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FOOD IN SOCIETY This page intentionally left blank FOOD IN SOCIETY Economy, Culture, Geography PETER ATKINS Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK and IAN BOWLER Department of Geography, University of Leicester, UK A member of the Hodder Headline Group LONDON Co-published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Inc., New York First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH http://www.arnoldpublishers.com Co-published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY10016 © 2001 Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P OLP. The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the author nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0 340 72003 4 (hb) ISBN 0 340 72004 2 (pb) 123456789 10 Production Editor: Rada Radojicic Production Controller: Bryan Eccleshall Cover Design: Terry Griffiths Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Sabon by Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall What do you think about this book? Or any other Arnold title? Please send your comments to [email protected] Contents Preface vii Abbreviations xi PART I HORS D'OEUVRE 1 A background to food studies 3 PART II THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FOOD 2 Introduction 21 3 Food regimes as an organizing concept 23 4 Globalization and food networks 37 5 Transformation of the farm sector 56 6 Food processing and manufacturing 74 7 Food marketing and the consumer 89 PART III GLOBAL AND GEOPOLITICAL FOOD ISSUES 8 Introduction 105 9 Food production and population 107 10 Malnutrition, hunger and famine 123 11 Food surpluses 139 12 Food security 154 13 Food, world trade and geopolitics 173 PART IV A POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF FOOD 14 Introduction 187 15 Food quality 190 vi Contents 16 Food and health 201 17 From the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution 220 18 Food ethics, food policies and civil society 237 PART V FOOD CONSUMPTION SPACES 19 Introduction 253 20 Factors in food consumption 255 21 The origins of taste 272 22 Food habits, beliefs and taboos 296 23 Food, gender and domestic spaces 311 PART VI 24 Conclusion 323 Index 325 Preface The authors of this book have known each other for 40 years. We lived in neighbouring streets in Great Crosby, a suburb of Liverpool, and attended the same schools. At Merchant Taylors' School we acquired a taste for geography under the influence of Granville Jones, Ron Roby and others, and we are grateful for the formative nature of that experience. After school our careers diverged, but we have always continued to share an interest in agriculture and food. The present book arose at the invitation of Laura McKelvie at Arnold and it is based on our research and teaching at the Universities of Durham and Leicester. We have attempted to write a volume with varied subject material. The linking theme is food, an issue on which all of the social sciences, and for that matter all of the general public, have a view. There is therefore great scope in terms of approach. The study of food is rather like a 'barium meal' for X-raying social, political, economic and cultural issues, a kind of marker dye for broad structures and processes. In this sense food is the bearer of significance, as well as a material object of consumption. The book is divided into six parts. Following an introduction, attention is devoted in turn to the political economy of the supply chain, global and geopolitical issues, the political ecology of food, and food consumption. Each part is sub-divided into thematic chapters, each of which is supported by suggestions for further reading and by lists of references. The book is principally aimed at students attending courses on various aspects of food studies, but we also intend the material to have a broader appeal. A list of relevant websites is posted at http://www.arnoldpublishers. com/support/food/. Surfing the web has become commonplace, but perhaps we should remind ourselves of two points. First, websites are not subjected to the same academic refereeing process in terms of their contents as are most journal articles, and therefore one cannot always be confident of their accuracy and objectivity. Anyone can set up a website and this led to a vast outpouring of the electronic publication of text and images related to food in the 1990s which was both stimulating and of varied quality. The second viii Preface point is that no listing of the Worldwide Web can be wholly accurate or comprehensive. Websites come and go and their addresses (URLs) change. The inevitable delays in writing, publishing and marketing this book mean that the listings will be out of date by the time you read this. Readers are invited to use one of the many search engines to update links and find addi- tional food sites. We wish to thank Steven Allen and Chris Orton at Durham for drawing most of the art work. As ever, Nicholas Cox has been a source of much information, and we wish to thank Bruce Scholten and Arouna Ouedraogo for discussing issues with us. Every effort has been made to trace the copy- right holders of quoted material. If, however, there are inadvertent omis- sions, these can be rectified in any future editions. The book is dedicated with love to Liz and Val. Setting the scene Who can deny the significance of food? It has a central role in our suste- nance and pleasure, and it touches the deepest of nerves in our economy, politics and culture (Rozin 1999). Yet Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo (1992) have observed that until recently food has received little academic attention. They give two possible reasons for this neglect. First, our regular consumption of food makes it one of the most taken-for-granted aspects of life and, as a topic for research, it may therefore have appeared to lack the novelty, scarcity or exotic qualities that tend to propel new themes on to the agenda of social science. Second, food preparation and presentation have always been women's work and, in a male-dominated academy, they have therefore acquired a lowly status. We may add the further observation that, in the past, social scientists have tended to reflect the preferences of their own cultural context. Thus, there has been a relative indifference to culi- nary culture shown in the Anglo-American realm, by comparison with a greater commitment shown by scholars in France, Germany and Italy. We are pleased to say that the recent outpouring of food-related publi- cations, particularly in sociology and to some extent in geography, has broken with all three of these constraints and scholars from many countries are now actively researching food issues. Food studies can claim to have a growing constituency and we hope that this book may make a contribution to popularizing the social science of food in its varied aspects. Some themes The literature on food is now so vast that a selection of themes is inevitable in a book of this kind. We have decided to blend some familiar economic Preface ix and political issues with environmental and cultural perspectives that are less well known, at least with the slant that we intend to give them. In Chapter 1 we will give a brief background to the lineage of food stud- ies by discussing the approaches adopted in the last few decades. The iner- tia of intellectual capital invested in these empirical and theoretical traditions means that entirely new departures are rare, but the recent cultural turn in ethnographically inspired food studies looks set to become one such revolutionary change. Part II adopts the stance of political economy in dissecting the food chain. The argument here is that an understanding of the role of capital in the restructuring of agriculture, food processing, manufacturing, and distri- bution is fundamental. This provides a foundation for the rest of the book since the structures, processes and manifestations of capitalism bear heav- ily upon issues raised in the remaining chapters. Part III is closely related because it builds upon the globalized food networks introduced in Chapter 4. The drama of famine is familiar to all consumers of the media and most readers will already have been introduced at some level to the food security debates rehearsed in Chapters 9-12. The novelty lies in our attempt to find where the balance lies between the pessimistic and optimistic viewpoints which are often presented as being mutually incompatible. After that, Chapters 12 and 13 suggest that global food trade and international food policies have a major economic and polit- ical significance that cannot be accommodated in a descriptive framework of commodity systems. Part IV gives an environmental dimension to the notion of political econ- omy by shifting the focus to the 'political ecology' of food.