Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Under the agrarian system, direct, rapid and locally apparent feedbaks existed
between nutrient cycles, plant and animal yields and human life and death. Marx ar-
gued that, to ensure its survival in the context of exploited soil, capitalism had three
main options: (i) to expand into new nutrient-rih environments; (ii) to apply tehno-
logies to restore soil fertility, suh as the use of synthetic fertilizers in existing locales;
and (iii) to develop new plant and animal varieties whih could survive nutrient-de-
pleted states.
Transnational corporations have indeed followed this script according to the
many current applications of 'the metabolic rift' paradigm. However, Marx intended
that the concept operate more dialectically so that actions by producer-traders and
consumers could be simultaneously analysed. He foresaw that the key to exploita-
tion, as opposed to sustainable production-consumption, lay in the disengagement of
relationships, whether between different social classes or between people and their
environments: between society and nature, as he put it.
In these next paragraphs we turn to some of the manifestations of that disen-
gagement. We begin from the premise that large numbers of food consumers are, for
complex bio-cultural reasons, driven by their evolutionary dispositions towards par-
ticular dietary practices (suh as feasting) in the food-enrihed environments whih
many now inhabit. As these combined realities intersect with a dependence on oth-
ers, often unknown producers and companies located many thousands of kilometres
away, the feedbaks between actions and resources become extremely atenuated
(Campbell, 2009). he absence of feedbaks is a multi-dimensional and multi-scalar
process: it implicates culinary cultures, ecosystems and human communities and it
ranges from the individual metabolism to the planetary system.
For example, in searh of the elusive goal of optimal nutrition, large numbers of
people have been induced, often through advertising, to consume large quantities of
synthetic vitamins, either as pills or hidden as fortified foods. Many others follow
faddist diets. This is despite the substantial evidence that the consumption of a wide
range of micronutrient-rih foods, especially fruit and vegetables, provides people
with compounds whih promote improved health, including by lowering risks of
cancer and heart disease. Yet, although vitamin deficiencies are harmful, the eviden-
ce that high vitamin doses are beneficial is far frailer than promoters would wish. In
fact, the strongest epidemiological evidence concerning supplementary ingestion of
vitamins and even minerals is that they harm health (Lawlor
et al.
, 2004). Overall,
the evidence for benefits of supplementation with isolated molecules is reductionist.
