because a just market will give every laborer in the market a living wage. Government policies like the "Poor Laws" are the only things that can damage the market, because a free market should respond to laws of supply and demand to make sure that all is distributed fairly.

Sen - Population: Delusion or Reality

Improve women's status → reduction in birth rates → complete demographic transition Greater opportunity for women's education and engagement Demographic reductionism: Reducing deprivation to overpopulation

Romero - Commercializing Chemical Warfare

In Romero's work (2015), he likens our use of pest-control chemicals to the narratives of gas chambers and chemical warfare so prevalent in the 20th century. He explains in-depth the process of cyanide fumigation and its use in the citrus groves of Southern California. He also explains the process of perfecting fumigation; the balance of cyanide to reduce damage to foliage and to protect against different scale insects.

Romero - From Oil Well to Farm

In Romero's work (2016) details the close relationship between petroleum development and agriculture. California agriculture quickly became a market for Shell Petroleum's development of ammonium sulfate fertilizer. Soon after, Shell patented a process of adding ammonia to irrigation water. The introduction of a petroleum chemical, D-D, increased agricultural output dramatically, leading agriculture to become a "sink" for petroleum chemical products.

Ishii-Eiteman - Food Sovereignty and the IAASTD

Ishii-Eiteman discusses the relationship between food sovereignty and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology, for Development (IAASTD) report. Most strongly, the report notes that our society had to make immediate changes to climate, energy, water, and food policies. IAASTD found that "corporate concentration within the food and agribusiness industries, along with vertical integration of the food system" have had negative impacts on human and environmental health, and social equity. IAASTD also points out that reliance on technological solutions may only exacerbate the issues around poverty and inequality in the food system. The IAASTD makes a few recommendations including supporting small-scale and marginalized farmers, establishing equitable regional and global trade agreements, and developing a cost system that accounts for negative externalities of food and agricultural industries.

Kloppenburg - First the Seed

Kloppenburg discusses the commodification of seeds and how hybridization became a part of farming. He begins by discussing the history that created this market (the Hatch Act, the Morrill Act, etc.) and delves into how the commodification of seeds came to be. As new technological advances occurred and more robust genetic pools were created, the seed was successfully commodified. It is interesting that he notes that the methods of selectively breeding seeds in the early 19th century is mostly the same as the process used by Neolithic farmers.

Mariola - The local industrial complex?

Mariola discusses how the shift of many marketplaces towards "local" food, while it can be better for local economy and make consumers feel less distanced from their foods, does not create a more equitable marketplace. This movement focuses on farming sustainability but not sociological sustainability because it does not concern itself with farm-worker conditions, and distances itself from the root of the issue. He unpacks the underlying assumptions between energy usage and buying "local," explaining that food miles does not consider what types of vehicles are transporting food, how much food is being transported, the energy used by consumers to access food, and the idea that buying local changes the structure of the agricultural industry. He indicates ways to combat energy consumption in the food.

Jayaraman - Shelved

Most people involved in work within the food industry face food insecurity - an interesting irony. She explains that in California this is due to low wages and poor working conditions. As a result of these poor working conditions, the people who work to provide food for consumers go hungry themselves and suffer low standards of living.

Mazoyer and Roudart - A History of World Agriculture

Mazoyer and Roudart discuss the second agricultural revolution and the shift to motorization, mechanization, seed selection, and other technological advances. Because of how labor divided both "horizontally" and "vertically," combined with better technology, made it so fewer workers were required to create the same yields. They also note that the government has facilitated an agricultural economy that prompted the accumulation of capital, creating "large inequalities in earned income between farms and regions." Farms have shifted from self-supplying, to focusing on only a few profitable crops, and relying on tractors, synthetic fertilizers, and livestock feed. Although the Green Revolution increased production in some countries, it did not assist small-scale farms or peasant agriculture in developing countries. World trade and improved transportation have allowed food prices to diminish.

McMillen - Chemurgy

McMillen discusses the state of chemurgy in 1939, and the usage of products like soybean oil and Tung oil. It says that chemurgy and the implementation of these new advances into farming technology follows an American pattern; recognition of a problem, followed by a creative solution to this problem either with new materials or usage of neglected materials in order to create more wealth.

Karl Marx-Capital

Organic composition of capital, metabolic rift, labor

Thomas Malthus - Essay on the Principle of Populations

Population increases geometrically while resources increase arithmetically, meaning that population will soon outpace resources, leading to poverty, hunger, and vice. The only solution is if the poor turn away from vice, stop producing children, and slow population growth. Critical response to Poor Laws of England.

Hauter - Foodopoly

Process of corporate consolidation of the American food industry because the efficacy of the antitrust laws were abandoned in favor of supporting large food companies in the market. Thus, the food industry redirected its focus from supporting its workers and providing healthy, fresh food to people to processed foods in an effort to increase company profit. Hauter uses Walmart as an example of the implications that these large corporate providers on workers, consumers, and the market.

Robertson - Malthusian Moment

Robertson discusses foreign aid programs directed toward food aid around the world in the mid 1900's. Draper, head of the Draper committee and a foreign policy leader, believed that birth control was needed to slow population growth in other countries in order to succeed in the Cold War. It was believed that overpopulation in the developing world led to poverty, which then made those countries vulnerable to communism. Hugh Moore framed the growing population of the developing world as a military threat the US, as communism spread into these countries, they would have a large, expanded army. However, many other progressives, like Ernest Gruening, saw the advocacy for birth control as a critique of women's rights worldwide, not through the lens of war. Later in the Cold War, both Kennedy and Johnson pushed their focus toward India because of its strategic trade networks and geographic location. This era also shifted the focus on the Green Revolution in agriculture as a means of easing hunger.

Carney - Black Rice12

Slaves, specifically female, brought to the American South from West Africa provided the knowledge and labor source, as well as culture, which were utilized to domesticate rice to allow the system to be transformed and expanded into a much larger economic production system. Commodification of production (time, mechanization), labor, land

Stock - Rural Radicals

Stock draws the parallel between the rural radicalism that is today associated with racism and close-mindedness and the rural movements of democracy and equality a few centuries before. She clearly explains how these two types of rural radicalism, while separated by time, share the same basic foundations. These foundations are the distrust in government, attitudes against being told what to do or how to do it, and the perceived condemnation of their ways of life by elitists who were far removed from their communities. She details how the increasing price of production, price of land, and interest rates, combined with the plummeting cost of food on the global market frustrated many farmers, only validating their distrust. This caused farmers to take action and organize, leading to the creation of the AAM and grass-roots organizations. Then the rise of McCarthyism and stringent anti-communist messaging permeated rural regions, and still persists today.

Raj Patel - Stuffed and Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System

Talks about the irony of the world's poorest people suffering from diseases related to over-consumption such as diabetes. This is related to the inequality in the distribution of food around the world due to corrupt market forces, meaning that world hunger actually has to do with over-production of agricultural resources rather than under production.

Tansey - Food and Thriving People

Tansey details a series of paradigm shifts he says need to occur to have our food system function as it should. He argues that we currently produce enough food globally, but that because "we do not live globally," resources and power are concentrated, and so are poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition. Four challenges against food security are climate change, marginalization of poor communities, increased resource competition, and increased militarization. He argues that 15th century European expansionism has structured our present food system by reshaping production and changing what is grown.Over-production has forced developed countries to find new markets for food, instead of changing our production patterns. He also posits that often we use technology to avoid the solutions we need to implement, and to surpass this barrier will require major geopolitical, economic, and social paradigm shifts.

Ogle - In Meat We Trust

The development of mechanized feedlots for cattle in the late twentieth century is explained in an effort to demonstrate how increasing demand for beef, loss of land and labor, development of alternative feedstocks contributed to the commercialization of the beef industry.

Mike Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts

The global famines which occurred in the late nineteenth century were not the result of food shortages or the droughts brought about by El Nino global climate patterns, but exploitation of the colonies in which droughts occurred by imperialist European countries seeking profit in the global food economy. Grow food there, sell it on global market, those small communities couldn't afford their own food, so they starved.

Walker - The Conquest of Bread

Walker discusses the history of California agribusiness. He begins by talking about the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which was held in San Francisco in 1915 and showed California's wide variety of crops from wheat to seedless avocados. He discusses the shift towards large-scale fruit production where livestock was lacking. Eventually livestock production picked up, but was accompanied by a geographic change in areas of production. He explains that after the 1920's, many of the most productive counties in northern California (Solano, Yolo, Stanislaus, etc.) fell as these areas urbanized. With the introduction of railroads entering southern California, these counties (LA, Kern, Fresno, etc.) became the primary agricultural counties.

Wallace - Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests Produce a New Niche for Ebola?

Wallace discusses how changes in land use in the Guinean Forest Region laid the foundation for the Ebola outbreak. As the commodification of palm oil in the region spread, industrialization of the forest affected the native fruit bat eating and sheltering habits, increasing the contact humans had with the Ebola reservoir. Changes in land use stripped the forest of its "stochastic friction," which previously kept Ebola virus at such low transmission it was negligible. Wallace explains that the Ebola vaccine, which cures the obvious problem, also obscures and hides the social context for the outbreak, stemming from western ideals being implanted in the region.

Cronon - Nature's Metropolis

Waterways and then the railroad allowed for corn and wheat to become a huge economy of scale by commodifying not only the crop, but the land as well through segmenting land, using silos/elevators, and creating a set of trade standards for the crops. Also Chicago Board of Trade standardized corn.

Vaclav Smil - Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century

With technology and increased efficiency in agricultural production, humans have the ability to limit environmental damage while increasing output of agricultural products. In this way, we have all the information we need to produce enough food to supply the ever growing population for years to come. Views the issue of hunger as an issue of limited supplies.

Worster - Dust Bowl

Worster explains the devastation of the Dust Bowl and how it sparked many changes to US agriculture. He explains the many dust storms that would bury cities under feet of dust, and eventually prompted the creation of the Soil Conservation Service and other agencies dedicated to farming productivity. Worster explains that the Dust Bowl occurred because of how unaware farmers were of the local ecosystems, pulling up all types of grass in order to make room for cropland. However, they were ignorant to the lack of rain in the plains past the Rockies rain shadow, and the effect of overusing the soil