Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
food engages deeply held cultural norms—“tradition”—that resist interest politics
characteristic of less culturally embedded commodities. Lines are drawn thereby
between the natural and the unnatural, the acceptable and the unacceptable. Finally,
food is increasingly embedded in technical discourses that make outcomes dependent
on knowledge and science; both are contested as components of larger ideational sys-
tems. A political economy of food outcomes is then especially dependent on politics of
ideas, in which information costs, social networks, epistemic brokerage, and collective
action loom large.
Agreement on how to settle disputed claims of knowledge, safety, and ethics has kept
up with neither the pace of technological change nor the organization of contentious
politics. Of special importance is the thread running through a number of chapters: the
empirical contingency of normative claims. Coming together on desired end states
is easier than reaching agreement on the empirically complex issue of means to ends,
whether in sustainability or poverty alleviation. Given the increasingly transnational
nature of contention, the knowledge dependence of food politics, and the asymmet-
ric power relations in international networks, we return to Michael Lipton's critique of
“urban bias”: much of the international debate over food is driven more by consumers in
cities than producers on farms.62 Claimants for a legitimate voice in deciding how grain
piles should be produced and how food should be distributed have multiplied, ever
more distant from the grain pile itself. The class composition of claimants has changed
as well; the skills that matter are not necessarily those honed on the farm. In evaluat-
ing the claims and counterclaims of global food knowledge politics, then, it is useful
to recapture the humility of a president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, in a
simpler time:
You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thou-
sand miles from the corn field.63
Notes
1. Originally from Pollan 2008, the phrase has become pervasive in American food culture
circles via numerous blogs, interviews, tweets, and postings. For example:
www.omnivo-
racious.com/2008/02/table-talk-gues.html
February 12, 2008;
https://twitter.com/bucky-
July 16, 2013. Nestle 2002 offers systematic evidence on industry power in setting official
nutrition standards.
2. See Stein, this volume; Taubes 2001, 2007. David Sahn in this volume challenges the conven-
tional emphasis on food in combating malnutrition's worst effects with a chapter entitled: “Is
Food the Answer to Malnutrition?” Most estimates of hunger are snapshots in time; the
more critical question is vulnerability over time—a family can be secure at one price level
and acutely malnourished at another, or when unemployed, or following a crop failure, etc.
3. On international papaya politics, see Evanega and Lynas, this volume. Despite its nomo-
thetic commitments to consensus, in practice science is disputed along ideological lines
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