How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 2

consensus. Jewish and Muslim moms may agree about eating pigs, but Chinese moms
will not. Politics matters as well: there is an activist Moms Against GMOs ( http://mom-
sagainstgmos.weebly.com ). Modern claims from nutritional science may question all
moms' wisdom on animal fat, or what it means to eat enough once all micronutrients
are taken into account and the consequences of obesity are understood. Not all moms
knew of global malnutrition that might or might not make a case for bio-fortification of
cereals poor people can afford when pork is not an option. The FAO's publication Edible
Insects (2013) advocated increased consumption of insects for food and feed security,
reviving a tradition of some societies but quite discordant in others. Few moms pre-
dicted the challenges of global warming. Where mom's farmers had relied on cultural
wisdom to tell them what to plant and when, extreme weather events and unpredict-
able variation make new demands on knowledge, innovation, and political response. As
the knowledge base of food politics changes continually, new fissures deny the unitary
notion of “society,” exposing divergent interests, ethics, and knowledge claims (IAASTD
2009).
The metaphor of Mom as a stand-in for cultural wisdom does, however, define a
critical element in food politics. The persistence of traditional values and valued ways
of doing things has strong effects on production and consumption, and thus politics,
but it is incomplete. Consider the persistent undernutrition of something like a bil-
lion humans on the planet. A global industry has grown up around research and policy
analysis aimed at finding the means to right what most—but not all—would consider a
self-evident ethical wrong. Those who work to feed the rest of us often cannot feed their
own families adequately. That hunger of some people in some distant places constitutes
a matter of altruistic concern and global policy is not, however, universally accepted, nor
does it automatically evoke support for foreign assistance, agricultural research, or cam-
paigns in global civil society. Nor is it clear which—if any—of these would make matters
better. Obligations rest on a contested terrain of normative theory—notions of justice
and right action; how to act depends as critically on systems of empirical knowledge—
credible information about what is possible, about what will work. These two dimen-
sions of knowledge—normative and empirical—define much of the political action and
political contention around food locally and globally.
At the most elemental level, food has for most of our species-history been a game
against nature; politics followed from divergent material interests facing scarcity: who
gets to eat what, how often, through what means of acquisition or entitlement? The
scale of polity has shifted over time, from very local divisions of the village grain pile
in India's archetypal jajmani system to an imagined international community in the
Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. In the UN's aspirational and
global vision, Goal 1 is elimination of poverty and hunger; Target 3 of Goal 1 is to halve
by 2015 the proportion of people on the planet who suffer from hunger. That elusive
target hovers around one billion people, though estimates of the extent and variet-
ies of malnutrition vary widely.2 In these grand developmental visions, conceptual-
izations of both the pile of grain and the array of legitimate claimants have shifted
fundamentally.