The Ecopolitics of Consumption

The Food Trade

Edited by H. Louise Davis; Karyn Pilgrim and Madhudaya Sinha - Contributions by Nicole Anae; Cori Brewster; Daniel Grinberg; Robert King; Christopher Miles; Salvador Jiménez Murguía; Nancy Smith; Walt Vanderbush and Melanie Ziegler

Today’s highly industrialized and technologically controlled global food systems dominate our lives, shaping our access and attitudes towards food and deeply influencing and defining our identities. At the same time, these food systems are profoundly and destructively impacting the health of the environment and threatening all of us, human and nonhuman, who must subsist in ecological conditions of increasing fragility and scarcity. This collection examines and exposes the myriad ways that the food systems, driven by global commodity capitalism and its imperative of growth at any cost, increasingly controls us and conforms us to our roles as consumers and producers. This collection covers a range of topics from the excess of consumers in the post-industrial world and the often unacknowledged yet intrinsic connection of their consumption to the growing ecological and health crises in developing nations, to topics of surveillance and control of human and nonhuman bodies through food, to the deep linkages of cultural values and norms toward food to the myriad crises we face on a global scale.

Lexington Books

Pages: 228 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-4985-1995-3 • Hardback • December 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)

978-1-4985-1997-7 • Paperback • April 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-1996-0 • eBook • December 2015 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: Political Science / Public Policy / Environmental Policy, Social Science / General, Social Science / Human Geography, Social Science / Environmental Geography

The Ecopolitics of Consumption

The Food Trade

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Today’s highly industrialized and technologically controlled global food systems dominate our lives, shaping our access and attitudes towards food and deeply influencing and defining our identities. At the same time, these food systems are profoundly and destructively impacting the health of the environment and threatening all of us, human and nonhuman, who must subsist in ecological conditions of increasing fragility and scarcity. This collection examines and exposes the myriad ways that the food systems, driven by global commodity capitalism and its imperative of growth at any cost, increasingly controls us and conforms us to our roles as consumers and producers. This collection covers a range of topics from the excess of consumers in the post-industrial world and the often unacknowledged yet intrinsic connection of their consumption to the growing ecological and health crises in developing nations, to topics of surveillance and control of human and nonhuman bodies through food, to the deep linkages of cultural values and norms toward food to the myriad crises we face on a global scale.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 228 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-4985-1995-3 • Hardback • December 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)

978-1-4985-1997-7 • Paperback • April 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-1996-0 • eBook • December 2015 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: Political Science / Public Policy / Environmental Policy, Social Science / General, Social Science / Human Geography, Social Science / Environmental Geography

Author

H. Louise Davis is associate professor of American studies and chair of the Integrative Studies Department at Miami University of Ohio.

Karyn Pilgrim is an associate professor of cultural studies at SUNY Empire State College.

Madhudaya Sinha is lecturer in the Integrative Studies Department at Miami University of Ohio.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Oodles of Noodles: Nestlé India and the Maggi Consumer Nightmare
Madhu Sinha
Chapter 3: Spectacles of Revulsion: The Challenges of Bush-Tucker as Contemporary Cuisine
Nicole Anae
Chapter 4: “Pets or Food?”: Unstable Object Lessons in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Karyn Pilgrim
Chapter 5: Agvocates for Industry: Citizen-Farmers, Social Media, and the Gendered Production of Food
Cori Brewster
Chapter 6: The Politics of Food Behind Bars
Salvador Jimenez Murgia
Chapter 7: Live Feeds: Surveillance and the Food-Industrial Complex
Daniel Grinberg
Chapter 8: What Grows in Silicon Valley? The Emerging Ideology of Food Technology
Christopher Miles & Nancy Smith
Chapter 9: Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Cuba’s Quest for Food Security in the Twenty-First Century
Melanie Zeigler and Walt Vanderbush
Chapter 10: The Political Economy of Food Production: The Low-Input Alternative to the Capital System’s High-Input Structural Dynamics
Robert Drury King
Chapter 11: He Who Feeds You Will Also Impose His Will on You”: Food Sovereignty Versus the Free Market
H. Louise Davis
About the Contributors

Reviews

A visceral, timely and deeply unsettling exploration of the malaise endemic to the global food system. This wonderful collection of essays bravely seeks to revitalize the concept of ecopolitics for our current era of neoliberal expansion.
— Tulasi Srinivas, Emerson College; Author of the award winning Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia