INTRODUCTION: SHOCKING THE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM - Food Systems Failure - page 14

the reduced recognition of food as an essential element of human life (its use value),
thereby removing any connection to the ethical responsibilities associated with its
exhange. Both of these hapters identify aspects of global food production that hal-
lenge local conditions of food security while also arguing for a more human rights-
based emphasis in the economic regulation of the global food system.
Claire Mahon in hapter 6 The right to food: a right for everyone provides a shift
to the strong sociological focus of the remaining hapters, arguing for the need to
apply a human rights approah to the development of food policy. Based on her ex-
tensive experience as a member of Jean Ziegler's researh group on the right to food,
Mahon explains the implications of existing international human rights that include
the right to food. It is in taking suh obligations seriously that the world's govern-
ments can begin to bridge the policy contradictions identified by both Campbell and
Prithard.
In hapter 7 , Plentiful food? Nutritious food? Colin Butler and Jane Dixon address
a further, oten unaknowledged, aspect of food security, namely the nutrition of the
food available. They first examine the unequal access of societies and people to nu-
tritious food and the emerging issue of overconsumption and obesity. This situation,
they argue, is the result of a food production system that is poorly mathed to the
dietary behaviours and needs with whih humans have evolved. hey further loc-
ate the rationalization of the disjuncture identified by Raj Patel (2007) in Stuffed and
Starved in Marx's concept of the metabolic rit, whih suggests that consumers will
become less aware of the social and environmental implications of production as
they are more distanced from it.
The first section concludes with a more general argument about the misplaced
(utopian) emphasis on quantity in the current food system. Paul Stok and Mihael
Carolan argue in hapter 8 A utopian perspective on global food security that the
drive to feed the world has, to this point, focused on supply and demand as quantit-
ies in an equation that must be balanced. This emphasis ignores, however, the qual-
ities inherent to food that necessitate greater awareness of processes of production
and consumption. In this sense, Stok and Carolan provide further evidence of the
type of shit in orientation and practice necessary to help account for the hallenges
to food security raised by the remaining authors in the first section.