How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 6

affected by production. The object is novel, but the strands of contention demonstrate
continuity with the new food politics—knowledge intensive and transnational. We
mean for this second brief example to illustrate how ideas and knowledge not only
can be autonomous sources of politics, as commonly understood, but also can be con-
ditioning factors of material interests: one's interest in biotechnology as consumer is
mediated by what science one believes, how one constructs risk, what networks one
trusts. Concluding the chapter scales up to the global question of “development” and
the North-South divide. Food politics does not disappear with success in the histori-
cal struggle with scarcity, but does acquire new dimensions. If anything, new conten-
tions have aroused more interest over time. Victor Magna (1991) began Communities
of Grain :
It is ironic that the late twentieth century has seen a renaissance of rural history.
The march of industrial society continues to change the institutional fabric of every
region on the globe; yet, intellectual interest in rural life has perhaps never been
more pronounced.
Much of the reason for this renaissance is food politics. Separated so far from rural
roots, modern populations beyond the biological crisis of getting enough to eat seem
to crave an understanding of the food that we no longer produce ourselves, as well as a
knowledge of the people who do.
The Three Unavoidable Questions:
Introductory texts in economics explain to students that every society must answer
certain basic economic questions. This is true because of the inexorable economic
problematic: wants are unlimited, but means to satisfy wants are limited. There is
scarcity; there will be trade-offs. The questions generated by structured scarcity are
unavoidable in any settled social order. These questions are traditionally stated as fol-
lows: First, what is to be produced—including a subset of how much ? Second, how is
it to be produced? Third, how is it to be distributed ? Understanding the deeply struc-
tural bases of food politics requires taking a step back to political economy: We can
think of choices around the place of economic decisions in society as meta-political
questions.
All societies, of whatever scale, confront these meta-political choices. Answers may
be roughly classified as tradition, markets, or regulatory authority—that is, the state.
Karl Polanyi provided an influential account based on a rough historical logic of pro-
gression across these mechanisms (1944). In Polanyi's framework, the creation of
markets for land, labor, and money disrupted traditional societal arrangements in
destabilizing ways, producing outcomes that were socially unacceptable. Land and labor
become mere commodities subject to market logic rather than traditional rights and
restrictions.