Geoscience Reference
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functional foods, which comprise products that have proven health benefi ts, beyond
basic nutrition, from targeting functions in the body (e.g., probiotic bacteria in
yoghurt, Omega 3 milk). These interwoven developments have signifi cantly remade
and hybridised agriculture and food. Strong preferences have become deeply
ingrained in consumption cultures - sweeteners over sugar, thickeners over fl our or
cornstarch, fats over palm oil or butter or margarine, and proteins over beef or cod.
A key point is that food constituents (what a food item consists of) and their valu-
ation (attributes deemed especially important) are actively created and are therefore
always open to change. Signifi cantly, the technological and scientifi c advances that
characterise the several century trajectory of the industrialisation and commodifi ca-
tion of agriculture and food means new production possibilities keep coming on the
scene. A noticeable overall trend by the late 20th century was the shift by food
companies from the mercantile (trade-oriented) strategies of diversifying sources of
supply of specifi c crops to increasing reliance on interchangeable natural or chemi-
cally synthesised inputs. This strategy allows a higher degree of control by corporate
agriculture by switching components and bypassing products and regions in sourc-
ing industrial requirements.
The geographical trace of agricultural industrialisation and the related interna-
tionalisation of traded agricultural and industrial inputs into food production have
been considered at several levels. The 20th century saw the rise of specialised
agricultural areas and specialist agricultural producers - with both being increas-
ingly tied into national food systems and globalising trade and production
networks. Agricultural specialisation emerged out of more diversifi ed farming
approaches and the appearance of farmers who specialised in particular land uses
and outputs. FitzSimmons (1986) and Le Heron and Roche (1996), for instance,
document what happened in two agricultural areas, the Salinas Valley, California,
and the Heretaunga Plains, New Zealand. In simple terms, the processes of regional
transformation involved intensifi cation and local integration. For the Salinas Valley,
this meant the rise of truck crops, such as lettuces and grapes, while the Heretaunga
Plains moved out of pastoral farming and process cropping into apples and then
increasingly into grapes for wine. Local restructuring led to fewer and fewer
growers/farmers and the consolidation of agribusiness processors as the volume
and quality of specialised production grew. Such transformations shifted the
balance of power between farmers and processors and paradoxically decontextu-
alised industrial food while linking places of food production and consumption in
more complex ways.
Agri-food researchers have tried at different times to reveal something of the
geopolitical, geo-economic and geo-cultural dimensions to contemporary food.
Gray et al. (2007), for instance, map how the dairy exports from New Zealand to
the world have changed dramatically over three decades, bringing the key New
Zealand dairy industry actor into complex local, national and international encoun-
ters with diverse moral and political orders. Lang (1999, p. 124) operationalises the
idea of 'ghost acres' to map from where in the world animal feed imports for
Europe's industrial-livestock complex derived in 1993. In their introduction to The
Atlas of Food Millstone and Lang (2002, p. 7) write 'What we eat, where we eat
and how we eat reveals a world of food and drink culture. How our daily bread - or
rice - reaches our plates and palates is sometimes so complex that we cannot unravel
its route in one bite'. Their atlas contains sections that disclose many dimensions
about the internationalisation of contemporary food - trade fl ows, animal transport
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