How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 26

by a new politics of food: controversies around safety, nutrition, ethics, regulation, sub-
sidies, and trade.
What makes food political then has changed in recent decades. Issues of a classical
political economy of interests have not disappeared—struggles for agrarian reform such
that food producers can afford to eat, control of agricultural land to assure food secu-
rity, state subsidies for those whose market power is insufficient for adequate nutrition.
Mobilization around these issues is, however, more global and more complex, as the new
food politics layers fresh issues onto the old. Biotechnology is supported and attacked by
global networks, each claiming concern for the poor and for food security: suicide seeds
and silver bullets.
The chapters that follow examine overt food politics of increasing importance: social
movements, protests, subsidies, regulatory restrictions and certifications, ethical con-
sumerism. We observe that these tensions frequently derive from deeper elements of the
political economy: what kinds of questions ought be answered by state evocation of tra-
dition or new knowledge or by markets responding to ethical or traditional preferences?
Two aspects of the new food politics stand out: fundamental dependence on knowl-
edge—both normative and empirical—and transnational advocacy bringing more and
different voices to local grain piles. On the knowledge front, dispute abounds: Michael
Pollan's Mom is fragmented, quarrelsome, and irresolute. Yet these knowledge claims
operate both as political objectives in themselves—“sustainability”— and as mediation
of interests—global warming and livestock, organic and conventional. Where the mar-
ket-state boundaries in food are set reflects the interplay of both ideational interests,
e.g., “GMO-free,” and material interests mediated by knowledge, e.g., “free trade.” The
fundamental meta-choice continues to confront all societies: through what mechanisms
will answers to the inescapable questions of production, distribution, and exchange of
food be decided?
We have seen how these questions could be, and have been, answered by three mech-
anisms: tradition —established routines legitimated by long use—or market , or state—
authoritative institutions at some level. No free-floating technical expertise exists to
answer these questions; they are irreducibly political. Karl Polanyi's historical sequenc-
ing of dominant mechanisms provides a conceptual guide to resulting boundary politics
between states and markets: The great transformation made food itself a commodity
like any other object of production and exchange and, therefore, a sphere of insecurity
for those at the bottom of national and international pyramids. That transformation is
politically contested, across various arenas, along multiple dimensions. But we have also
seen that “society,” like “tradition,” is more a political claim than coherent entity. Polanyi
reified society as Pollan reified culture.
Food then generates distinct politics for interrelated reasons. First, the urgency of
food provisioning, micro and macro, is biological, not merely preferential. Deep mate-
rial interests in survival drive overt food politics contesting land and its products.
Distributive questions in turn energize a politics of rights, security, and social justice,
and thereby potential for collective action and contentious politics. Ethical concerns
for justice over an imagined international community globalize these politics. Second,