It would be much harder to get my day started if I did not have a cup of coffee, tea, or, if I am feeling decadent, hot chocolate. The aroma of dark roast beans (sorry, not a fan of light roasts) that fills the apartment tells me it is time to get moving. I know it will not be my only cup of the day, but it is the one I cannot do without. Born and raised in Italy, a big savory breakfast is not usually my first choice: yogurt with cereals (not the cloyingly sweet ones), oatmeal with jam and almonds, or—even better—a fresh cornetto pastry does it for me. Of course, I’m adaptable. When I was traveling in Japan, I, like many locals, enjoyed grilled fish and miso soup with rice as my first meal of the day, beautifully served in deceptively rough tableware. During my years in China, I must admit I never quite got used to the very common breakfast of rice congee, often served with pickled vegetables, eggs, or whatever was left from the previous night’s dinner. Now that I often do research in Poland, I don’t mind their jajecznica scrambled eggs with kielbasa, tomatoes, and cucumbers. What is familiar and comforting differs quite substantially from place to place. Wherever I eat, though, I need my coffee—or at least a strong tea. Such excitants are relatively convenient and cheap, especially—but not exclusively—in the Global North. Those same items may feel luxurious elsewhere, particularly to less affluent consumers.
I may be sleepy or thrilled about the day or nervous about an impending work task or sad because of something that happened the night before—so though I savor my breakfast, I rarely feel very inclined to think about where the drink I am consuming really comes from. That is not uncommon among consumers. Depending on our level of engagement with what we eat, our horizon may limit itself to the kitchen pantry or the fridge, especially if we are not in charge of shopping, or may extend beyond our homes to the stores, supermarkets, street merchants, and trucks from which we may purchase our groceries or which provide a convenient delivery service directly to our doorstep.
Most of the time, we are not particularly concerned about where our food was grown or processed and how it got from there to where we bought it. We tend to be oblivious to the complex infrastructures that underlie contemporary distribution systems, from technologies such as refrigerated transportation to warehousing logistics. The child who enjoyed her chocolate candy in the last chapter is likely to have very little investment in understanding the provenance of her treat. Similarly, a busy office worker gulping down coffee all day long at her desk may not probably care that much about where her java comes from, nor would a British miner sipping hot tea out of a thermos during his break muse about the source and history of the leaves steeping in his drink.
We are suddenly—and painfully—made aware of the provenance of food when disruptions such as labor strikes, riots, disease outbreaks, fuel shortages, or natural disasters cut us off from food’s invisible distribution networks.
Of course, we are suddenly—and painfully—made aware of the provenance of food when disruptions such as labor strikes, riots, disease outbreaks, fuel shortages, or natural disasters cut us off from food’s invisible distribution networks. The fragility of the whole system may reveal itself even in the most modern cities of the Global North. New Yorkers experienced fear of food scarcity in 2012 after hurricane Sandy, when no gas was available for trucks to make deliveries to stores, electricity outages made refrigerating and cooking food very difficult, and flooding in some neighborhoods forced people to turn to family, friends, and charities for food. Knowing where our food comes from, and how, is important to us as consumers and as citizens, allowing us to make more careful choices. In this chapter, we will go beyond our daily experiences to explore the global food system and the structures, flows, and stakeholders that compose it. We will also examine how supply networks function; we will see how they are shaped not only by economic and logistic factors, but also by cultural, social, and political dynamics.
Wherever we live, whatever portion of our budget we spend on food, however we experience our meals, it is quite likely that much of what we eat is harvested or slaughtered in distant places we are not familiar with. Our food is often prepared, processed, and packaged in plants the operations of which we may not understand, to be distributed through intricate networks spanning from the local to the global. The final products are eventually sold to us through different channels as ingredients and prepackaged items. We can also enjoy them prepared and cooked in restaurants, cafes, cafeterias, and other places of public consumption.
Such complexity is not limited to products such as bananas or pineapples, which obviously are harvested in tropical and equatorial locations. Our shrimp may be farmed and frozen in Vietnam. Our grapes may come from Chile. Our coffee may be grown and harvested in Nicaragua, roasted in Germany, and distributed in Canada. The feet of chickens raised and slaughtered in the United States often end up in China. The cookies I enjoy with my coffee when I am in Italy may be made with flour, butter, milk, and sugar imported from other countries. The wheat from which the flour was milled, possibly originating in Canada or the Ukraine, may be the result of breeding experiments conducted in anonymous laboratories in far-flung sites and patented by a transnational corporation with its headquarters in Paris, New York, or Shanghai. The factory that manufactured the cookies may be around the corner from my apartment in Rome or located across national borders, even if a local brand packages the product in familiar ways. Living in the countryside does not provide better assurance of fresh, local food; in fact, rural consumers very often have little access to products from their own area and are forced (and sometimes prefer) to buy from stores or even big-box supermarkets that purvey cheap and convenient goods from remote places. Anonymous commodities then can be transformed into familiar meals and comfort food through the preparation, care, and emotional labor of consumers.
The complexities of production and distribution are not necessarily negative, as they ensure easy and affordable access to food for large segments of the world’s population. As consumers, we tend to appreciate fruits and vegetables regardless of the seasons and their provenance. It’s hard to complain about having flour, sugar, salt, and all sort of groceries within arm’s reach at any given time. That was not always the case, and it still is not in many areas of the world. It’s a luxury that until recently only the richest were able to afford. It’s important to resist any temptation to embrace nostalgia for an idyllic, preindustrial past that never existed while ignoring the hardships that most humans have experienced throughout history to produce, acquire, and prepare food. However, the mechanisms that make food convenient, cheap, and available year-round remain obscure. What do low production costs mean in terms of the wages and safety of those employed in the food industry? What do the people who produce our food eat?
The mechanisms that make food convenient, cheap, and available year-round remain obscure. What do low production costs mean in terms of the wages and safety of those employed in the food industry? What do the people who produce our food eat?
We are so enmeshed in this sprawling circulation of anonymous ingredients and foods that we may rejoice when we have access to groceries the provenance of which we can pinpoint: fresh mushrooms an aunt foraged for us, vegetables from a nearby farm (urban or rural, depending on where we live), bread from a baker we are on a first-name basis with. Growing segments of shoppers, in particular those with larger disposable incomes, are willing to pay premium prices for foodstuffs with specific places of origin, produced according to traditional methods, and distributed more directly to consumers. These shifting preferences are still mostly limited to cosmopolitan, mostly urban, and relatively educated and affluent consumers from the Global North. However, they have become visible enough to be a target of satire, as in a skit from the US TV show Portlandia, in which a waitress tells the life story of a free-range chicken to increasingly concerned customers, providing detailed information—including the bird’s name—and even a picture. Such predilections are becoming common among upwardly mobile middle classes around the world. In Poland, regional and traditional foods are increasingly available in stores and at food fairs and culinary events, after years of sushi and risotto constituting the epitome of cosmopolitanism and refinement. In Rio de Janeiro, various organizations are striving to bring food from nearby producers to urban shoppers, formerly cut off from direct provisioning, and to create direct connections among them. These kinds of products provide an alternative to commodities that, though usually cheaper, more accessible, and more convenient, do not ensure the same transparency, especially when marketers wrap them in nostalgia. We are all familiar with industrial ice cream pretending to be lovingly manufactured in quaint, old parlors, or precut frozen vegetables allegedly coming from green valleys, duly represented on the plastic packaging in all their splendid greenery. Knowing where what we eat really comes from is becoming increasingly important.
These shifts in consumers’ preferences have led, among other consequences, to the development of geographical indications, a category of intellectual property—regulated by a World Trade Organization (WTO) treaty—that provides visibility and protection to specialties such as champagne from France, Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy, Darjeeling tea from India, and tequila from Mexico. The premium prices of these products are predicated on their connection with a precise (and circumscribed) place of origin and codified production procedures.1 The legal category of geographical indications, in fact, builds on and expands the concept of terroir, which emerged in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. The idea of terroir connects quality, flavor, and other tangible characteristics of a product with the environment from where it originates—including soil and climate—and the practical know-how established over time by the communities that inhabit that same environment.
It is not coincidental that the concept of terroir developed precisely at a time when France was undergoing its industrial revolution. Large groups of countryside dwellers were moving to the cities, where jobs in modern manufacturing sectors were abundant. Quite suddenly, individuals and families that were used to directly producing at least part of their food and buying the rest from neighbors and sellers that they knew personally found themselves instead in urban environments, removed from the places where food was grown and separated from the family and community networks that ensured access to fresh, local fare.
This sense of loss and anxiety was intensified by counterfeits and adulterations that at times had fatal consequences: not infrequently, chalk was added to milk or sawdust to bread. Cities found themselves forced to provide food safety protection to their inhabitants, especially those from the upper classes who were more vocal and could exert more pressure on local authorities. Those interventions are at the origin of the policies that cities still adopt to address contemporary concerns about food quality. On the one hand, cities started building more spacious and salubrious markets that offered a valid alternative to small stores and street vendors (also allowing more control and easier taxation). On the other hand, tighter quality controls were established and specialized laboratories were founded to verify and guarantee the content of food products.2
It is at this time that in the most advanced Western European countries, the United States, and, later, Japan, the food system changed radically, shifting from local to national and international networks that increased the distance and separation between producers and consumers. As a matter of fact, being able to have access to and afford products coming from far away was experienced as a mark of social distinction. Such transformations were ushered by advances in agriculture. New varieties of seeds and animal species selected for sturdiness and higher yields were introduced, while the mechanization of agricultural processes increased. In the twentieth century, the use of fertilizers and pesticides became widespread, allowing the intensification of cultivations, with more abundant crops growing faster and more efficiently. These advances were spread among farmers by specialized public agencies, often connected with research centers and universities.
Such a revolution would not have been possible without new forms of transportation supported by increasingly efficient engines—powered by steam and later by fossil fuels—that reduced the time to move goods from one point to another within nations and beyond. Fast ships could easily carry merchandise along rivers and across seas, whereas railroads crisscrossed continents, ensuring a more capillary, efficient, and swift acquisition and distribution of foodstuffs. Many technologies were launched and developed as part of war efforts, starting with the appertization process (which allows for preservation in jars and cans) during the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. These advances were further compounded by refrigeration, which over time changed not only the way food was produced, warehoused, and shipped, but also consumers’ expectations about freshness and their relationships with seasonality.3
Inevitably, such changes allowed for a greater specialization in food production. It made sense to grow certain crops in locations that were more favorable and provided a comparative advantage in terms of soil, climate, availability of labor, and proximity to large markets. The expenses connected with long-range transportation were compensated for with lower production costs at the origin. In addition, new technologies allowed for economies of scale that further reduced the costs of production.
However, the investment necessary for machines and infrastructure increasingly disadvantaged small farmers who did not have access to capital and financing, favoring concentration and further mechanization. Due to the need for liquidity and investment funds to launch and maintain large enterprises, as well as the need to secure sales at acceptable prices in cases of natural disasters, wars, or other unexpected events, farmers took to hedging—that is, signing contracts for future deliveries at a price agreed upon before harvest. Such agreements, which distributed the risks between sellers and buyers, facilitated the introduction of food commodities such as wheat, pork, and beef to the stock market, where the contracts could be sold, bought, and speculated on.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw colonialism reach its apex, with imperial powers imposing their priorities over the productive systems of their colonies (see chapter 7). Materials were extracted in subjugated territories at low cost and shipped to the imperial metropolis to be turned into value-added merchandise, which was in turn sold back to the colonies for a profit. For instance, after new technologies were developed to produce cooking oil from peanuts, the French government promoted a shift from rice, a traditional staple, to peanuts in its West African colonies. Peanuts were shipped to France and turned into oil that was then sold at high prices in West Africa, where rice was now imported from the French colonies in Southeast Asia. Such structures of domination and exploitation, which food system experts Harriet Friedman and Philip McMichael defined as the first global food regime, were predominant between 1870 and the 1930s.4 They developed out of the explorations that European countries embarked on from the fifteenth century, followed by the conquest of territories into which commercial crops from all over the world were introduced to support the economic growth of the colonial powers. Coffee was taken out of the Middle East and planted in the Caribbean, Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Vanilla and cocoa were brought from the New World to tropical areas around the world. Colonies became stuck in the production of commodities at increasingly low prices, without the ability to develop local industries; manufactured products were often imported from the metropolis, wrapped in an aura of modernity and sophistication that made them more valuable and pricier than the local foodstuffs. The consequence was that traditional crops that required intense labor and provided relatively lower yields–such as fonio in West Africa, amaranth in Mexico, or quinoa in the Andes—were not only replaced by crops imposed by the metropolis to support industrial production but also shunned as symbols of backwardness and poverty. Increases in yield and efficiency favored monocultures that have been threatening agrobiodiversity ever since, limiting the variety of crops and food available to consumers. The independence and decolonization movements in the second half of the twentieth century have not succeeded in changing these global dynamics. Forms of quasi-colonial exploitation still exist, exacerbated by a tendency toward greater concentration and consolidation in the food system. To this day, commercial crops constitute crucial sources of income for developing countries, despite their low prices—such as cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, bananas in Ecuador and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and coffee in Indonesia, Honduras, and Uganda.
World War II deeply influenced how populations around the world experienced food availability in terms of expectations, rations, public interventions, technology, and logistics. According to Friedman and McMichaels, this determined the second food regime, in full swing between the 1950s and the 1970s, when the United States acquired a central position in international exchanges by using its agricultural surpluses to support first the Western countries that were recovering after the war and later Eastern European and developing countries. In the political atmosphere caused by the Cold War, big firms participated first in food aid and later in the efforts of the green revolution, the goal of which was to spread modern agricultural methods, technologies, and high-yield varieties in developing countries (see chapter 5). This involvement allowed large transnational corporations to capture growing segments of the global food markets. Since the 1950s, they have constantly expanded and absorbed competitors both among upstream firms, which provide inputs such as machinery, fertilizers, and seeds to agribusinesses, and among downstream firms that operate in food manufacturing and marketing.
The push toward deregulation in the 1980s ushered what may be considered a third food regime, based on free global trade, easy movement of financial capitals, and the growing centrality of intellectual property—from trademarks to scientific innovations (see chapter 5). A few companies now control international seed production, agricultural machinery, commodity trading, meat processing and packaging, and food processing. The agricultural chemical and seed sector, for instance, has recently seen a sudden wave of mergers: Dow Chemical Co. integrated with DuPont Pioneer; ChemChina took over Syngenta; and as of the time of writing, Bayer is buying Monsanto. Such historical transformations, as abstract as they may seem, have profoundly influenced what ends up on the fields and on our plates, regardless of who we are and where we live.
Big-box supermarkets can impose their terms on farmers and manufacturers around the world, pushing prices down and forcing smaller retails competitors out of the market. There are plenty of food producers and final consumers, but very few companies in between that can connect them, both within each individual country and globally. Author and activist Raj Patel observes that “the process of shipping, processing, and trucking food across distances requires a great deal of capital—you need to be rich to play this game. It is also a game that has economies of scale … when the number of companies controlling the gateways from farmers to consumers is small, this gives them market power both over the people who grow the food and the people who eat it.”5 Large transnational corporations such as Nestle, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Danone, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez control most of the brands that consumers around the world can easily recognize.
The swift process of industrialization that started in the nineteenth century has profoundly transformed the preferences, habits, and eating patterns of consumers not only in Western Europe, North America, and Japan, but also in the Global South, where such dietary models, although not necessarily healthier, are increasingly perceived as expressions of progress and economic success. The Chinese and Indian middle classes now eat more meat and dairy, considered higher-status foods and symbols of wealth and Western modernity. In the early 1980s, the Chinese consumed around 10 kg of meat (mostly pork) per person—but in 2015, the amount was already closer to 60 kg, with an increase in beef and, above all, poultry.6 The average annual growth rate of milk consumption in India has been 4.4 percent (8.0 percent for skim milk powder), concentrated above all among the wealthier segments of the population. Fast food and highly processed packaged products are ubiquitous.7
However, not everybody has access to the same quantity and types of food. The percentage of the household income spent on food varies not only from country to country, but also within countries. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2015 the average percentage of household income spent on food consumed at home in the United States was 6.4 percent (due to the widespread availability of prepared food in commercial venues). At the other end of the spectrum, Nigerian families spend 56.4 percent of their income on food consumed at home.8 It seems there is a direct correlation between the level of industrialization of the food system and the affordability of food. However, there are also stark differences within countries. In 2017 in the United States, families in the bottom 20 percent in terms of wealth spent 34.1 percent of their income on total food expenditures (both at home and outside), whereas the top 20 percent spent less than 10 percent.9 Food may be cheap, but that does not necessarily make it affordable.
The apparently infinite choices, the convenience, and the food accessibility that consumers in postindustrial societies enjoy today are neither the inevitable outcome of unstoppable scientific and social progress nor so stable as to be everlasting. They are the results of complex interactions among countless and diverse actors. Is it possible to pinpoint stakeholders, organizations, and institutions that decide what to grow, where, and in which quantities? How do supply networks determine what animal species and varieties are raised, how they are butchered, and how they get to your local store? How are processing, packaging, distribution, and sales of food products coordinated? What kind of interactions among scientists, research institutions, food industries, and consumers determine what technologies succeed and are widely adopted and which are discounted and forgotten? The innumerable, intricate, and interconnected supply networks that make these productive and economic functions possible constitute what we call a food system.
It isn’t easy to follow an item from its point of origin to where it is sold, consumed, and disposed of because the actors involved go well beyond the individuals or companies that grow, manufacture, package, distribute, and sell foodstuffs. As in the case of the chocolate candy we described in the previous chapter, the multilayered connections among places, actors, and processes are extremely complex. Contemporary supply mechanisms are more similar to open-ended, shifting, and unstable multidimensional networks than to well-defined, monodirectional chains neatly joining subsequent phases from production to consumption.
Let’s explore the supply network that brings apples to a Warsaw supermarket. When looking at the agricultural side, actors include biologists that maintain old varieties and select new ones. National and transnational corporations may have patented such varieties while agronomists devised cultivation techniques and engineers designed the machinery used for the harvest, sorting, and climate-controlled storage of their fruit. Farmers and the labor they hire interact with local authorities that determine or influence the use of land, with legal experts that may intervene on property issues, with bank officers making decisions about loans and investments, and with insurance agents evaluating risks ranging from yield failures to market price fluctuations and natural disasters. Both farmers and authorities at the local and national levels negotiate with the European Union to obtain funds for rural development. This list, which could be further expanded, indicates how linkages go well beyond the field, the fruit, and the people who grow it, connecting the place where apples originate with disparate locations, stakeholders, and processes inside and outside Poland.
Similar complexity extends into processing and distribution to include food scientists that come up with new products and manufacturing methods for cider, snacks, or jams, as well as designers that work on packaging. Local and national officers make political choices in terms of taxes, regulations, public health, food safety, and subsidies, under the influence of lobbying groups, international trade, and diplomacy. Marketers and advertisers are tasked with selling the fruit, whereas cultural mediators like journalists and food critics may highlight specific varieties for their flavors or for their connections to Polish traditions. The network extends to truckers and transportation agents, warehouse managers and workers, and distributors, wholesalers, and supermarket buyers. Consumers, both as individuals and as members of organizations that include activist groups, consumers’ associations, and fan clubs of specific products, eventually connect with garbage collectors, landfill operators, and in some cases recycling experts. Even foreign countries may have an impact on supply networks. When Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia, which in turn limited imports of EU products in retaliation, including Polish apples. In reaction to the political events, Polish authorities prompted their citizens to eat apples as a form of patriotism.
Such a list of actors, factors, and processes may seem confusing because it connects very heterogeneous and seemingly unrelated elements. That is precisely the point: networks are difficult to assess in terms of neat and clear relations among components belonging to the same category, along well-determined phases of production. Addressing such complexity requires new approaches. To fully understand supply networks—and to be able to intervene on them—it is necessary to shift from linear thinking, merely following products through various phases from beginning to end along neatly organized supply chains, to systemic thinking. This shift implies reasoning in terms of nodes and links that are connected not only with the step before and after in the production process, but also in multiple, concurrent, and often unpredictable ways with apparently unrelated factors, other supply networks, and external players. In the case of the Polish apples, farmers turn out to be tied to diplomats, European Union officers, scientists, engineers, and activists, among others. It’s quite likely that the farmers are aware of such connections thanks to media, their own information networks, and professional organizations.
Supply networks go well beyond human actors. They include and depend on natural environments and artificial ecologies; resources such as soil and water, fuel, and other inputs; infrastructures and designed spaces; and objects and technologies as diverse as computers, cell phones, refrigerators, freezers, cargo containers, forklifts, and warehousing pallets (see chapter 5). To make everything even more fluid, supply networks are not only composed by static elements but also shaped by the interactions and flows of diverse factors ranging from money to ideas, diseases, contaminants, and the weather.
Considering the intricacy of supply networks, it isn’t easy for us as consumers to understand why things cost what they cost and where their worth comes from. The value we attribute to a product may or may not be reflected in the price, which is determined by many diverse factors. For instance, when it comes to chocolate, the final price we pay at the grocery store is the result of the sum of costs attributable to the inputs and services provided by various stakeholders along the chain. After the farmers are remunerated for the cocoa beans, other value is added by those who take care of collecting and transporting the beans, those processing and packaging them, the exporters and importers, the processors and manufacturers that turn cocoa into chocolate, the marketers and advertisers that promote the final product, and finally the distributors and the retailers that sell it. All actors are supposed to receive compensation for their contribution and the value they add toward the final product, although in some cases laborers—especially children—work in conditions of extreme exploitation, with little pay.10
The distribution of opportunities for value creation and profit is inevitably the result of power negotiations among the actors involved in the supply network, determining who has control over the most lucrative phases of production. In the case of chocolate, the greatest amount of value is created in the transformation of cocoa into chocolate and in its packaging, branding, marketing, and distribution. These phases usually take place in the Global North, where large food companies reap the largest benefits. Could those high-value-added activities be transferred closer to the areas of production? What if cooperatives of cocoa farmers could also process the beans? How much of the value added would they be able to capture? And what kind of structural, political, and economic changes in the supply network would be required to make this shift of value production possible? It’s quite likely that big companies in developed countries would oppose such moves because they would affect the bottom line.
Such reflections are valid not only for transnational supply networks but also at the national and local levels. What percentage of the final price of vegetables does a farmer receive if she sells her products to an intermediary who then in turn sells to a wholesale market that in turn sells to retailers? How would her percentage increase if that farmer could sell directly to consumers? Of course, this shift would require finding customers and creating stable relationships—and that’s what farmers’ markets and CSA initiatives are for.
Because supply networks do not operate in isolation from each other, they may generate connections, synergies, and conflicts. Almond growers in Southern California, where little water is available, inevitably find themselves clashing with other food industries to secure water rights (and clashing with those who live in the area, who also need water). The runoff of fertilizers from agricultural fields that flows into rivers and eventually to the sea may create sustainability issues for industries such as fish farming or fishing. However, farmers who use fertilizers to increase their yields and improve their incomes do not cover the expenses necessary to clean polluted waters. These examples show how productive factors in one supply network can easily turn into negative externalities in others. By negative externalities, economists and environmental experts mean the side effects caused by one industry that are not taken into account in determining its costs of operation, such as pollution and public health issues generated by the production or consumption of certain goods. By not having to pay to take care of these side effects, an industry can keep its prices low, transferring costs to other actors or industries that unwillingly find themselves dealing with the externalities and, often, picking up the tab.
As a reaction to these issues and to the growing complexity of the global food system, the connections between urban centers and the nearby countryside in terms of infrastructures, social dynamics, and flows of goods—networks often referred to as foodsheds—have been playing an increasingly central role in building efficient, equitable, and sustainable food systems. It’s important for people in Rome to have access to affordable, fresh food from nearby places they may be familiar with or they may get to know in the future, the same way dwellers of Lagos may enjoy vegetables and seafood from close-by areas, especially if the proximity allows for cheaper prices, as well as more stable and reliable supply connections. According to the World Bank, urban population worldwide has increased from around one billion in 1960 to over four billion in 2016—that is, from 33 percent to 54 percent of the total world population.11 In the same period of time, the rural population only increased from 2 to 3.3 billion, which corresponds to an actual decrease from 66 percent to 45 percent of the total world population.12 Not only do cities need farmers, but farmers need cities and large numbers of consumers to support their businesses. These concerns are legitimate and important. Being embedded in local food initiatives, from community gardens to CSAs, has great relevance in terms of civic society building and the creation of spaces outside the control of large, delocalized agribusinesses.
The notion that buying local is inherently better than accessing far-reaching networks has been gaining ground. Such a point of view has its most evident manifestation in the phenomenon of locavorism, which is the preference for or the exclusive consumption of food produced geographically close to consumers. We can also observe growing preoccupation with food miles, the distance over which products are transported from their origin to the final consumer. Such distance has obvious implications in terms of the amount of fuel used to move the merchandise and, therefore, in terms of carbon footprint, overall environmental impact, and, down the line, climate change. Importing water in plastic bottles from Fiji does not seem efficient.
However, one should avoid what urban planners Branden Born and Mark Purcell have defined as the local trap: the uncritical embrace of small-scale food networks as automatically more sustainable, more democratic, or more socially fair than far-reaching arrangements. Born and Purcell argue that the power balance among actors, their priorities, and the negotiations taking place among them are more relevant to determine the overall character of a supply network than its scale and dimension.13 Furthermore, at times it may make better sense from the point of view of the environmental impact to obtain something from afar where that good can be produced more efficiently, rather than producing it locally at greater cost in terms of inputs and energy. In other words, in New Mexico, lamb from New Zealand may overall carry a smaller carbon footprint, despite the long-distance transportation and the use of large amounts of fossil fuels (food miles), than lamb raised in a nearby dry area, where huge amounts of water—a scarce input—must be used to provide good pastures for the animals. Of course, we could renounce all products that come from faraway locations; such choices, however, would be easier in temperate or Mediterranean climates than, say, in Scandinavia or Patagonia. Sustainability needs to be evaluated from economic and social points of view. Many factors determine what the best decision may be. If the Global North suddenly stopped importing bananas, coffee, and cocoa, among other products, to shift exclusively toward local crops, the economies of whole developing countries with incomes tied to agriculture would collapse.
The internal choices of national governments often have repercussions for the structure and functioning of supply networks, well beyond their borders. Besides scale and distance, food politics and policies, which vary enormously from country to country, contribute to the complexity of the global food system. In places like the United States, competition and efficiency are supposed to give order to the market; in fact, vast segments of the population argue that the government should intervene as little as possible in food-related matters and let supply and demand take care of everything. When such an approach dominates in Congress and in the executive branch, due to the pressure of lobbying groups and large transnational corporations operating in food production and manufacturing, the result is deregulation from the point of view of labor issues, industry concentration and acquisitions, consumer protections, environmental safeguards, food safety, and food security. Contrary to its hands-off ideological proclamations, however, the US government employs a wide set of measures—the object of legislation known as the Farm Bill—to support its food production, from stabilization of farmers’ incomes to direct payments, tariffs on imports, export subsidies, and acquisition programs for surplus products.
The United States is not the only country in which food production relies heavily on subsidies: this is the case in Japan and the European Union as well. However, there are differences in other aspects of food policies. In Western Europe, consumers tend to accept greater control and stricter regulatory measures from their governments if these can guarantee better quality, accessibility, affordability, and safety. As many of these regulations are now out of the hands of national governments, negotiated and voted on instead at the EU level, citizens often resent the interventions of a bureaucracy they consider disproportionate and out of their control.
Although most national food systems are more or less built on capitalist dynamics based on private initiative and the free play of supply and demand, governments still intervene to various degrees, as subsidies, quotas, and tariffs indicate. Control over alcohol (in many US states), meat (India), and staples (rice in much of Eastern Asia) blurs the distinctions between deregulated and coordinated capitalist food systems. In the past, experiments were made to establish a central control over all food production, distribution, and consumption, with the goals of ensuring sufficient and healthy food and increasing equality across the population. In war times, it was not unusual for governments to institute rations and coupons to better distribute limited resources among citizens of all social backgrounds. After World War I, the USSR introduced the collectivization of food production and manufacturing, and markets were centrally regulated. Other countries, such as China and Vietnam, followed its example. Although such experiments allowed for more egalitarian access to food across class differences, their inefficiencies also caused temporary scarcities and, in the worst cases, famines, as happened in Russia and the Ukraine in the mid-1930s and in China in the early 1960s. Even in the absence of crises, the limited availability of food, the long lines citizens had to endure on a regular basis to access a limited choice of products, and the relative luxury that party cadres seemed to enjoy contributed to delegitimize socialist regimes. Over time, changes happened either through planned reforms, as in China in the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping ushered in the progressive liberalization of agricultural production and sales, or through the catastrophic implosion of the system, like in Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.
Although China has succeeded in ensuring food for most of its citizens, over time inequalities have emerged again between consumers in large urban areas, especially on the coasts, and farmers living in the interior and producing crops for the national market. The low prices that consumers pay are counterbalanced by the widespread poverty among food producers and the injustices they often deal with, from land expropriations to various forms of exploitation. Cuba has had to deal with the effects of both a long-term economic embargo, which limits its possibilities to export cash crops and to import food, and the consequences of the disintegration of the Communist bloc, which caused lack of fuel, agricultural inputs, and machinery. As a consequence, all of Cuban agriculture was forced to embrace forms of organic cultivation and permaculture. Following recent reforms, much food is being produced for the growing tourist sectors, and private citizens are allowed to turn their homes into paladares, small restaurants serving mostly traditional dishes.
The variety of structures and dynamics, the scope in terms of scale and distance, and the influence of factors ranging from social priorities to logistics all indicate that the global food system is not the inevitable result of an invisible hand or the expected outcome of natural endowments and productive resources, but rather the consequence of specific political and economic decisions at the local, national, and international levels. Choices in terms of land tenure legislation, market regulations, subsidies, and prices are the result of ongoing negotiations among stakeholders that may take different forms, from formal lobbying to informal influence or even corruption. The crucial question to ask to achieve a better understanding of the food system is simple: Who gains and who loses? And, in the most extreme cases, who ends up malnourished or hungry?
At times, basic economic competition is shrouded in the language of ethical and social principles, political partisanship, and even economic rationality. It is necessary to cut through the fog and follow the money to get to the bottom of noisy and at times overblown arguments. How do different groups express their manifest and hidden interests? How do they push their agendas ahead? These debates, heavily influenced by financial and political factors, have a profound impact on the well-being of citizens. In fact, as we will discuss in the next chapter, even health and nutrition are far from being free from controversies, entangled as they are in cultural categories, social taboos, economic interests, and discussions about the validity and trustfulness of science.