Routes of Industrialized Agriculture

 

Long Distance Trade Routes: Spices, and Exotic Foods

Spices were considered a desired commodity in the Columbian Exchange that occurred as the West explored and then colonized the "new world"

• Salt was the first seasoning that was desired by agricultural populations, especially those living away from the oceans and other salt sources
• salt was the principle unit of economic exchange between cultures all along the eastern side of the African continent
• humans and their domesticates n
• eeded salt
• salt is great for preservation of food surpluses
• Spices and sugar were next and they became a status commodity in the beginning supplying flavor to the peasant style diet for the rich.
• Eventually spices became democratized and became characteristic of certain cultural cuisines (Social to cultural differentiation)
• products traveled in both directions
• from the New World: potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, maize, manioc, peanuts, pineapples, green beans. papaya, chocolate
• from the Old World: wheat, rice, bananas, sugarcane, olives, citrus, mangos, cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, goats
• In each area, new crops were planted, grown and eaten, transforming the original environment and landscape.
• clear forests for cattle, provide irrigation for rice, etc.
• old staples frequently replaced new staples
• Foodscapes were transformed using existing classifications and rules creating dishes that were "recognized". 
• Dietary changes
• European traditions improved nutricion, colonized regions suffered decreased nutrition.

Northern European Colonizers and Foodscapes: Britain

• Britain's national identity is firmly rooted in their history of colonialism and their settled colonies. 
• These colonies firmly cemented British social classes by affording wealth to the nobility through the acquisition of land, this furthered the poverty of the lower classes
• Agriculture has wrought poverty in this exchange (but how?)
• land owners sought more land to intensify production 
• Industrial technology increased production by decreased need for human labor
• peasant lands were confiscated and this led to food insecurity as land owners got richer with larger holding and produced more surplus for sale or exchange
• result: hunger and famine but not because of a general lack of food globally. this persists today in some form or another around the globe
• rural people's lives and livelihoods were undermined because surpluses were needed to feed urban centers where manufacturing was taking place and money was being made. 
• working class arose from these once rural agricultural working forced from their lands to cities for wage labor
• Cash Crops: were planted all over the colonies and imported back to northern Europe to feed growing urban populations
• created a reliance on imported foods from around the world
• disconnection of people from subsistence
• loss of connection between humans and their domesticated animals that is so prominent in non-industrial systems
• the use of chemical fertilizers
• confined penning (zero grazing/animals out of sight)
• mechanized ploughs and machinery
• underpinned by Capitalism, which financed colonialism and industrialization and laid the groundwork for global corporate economics that still exists today
• emphasis on continued production of surplus (economic growth) to create capitol through exchange.
• invented wage work
• transformed our sense and meaning of time
• traditional societies saw time as punctuated by events or deduced from cues in the environment and subsistence activities were highly valued
• industrial capitalistic societies see time and discrete and punctuated for the calculation of wages. Agricultural labor became unskilled which justified low wages and the loss of value for subsistence work. 
• "time is money"
• time is "spent, wasted, and saved"
• workers lives regulated by work schedules which require discipline and compliance
• changed workers relationship with food
• don't have time to cook- quick, convenient and cheap foods
• meal schedules (3)
• loss of social and cultural life around food
• industrial cuisine is a staple for poorer wage workers- proletarian diet- prepackaged for convenience and sold in stores
• wage work is away from home in a time consuming, socially isolated workplace disconnected from kin group
• interdependent instead of independent
• Rise of nuclear family household which is isolated and without larger support network of kin
• Rise of commercialized food industry

Markets to Supermarkets

• local markets are physical places where goods and services are exchanged locally and the majority of extra-familial social exchange occurs
• they are still very important in the developing world
• each vendor has the same local goods, are well known to customers, carry all the essential ingredients of local cuisine, and are eager to sell their products
• strategies for sales: competitive pricing, slipping extra to regular customers, cheerful and humorous salesmanship, friendship, and maybe even the use of magic.
• face to face transactions
• lasting trade relationships are established
• goods are local and seasonal and provide most nutrition for populations
• Transition to specialty stores (fish, meat, bakeries, produce stands, etc)
• buying from strangers
• no food safety requirements
• class stratified
• needed money
• 1950's food chains arose 
• promised a class-free environment, where food was both safe a available
• Transition: wild food--domestication--pre-made foods--processed food
• loss of culinary skills and reliance of premade products
• nutritional transition
• proletarian diet: shift from core complex carbohydrates with small amounts of protein and vegetables (agrarian diet) to refined carbohydrates with prominent sugars and fats and a small amount of protein. 
• led to chronic health problems and malnutrition
• sugar becomes a sign of wealth and is restricted to poor "let them eat cake" (French Revolution)
• leads to the valorizing of sugar and other aspects of the proletarian diet which become local cuisines with cultural meaning.
• lead to "poor diets" becoming strongly associated with working class cultural groups-- sustaining poor nutrition

Exporting Industrial Agriculture

• following WWII, Western societies developed the IMF, WTO, and WB to try to reconstitute the globe as a productive safe place. 
• ethnocentrism: Western societies offered a desirable way of life which could be achieved by all through innovation, scientific technology, and economic development.
• all other cultures were "backward" (resisted progress) ---Global South
• wanted to stablized population growth through "prosperity"
• plan
• uniformity based on mono-cropping
• large scale production -economies of scale lower cost of production
• lower food prices to feed the world
• focus on exports 
• must be perfect
• consolidating business with multinational corporations and high yield genetically modified foods and dependence on fertilizers and pesticides (Monsanto)
• research and development-scientific (pesticides, antibiotics, hybrid seeds, herbicides
• result
• loss of food sovereignty and security for developing nations
• loss of self-sufficient subsistence practices
• dependency on wage labor
• vassal states
• source of cheap wage labor
• source of cheap raw materials
• provides cheap food and other goods to Western world
• produce food for world food security rather than their own subsistence needs

India's Green Revolution?

• introduce new seed varieties with higher yeilds but less pest resistence than traditional varieties
• increase use of pesticides and herbicides--health problems
• rarely have resources to use these safely
• requires more money
• take out loans they can't pay back
• greater demand on scarce resource - clean water - for irrigation
• theft of Indian farmer's intellectual property (devalue local knowledge)
• loss of religiously based system to one valorizing mechanization and machines (water pump)
• abandon time tested intercropping

British Columbia's Blue Revolution?

Protesting multinational aquaculture and "weak fish with no meat that can't be smoked"

• subsistence fishing of wild salmon replaced by commercial fishing and aquaculture
• overfishing and reduction of species
• aquaculture seen as inedible by Haida and other first nations who have cosmological ties to Sockeye salmon. 
• fight for food sovereignty by creating their own sustainable a creulty-free aquaculture -KUTERRA ("land salmon")

Guatemala's Guicoyitos Food Miles Away

• As agriculture for export became established by the spanish during colonialism, the Maya were divested of the their prime agricultural lands
• Lands owned by large agro-corporations like United Fruit Company that in 1930s owned 70% of the arable land
• Milpa- family owned subsistence plots can no longer support the family so they have "opted" for "something better"
• holding onto their land by growing non-traditional export crops - acquiring more income for their families, enabling their children to go to school, and build local community.
• built upon existing agricultural knowledge and skills
• involving entire family
• local cooperatives have formed to allow community members to pool their resources and work together to access land and attract export contracts for their nontraditional crops (which they do not consume)
• Crops must be aesthetically PERFECT or they can not be exported. If they don't eat them (broccoli) this creates a lot of waste