The power of food

Philip McMichael

Agriculture and Human Values, 2000, vol. 17, issue 1, 33 pages

Abstract: In the developmentalist era,industrialization has simultaneously transformedagriculture and degraded its natural and culturalbase. Food production and consumption embodies thecontradictory aspects of this transformation. Thispaper argues that the crisis of development hasgenerated two basic responses: (1) the attempt toredefine development as a global project, includingharnessing biotechnology to resolve the food securityquestion, and (2) a series of countermovementsattempting to simultaneously reassert the value oflocal, organic foods, and challenge the attempt on thepart of food corporations and national and globalinstitutions to subject the food question to marketsolutions. It is proposed that the power of food liesin its material and symbolic functions of linkingnature, human survival, health, culture and livelihoodas a focus of resistance to corporate takeover of lifeitself. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000

Keywords: Biotechnology; Corporate regime; Development; Food security; Globalization; Market rule; Organic agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1007684827140 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:17:y:2000:i:1:p:21-33

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10460

DOI: 10.1023/A:1007684827140

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture and Human Values is currently edited by Harvey S. James Jr.

More articles in Agriculture and Human Values from Springer, The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().