food

Ultra-Processed Food: The Profitable Filth Capitalism Feeds Us

By Ezra Ellis

Republished from In Defence of Marxism.

Capitalism is polluting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the very food we eat: all in the name of profit. Further evidence of this comes from a review published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on 28 February, evaluating the best available research on the effect of ‘ultra-processed food’ (UPF) on our health. This review included 45 studies and almost 10 million participants, and crucially did not include any research funded by the big food companies. The findings are categorical.

The review found that consumption of UPF was linked to a substantially increased risk of at least 32 harmful health outcomes including all-cause mortality, cancer, diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases and mental health problems. This review confirms what UCL doctor and health researcher, Chris van Tulleken, argued in his book Ultra Processed People (published 2023): the food we eat is making us sick.

In general, the discussion around diet today is a monotonous sermon. From the newspaper columns to the television studios, the problem, we are told, begins and ends with the individual. The root cause of the global nutrition epidemic is boiled down to a lack of will to exercise, a lack of discipline to resist unhealthy snacks, and a lack of intelligence or capacity to teach oneself how to cook and prepare varied meals.

In this stale atmosphere, van Tulleken’s book, Ultra Processed People comes as a breath of fresh air. He puts forward a rigorous materialist analysis of the effect of the capitalist system on both the global food system and human diet.

Using a wide range of research data and interviews, van Tulleken challenges the consensus that humans have just become lazy and greedy.

Instead, he proposes the leading cause of growing levels of obesity is the drastic change in our modern diet that has come with the introduction and proliferation of UPF, pushed for profit over all else. UPF now constitutes more than half our diet in the UK, US, Canada and Australia but the big food companies are trying (successfully) to make it the staple across the globe.

UPF: not really food

UPF is a scientific definition for a category of food, originally drawn up by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian nutrition researcher. The hallmarks of UPF are the addition of stabilisers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin and obscure oils you’ll never find in a supermarket or ordinary kitchen. What these ingredients have in common is they save corporations money, as they reduce the need for real ingredients in the food.

Not all scientists are in agreement that UPF is the problem. There have been many to speak out in defence of UPF, some even arguing that it can be good for you. However, a closer inspection shows that these scientists defending UPF have ties to the big food corporations manufacturing UPF such as Mcdonald's, Nestle and Coke.

UPF and Overeating

By analysing the past 100 years of research, the book demonstrates that it's neither fat, sugar, nor lack of exercise that has fundamentally led to the obesity crisis and increase in metabolic disorders. Instead, it is the nature of UPF itself that results in weight gain and poor health, as these foods are designed to encourage overeating.

UPF is soft and low in fibre making it faster to eat and digest, leaving you less full, and the flavour additives in it rarely correlate to the nutritional content interfering with our bodies' hormonal appetite regulation. UPF is engineered to keep you eating, and studies have found it can activate the brain in the same way as alcohol and drugs.

Van Tulleken references a study that demonstrated UPF leads to overeating and associated weight gain. The researchers fed two groups a diet identical in nutritional content, one 80 percent UPF and the other UPF-free, and swapped the groups over after two weeks. The same individuals ate an average of 500 calories more a day on the UPF diet.

This overconsumption of food has become a global health epidemic. Since 2017, more people in the world have been obese than underweight. Obesity is paradoxically beginning to be understood as a form of malnutrition, as UPF is high in calories but low in nutritional content.

In some places, this transformation has happened over just a few years, as multinational food companies like Nestle extend their reach into the developing world and swamp the local markets with UPF. The consequences for people in low-income and developing countries can be devastating as they have no access to dentistry or healthcare to address the problems UPF consumption causes, like tooth decay and diabetes.

You can’t ‘run off’ UPF

The proposed solution to overeating is exercise. This is often pu forward by the same multinationals causing the crisis. For example, Coke funded the ‘Exercise is Medicine’ programme, and funded many studies to ‘prove’ that the cause of the obesity crisis is lack of exercise, not Coke consumption.

However, Ultra Processed People examines the evidence and demonstrates that increasing exercise will not increase our bodies' expenditure of calories.

The book uses a study of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania, and discovered they burned the same amount of calories as an American office worker. This isn’t to say Van Tulleken believes we should stop exercising. Exercise is good for your health – both physical and mental. However, diet is the crucial factor.

UPF is often the only option

Despite the effect UPF has on our bodies, the domination of the big food monopolies means that, for many, UPF is the only option.

23.5 million Americans live in food deserts, where fresh food isn’t available. 3 million people in the UK don't have a shop selling raw ingredients within 15 minutes of their home by public transport. Almost a million people in the UK don’t have a fridge, 2 million have no cooker, 3 million have no freezer, and the cost of energy now means many who do have it, can’t use it. UPF is consequently indispensable.

Deprived areas of England have more than twice as many fast food outlets (per capita) as more affluent areas. Teenagers are swamped with UPF, their bus tickets contain McDonald’s vouchers and fast food restaurants are often the only place they can hang out after school given the closure of youth clubs and community centres.

In the developing world, the situation is even worse. Coke is often cheaper than water, and as the influx of cheap UPF squeezes local farmers out of the market, UPF quickly becomes the only option. Globally 75 percent of our diet today consists of only 12 plants and five animals, UPF has replaced traditional foods.

To see the depravity of the capitalists you need look no further than the baby formula monopolies, like Nestle. They have aggressively pushed their products in countries where it was impossible to access safe drinking water, leading to 80,000 preventable infant deaths a year.

Why companies can’t stop selling it

What Ultra Processed People makes clear is that we can’t just change UPF and make it healthier. The products that are most addictive will sell best and do best on the market.

The book gives the example of ice cream. This is most often made using emulsifiers as an egg substitute, as it is cheaper and easier to store and transport. The reason companies are driven to experiment with the ingredients is that there is no room left to reduce costs in other areas. Capitalism drives companies to cut costs in production wherever possible, and UPF is cheaper to make, easier to store and transport, and has a much longer shelf life.

The evidence of the dangers of UPF, as found by the BMJ, falls on deaf ears for the capitalists, who respond with more processing: adding probiotics to ‘counteract’ their microbiome-damaging emulsifiers, adding artificial sweeteners, adding vitamins and minerals after all the original ones have been bleached out.

However they reformulate their products, their ultimate priority will always be to make profit, to sell as much as possible, and therefore to drive excess consumption.

The reason for the proliferation of UPF, despite these detrimental effects on nearly every aspect of human health is straightforward economics: a food that people consume more is food that sells more. This comes with the double benefit that you can sell a gym plan, “weight loss” branded UPF, or private healthcare membership as solutions to add even more revenue.

It is no coincidence that our diets are killing us – it is part and parcel of the capitalist profit-seeking system.

Why we need a revolution

What Ultra Processed People demonstrates is that consumers are largely powerless to cut out UPF, as we eat what we can afford. Companies are almost equally powerless to change things as they must produce the most profitable commodities, and rubbish that we can’t stop eating is a gold mine for them.

The main shortcoming of Van Tulleken’s book is that, having drawn these conclusions, he calls for government reform as the solution. In reality the government – through campaign funding, outright bribes and lucrative ‘job’ opportunities for MPs – is bought off by the food companies. And capitalists trying to cut their costs by feeding us rubbish is as old as capitalism itself; Marx was talking about the adulteration of bread going back to the beginning of the 18th century.

If we want to imagine a world without UPF, which is possible, we have to imagine a world without capitalism.

UPF has become indispensable, because the living and working conditions of the working class are so poor. Even before the cost of living crisis, British people spent 8 percent of their household budget on food. If the poorest 50 percent of households wanted to eat a diet that adhered to current healthy living guidelines they would need to spend 30 percent of their budget on food. The reason we spend so little? Because everything else (rent, utilities, transport) costs so much.

Even if you can afford to buy healthier real food, most people don’t have the time or energy after work to cook three meals from scratch every day. Many other people are completely dependent on ready meals because they are unable, through disability or illness, to cook for themselves.

Despite the industrialisation of agriculture, and the production of 2.6 times the food that humanity needs to feed itself, at least 2.3 billion people lack secure access to healthy and nutritious food. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Through a socialist plan of production, we could easily produce enough real food to meet everyone’s needs. With the creation of public canteens serving healthy and delicious food, we could socialise the domestic labour of cooking, which is currently primarily the burden of women. We could enable people to engage socially at mealtimes, rather than the lonely reality many face today of returning from a long day at work to eat a ready meal in front of the television.

This is all possible and it is the only way we can free ourselves from dependence on UPF. But it requires abandoning the profit motive and recreating our society at every level for the benefit of the working class – the overwhelming majority of the population.

Menace on the Menu: The Financialization of Farmland and the War on Food

By Colin Todhunter


Republished from Countercurrents.


Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015. Land prices in the US agricultural heartlands of Iowa quadrupled between 2002 and 2020.  

Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.  

Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation. 

Top-down ‘green grabs’ now account for 20% of large-scale land deals. Government pledges for land-based carbon removals alone add up to almost 1.2 billion hectares, equivalent to total global cropland. Carbon offset markets are expected to quadruple in the next seven years. 

These are some of the findings published in the new report ‘Land Squeeze’ by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), a non-profit thinktank headquartered in Brussels. 

The report says that agricultural land is increasingly being turned into a financial asset at the expense of small- and medium-scale farming. The COVID-19 event and the conflict in Ukraine helped promote the ‘feed the world’ panic narrative, prompting agribusiness and investors to secure land for export commodity production and urging governments to deregulate land markets and adopt pro-investor policies.  

However, despite sky-rocketing food prices, there was, according to the IPES in 2022, sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages. Despite the self-serving narrative pushed by big agribusiness and land investors, there has been no food shortage. The increased prices were due to speculation on food commodities, corporate profiteering and a heavy reliance on food imports.  

At the same time, carbon and biodiversity offset markets are facilitating massive land transactions, bringing major polluters into land markets. The IPES notes that Shell has set aside more than $450 million for offsetting projects. Land is also being appropriated for biofuels and green energy production, including water-intensive ‘green hydrogen’ projects that pose risks to local food production. 

In addition, much-needed agricultural land is being repurposed for extractive industries and mega-developments. For example, urbanisation and mega-infrastructure developments in Asia and Africa are claiming prime farmland.   

According to the IPES report, between 2000 and 2030, up to 3.3 million hectares of the world’s farmland will have been swallowed up by expanding megacities.  Some 80% of land loss to urbanisation is occurring in Asia and Africa. In India, 1.5 million hectares are estimated to have been lost to urban growth between 1955 and1985, a further 800,000 hectares lost between 1985 and 2000, with steady ongoing losses to this day.  

In a December 2016 paper on urban land expansion, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland. Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities, and this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.  

This means that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers are being displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security.  In their place, we are seeing the aggregation of land into large-scale farms and the spread of industrial agriculture and all it brings, including poor food and diets, illness, environmental devastation and the destruction of rural communities.  

Funds tend to invest for between 10 and 15 years and can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food security. Returns on investments trump any notions of healthy food, food security or human need. 

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The IPES notes that, globally, just 1% of the world’s largest farms now control 70% of the world’s farmland. These tend to be input-intensive, industrial-scale farms that the IPES says are straining resources, rapidly degrading farmland and further squeezing out smallholders. Moreover, agribusiness giants are pursuing monopolistic practices that drive up costs for farmers. These dynamics are creating systematic economic precarity for farmers, effectively forcing them to ‘get big or get out’. 

Factor in land degradation, much of which is attributable to modern chemical-intensive farming practices, and we have a recipe for global food insecurity. In India, more than 70% of its arable land is affected by one or more forms of land degradation. 

Also consider that the Indian government has sanctioned 50 solar parks, covering one million hectares in seven states. More than 74% of solar is on land of agricultural (67%) or natural ecosystem value (7%), causing potential food security and biodiversity conflicts. The IPES report notes that since 2017 there have been more than 15 instances of conflict in India linked with these projects. 

Nettie Wiebe, from the IPES, says: 

“Imagine trying to start a farm when 70% of farmland is already controlled by just 1% of the largest farms – and when land prices have risen for 20 years in a row, like in North America. That’s the stark reality young farmers face today. Farmland is increasingly owned not by farmers but by speculators, pension funds and big agribusinesses looking to cash in. Land prices have skyrocketed so high it’s becoming impossible to make a living from farming. This is reaching a tipping point – small and medium scale farming is simply being squeezed out.” 

Susan Chomba, also from the IPES, says that soaring land prices and land grabs are driving an unprecedented ‘land squeeze’, accelerating inequality and threatening food production. Moreover, the rush for dubious carbon projects, tree planting schemes, clean fuels and speculative buying is displacing not only small-scale farmers but also indigenous peoples. 

Huge swathes of farmland are being acquired by governments and corporations for these ‘green grabs’, despite little evidence of climate benefits. This issue is particularly affecting Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The IPES notes that some 25 million hectares of land have been snapped up for carbon projects by a single ‘environmental asset creation’ firm, UAE-based ‘Blue Carbon’, through agreements with the governments of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia and Liberia. 

According to the IPES, the ‘land squeeze’ is leading to farmer revolts, rural exodus, rural poverty and food insecurity. With global farmland prices having doubled in 15 years, farmers, peasants, and indigenous peoples are losing their land (or forced to downsize), while young farmers face significant barriers in accessing land to farm. 

The IPES calls for action to halt green grabs and remove speculative investment from land markets and establish integrated governance for land, environment and food systems to ensure a just transition. It also calls for support for collective ownership of farms and innovative financing for farmers to access land and wants a new deal for farmers and rural areas, and that includes a new generation of land and agrarian reforms. 

Capital accumulation based on the financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. However, financialisation of the economy in general goes back to the 1970s and 1980s when we witnessed a deceleration of economic growth based on industrial production. The response was to compensate via financial capitalism and financial intermediation.  

Professor John Bellamy Foster, writing in 2010, not long after the 2008 crisis, states: 

“Lacking an outlet in production, capital took refuge in speculation in debt-leveraged finance (a bewildering array of options, futures, derivatives, swaps, etc.).”  

The neoliberal agenda was the political expression of capital’s response to the stagnation and involved four mechanisms: the raiding and sacking of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, frenzied financial speculation and militarism. 

With the engine of capital accumulation via production no longer firing on all cylinders, the emergency backup of financial expansion took over. Foster notes that we have seen a shift from real capital formation in many Western economies, which increases overall economic output, towards the appreciation of financial assets, which increases wealth claims but not output.  

Farmland is being transformed from a resource supporting food production and rural stability to a financial asset and speculative commodity. An asset class where wealthy investors can park their capital to further profit from inflated asset prices. The net-zero green agenda also has to be seen in this context: when capital struggles to make sufficient profit, productive wealth (capital) over accumulates and depreciates; to avoid crisis, constant growth and fresh investment opportunities are required.  

The IPES report notes that nearly 45% of all farmland investments in 2018, worth roughly $15 billion, came from pension funds and insurance companies. Based on workers’ contributions, pension fund investments in farmland are promoting land speculation, industrial agriculture and the interests of big agribusiness at the expense of smallholder farmers. Workers’ futures are tied to pension funds, which are supporting the growth and power of global finance and the degradation of other workers (in this case, cultivators).   

Sofía Monsalve Suárez, from the IPES, states: 

“It’s time decision-makers stop shirking their responsibility and start to tackle rural decline. The financialisation and liberalisation of land markets is ruining livelihoods and threatening the right to food. Instead of opening the floodgates to speculative capital, governments need to take concrete steps to halt bogus ‘green grabs’ and invest in rural development, sustainable farming and community-led conservation.” 

Unfortunately, ordinary people cannot depend on ‘decision-makers’ and governments to bring about such change. Ordinary people themselves have always had to struggle for change and improvements to their lives. Groups across the world are fighting back, and the IPES report provides some inspiring examples of their achievements. 


Readers can read the IPES report here

The author specializes in food, agriculture and development issues and his two recent books on the global food system can be read here.

How Capitalism Killed Nutrition: A Review of 'Ultra-Processed People'

By Luka Kiernan


Republished from Red Flag.


Review of Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food ... and Why Can’t We Stop? By Chris van Tulleken. Cornerstone Press; 384 pages.


The maiden voyage of the Terra Grande, also known as Nestlé Até Você a Bordo (Nestlé takes you on board), set sail from the Brazilian port city of Belém in July 2010. The barge was described as a “floating supermarket” as it embarked on an eighteen-day circuit up the rivers of the Amazon lowlands, providing 800,000 people in impoverished riverside towns with the glories of the modern Western diet. The best-sellers were Kit-Kats, an 80-gram serving of which contains 38 grams of sugar. 

The products rapidly infiltrated the communities. To compete, local stores began stocking the ultra-processed junk food peddled by Nestlé. In its wake, the Terra Grande left dietary chaos. High sugar, ultra-processed food became a core food group. Childhood obesity rates rose as high as 30 percent in some communities, and cases of Type 2 diabetes have since been reported in large numbers, a disease that was previously unheard of.

Nestlé complemented the floating supermarket with another program, Nestlé Até Você (Nestlé Comes to You), to better access Brazil’s urban slums. Seven thousand women were employed as door-to-door salespeople, and the program now visits 700,000 low-income households each month with its ultra-processed goodness. As one company supervisor put it: “The essence of our program is to reach the poor”. 

This story of a multinational food company destroying the health of impoverished populations is recounted in Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People. The book is an insightful scientific, political and economic look into capitalism’s global destruction of nutrition and health. It points the finger squarely at the profiteering multinationals and complicit governments, regulatory bodies and NGOs. Van Tulleken contends that the rise of “ultra-processed food” (UPF), defined as any food containing synthetic additives, has led to the deterioration of people’s health. Today, in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, UPF constitutes up to 60 percent of the average diet.

A tendency has emerged across the world over the last 50 years regarding health that contradicts the rest of human history. In most countries, the poorest people eat the most calories. They are also the most nutritionally malnourished. “Diet quality and associated health outcomes follow a social gradient in Australia, and internationally,” concluded a recent VicHealth study. In the UK, working-class children are getting shorter on average, at the same time that they are getting fatter. Rich children continue to grow. 

From the 1950s onwards, savvy food companies figured out ever more novel ways of using additives and synthetic ingredients to mimic more expensive foods. Modified starches from potatoes or corn were far cheaper than dairy fats, and, once packed with bulking agents, flavouring and colouring, could appear close enough to the real thing. The cheapest forms of fats, proteins and carbohydrates could be processed in any number of ways to create a lucrative mass product. With added preservatives, food was much more suited to the logistics of the market. Beyond just reducing ingredient costs, these chemicals and methods of processing were used to “extend shelf life, facilitate centralised production and, as it turns out, drive excess consumption”, according to Van Tulleken. Excess consumption became increasingly central to the profitability of these products.

There are an estimated 10,000 additives in modern food production, according to a study published in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety: flavouring, colouring, foaming and anti-foaming agents, bulking and anti-bulking agents, preservatives, emulsifiers and gums, among many others. Some of these have known serious health effects, but the overwhelming majority haven’t been researched enough to determine their consequences conclusively. The average UK resident consumes eight kilograms of these substances a year. 

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These additives are also incredibly effective at subverting the body’s natural regulatory system. Van Tulleken writes about studies that have shown that, when infants are given full access to a variety of nutritious foods, they feed themselves a nutritionally balanced diet, without over- or under-eating. This indicates that the body’s regulation of nutritional intake is as sophisticated as that for temperature or blood pressure. But the rise of UPF has disrupted these processes.

For instance, a 2019 study by the US National Institutes of Health found that even when UPF and unprocessed foods have identical nutritional profiles (in terms of calories, and macro and micronutrients), people will overeat the processed food. 

According to Van Tulleken, there has been “an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions”. That is, getting people addicted to calorie-dense, nutritionally lacking, additive-loaded products—to the immense detriment of their health—is the food industry’s main game. 

Coca-Cola, for example, is packed full of sugar: ten teaspoons per can. To make it palatable (because spoonfuls of raw sugar don’t taste good) Coca-Cola adds bitter flavouring that cancels out some of the sweetness, so that consumers get the unnatural sugar and caffeine hit without their body rejecting it. 

Like the quantity of additives in their products, the profits of these companies are immense. Nestlé, the biggest of them all, grossed US$45 billion last year, PepsiCo $46 billion, Mondalez $11 billion, Archer-Daniels-Midland $7.5 billion.

Van Tulleken makes a series of compelling arguments throughout the book regarding the social and economic factors behind the health crisis. He rejects the individualist, personal responsibility framework that dominates mainstream discussions of nutrition and health. The book is explicitly not a self-help guide. 

He writes that, across the West, “there was a dramatic increase in obesity, beginning in the 1970s. The idea that there has been a simultaneous collapse in personal responsibility in both men and women across age and ethnic groups is not plausible”. 

Over the past 30 years, childhood obesity in England has increased by 700 percent, and severe obesity by 1,600 percent. This can be explained only by tectonic shifts in the diets made available. 

In Australia, the number of people living with Type 2 diabetes has tripled (or doubled when adjusted for population growth and age structure) over the last twenty years, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Comprehensive meta-analysis has demonstrated a conclusive link between UPF consumption and Type 2 diabetes. Multiple studies have indicated that higher consumption of UPF also leads to massively increased risks of heart attack and stroke.

Consistent with this structural approach, the book centres inequality as a major factor in health outcomes. The consumption of UPF is directly correlated with income, the poorest eating the most. This can largely be explained by pretty simple personal economics. In the UK, a study by the Food Foundation charity shows that the poorest half of the population would need to spend a third of their disposable income on food to meet the minimum nutritional guidelines. The bottom 10 percent would need to spend 75 percent. There are twice as many fast-food outlets in the poorer suburbs of England as in the richer, and advertising is most concentrated in those areas. 

In Australia, age-standardised rates of Type 2 diabetes are more than twice as high in the lowest socioeconomic areas as in the highest. Van Tulleken makes the case that diet and access to quality food are major transmitters of the “health-wealth” gap, alongside smoking and access to health care.

The book also decries the crimes of the major food companies that get rich by destroying the health of billions. For instance, in the 1970s Nestlé was accused of getting mothers in sub-Saharan Africa hooked on free samples of baby formula to the point where they stopped lactating. Mothers were then compelled to purchase baby formula or have their children starve—which thousands of the poorest did. 

In Ghana, one of the poorest countries in the world, obesity rates have risen from 2 percent to 13.6 percent since 1980, as fast-food outlets and UPF companies have expanded their territory. Former CEO of YUM!, KFC’s parent company, justified their intervention by saying: “It’s so much safer to eat at a KFC in Ghana, than it is to eat, obviously, you know, pretty much anywhere else”.

The agricultural system that serves the modern food industry is equally as destructive. Brazilian rainforests are chopped down to grow soybeans, which are used to force-feed factory-raised animals and produce various proteins and fats in their cheapest forms. Indonesian peat forests are burned to clear land for palm oil production, generating thick blankets of smoke and unfathomable amounts of pollution. In 2015, the burning of these forests emitted more CO2 in just a couple of months than the entire German economy that year. Modern agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, fuelled by the demands of the industrial food sector. 

There are broader dynamics at play than just the individual wickedness of CEOs. As Van Tulleken puts it, each company “is in an arms race with other companies ... all vying for that real estate in the shops that maximises sales. If Kellogg’s decided to take a stand [by making their food healthier and less profitable], the space would instantly be filled by another product from another company”. The nutrition crisis is a built-in product of modern capitalism, stemming from its competitive economic structures.

In this way, Van Tulleken approaches an anti-capitalist perspective. He argues that “shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities” and “their behaviour only changes when the flow of the money is diverted”.

Van Tulleken also lacerates the useful idiots and the actively complicit of the health NGO world. He slams the growth of “healthwashing”, whereby the worst offenders of the obesity crisis fund research about the very crisis that they are causing. He puts it firmly: “Organisations that take money from, for example, Coca-Cola, and claim to be fighting obesity are simply extensions of the marketing division of Coca-Cola ... the interests of [these companies] and those of obesity campaigners are not, and cannot be, aligned”.

However, Van Tulleken stops short of the full-blooded anti-capitalism that is required really to tackle the systemic issues he describes so clearly. While rejecting regressive proposals, such as sugar taxes, he falls back on milquetoast technocratic solutions. His proposals for policies like limits on fast food advertising and better regulated health research to prevent corporate influence would be welcome, but will not even scratch the surface of the structural causes behind the obesity epidemic. 

Elsewhere, Van Tulleken devolves into utopianism, arguing for a “fixing” of the agricultural system which today is based on monoculture crops, mass use of antibiotics and massive environmental destruction. But without a way to fight for such a system, the suggestions remain, as Marx put it 150 years ago, “recipes for the cookshops of the future”.

Ultimately, what Ultra-Processed People clearly demonstrates, but does not actually say, is that there is no solution to the health crisis under capitalism. For business, even the most essential of products, food, is just another way to make obscene amounts of money. The health of billions is sacrificed in the interest of profit.

Imperial Roots of the Global Food System: A Review of Chris Otter's 'Diet For A Large Planet'

By Amy Leather

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

Why do we eat what we do? This is the question Chris Otter seeks to answer in Diet for a Large Planet. It is very timely. In recent years there has been growing anger and horror at a food system that delivers both unhealthy and environmentally destructive diets. Food has become deeply politicized.

In 2019 the medical journal The Lancet published what it called a “planetary health diet.” Their conclusion was that “the world’s diets must change dramatically” to save the planet and ourselvesThey argued that a Great Food Transformation is required — a move away from what is often called the Western Diet, high in red meat, refined grains, saturated fat and sugar, to a more plant based diet.

This is not in fact a new argument. Otter’s title deliberately echoes Diet for a Small Planet, first published 50 years ago, in which Frances Moore Lappe blamed a diet rich in meat and refined carbohydrates for environmental and health problems.

dietforalargeplanet.jpg

But when looking at today’s food systems most commentators tend to focus on the post war period, and in particular the role of the US in driving a model of industrialized food production and agriculture. This is a model epitomized by the ascendancy of processed foods, the growth of the fast food giants and supermarkets, and the scale and dominance of agribusiness.

However, Otter argues that “in order to understand the deeper history of today’s global food situation, it is necessary to explore post-1800 Britain.” He argues that “Britain laid the foundations for contemporary food systems. It was the nineteenth century’s dominant world power, controlling immense global resources, and creating long distance food chains to supply vast quantities of meat, wheat and sugar.” This is a good starting point. Locating our current food systems in a wider political and historical context, very much bound up with the development of capitalism and colonialism.

What stands out in the book is just how early the internationalization of food production developed for Britain. Britain was sourcing foods from round the globe in vast quantities from the mid 1800s, importing grain, meat and dairy products.

Otter shows this with a vast array of statistics. He outlines how “the volume of British food imports rose almost eightfold between 1850-52 and 1910-12, by which time they represented around two fifths of all British imports by value. Over four fifths of bread consumed in Britain came from imported grain by 1909.”

Initially Ireland had contributed much of Britain’s imports of grain, meat, butter and livestock but Britain soon became the world’s richest single consumer market for food and raw materials. In 1860 Britain received 49% of total Asian, African, and Latin American food exports. In 1930 with just under 3% of the world’s population Britain imported 99% of world’s exports of ham and bacon, 63% of its butter, 62% of its eggs, 59% of its beef, 46% of cheese, and 28% of its wheat and wheat flour.

Otter looks in detail at how Britain came to import so much meat, grain and sugar. For example, during the 1800s farmers in Britain had experimented with selective breeding to produce the cows and other animals ideal for meat production, such as short horn cows and Herefords. It soon became more profitable to ship these types of livestock out to new areas of the globe, such as the United States and Argentina, to be bred and reared on their huge pastures and their meat imported back to Britain.

Such outsourcing, as Otter calls it, meant a vast infrastructure was built in these areas. As he outlines “there were nearly 70 million cattle in the US by the early 1930s. This heavily capitalized industry with its vast ranches and industrialized meat packing, operated on a much larger scale than Britain’s.” It’s not hard to see how this paved the way for the great acceleration of meat production after 1945 in the US.

There was a massive increase in the amount of wheat bread consumed in Britain between 1771-1879, and by 1911 wheat bread provided around half the working class calorie intake.

Otter outlines how Britain had been self-sufficient in wheat until about 1850. However, at that point wheat production started to become unprofitable and so grain began to be drawn from different and shifting areas of the globe, including Australia, India, Argentina and North America. By 1909 over 80% of British bread was made with imported grain.

Alongside meat and bread, sugar also became central to the British diet. In a short period of time it went from being a luxury to an essential. Otter makes the point that it became a cheap “fuel food” for the working class in Britain. By the late eighteenth century Britain consumed nearly half of all the sugar reaching Europe, and British consumption levels were over ten times higher than those in the rest of Europe. In 1750, the average Britain received 72 calories daily from sugar, by 1909-13 this figure was 395. Sugar still provides 12-15% of Britain’s calories.

Such cheap calories were a consequence of colonialism and slavery. Portuguese, Spanish, French and British colonial systems created a sugar industry linking Europe to the Caribbean and parts of South America. For Britain Barbados became particularly lucrative, with sugar becoming the island’s most important export by 1650. Jamaica was colonized from 1664, and by 1805, it was the world’s largest sugar exporter. By the 1830s Britain was using some two million overseas acres for sugar production.

Alongside exploring the internationalization of food production, Otter also shows how mass production techniques and food processing are not just a postwar invention. For example, the mass production of bread began in the 1870s. Traditional milling methods in Hungary and the US were replaced by roller milling and then introduced into Britain. It is fascinating to note that factory made American cheese was already cheaper than British cheddar in the 1860s — and arrived in Britain in increasing quantities. Mass production techniques meant that Britain was producing some 300,000 tons of biscuits by 1939 while sweets we know today such as fruit pastilles and fruit gums have been industrially produced since the late 1800s.

However, Otter seems to argue that this internationalization of food production or outsourcing was a consequence of what he terms a “large planet philosophy.” He defines this as “the premise that the entire earth was a potential source of material wealth and capital investments.”

The implication throughout the book is that the idea of sourcing food from across the globe was the driving force behind the developments rather than the dynamics of capitalism. Here the book is at its weakest. While Otter references Marxism in his introduction as a framework he will draw on, there is virtually no discussion of how the development of capitalism turned food into a commodity. There is nothing about how the competitive accumulation and the drive for profit at the heart of capitalism impacted on food production, including its expansion across the globe.

As Martin Empson points out in Land and Labour, “Marx understood how the development of industrial capitalism in one part of the world had the effect of shaping the agricultural economies of the rest of the world.”

In Capital, Marx writes that, “large scale industry, in all countries where it has taken root, spurs on rapid increases in emigration and the colonization of foreign lands, which are thereby converted into settlements for growing raw material of the mother country…. A new and international division of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.”

Diet for a Large Planet often reads almost as a summary of political thought and as though food production was shaped by a battle of ideas. Of course there were competing ideas, for example over free trade, a requirement that underpinned cheap food imports. But these reflected real class interests, as well as divisions within the ruling class themselves. The battle over the Corn Laws of 1815 exemplified this — with the established landowning class wanting to keep grain prices high while the rising class of industrialist capitalists wanted cheaper grain, so they could pay their workers less.

Without such a framework of understanding the dynamic of capitalism, the drive for profit at the heart of it and how different class forces asserted themselves, the central arguments the book seeks to make are weakened.

While Otter makes some interesting points about food, power and racism, he downplays the centrality of slavery to the development of capitalism. And although he explores the Irish and Bengal famines he doesn’t emphasize the fact that food was exported from these countries during those famines.

The book contains a wealth of detail and a vast array of facts and figures, covering everything from imports to the size of working class kitchens, from animal slaughter techniques to historical records of calorific intake and tooth decay, from the working of grain elevators to the specifics of the sugar extraction process and beet production, and much more. This makes the book a useful resource, but at times I felt that the detail drowned out the big picture and obscured explanation and analysis.

Overall, Diet for a Large Planet is a useful, and at times thought provoking, contribution to the discussion of food systems, but I finished it with unanswered questions.

Workers and Communities Must Control COVID Relief Funds: A View From Detroit

By Jerry Goldberg

Republished from Liberation News.

The Biden Coronavirus Relief Bill offers significant funding that could alleviate at least in part the poverty faced by millions of people in the United States. An article in Bridge Michigan summed up the potential benefits for poor people in Michigan.

  • An estimated 1.97 million children under 18 in Michigan — and 65.7 million across the United States — could benefit from the expansion of the child tax credit. This constitutes 92% of all children in the state.

  • The bill includes an $880 million increase for food assistance, including a 15% increase in food stamp benefits. This potentially could help alleviate hunger for the more than 430,000 adults in Michigan who reported they can’t afford food to adequately feed their children.

  • Some $25 billion in rental assistance and housing vouchers could provide assistance to the 139,000 families at risk of eviction in the state.

  • There is $25 billion in aid to help child-care providers reopen safely and $15 billion in additional child-care assistance to help families return to work, as well.

All these benefits will be squandered if the workers and oppressed people rely on the capitalist state, a state set up to serve the interests of the corporations and the rich, to deliver these benefits to the people for whom they are intended. This is especially so in oppressed cities like Detroit.

Detroit’s poor completely alienated from capitalist state apparatus

In Detroit, years of grinding poverty and austerity imposed by finance capital have deprived hundreds of thousands of people of the resources to know about and take advantage of benefits, on the rare occasion when they are offered. The following statistics bear out the depth of poverty and lack of accessibility from any basic resources for tens of thousands of Detroiters.

  • In Detroit, 40% of the population has no access to any type of internet, 57% lack a high-speed connection, and 70% of school-aged children have no connection at home.

  • A 2011 report noted that 47% of Detroiters were functionally illiterate. In 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Detroit schools deprive their students of basic access to literacy.

  • The median household income for Detroiters in 2018 was $31,283 compared to $61,973 nationally.

The effect of this lack of online access and basic literacy among Detroit’s poor means that even when grandiose programs are announced, those who could benefit the most are not in a position to take advantage of them.

  • While Detroit’s Black community suffered some of the highest COVID rates in the state, only 34.5% of Detroiters have been vaccinated compared to 54.5% of the statewide population.

  • As of January 2020, 11,297 homes lacked water service. Despite a plan being announced to restore service after the pandemic hit in March 2020, in fact there were only 1,250 water restorations as of May 17, 2021.

  • Between 2011 and 2015, one in four properties in Detroit was foreclosed on for unpaid property taxes by the Wayne County treasurer.

  • A survey conducted in 2019, found that of the 25,000 homeowners behind on paying their property taxes, 55% were unaware of the Homeowner Property Tax Assistance Program tax exemption, a program which exempts families earning less than $26,780 per year from paying any property taxes. And in 2017, only 197 families benefitted from the $760 million in federal hardest hit funds given the state to stop foreclosures. Instead, $380 million of the funds were diverted to contractors to tear down homes in a program laced with corruption.

Let the workers and community run things

One of the aspects of the Coronavirus Relief Bill is that it is expected to provide $10 billion for governments across Michigan: $4.4 billion for local governments plus another $5 billion for the state. The City of Detroit will be receiving $826.7 million. These funds must be spent by 2024 or be returned to the federal government.

The people must organize to make sure these funds aren’t squandered as they too often are in the capitalist United States, diverted to crony contractors and nonprofits. Instead, these funds should be used to set up community centers in every neighborhood of cities like Detroit, staffed and run by residents from the communities they serve.

The centers should have computer stations, and aides trained in helping individuals learn about and get access to all benefits they are entitled to. They should sponsor literacy classes. They should employ workers who go out into the community every day, to make sure those who are homebound are reached out to.

The workers and community members staffing these centers should be from the communities they are serving where they are known by their neighbors. They should take stock of basic items like access to electricity, heat and safe non-lead-poisoned water, so families are not afraid to report the lack of basic necessities for fear of having their children taken away.

They should also make sure that undocumented workers, who often are afraid to request aid for fear of deportation, get the services they need regardless of their so-called “residency status.”

Each center should include a health clinic, staffed by doctors, nurses and medical students who live in the community and can provide holistic and environmentally sensitive healthcare that really meets people’s needs.

Cuba shows the way

A model for community-based services can be found in socialist Cuba. An article by Ronn Pineo published in the Journal of Developing Societies described Cuba’s community-based health care system. As early as 1984, Cuba began implementation of its “one doctor plus one nurse team” approach — called Basic Health Teams — with each team unit caring for 80 to 150 families. The healthcare teams live in the communities that they serve so that they can better understand the local health issues.

The doctor/nurse/public health official teams are supported, in turn, by local Group Health Teams, which meet regularly to scout for common issues facing the populations they serve, keeping very careful records of their findings and reporting to the Ministry of Public Health.

Rather than waiting for people to get sick and come into doctors’ offices — the common practice elsewhere in the world — the Cuban doctor/nurse/public healthcare worker groups spend their afternoons walking about their assigned districts, medical bags in hand, dropping in unannounced on the homes of those living in the communities. As a result, they are in a position to notice medical conditions of the people they serve before most afflictions can grow to become too serious. The teams use their house calls as opportunities to remind residents to take their medications — supplied free or at very low price-controlled costs — to exercise more and usually quiz their patients closely about their daily diets.

Demand worker/community control the of relief funds

For the Coronavirus Relief Bill to really make a dent in poverty, hunger and homelessness, it will be up to workers and oppressed people to organize to demand control of the funds to ensure they serve the people for whom they are supposed to be intended. We cannot leave it to the capitalist state, an organ for repression of the people on behalf of the corporate elite, to do the job.

Ultimately, the only way to take the vast wealth of U.S. capitalism, produced by the working class and stolen by the bosses, is to overthrow this rotten system and replace it with a socialist system where the needs of the people in the United States and worldwide could easily be met.

COVID-19, Marxism, and the Metabolic Rift

By Sagar Sanyal

Originally published at Red Flag.

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from a purely natural occurrence. Respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) that exist in populations of birds and various mammals such as pigs, horses, cows and humans, are nothing new. But the circulation of these viruses between species, and the frequency of viruses spreading from animals to humans, has increased in recent decades, and changes in the relationship between human society and nature have been the main driver of this.

The origin of COVID-19 and the vector for its spread to humans are still under investigation by scientists. The closest variant of the virus has been identified in bats, and it’s possible it was transmitted to humans through wild meat or bush meat markets, perhaps via pangolins. Whatever the exact origin and vector, however, the jump from animals to humans fits a familiar pattern, one long understood by epidemiologists.

The destruction of nature by capitalist industry plays a big part. As forests and other areas untouched by human development are destroyed, wild species like bats are forced out to forage for food in urban centers. Those wild species carry diseases that previously remained confined to forests and only rarely infected humans – never enough to cause an epidemic. But now this migrating wildlife comes into more frequent contact with large human populations. Sneezes and droppings from wild animals spread the virus to other animals that humans handle more often – like pigs, chickens or, as with the MERS outbreak in the Middle East a decade ago, camels.

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, is among the writers who for years have warned of the increasing likelihood of such epidemics. On COVID-19 specifically, Wallace and his collaborators emphasize how the wild meat sector fits into the broader context of industrial food production. “How did the exotic food sector arrive”, he asks, “at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan? The animals were not being sold off the back of a truck or in an alleyway”.

Increasingly, according to Wallace, wild food is being integrated into the mainstream of the capitalist food market. “The overlapping economic geography”, he writes, “extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness. As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid the last stands”.

Right wing news outlets more interested in racist scapegoating than in facts made a big deal of the wild meat issue, as if the world would have been spared the virus if only Chinese consumers had stuck to eating chicken or pork. But that is a false narrative. Since the 1990s, several deadly strains of bird flu and swine flu have developed and spread from industrial farms of chickens or pigs, including in North America and Europe, as well as in China.  

It has long been understood why these places breed disease. The animals are crowded into feedlots under conditions that run down their immune systems. The genetic monoculture of these populations takes away the natural diversity that reduces the prevalence of diseases. As farmers try to minimize time from birth to slaughter, this has the perverse consequence of acting as a natural selection pressure for pathogens that can survive more robust immune systems. All these things mean diseases can spread very fast within industrial herds and flocks. The cost cutting imperative means that work conditions (like protective equipment) are so poor that farm laborers are highly vulnerable to catching viruses from these animals.

The danger to humanity from such practices was reinforced in June, when scientists discovered a number of new strains of swine flu with pandemic potential circulating among pigs on farms in China. Although the strains, collectively referred to as G4 viruses, don’t appear currently to be able to spread between humans, around 10 percent of blood samples taken from farm laborers showed evidence of prior infection. All it would take is a small mutation and one or other of these viruses could start jumping from human to human and spread rapidly through the broader population, just as has occurred with SARS-CoV-2.

Marx and Engels’ groundbreaking work on the relationship between human society and nature in the context of the emergence of capitalism as a global system in the 19th century can help us understand the destructive dynamics underlying these developments. Central to their work in this area was the idea of the “metabolic rift”. All living things have a metabolic relation with their ecological surroundings, taking in certain things and putting out waste. When it comes to humans, Marx and Engels noted that our metabolism with the rest of nature is not due to our biology alone, but also to the kind of society we’ve built. To understand human metabolism with nature, we thus need social science in addition to natural science.

The metabolic rift has both historical and theoretical aspects. On the historical side is the displacement of peasants and peasant farming methods from the countryside, and their corralling into towns to create the modern working class. Workers, unlike the peasantry, had no means of livelihood of their own, and therefore had to move around to find waged work, crowding into the cities where that work was concentrated. One consequence of this was that, instead of being reabsorbed back into the local environment, human waste now collected in vast pools in the cities.

This process was the main driver of the soil fertility crisis that struck Europe in the late 19th century. By displacing the peasantry, and forcing more and more people into the cities, capitalism, Marx wrote, “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”.

What about the theoretical aspect? The rift isn’t just about the natural effects they observed, but also their social cause. It is a rift in social relations: the forcible conversion of a peasantry into the modern working class.

Peasants farmed a plot of land to which they had customary right over generations. They controlled their own labor process, and this meant there was a feedback mechanism between their labor and its effects on the land. If they depleted the soil and thus threatened their livelihood, they could adjust their methods of work accordingly. Peasant farmers had, over many generations, developed practices to maintain soil fertility through crop rotation, cycling between crops and pasture to ensure manuring, and returning human excrement to the fields. Peasant methods of labor were the main factor in the metabolism between feudal society and the rest of nature. Feudal lords would leave peasants to farm as they wished, then take a portion of the produce.

By contrast, the capitalist mode of production involves the capitalist dictating the labor process, and then just hiring laborers to do what they are told. As capitalist farmers emerged, they realized more money was to be made by cutting out the aspects of peasant farming practices that had no immediate pay-off (even though they maintained soil fertility) and focusing just on the highest earning aspects.

Around the same time the first factories were bmetabloismeing established in towns, and the emerging capitalist class and the state that served them realized that wages could be forced down if large masses of former peasants were concentrated in a handful of industrial areas rather than scattered across a large number of small population centers. During the 18th and 19th centuries, vast numbers of peasants were driven from the land by a combination of brute force and legal changes (such as the Enclosure Acts). Out of this uprooted peasantry, the modern working class was born.

A new dynamic began to shape social metabolism with nature. Unlike the peasants who worked the land directly, capitalist farmers and the new captains of industry were far removed from the destructive consequences of their activities. So long as they had workers prepared to exchange their labor for a wage (and the desperate poverty in which most people lived ensured that there was no shortage), they could turn a profit, even if their actions were detrimental to the natural world on which their business ultimately depended. If they destroyed the land, they could use the profits they had made to buy more land elsewhere. More often, however, the destructive consequences of their activities were simply externalized – the poisoning of the air and water in factory districts, which had a major impact on the lives of workers in this period, provides a clear example.

From this point on, what was produced in society and through which methods was determined by the profit motive and competition among rival capitalists and nation-states. The impact of production on the natural world became, at best, an afterthought. A new dynamic was driving society’s metabolism with nature – one that would create environmental disasters on an ever widening scale.

Scientists who study the origins of diseases have been telling us for decades that we will continue to have outbreaks of novel viruses that hop from other animals to humans because of how we farm animals and how we destroy wilderness. This advice is ignored, just as the advice of climate scientists is ignored, because acting on it would require breaking from the profit-driven logic of capitalism.

Where it’s a choice between booking short-term profits and taking a hit to profit to address potentially destructive consequences in the longer term, capitalists will always put profit first. They, after all, can escape the consequences of their actions. They spend their days in air conditioned offices, unlike the farm laborers who spend their days surrounded by hundreds of pigs riddled with swine flu. In a pandemic, capitalists can hide away in their country mansions and, in the event that they fall ill, can pay for the very best of medical care.

For workers it’s a different story. We’re the ones on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, not through our own free choice, but through economic necessity. For the vast majority of workers around the world, stopping work isn’t an option. We must work to survive, even if in doing so we are actually putting our lives at risk. This suits the capitalists very nicely. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a moment when the world economy was already struggling. The ruling class, whether in Australia, the US or any other country, is desperate to limit the economic damage from the crisis, even if that means many more people will die.

If workers ran the world, it would be very different. It would make no sense for us to ignore the warnings of scientists about how industrial agriculture and environmental destruction are fueling the emergence of new diseases, for the simple reason that we’re the ones who will suffer when they appear. We don’t have a stake in the relentless scramble for short-term profit that defines capitalism today. We can organize production – both what we produce and how we produce – with human health and environmental sustainability in mind.

In the current pandemic, that might mean shutting down all but the most essential parts of the economy to slow the spread of the virus, while ensuring other workers are paid to stay home. In the longer term, it would mean reshaping animal agriculture to limit the potential for it to function as a petri dish for the emergence of deadly diseases.

This is how Marx envisaged the metabolic rift being healed. “Freedom in this field”, he wrote in volume 3 of Capital, “can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature”.

Such freedom will never exist under a capitalist system in which the drive to profit rules. The first step in fixing the metabolic rift is to make our labor our own again. That means taking it back from the ruling class.

"There is No Straight Line to a Just Food System": What We Do with Our Bodies Until Then

By David Pritchett

Two Kinds of Farming

The summer of 2012 was hot in the Midwest. By the fourth week of temperatures over ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and over two months without rain, the grass was brown and many of our crops in Northeastern Indiana were not faring much better.

I lived on a twenty-six acre farm, three acres of which my friends and I were homesteading and vegetable gardening. Our farm - "Bluefield Farm," named after the abundant chicory with its blue blossoms - was an oasis in the middle of an industrial agriculture desert. The surrounding landscape, on the other hand, was filled with acres of corn and soybean. Most of the farm lay pastured with organic hay, but we planted market gardens on about one and a half acres of the landscape.

The work was hard but rewarding. Gardens require thoughtful soil preparation--compost or manure ensure proper nutrition for the plants, and manual tillage loosens the soil so that roots can take hold and take up crucial minerals, but unlike plows, does so without killing beneficial worms and fungal threads. Hand tillage and planting of even two acres can be backbreaking, but shared labor lightened the work, and even made it enjoyable. Mentors helped us to know when to start seeds, how and when to transplant, and offered tips and strategies for dealing with insects and weeds without utilizing chemicals. Late night research provided information on companion and succession planting, to negotiate plant tolerance and space. And always, the gardens humbled us with our amateur knowledge of how to grow enough to feed ourselves with a margin of extra.

The contrast between our farm and the surrounding agricultural practices was evident on a daily basis. Our small-scale gardens were planted with seedlings before the surrounding fields were dry enough for the tractors to till. Even in the heat and drought of 2012, we had some crops that survived. The diversity of our planting plan meant that although some of our vegetables did not tolerate the hot, dry weather, some did. Surrounding us though, were thousands of acres of soybeans and corn that desiccated into brown stalks without the water they needed. The large scale of those farms of hundreds or even thousands of acres was brittle and fragile.

But it was an event that summer - a disaster - that truly marked the difference between industrial food production and the small scale agroecology we practiced on Bluefield farm. Up the road just a quarter mile was another kind of farm. A chicken farm, but more properly just a collection of large industrial buildings. This was an egg production facility, alleged to provide all the eggs for all the Kroger grocery stores east of the Mississippi. I believed this to be true, because it consisted of four buildings, each a quarter mile long and one hundred yards wide. The factory boasted of two million hens, each housed in a cage constructed such that the daily egg born of their bodies was moved on a conveyor belt to be collected, cleaned, bleached, and packaged. Production was mechanized to facilitate as little human intervention as possible, but workers were still needed for various tasks - one of the inauspicious duties was the daily chore of collecting birds dead in their cages and throwing them out.

I was in town one scorching day when I heard the news from one of the locals - the giant fans, big as airplane engines, just couldn't keep up with the heat. Those big buildings became giant ovens, and three hundred thousand chickens died from hyperthermia.

When I got home from town, I rushed over to our small chicken coop, constructed of leftover odds and ends of wood and tin nailed onto a frame of two by fours. Our ten hens were fine, pecking away at the occasional insect, and fussing about as they generally did under the shade of a tree. For the rest of the day, though, I could hear the commotion of large machinery in the distance. I was told that they buried the dead chickens--all three hundred thousand--in a massive heap of feathers, flesh, and bones.


Three Pillars of White Heteropatriarchy

Scholar of Indigenous Studies, Andrea Smith, wrote a short but incisive analysis of the interconnected nature of racism in the United States. Her thesis was that while various racialized groups experience racism in different ways, their struggles for liberation are connected as each form of racism is a pillar in white supremacy.

The first pillar is the logic of slaveability/capitalism. The logic of slavery anchors capitalism and at its worst renders black bodies as nothing more than property to be used in the cotton fields, or, after the 13th amendment, to be put to work via Jim Crow laws. Despite eventual abolishment of Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration of black persons today continues the logic of slavery by corporate prisons and prison work for low wages.

The second pillar of white supremacy, according to Smith, is the logic of genocide/colonialism. This logic holds that native people must constantly be disappearing. The myth of the Americas as open landscape for the taking necessitated the genocide of indigenous peoples who had lived in relationship to the land for thousands of years. Religious rhetoric fomented this genocide, calling the "New world" a "new Israel," which of course meant that the colonizers had the right to murder the indigenous inhabitants of the land. The logic of genocide perpetrated the forced displacement of native nations onto reservations and continues today in the myth of the disappeared Indians, spoken of as the original inhabitants who are now vanished.

The third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of orientalism/war. This logic sees Oriental nations (inclusive of the Middle East) as perpetual threats to the superior civilizations of the West. While these exotic foreigners are not disappeared or owned, they loom on the horizon as a source of fear, and thus represent the reason for the creation of the military complex that takes over the national budget of the United States and perpetuates the control of the globe by Western nations. The "War on Terror" that allows everything from drone strikes to water-boarding and indefinite detention of brown bodies continues due to this logic of the foreign threat which justifies perpetual war.

Why discuss racism and white supremacy in an essay about agriculture? Food justice advocates already argue that the food system is inherently inequitable. Class and race have too much impact upon access to healthy foods. Fresh vegetables and less processed foods cost more, and food deserts exist in many urban neighborhoods dominated by people of color.

But analysis of food injustice often misses the explicit links between racial injustice and the manner in which white supremacist logic has affected the land itself. The heart of industrial agriculture extends the three-fold logic of white supremacy against nature itself: just as capitalism commoditized Africans into slaves, so too does profit enslave the soil to constantly produce; along with genocidal policies toward Native Americans came ecocidal land management that disappeared mature ecosystems; finally, the perpetual war against the foreign threat was directed toward pests and weeds. In what follows, I look more deeply into each of these pillars of white heteropatriarchy and how they affect the land community.


Slavery

Just a short walk down the road from Bluefield farm was an old graveyard, with some markers dating to the mid-1800's. Scattered elms and oaks shaded the cemetery, and it offered a quiet place to think. I went there often, sometimes in the heat of the day for a break from weeding, and other times at night to sit pensively under the moonlight. The last part of the ten-minute walk from the farm required a walk up the knoll atop of which lay the gravestones. I did not think much of this rise in the landscape until I heard a story regarding this phenomenon. As it turns out, old cemeteries like the one I frequented often sit higher on the landscape for a reason. These cemeteries were established in the early days of settlement by Americans in the Midwest. As farmers cleared land and farmed for over one hundred and fifty years, poor land husbandry led to significant soil erosion across the landscape. Areas immune to this loss were areas that had never been cleared and farmed--places like graveyards.

Slavery, the fundamental capitalist logic behind white supremacy that allows bodies to be monetized, extends in industrial agriculture against the soil itself. This story of slavery, mineral depletion, and soil erosion goes back to the heart of the European settlement of the Americas, to the earliest of colonies.

In 1606, a shipment of colonists funded by the Virginia Company, a group of wealthy London investors, landed in eastern Virginia. They founded the colony of Jamestown, but struggled to survive, much less to turn a profit for the Virginia Company. But soon the colonists discovered that tobacco grew well in the climate and began producing thousands of pounds to ship back to England. The crop was so profitable that farmers grew only the little food they needed to feed their families and utilized the rest of the land to grow tobacco. By 1617, the colonists were able to send twenty thousand pounds of tobacco in one year across the Atlantic.

But the crop depleted soil fertility at an unsustainable rate. A tobacco plant requires ten times the nitrogen and thirty times the phosphorus that most food crops need. This meant that soon tilled for tobacco soon had to be abandoned, and more land cleared for the crop. After a decade of exporting tobacco, Jamestown colonists petitioned for new land due to soil exhaustion. In addition to the problem of depletion, tobacco farming caused severe erosion. Farmers piled up soil in mounds by hand or with a plow around each plant and left bare. Rains of any significant amount thus washed much of that bare soil away.

The work of tilling and harvesting tobacco was hard, and land clearance was even harder. Land-owning colonists soon capitalized on black and white indentured servants to help with this difficult work, but by the mid-17th century, African slaves with no prospect of freedom were brought in for the task. Within a century, there were over a hundred thousand slaves in the Chesapeake Bay region.

Cash crop agriculture soon led to the rise of class in this New World for the colonists. Wealthy landowners who could afford slaves cleared new land, farmed it for tobacco or cotton until the land was depleted, and then sold the land to poorer farmers who could not afford to buy and clear new land. Once all the land had been settled, plantation owners continued to farm the same soil even with increasingly marginal returns so that they could keep their slaves occupied.

The devaluation of land meant that farmers with wealth did not need to properly tend the soil or care for the land. As soil health declined, the productivity gap was filled by the labor of enslaved black bodies. Because white supremacy deprecated the lives of Africans, the importance of healthy soil itself could be trivialized under slavery.

Although slavery was outlawed (but still exists in the form of prison labor), this same devaluation of soil persists in industrial agriculture. Healthy soil is a rich community itself, consisting of millions of microbes, mycelium, and insects that keep organic and mineral nutrients cycling in a way that benefits not only themselves, but plants as well. But constant tillage and application of fertilizers destroys the soil community and leads to erosive soil loss and the destruction of the microbial and insect community that creates healthy soil. Under slavery, the steady loss of soil productivity was made up for with slave labor that continued to eek out marginal returns. Today, the erosion of soil and fertility is replaced by large machinery powered by fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers that make up for loss of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium due to deprivation and depletion.


Ecocide

On Nov 13, 1838, Father Joseph Petit wrote the following description of the Potawatomi Trail of Death to Bishop Bruté:

"The order of the march was as follows: the United States flag, carried by a dragoon (soldier); then one of the principal officers, next the staff baggage carts, then the carriage, which during the whole trip was kept for the use of the Indian chiefs; then one or two chiefs on horseback led a line of 250 or 300 horses ridden by men, women, children in single file, after the manner of savages. On the flanks of the line at equal distance from each other were the dragoons and volunteers, hastening the stragglers, often with severe gestures and bitter words. After this cavalry came a file of 40 baggage wagons filled with luggage and Indians. The sick were lying in them, rudely jolted, under a canvas which, far from protecting them from the dust and heat, only deprived them of air, for they were as if buried under this burning canopy - several died thus."

For the year prior, Petit had been a missionary to the Potawatomi band near Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had been away from Twin Lakes, Indiana, when the Potawatomi Trail of Death began, but had petitioned his superior so that he could join the villagers with whom he had become acquainted. By the time he was able to join the forcibly displaced Potawatomi, many had already fallen ill.

Colonialism is the logic behind indigenous genocide; this same logic conflated indigenous people with their indigenous ecosystems. What were seen as unproductive, pristine forests, were actually tended landscapes that provided for Native American life. Nut-bearing trees provided staple calories. Open meadows provided browse for deer and other game animals. A wide range of encouraged herbs and woody perennials provided for basketry, medicine, and other crafts. Even tribes that were primarily farmers were not recognized as such, since their farms did not look like those of the European settlers. Because of this, Native Americans were displaced, killed, or otherwise marginalized, and at the same time, their native ecosystems deforested and cleared for European style farms. Thus, indigenous genocide and ecocide went hand in hand.

The United States government had made multiple attempts to assimilate the Potawotamis. President Jefferson, ever the champion of the farm, expressed his hope to integrate the tribe into European ways of farming. In a letter to Chiefs Little Turtle and Five Medals, he relayed the following: "We shall with pleasure see your people become disposed to cultivate the earth, to raise heards [sic] of useful animals, and to spin and weave for their food and clothing." (Edmunds, 160).

A few Chiefs had expressed interest in learning settler agriculture, but the overwhelming majority of Potawotami had no interest in the hard lifestyle. Attempts by Quakers to create a model farm to teach the Potawotami failed; the few men who started to assist with farm work soon lost interest, and the leader of the effort, a man by the name of Phillip Dennis, soon gave up.

While the Potawatomi did assimilate somewhat by adopting some of the textiles and goods that Americans sold, they maintained their own traditional lifeways. They continued to live in the wigwam-style house common to the region, and planted small gardens of corn, beans, and squash in the summer, supplementing their diet with hunting in the winter. Officials and missionaries agreed that the tribe had not made strides toward "white civilization." They "adhered with tenacity to the manners of their forefathers while everything around them has changed," according to one report (Edmunds, 227).

Potawotami lands were ceded piecemeal over a quarter century, starting in 1816. This process was complicated by the multiple Potawatomi chiefs involved, as well as the many federal agencies and agents. Population pressure from setters arriving from the east caused problems for the Potawatomi traditional lifestyle. Over hunting and trapping by fur traders and settlers had reduced the deer-herds and small game which the natives depended upon for winter food. Settlers were happy to hunt in Potawatomi lands, but were angered when the Indians encroached upon their farms and settlements.

A conflict in LaSalle county, Illinois, was paradigmatic of settler-indigenous relations in the area. A man named William Davis set up a mill and a blacksmith shop on Indian Creek. He dammed the creek to power the mill, which prevented fish from swimming upstream where a village of Potawatomis lived. This disregard of their food supply angered the villagers, and tensions grew. Davis refused to give in despite being warned by other Potawatomi chiefs who attempted to intervene, and he gathered more settler families around his homestead in an effort to dig in. Eventually, a group of forty Potawatomi attacked the settlement, killing Davis and other men and capturing some women and children.

American settlers continued to pour into the region. Even where Potawatomi had agreed to cede land or allow settlement, land was occupied and cleared for farming so quickly that Chief Metea complained, "the plowshare is driven through our tents before we have time to carry out our goods and seek another habitation" (Edmunds, 220). When new lands were opened for settlement after sale or treaty, often the land-hungry farmers would take up residence before surveyors had properly demarcated the sections belonging to Potawatomi and those open for settlers, creating tension and confusion.

Growing tensions and rising populations of settlers added to the "Indian problem." By the time President Jackson had signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the Potawatomi had already sold much of their land, and lost much of the land community that gave them food, medicine, and shelter due to the continual encroachment of white settler farms. Stipulations in the Indian Removal Act were that the relocation of tribes would be voluntary and would move them to land west of the Mississippi.

In 1836, Abel Pepper, commissioned to attempt to purchase the remaining reservation lands in Indiana, compiled a group of dubious Potawatomi leaders he called "the Chiefs warriors, and headmen of the Patawattamies of the Wabash." Although this group had little claim over the land or recognition from the villagers, the Senate recognized the treaty as valid and ratified it. Chief Menominee, one of the leaders who refused to sign or acknowledge the treaty, gave the following charge, worth quoting in full:

"The president does not know the truth. He, like me, has been imposed upon. He does not know that you made my young chiefs drunk and got their consent and pretended to get mine...He would not drive me from my home and the graves of my tribe, and my children, who have gone to the Great Spirit, nor allow you to tell me that your braves will take me, tied like a dog....the President is just, but he listens to the words of young chiefs who have lied; and when he knows the truth, he will leave me to my own. I have not sold my lands. I will not sell them. I have not signed any treaty, and will not sign any. I am not going to leave my lands." (Edmunds, 267)

But the President was not just. White settlers had already been promised the lands around Twin Lakes, Indiana, that Menominee refused to cede. Squatters came, intent on taking the best land before the crowds, and a Potawatomi party burned a squatter's hut, leading to retaliation from settlers, who then burned down a dozen Indian homes.

Pepper requested military assistance, and Senator John Tipton gathered one hundred volunteers for a militia to remove the remaining Potawatomi to land in Kansas. On August 30, 1838, Tipton had the remaining villagers gather, and his militia surrounded the villagers and at forced them to enroll for removal, giving them five days to gather their things. Five days later, the march began. Still, Menominee would not leave the village, and so was forced at gunpoint to go, and placed under arrest with two other chiefs who also resisted.

The march began on September 4, 1838 and concluded sixty-one days later after traveling over six hundred miles to the Osage river in Kansas. Of the forty-two people who died during the march, twenty-eight were children. Petit survived the march and much of what we know is recorded in his journal.

With the Potawatomie and other indigenous tribes largely displaced from their ancestral lands, American settlers were free to turn the landscape into the acres of corn and soybean so quintessential to the modern Midwest. Of the roughly twenty million acres of old growth forest that once covered the state, about two thousand acres remain. Settlers cleared the land for farms, and harvested timber for building, fuelwood, and railroad ties.

Indigenous removal leads to ecocide. Contemporary indigenous groups vocalize this in their advocacy for themselves and for the ecosystems with which they are in relation. The Baiga, who inhabit an area of jungle in India, declare, "the jungle is only here because of us." Similarly, a statement by indigenous peoples from the Amazon articulates their understanding of the deep interrelationship:

"We have used and cared for the resources of that biosphere with a great deal of respect, because it is our home, and because we know that our survival and that of our future generations depends on it. Our accumulated knowledge about the ecology of our home, our models for living with the peculiarities of the Amazon Biosphere, our reverence and respect for the tropical forest and its inhabitants, both plant and animal, are the keys to guaranteeing the future of the Amazon Basin, not only for our people, but also for all humanity."


War

Once the snow melted on the Indiana roads, I would often ride my bike from our farm to town. I learned quickly, however, that early summer was the spraying time. I pedaled past acres of corn and soybean down the straight county roads. When the tractors were out, pulling large tanks labeled "anhydrous ammonia," I had to hope the wind was blowing the fumes away from the road. When the breeze was not in my favor, I did my best to pedal furiously, holding my breath and hoping I could pass the cloud without inhaling too much of it. At other times, the chemical applicants were not labeled, or were dropped by prop plane, and so I could not know what noxious admixtures made it into my lungs. These various chemicals - fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides - so crucial to industrial agriculture, were at the same time devastating to the community of creatures that tried to inhabit the same space as this technological system.

Summer evenings highlighted this. My friends and I could climb the roof of our barn and see our pastures and the night air above them glowing with the mating rituals of fireflies populating our land; in contrast, the farm fields around us were dark, bleak, and barren. This nightly event was a reminder that our insistence on working with spade and hand rather than by chemical mattered a great deal to the other creatures - insects, birds, and small mammals - who shared the land with us and whose interconnected lives led to a healthy ecology on our small farm. What Smith names as the third pillar of white supremacy, the logic of perpetual war, manifests itself in the war against pests and weeds.

The connection between war and agrochemical has been solid since at least World War I. Fritz Haber, a German chemist, revolutionized agriculture by finding a cheap way to convert inaccessible atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia, a form of nitrogen that could then be converted to explosives or to agricultural fertilizer. This discovery allowed Germany to continue producing both munitions and food despite trade blockage of traditional sources of nitrogen. In addition to his creation of the nitrogen fixation process, Haber became infamous by using his chemistry genius to invent weaponized chlorine gas.

Haber devised a system of pressurized canisters of chlorine which would release mist from the German trenches, needing only a steady but not too strong wind to blow the chemical fog toward Allied forces. On April 22nd, 1915, the German front in France had such favorable winds. After the release of the canister valves, a greenish-yellow cloud moved slowly toward the British and French forces in their trenches. British field marshal John French described the effect of the gas on soldiers: "smoke and fumes hid everything from sight, and hundreds of men were thrown into a comatose or dying condition." But what was for Allied forces a death cloud was to the German army a sight of beauty.

From the journal of German Lieutenant Becker:

"As the cloud rolled forward, it was yellowish-green, a hellish, sulphurous haze. As the sun broke from behind a cloud this new and monstrously beautiful image was lit up before us."

Wrote German Lieutenant Drachner:

"A poisonous green smoke drifted out of the fire trenches as far as the eye could see. One could see the landscape bathed in the most beautiful sunshine as though through a fine veil. It looked like the scene from a fairy tale."

In 1925, the Geneva convention banned the use of chemical weapons in warfare. However, chemicals were still used in creative ways in warfare activity. One of the most widely known of the herbicides used against enemies is Agent Orange. American forces employed this herbicide in Vietnam for a two-fold purpose: first, to defoliate jungle areas where Viet Cong hid, and second, to obliterate crops that could feed the Viet Cong. Over the course of nine years, the United States military sprayed almost twenty million gallons of the chemical over South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The defoliant did its job and destroyed over five million acres of forest and crop land. "Only you can prevent a forest," joked American soldiers while deploying Agent Orange, in a sardonic nod to Smokey the Bear ads. In addition to wiping out the food systems of many peasant farmers, pollutants from Agent Orange persisted in the environment and continue to wreak devastating effects on the land and Vietnamese.

Insecticides have not been used explicitly in war but represent war against nonhuman life. The best-known synthetic pesticide, DDT, led to a Nobel Prize for its manufacturer, Paul Müller. Its toxicity for non-target species was detrimental and came under fire in the wake of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. DDT is a persistent organic pollutant which can linger in soils for up to thirty years. The chemical is fat soluble, and thus accumulates up the food chain, especially in birds that depend on insects in their diet. In addition to its toxicity to aquatic and avian life, it has been associated with human cancers, and is known to disrupt hormones.

More recently, neonicotinoids have been used as pest control. However, this class of chemicals has been linked to loss of bees, in which it has been shown to impact foraging and navigation, reduce lifespans, and decrease reproduction in queens. Bees are responsible for the pollination of seventy percent of all flowering plants. It is from these bee-pollinated plants that humans get more than thirty percent of our food.

A case study of the Sichuan province in China heralds the problem. Pomme fruits - that is, apples and pears - are the primary crop of the mountainous Sichuan region, where the flowering trees must be pollinated within five days for the trees to fruit. Use of chemical pesticides grew rapidly with their introduction to the region.

By 1990, a fifty percent decline in the production of the orchards was noticed, a trend corresponding to the rise of pesticide use beginning in the 1970's and subsequent decline of native bees and other pollinators. Even commercial bees introduced later to the orchards died as a result of the pesticides. Now, every year during orchard bloom, people are hired by the thousands to hand pollinate around two hundred thousand trees within the five-day window.


An Apocalyptic Aside

In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote a play elaborating on the story of John the baptist. The biblical account simply notes a dancer, the daughter of Herodias, who danced before King Herod and his friends. The dance was so remarkable that Herod promised her anything she wanted, up to half his kingdom, yet, what she requested--after consulting her mother--was the head of John the baptist on a platter. Her mother had her own grudge against the prophet John, who had criticized her for marital machinations. Salome, unnamed in the biblical account but known by historical sources, danced her way into the center of a conflict between prophet and power.

This short story inspired Wilde's play, "Salome and the Seven Veils." Wilde deepened the story, however, by adding the motif of the seven veils. The seven veils represent a departure from the biblical story but allude to the myth of the descent of Inanna. In the story of her journey into the underworld of the dead, Inanna encounters seven gates, and at each must remove a garment, until she stands naked at the throne of the goddess of the underworld, her sister Ereshkigal. For Wilde, the veils of Salome symbolize this movement toward the deathly realm. With the removal of each veil, death dances closer.

French artist Alphonse Allais took the story even further in its allegory of death. In his rendering, Salome removes the veils accompanied by the lusty cries of Herod. "Go on, go on," he says. Yet when the last veil falls, he continues to shout for more. Salome complies by ripping the skin from her body. And still, Herod says "go on," so she continues to flay fascia with her fingernails, layer by visceral layer, until nothing is left but bone.

Apocalypse means unveiling. Originally the word referred to the lifting of a bride's veil at a wedding but has since taken on symbolic meaning. In apocalypse, everything hidden will be revealed. But the face underneath the veil is not always good. Sometimes apocalypse is the lover who tells you they are leaving. Sometimes it is the cold calm of a doctor relaying a cancer diagnosis. Occasionally it is the brief moment before dusk when the light slants through the pines and the woods reveal a momentary beauty previously unknown. But mostly, apocalypse pulls back the fabric of cloth and skin to show the bone underneath.

For writers in the ancient genre called apocalyptic, the revealing is about power, history, and hope. Their prophetic imaginations pull back the veil on empires like Babylon and Rome to expose a view from the underbelly. This kind of apocalypse is not personal. It is as big as the arc of history. The subject is not people but powers. Kings become beasts, militaries their horns. Politics play out in the imaginal realm as the beasts vie for control. Within this imaginal realm, apocalyptic writing discloses the dreams of the disempowered. An end to oppression approaches. So many heads of so many beasts become decapitated. Magical scrolls foretell future vindication. Trumpets blast sounds of triumph. Lakes of fire and glittering cities signify the fate, respectively, of the damned and the delivered.

Just because apocalypse has creative imagery does not mean that it is fanciful. Apocalypse is an exercise of what anthropologist David Graeber calls "imaginative counterpower," which is to say, it helps the oppressed name the various powers that seem to control their lives, as well as to imagine an end to these powers. As oral stories, they inspire the hearer. As texts, they show the reader a view from the belly of history, from the people with a knife to their throats as the military raids the coffers and the granaries.

And always, apocalypse shows the skeletons. In the midst of kings shouting with lust, "go on" - more power, more money, ever more consolidation of resources - apocalypse pulls back the flesh and fascia to show the bone-dead trajectory of their desire.

The book of Daniel is one such apocalyptic text, written during the Antiochean rule of Palestine to aid the imagination of an occupied people. It reflects the memory of Hebrew people exiled and taken to Babylon, and thus operates in code--"we have been under the thumb of other rulers," the story seems to say, "and managed to find a way then, so we can do so now."

In the first chapter, the author sets the tone for the book in portraying Daniel and his friends as ones who-despite being captive to empire-attempt to live faithfully to their indigenous ways within it. The story introduces Daniel and friends as intelligent members of Jerusalem's elite taken into service for the king. This assimilation of members of the elite is an important imperial strategy: in the same way that if the urban grid represents a control measure for civilians, putting the social elite at the king's table essentially puts them under his thumb.

The renaming of Daniel and his friends reveals how their lives were meant to be reshaped according to the priorities of Babylon. Just as later nation-states developed surnames in order to track, and tax populations, so the renaming of newly acquired servants is a measure of the degree to which Babylon claimed authority over the lives of the political prisoners.

Daniel's refusal of the king's food constitutes the crux of the story. Patbag, the word at issue here, is the allotted meal taken from the royal coffers to meet the needs of his courtiers. Most interpreters take this refusal to be a religious one-Jews in antiquity often maintained their ethnic and religious distinction vis-a- vis food purity by observing dietary rules. In diasporic communities, food connects people to their culture. Even modern food sovereignty movements advocate for culturally appropriate food. An overlooked area of this issue, however, is that the royal court system depended upon an empire that extracted goods from the margins of empire to benefit the center. As scholar of the Ancient Near East, David Vanderhooft, notes, wresting resources from conquered periphery to the king's palace was commonplace:

"The procedure of funneling resources from the subject populations to the heartland through seizure and exaction was no less important to the Babylonians as it had been to the Assyrians…Nebuchadnezzar campaigned almost yearly in the west, in part to insure order, but also to fill the royal coffers."

The king's table would certainly be maintained by such imperial campaigns; meat and wine would be sourced from tribute from conquered nations, meat being transportable as livestock, and wine as an imperishable good which could travel distance without spoiling. Meanwhile, For the average urban dweller in Babylon, whose had a diet that was more likely grain-based, dependent on grain was transported from the surrounding countryside. Babylon's foodprint, according to one catalogue of grain imports, consisted of an area extending from the Sippa in the north to Sealand in the south, a length of 186 miles of irrigated land. In contrast, vegetables do not travel well, so must be grown nearby.

Daniel's requested diet of vegetables and water represents an alternative to the extractive economy of empire in favor of local fare that could not be stolen from distant places. The refusal of the king's table food, therefore, can be read not just a dietary preference but rather as an act of defiance. If acceptance of the king's food symbolized political allegiance, the alternative diet was an implicit rejection of the king. The four friends might have to live in the king's court, but they would find ways to resist the politics of plunder epitomized by the patbag.


What We Do With Our Bodies

Bodies lie at the heart of the food system. This system is built upon a long history of enslaved bodies, displaced bodies, and bodies maimed or killed by war. Bodies still labor in the sunny fields of California harvesting vegetables. Food goes into our bodies, and builds our bodies. Poisoned food corrupts our bodies with cancer. The very soil into which we plant and harvest is itself full of the composted bodies of so many plants, insects, and animals. That very soil is understood by many to be the outermost skin of the body of the earth. So, when we talk about food, we are really talking about what we do with our bodies, with the bodies of so many racialized people, and with the body of the earth.

The food system is swallowed up in white supremacy. A commonly advocated solution to the ills of the industrial agriculture complex is to "vote with your fork," but such logic will not undo the centuries of colonization, slavery, and war that leave their mark on the landscape of food. In this context of historic and ongoing white supremacy, we must rethink our actions against the food system. "Eating locally," does not mean we have completely removed ourselves from the industrial complex. Your local food is still grown on native lands. At its best, nearly all foods depend somewhere down the chain upon petrochemicals. Too often, even when we buy organic foods, much of the labor to harvest the produce has come from undocumented workers--the very cheapness of our foods relies upon the precarious status of the brown bodies of latinx workers in the fields. And even when we do have access to locally grown and fairly traded foods, we are still in other ways participating in a system in which gentrification and redlining drive black folk into ghettos that are at the same time food deserts. In prisons, where inmates earn between twenty-five cents and one dollar and fifteen cents per hour, companies make a windfall profit off of labor, and the food system benefits as well. For instance, the grocery store Whole Foods, so prized for its conscious consumption, sells artisanal cheese and fish sourced from companies that use prison labor.

When we eat, we must do so knowing that our food has been held up by the system of white supremacy. And because our bodies are made of the stuff we eat, our flesh, too, is maintained by a racist food system. So we come to our gardens and dig in our soil with humility. Because as much as we want to be, we are not free of the complex and all-consuming system of oppression that bell hooks calls white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy. But eat we must, so let our eating be an act of discipline and hope. The discipline lies in learning, step by step, seed by seed, carrot by cabbage, how to feed ourselves. Because we cannot be free if we cannot eat, thus we cannot liberate ourselves without taking care of our basic need for nutrition. The hope resides in imagining with each bite the day when people live on lands their ancestors called home, and know that when they take food from the soil they stand upon lands known and tended for millennia by indigenous people.

There is no straight line to a just food system. But by learning from the history of white supremacy in the food system, we can begin to imagine new ways of taking care of our bodies. That will have to include allying with native people who are advocating for land. It will involve rejecting a logic of war against bodies of people, against pests, against the earth herself. It will mean moving beyond a capitalist logic of profit that requires productivity at the cost of the depleted bodies of workers, at the annual loss of billions of tons of soil. This will require work at the level of the body politic. Those who want to change the food system, it seems, must work at once on an individual basis as well as on the larger forces that shape the system.

An ecological metaphor is helpful here. Most plants have what scientists call a root-shoot ratio. This is the ratio of roots and leaves needed respectively, to harvest nutrients from the soil and to harvest energy from the sun. The plant requires both of these sources for life, growth, and reproduction. This root-shoot ratio changes over the lifetime of the plant as it grows and puts energy towards making pollen or seeds. But despite the change, the plant still has ultimate need for both the damp minerals belowground and the sunny energy aboveground. While sunlight capture is largely an individualistic and sometimes competitive endeavor amongst plants, the underground scene is quite opposite. Most plants have a high degree of interaction with the soil community - indeed, most depend upon a variety of soil microbes and fungi to survive. In addition, many species, especially trees, connect to each other by mycelium that penetrate the roots of many individuals, linking them in an underground network of shared nutrients and information. Examples abound. Forester Peter Wohlleben found that an ancient beech tree, long past having leaves to supply its own energy, was fed via its connect to other beeches by its root system.

In the same way, food justice proponents will have to establish their own ratio of working for system change at a large scale and smaller scale, more personal food practices to support their own bodies. Like plants, we must grow in our ability to nourish ourselves. Where plants increase their leaf mass in order to eat the sun, for us this means supporting local food sources, growing our own foods, and learning sustainable wild harvesting techniques. And yet, that is only half the work. We must also go deep, like plants, networking ensures that the larger food system, like a forest ecosystem, is healthy and promotes systemic wellbeing. This may seem daunting, as if I am advocating for a back and forth pendulum of energy. But rather than a frenetic pendulum, let this be like the root-shoot growth of a plant--sometimes expending more energy in one direction, but always sustaining the growth that has occurred opposite. Let our hands stay soil-tarnished from the garden while our feet yet remain strong from the march of all our bodies together toward a system that tends more deeply to all of us. Grow together, grow alone. Feed your body, yes, but also feed the bodies of others, and feed the land that sustains you. This is what it means to be human and to live on the body of the earth. This is what we do with our bodies.



David Pritchett is a healthcare practitioner, ecologist, and activist who writes at the intersection of these interests. His articles have been featured in Permaculture Magazine , Permaculture Design Magazine , The Other Journal , Missio Dei Journal , and in Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice (Wipf and Stock, 2016).