When Food Becomes a Mere and Distant Number
Increasing distance is making our food system increasingly complex, hidden, and abstract
It can be somewhat disconcerting to consider how far the food we enjoy has travelled from farm-to-fork. Some of us may be privileged to live in regions with well-developed and diverse local food systems which enable a degree of food self-sufficiency. However, for most of us, this somewhat idyllic life is sadly only a distant dream. The supermarket is where we obtain most of our food which guarantees that most of what we purchase will have travelled vast distances - sometimes half way around the world - before it reaches our plate. Apples and lamb from New Zealand, tomatoes from Spain, garlic from China, and tinned goods from all across the world - these are standard sights on the shelves of the supermarket. Although these products may undercut local producers and result in unnecessary food miles, they are not the most troubling of our globalised foods. This designation is reserved for commodity crops1 - those foods which can be stored, shipped, and crucially traded in vast quantities. These are the truly global foods which can wreck havoc on the geopolitical stage and upend the lives of millions - while reaping monumental profits for those who know how to play the system.
Before entering into some critiques, it is important to note the benefits that have arisen from the globalisation and commodification of our food systems. During the coronavirus pandemic we all witnessed the remarkable resilience of the global food system in keeping our cupboards stocked with sufficient food. This is to be lauded. The creation of globalised food markets and trading connections along with the huge increases in yields achieved over the past century have allayed the fear of famine for those of us in the West, which was an ever-present spectre that overhung past societies. We may have occasional acute shortages of certain foods (in the UK this has recently arisen for salad and cucumbers - an inconvenience but hardly an issue of significant food security) but ever since rationing ended post-World War Two, the fear of lethal famine has been notably and thankfully absent.
Every year, the uncertainties of weather, disease, and geopolitics cause certain regions to experience crop failure. In the past, this would have been disastrous for affected regions who would have been plunged into prolonged famines. Today, although still a critical issue for farmers in affected regions (who suffer foregone incomes and harvests) globally, the shortfalls can be smoothed out by gluts elsewhere. If one area is experiencing drought, the law of averages suggests another is experiencing abundance - and the globalised food system enables these surpluses to be distributed efficiently to areas where there are shortfalls. However, if simultaneous failures occur in multiple ‘bread basket’ regions, the ramifications can be extensive and severe. Multiple crop failures contributed considerably to societal discontent that culminated in the Arab Spring2 - an event which changed the lives of millions upon millions through the resultant political chaos and power vacuums - the fertile breeding ground for terrorists. Our need to fill our stomachs holds considerable power over world events - more so than we realise.
For the meantime I shall pass comment on the inherent unsustainability that observed yield increases have been founded upon - more ink shall be spilled in future essays on the contradictions and diseases of industrial agriculture. I shall also pass comment on the inherent vulnerability of a global food system to peak oil scenarios and future global trade disruptions (in short, the stability we enjoy may not last for long). But, it would be wrong to deny that the abundance (in some cases extravagance3) of food the world (or more accurately, the West) enjoys is a good thing. However, that we waste a third of global food production4 and that millions still suffer from starvation is evidence enough that our global food system is not stewarding and distributing this abundance well - it is in fact, significantly broken.
The monumental increases in distances in the globalised food system play a sizeable part in this brokenness. Every extra mile travelled is a mile that makes food more likely to be wasted and every additional step in the chain of the food system is another opportunity for food to be wasted5. Hence overproduction6 (founded upon environmentally degrading practices) is required to compensate for the inherent wasteful inefficiency of a supposedly hyper-efficient just-in-time global food transportation network. But not only does distance cause losses, it also obscures and hides the gross injustices and unsustainability that are present in the globalised food system. The fact we no longer know the exact location where our food has been grown means we are largely ignorant of the practices involved in its production. A food system for any crop that is built on unnecessary distance is likely hiding something the producers and the agri-corporations (who buy and trade the produce) would prefer you remain blissfully ignorant of.
Atlantic slavery may have been outlawed, but that does not mean that our food is not tainted with slavery today. The fields of our local farms may look green and healthy, but the distant fields where our food from the supermarket actually comes from are overworked, eroded, degraded. Our local farms may obey strict laws on workers rights, but the distant plantations where we get our bananas from expose workers to toxic pesticides and long hours out in the sun7. Our local butcher may source his meat from reputable ethical farmers, but time and time again the meat in our supermarket has been found to originate from industrial farms with atrocious welfare. These are just some of the practices of degradation the global corporate food system with its pretty marketing pictures complete with smiling farmers tries to hide - and increasing distance in the food system is an effective means of doing so.
Human rights organisations, conservationists, NGOs, and informed consumers have always been a thorn in the side of the agri-corporations in brining their hidden practices into the light. There is however, another distancing tool in the agri-corporations armoury, one that is being increasingly wielded - food financialisation. Obscuring hidden injustices and environmentally ruinous practices has become significantly easier as commodity food systems have become integrated with global complex financial markets. The precise mechanisms by which integration has occurred are incredibly complex and opaque (the complexity of which in itself is a means of hiding and obscuring injustices/costs). It began with the Chicago Board of Trade issuing futures contracts for grain in 1864 and has become ever more prevalent since then8 as investors and speculators realised global transport mechanisms, growing populations, and the high volatility of food production provided new opportunities for boom time profits.
It was Jennifer Clapp9 in her essay ‘Financialization, distance and global food politics’ who alerted me to the issue to food financialisation and how this is related to distancing when she stated: “both the increased activity of financial actors and the growing range of specific agriculture-based financial investment tools that they utilise have contributed to a new kind of ‘distancing’ within the [global] food system.”. This distancing includes not only ‘geographical distance’ of farm-to-fork, but also ‘knowledge distances’ and ‘power distances’. Agri-food corporations and traders hold power over data on prices and crop forecasts which they can use (and hide) from growers to strengthen their purchasing power, and then use such knowledge to play the global commodity markets. Additionally, as the spatial distance grows between the farmers and the agri-corporations they serve, the corporations become increasingly institutionally distanced. For farmers to access those who are writing and formulating the contracts they are all but forced to sign would entail navigating foreign, complex, and expansive corporate structures - a vast labyrinth designed to distance, confuse, and disorientate those who dare to enter and headquartered in some foreign distant western city - an inhospitable place for smallholders.
Increased distancing and financialisation also leads to the abstractification of food. To the agri-food corporations their commodity traders, individual items of food are no longer important in and of themselves themselves, but only as they contribute to a mass - a quantifiable commodity e.g a bushel of wheat of a ton of corn. These in turn are abstracted into tradable ‘numbers’ (index prices) which makes it easy to forget that one is dealing with real physical foods - the products of soil and sun and the care and skill of farmers. The complex financial derivatives that food commodities are enveloped within have allowed traders who reap the cream of the profits (profits which dwarf the rewards reaped by the farmers who have laboured night and day) to never even having to physically touch or see the crops they trade and briefly ‘own’10. The crops exist to them as mere numbers - tradable, manipulable numbers - but numbers that for poor consumers represent life and death realities.
As numbers are all that matter to the agri-corporations there is little concern as to the sustainability or ethics of what the numbers represent - nor a sense or responsibility for them. We do not care for mere numbers, they are an abstraction that represent a physical reality but have no tangible essence in and of themselves. It is why it is dehumanising to refer to a human by simply a string of numbers rather than their name, yet we have no trouble doing this with other living entities - and then wonder why we misuse and abuse them. For the traders, it does not matter how unsustainably or unethically these “numbers” are produced, only that they grow to larger numbers under their brief ownership. Profit is all that matters. In such an atmosphere and with such an attitude, the incentives for crops and livestock to be produced efficiently, cheaply, and en masse in huge monocultures - an environment that is antithetical to sustainable, ethical production - are irresistible.
Some ethically-minded actors in the system may raise concerns, but the untraceability that is inherent within commodity markets and indexes means commodities associated with gross injustices and unsustianability can be easily laundered into the global commodity system and obscured from the view of regulators and ethically-minded consumers. Those that should be brought to justice for their crimes and acts of degradation thus often get away scot-free and the malpractice and profit taking continues.
Clapp highlights that this is lack of accountability and justice is additionally enabled by the fact that when spatial and informational distances increase, this allow agri-corporations to create competing narratives concerning the sources of the externalities and issues of environmental degradation and ethical injustices. As those that are raising concerns are often not witnessing the malpractice first hand, irrefutable evidence of agri-corporation and trader malpractice can be difficult to obtain (worsened by the deliberate obstructions erected by the agri-corporations). In the absence of this evidence, and aided and abetted by the lack of transparency within the system, alternative narratives that lay the blame on other forces, actors, and events can be postulated which deflects blame from being levelled at the agri-corporations. They become all but untouchable, shielded by their opaqueness from activists and regulators. Those who try to dig deeper will come up against undecipherable data, closed doors, legal obfuscation, and extensive paper trails that eventually run dry. To those who the food system needs to be visible - the commodity traders and agri-corporations - the information is readily available so that they can do their trades and reap their profits. For those who want to uncover deeds done in darkness, the system will shroud itself in secrecy, obscurity, and pass-the-buck bureaucracy.
Even when some blame can be levelled at the corporations and trading houses, serial blame shifting occurs within the organisations themselves. As Wendell Berry lambasts, the food systems complexity and opaqueness culminates in a massive shareholder complex which gives rise to prolific “buck-passing”:
[The corporations] are structures in which, as my brother says, “the buck never stops”. The buck is processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to the shareholders, who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything. The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere and in terms of local accountability) nowhere.11
Responsibility and accountability thus evaporate and with them goes the opportunity for action, justice, and positive change. Injustice and unsustainability thus continue to define the global food system, and the average consumer is left none the wiser concerning the hidden practices and costs behind the food on their plates.
This is the food system modern society has collectively created and enabled. It is a system which feeds the glutinous hyper-rich huge profits and leaves the poor hungry and starving. It is a giant, almost all-consuming monster of the modern age - far removed from the smallholder communities or local food systems that dominated past societies. Even national food systems have been supplanted into obscurity by the domination of the global financialised food system. This food system is the rational consequence of “get big or get out”, the swallowing up of the small to create the truly massive and global. It is what we in the West are all a part of and are becoming ever increasingly reliant on. But, relying on a system that seeks only its own profit (and leaves a trail of land degradation in its wake) for one’s own sustenance seems to be an incredibly risky strategy in the long run. As the world found out during the last food crisis of 2008-09, selfish companies are no reliable friends to those who find themselves in dire need.
For those who do then aim for positive change, for those who work to break down the injustices and unsustainability, and for those who wish to wrest back some self-sufficient control, the corporate forces that one is up against are immense in scale and power. They are able to wield the strong arms of lobbying, legal force, and corruption with devestating effectiveness. The sums of money at their disposal are greater than the GDP of some small nation states. The agri-corporations have used financialisation and distancing to solidify their grip on the global food system - and they will not let go without a significant fight. Dismantling this system is nigh on impossible.
What can a small man do in the face of such power?
Resist and refuse.
What is then left to do is small acts of resistance, that in turn protect what remains (for now) outside of the reach of the agri-corporations. Buying from local producers, growing your own food and saving seed, buying from small companies with proven ethical and sustainable credentials, these are the little, simple acts which over time achieve far more than we could ever realise. I have argued before that supporting local businesses and ethical producers is a form of buying to give where by we enable though our purchasing good, ethical, and sustainable livelihoods and practices to continue. This action is available for all of us, though it comes with a cost - local and small producers cannot benefit from economies of scale, and utilising sustainable or traditional methods of production always will cost the producer (and in turn the consumer) comparatively more12. But not purchasing our food in this way means the hidden costs of the commodified, abstracted, and unsustainable food we buy will be borne by someone somewhere who suffers the brutal costs for us.
And this should be unacceptable to us all.
Such as Wheat, rice, palm oil, cocoa, coffee, sugar and corn. For a full list see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traded_commodities
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/
Subsidies for milk and grapes led to the widely publicised butter mountains and wine lakes of the EU - gluts from over production that went to waste.
Similar to how energy (metabolism) is lost in every step of the ecological food chain.
Trading became especially prevalent post 2000.
Jennifer Clapp, Financialization, distance and global food politics. Journal of Peasant Studies 41, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2013.875536
Although some (usually smaller or independent traders do inspect the crops at source for quality and network with suppliers and growers directly.
Wendell Berry, Conserving Communities.
And I accept that for most of us, it is beyond our financial means to shop completely ethically and sustainably. I know it is for me - I reluctantly shop at the supermarket, but even here opportunities exist to purchase more ethically and sustainably. Also some foods are unavoidably part of the globalised commodity system. This has to be reluctantly accepted.
_"What can a small man do in the face of such power?
Resist and refuse."_
I strongly believe that everybody's informed choices, consistent preferences, restraint towards novel fads, multiplied by millions of people, is a way to save local businesses from the power of monopolies.
With food, when it is not viable to wean off a supermarket totally, mark off a stretch of sacred land starting with your local bakery for instance. Then, interlace shopping in a big store with visits to a local grocery, maybe a closer relationship will ensue. (I write from a point of view of a townee, I am not a farmer.)
Resist seductive easiness: we really don't need to buy on Amazon., use the same email service, the same web browser, the same search engine.
Diversity, both in Nature and in our lives, is an indispensable condition for survival.
"I'd rather prefer not to" is a powerful attitude.
Thanks for the beautifully written article! Here in Indonesia, many people are convinced that mass produced, plastic-packaged products are actually higher quality (because they are 'Western') than locally grown produce, even when the latter are cheaper (!). Most of the traditional 'warung' (food stands) lining the roads, even in rural villages, sell packets of instant coffee with sweetener, instant noodles, candy and chips. This is in a country where traditional 'forest gardening' has been practiced since before the advent of agriculture in the western sense.