Food industry concentration, or the control of a relatively small number of corporations over the food system, has relatively deep historical origins, even if it has reached unprecedented levels since the 1980s. It is not simply that a handful of firms control a particular industry or crop. It is that all levels of the broader food system, including not only the production, processing, trade, and sale of food products but also of farm machinery, seeds, agrochemicals, and other inputs, are now controlled by relatively few and exceptionally large companies. This high level of concentration has determined the broad contours of our industrial food system, as well as our ability to transform it, while also having profound implications for food workers, farmers, consumers, animals, and the environment. This is true of the United States but is the case globally as well.
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Corporate Concentration in the Food Industry
Steve Striffler
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Culinary Tourism
José López Ganem and Alicia Kennedy
For practitioners and scholars, culinary tourism is recognized as the voluntary decision to interact with foodways and foodstuffs outside of an individual’s daily places or habits.
The seminal definition for the contemporary field of food studies was articulated by Lucy M. Long, who encapsulated culinary tourism as “the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other” (Culinary Tourism). Culinary tourists are understood as individuals who actively and willingly seek to construct meaning and value through an aesthetic appreciation of food.
Either through the act of moving themselves from one physical place to another or by incorporating “foreign” or “unusual” food items into a habitual physical place, the agent of culinary tourism—the culinary tourist, popularly conceptualized as a global foodie or food trotter—makes food, drink, or substance preparation and consumption the vehicle for personal value creation, either through a solo experience or within the broader context of a group similarly focused on such aesthetic appreciation.
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Edible Insects
Gina Louise Hunter
Insects have been an important part of the human diet from time immemorial. Although they are not a common food item in Western cultures, insects contribute to the traditional diets of many peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where they are valued for their sustenance, taste, and medicinal properties. Research on edible insects includes historical and archeological investigations, ethnographic descriptions of insect foods in indigenous cultures, and studies of insect food farming, commercialization, and acceptability. Like other animals, insects are a source of protein and fat macronutrients and many vitamin and mineral micronutrients. Given an increasing global demand for sustainable protein, insects are a potential food resource for the future. Agricultural development experts, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, suggest that farmed insects are environmentally sustainable because they offer high feed conversion efficiency, require less space, use less water, and need fewer chemical inputs than conventional livestock. Insects generally have a short life cycle, reproduce rapidly, and can subsist on a varied diet, sometimes including organic wastes and agricultural or industrial byproducts. Given that insects are not commonly eaten in Europe and Euro-America, much of the literature is written from the perspective of noninsect eaters on the potential and challenges of a novel or alternative food. Insect-based food items on the European, British, and American markets face regulatory challenges and lack of consumer acceptance.
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Food and Ethnicity
Krishnendu Ray
Ethnic food is a slippery concept, used in various anglophone publications by the 1960s, peaking in the 1980s, and no longer used in major US metropolitan newspapers by the 2020s. It came into play in other parts of the world about a generation later and continues to be used unevenly. It is typically used to identify cuisines that are not considered mainstream or archetypical of a region or a nation. Inferiority (or lack of class), cheapness, spiciness, and authenticity are the typical tropes used to judge such cuisines. It has always had the stench of primitivism and Orientalism attached to it and is increasingly considered outdated, such as terms like “Negro” or “Oriental.” The term was historically used to describe a cuisine that is different horizontally, such as Thai, Indian, or Chinese, but it also carried a hierarchical connotation, where French or Nordic cuisines were hardly ever named as ethnic anywhere in the world. New York City offers a case study in examining the history and hierarchy between food and ethnicity.
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Food and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Program
Jenny L. Herman and Raúl Matta
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Since the first inscriptions of food-related elements in UNESCO’s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICH) in 2010, the concept of food-as-heritage has grown and transformed, much like the field of food studies, to encompass an ever-expanding array of foodways, culinary products, and practices across the globe. Today’s social, digital, economic, and ecological realities have greatly transformed from the moment of these first inscriptions, which listed the “Gastronomic meal of the French,” the Mediterranean diet,” and “traditional Mexican cuisine.” Tracing its roots back to the 1989 “Recommendation in the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore,” and passing through the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, we can trace a shift from valorizing and giving visibility to cultural elements, with an eye on the Global South (departing from the dominant Western concept of built heritage, focused on churches or monuments) to an intention to preserve cultural practices through education and generational transmission. Food, however, according to Chérif Khaznadar (senior advisor for the French Cultural Commission to UNESCO) and other skeptics, was never intended to enter into this realm of internationally protected cultural recognition. Following inscription, critics worried about the inherent commercial component of foodways, the essentialization of practices, the impacts of tourism, and imbalances of power related to both representation and access to economic benefits. The state of UNESCO-inscribed ICH foodways today raises questions linking back to these initial concerns. This article will trace the emergence of food as part of UNESCO’s ICH program and outline key considerations and debates surrounding foodways and processes of heritagization. From discussing the concept of universal values and questioning top-down initiatives and power structures to exploring nation-branding, commodification, and links with culinary nationalism, this article presents the complexities of safeguarding food and of striking a balance between tradition and innovation. These discussion points will return to central questions relevant to the broader heritage field: By whom, for whom, and for what purposes is inscription sought?
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Food as a Weapon
Ellen Messer and Marc J. Cohen
The use of food as a weapon is as old as written records. Siege, blockade, and starvation are well-documented military strategies, as are political strategies that use food as a tool to attract supporters and dissuade opposition. In the 20th and 21st centuries, societies attempted to limit the use of food deprivation as a tool of war. In this time period, international groups also increased humanitarian efforts to monitor and redress the nutritional harms connected to violent conflict. International human rights principles, as supporting architecture, assert that adequate food is a basic individual right for all human beings and that freedom from hunger is an achievable, measurable, and sustainable development goal. Because of the long-term history of weaponizing food, recent institutional efforts are in place to identify, measure, prevent, and redress harms. These include legal frameworks; economic, food, and development politics; nongovernmental, civil-society mobilizations; and community organizing around peace, food, and nutrition.
Because the destructive impacts on human health, environment, economic livelihoods, and societies endure for decades to come, the concept of “food as a weapon” can be broadened to “food wars,” which encompass connections between food insecurity and conflict in both directions.
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Grocery Stores and Supermarkets
Craig Upright
The modern grocery store is an institution that could not have existed in earlier time periods. Its creation required the development of reliable distribution systems, preservation technologies, and cultural changes related to the purchase and consumption of food products. The constellation of contemporary grocery store operations is incredibly varied: while dominated by large multinational organizations that often seek vertical integration, grocery stores in the Global North also rely on many types of smaller actors more intimately tied to the communities they serve. The distribution of grocery store outlets often reflects the systems of stratification that exist in all communities across the globe.
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The History and Roots of Tea
Markman Ellis, Matthew Mauger, and Richard Coulton
Tea’s modern ubiquity as an international drink belies its origin as a plant—typically one of two varieties of Camellia sinensis—grown, harvested, and prepared for consumption in various Southeast Asian countries for millennia. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, historians with interests across the fields of trade, botany, and cultural studies have become increasingly interested in this remarkable transition and the perspectives it affords on global histories of labor, imperialism, mechanization, consumption, production, and transculturation (to name but a few). Tea’s foodways are both ancient, associated with cultural practices and origin stories found across the countries in which it flourished as an indigenous species, and profoundly modern. It is the ultimate convenience product, mass-produced and packaged in the form of cheap tea bags and bottles of the soft drink known as “ice tea.” Indeed, as a product of international trade since the early 16th century, tea has shown an astonishing ability to transform and redefine itself.
European travelers to China and Japan first encountered tea in the mid-16th century, and it was probably first imported into Europe in small quantities at around this time by Portuguese traders active in the area around Macau (澳門). In Great Britain, where drinking tea became recognized as a domesticated component of national behavior by the early 19th century, tea was first advertised for sale in the late 1650s. Across the 18th century, it increasingly became the focal point of the lucrative “East India” trade (as Europeans conceived maritime commerce with the Indian Ocean world), and its taxation as an article of consumption encouraged the formation of violent smuggling networks. During the same period, the establishment of a semi-regular overland trading network between China and Russia enabled tea to reach the eastern extremities of Europe via a caravan trade that was to persist until the mid-19th century. In the colonies of North America, tea became in the 1780s a focal point of the movement for independence, culminating in a series of protests remembered in national mythology as “the Boston Tea Party.” The rapid growth of the transoceanic trade in the 19th century, together with British imperial ambitions in India and beyond, led to the establishment of tea monocultures in India, Sri Lanka, and, in Africa, Malawi and Kenya, further extended in the colonial infrastructure of other European nations. The emergence of these tea plantations leveraged both the development of intensive practices of cultivation and mechanization (which were to shape global tea-production in the 20th century), and the consolidation of ownership and production by multinational corporations which continue to dominate the tea trade into the 21st century.
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Indian Ocean Trade
Jeremy A. Simmons
The Indian Ocean, with its annual monsoons, has served as an arena for human movement and the conveyance of foodstuffs for millennia. Climatological factors give rise to numerous distinct hydroclimates, ranging from the Nile River Valley to the Yemeni highlands and the vast watershed of the Himalayas. These environments supported domestication, cultivation, and redistribution of multiple staples, including wheat and rice. Spices, alongside aromatics, natural fibers, and organic dyes, were among the most popular items of trade: for example, black peppercorns, cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, and cassia. Littoral populations throughout the Indian Ocean world (often derided as ichthyophages, or “fish eaters”) relied upon local fisheries for their own sustenance and commodities of trade—not only the daily catch of fishermen but also corals and pearls collected by divers and foragers.
The early modern period heralded a distinct change. For one, foodways radically changed with the introduction of plant species from the Americas and the formation of a wider “Indo-Atlantic” world. Although acquisition of spices motivated Europeans to establish colonial footholds throughout the Afro-Asian world, increased interest in and (forced) cultivation of stimulants emerged to sustain the changing tastes of consumers (e.g., sugar, coffee, and tea). Despite the economic and ecological transformations brought on by modernity, the Indian Ocean remains a region of intense activity, its many cuisines preserving a shared, interconnected past.
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The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil
Wilder Robles
The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) is presently one of the largest, best organized, and most influential social movements in Latin America. The MST is one of the key founders of the Via Campesina, or Peasant Way, a global peasant movement dedicated to the struggle for agrarian reform. The MST is well known for linking both political and economic activism to contest authoritarian power structures in the Brazilian countryside. Agrarian reform is one of the most important objectives in this process. Since its formation in 1984, the MST has maintained the view that agrarian reform is fundamental to reversing Brazil’s long history of systemic marginalization of peasants and Indigenous people. Colonialism left a sad historical legacy of extreme concentration of land in the hands of a privileged few, and this situation has not changed. Brazil’s agrarian structure is controlled by a small minority that continue to promote a large-scale export-oriented agricultural economy. Currently, Brazil is the fourth largest agricultural economy in the world, exporting a high volume of diverse agricultural products such as soybean, beef, sugarcane, citrus fruit, and poultry to global markets. Yet, the intensive expansion of this export-oriented agricultural economy has caused immense human suffering and environmental destruction. These challenges have prompted the MST to propose a new vision of agrarian reform that integrates political and economic activism. Without comprehensive agrarian reform, Brazil will continue to be an inequitable society.
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Latinx Immigrant Workers’ Challenges and Collective Responses in the Rural US Food System
Diego Thompson
A large body of literature has shown immigrant workers in the US food system experience and deal with significant problems that are often worsened in rural areas. The state and the private sector have created conditions that rely on cheap immigrant labor in the food industry. Paradoxically, this same much-needed labor force is subjected to strict immigration policy and enforcement—including raids, detentions, and deportations—and poor and living conditions. Immigration control and struggles experienced by immigrant workers in different sectors of the food chain, are more pronounced in rural areas where immigrants often lack of supportive resources. The struggles of historically marginalized groups in the food system and rural communities in the US are well-documented but more attention is needed on how rural immigrant workers deal with their challenges. Furthermore, more research is needed to examine immigrant workers’ collective actions and the development of alliances. Studies have shown that collective agency does not necessarily need to come from traditional labor organizing or unions which may face barriers in working with immigrants in rural contexts. There are some experiences in the poultry and dairy industry, showing that worker-driven organizations with focus on immigration, human rights, and/or social justice issues, have been able to create solutions for immigrant workers’ needs and challenges in US rural contexts. Some of these cases have shown how Latinx immigrant workers have been able to develop and foster resilience in times of uncertainty and challenges, working with immigrant organizations and allies. Experiences from different regions of the US have shown that there are complex and vulnerable realities that immigrants in rural areas often experience which require special attention and need to be addressed before unfair or precarious labor conditions are challenged. It is important for scholars and community practitioners to pay more attention to how immigrant workers and communities can develop resilience and the capability to adapt and create better conditions in times of increasing anti-immigration political rhetoric and uncertainty.
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Low-Wage Labor in Distribution Sectors of the Food Economy
Jennifer Parker
Low-wage distribution workers are essential to the food economy. In a globalizing world, the distance between sites of production and consumption expands as firms search the world for more diverse and profitable sources of food. Truckers, seafarers, and warehouse employees dedicate their working hours to the safe transport and storage of food, often in dangerous and treacherous conditions, yet they remain largely invisible to consumers. Many of these workers face precarious employment conditions—temporary, unstable, and insecure work with little or no employer-provided benefits—emblematic of jobs in the neoliberal labor market.
Capitalist features of the modern food chain, including advancements in technology, the growth of e-commerce, and the logistics revolution, tend to prioritize speed and efficiency over workers’ well-being. From a political economy perspective, the pursuit of profit is reflected in ever-intensifying efforts to extract value from labor, introducing flexible, neo-Taylorist, algorithmic forms of employee monitoring and adopting just-in-time management logics. These changes have accompanied a deterioration of workers’ rights and conditions, making it critical in the 21st century to spotlight the human cost alongside “progress” in building a sustainable global food system.
The neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility increasingly pervades managerial practices, often contributing to labor suppression and absolving employers, including Walmart, Whole Foods, and other giant food retailers, of any obligation for employee welfare downstream in their supply chains. The conditions of workers in the global food economy are complicated by demographic inequalities, with the most socioeconomically vulnerable groups experiencing the most precarious, dangerous, and demanding conditions. This highlights the need for an intersectional approach to understanding hierarchies of exploitation in the global food economy.
Key theoretical frameworks provide insights into broader implications for labor in the food economy. Racial capitalism explains how economic development inherently pursues racialized directions, perpetuating inequalities, and employing a predominantly black, brown, and immigrant workforce at the bottom rungs of distribution sectors. Segmented labor market theory helps explains dual hiring practices, divided between “hegemonic” and “despotic” workforces, and influenced by multitier ownership structures with the rise of subcontracted “perma-temps” in warehouses, lease-to-purchase contracts/debt peonage in trucking, and agency-based competitive bidding in the unregulated international maritime market.
Theories of masculinities explain gender dynamics within male-dominated sectors like trucking and seafaring where men struggle in bottom-level, precarious jobs in order to maintain their breadwinner status back home. The concept of gendered-racial capitalism has shown to be a formidable research framework for examining how distribution labor is organized, exploited, and shaped by gender, race, and class. The structural power of distribution workers at critical “choke points” in the global supply chain is an important area of interest in discussions around low-wage food workers’ rights to basic human dignity and the potential for improvement in their conditions. Finally, it is essential to question what progress truly means and for whom it benefits.
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Processed Foods
Garrett M. Broad
Traditional forms of food processing have deep roots in human evolutionary history and across ancient civilizations. Food-processing innovations that began in the 18th century played a key role in spurring the Industrial Revolution and shaping the development of the global food system as we know it. Starting from the mid-20th century, novel food-processing technologies led to an abundance of processed foods in the marketplace, spurred on by industry-led research applied in the service of meeting increasingly large-scale consumer demands. Processed foods are championed by some as a crowning achievement of the modern food industry, a central element in a system that provides safe, affordable, and convenient foods to diverse populations around the world. To others, processed foods are most notable for their social, environmental, and public health downsides. Specifically, advocates of the NOVA food classification system, proposed and developed in the early 21st century, have raised concerns about the uniquely pernicious impacts of what they deem “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs)—industrial food formulations designed for maximum convenience and palatability—and have called for regulations to rein in UPF production and consumption. Critics of the NOVA framework, however, call into question the scientific validity and public policy utility of the UPF category. These opposing stakeholder perspectives reflect a combination of both fact-based and value-oriented differences of opinion.
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Proteins and Meat
Laura-Elena Keck
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Proteins held a special position in 19th-century nutritional debates: “Discovered” in the mid-1800s, they were thought to be the source of muscle energy and seemed to offer solutions to many of the problems and challenges of the industrial age. Meat, in particular, was praised by doctors and nutrition experts as a protein-rich food that could help to combat malnutrition, shape more efficient human bodies, and enhance industrial and military performance—serving not only the needs of the individual but also the interests of the nation state. Meat consumption was also associated with normative concepts of masculinity and “civilization” and was frequently cited as a reason—and justification—for colonialism. In this new equation, meat equaled proteins equaled strength. This attitude slowly started to change in the early 1900s: A growing number of nutrition experts joined early critics—vegetarians and nutrition reformers—in advocating the use of more “efficient” protein and energy sources, while excessive meat consumption increasingly came to be identified as a risk factor for disease. Nevertheless, today we can see many of the 19th-century preoccupations with proteins, meat, “civilization,” and masculinity lingering or re-emerging in dietary trends like the “paleo diet,” protein-enriched “functional foods,” or books written by vegan bodybuilders. Transcending nutritional debates, these phenomena are symptomatic of broader attitudes toward eating, health, society, and the human body.
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Spices in the Ancient World
Matthew Adam Cobb
The movement and consumption of spices and aromatics have been a feature of human history for many millennia. They have been found in contexts as diverse as early Iron Age Phoenician flasks, containing traces of cinnamon, to black peppercorns inserted into Rameses II’s nose cavity, as part of the mummification process. Traditionally, these plant products have been viewed as the preserve of the elite, at least in the Mediterranean world and parts of Europe, where many of them do not naturally grow. However, by the 1st millennium ce, thanks to a growing web of connections spanning Afro-Eurasia, especially via the Indian Ocean, a much wider range of peoples got a chance to experience spices. This impacted on everything from how their food tasted and smelled to the way in which religious and funerary rituals were performed.
Advances in archaeobotanical and the archaeological sciences enable us to build an increasingly more complex picture of the contexts in which spice consumption took place, the social paraphernalia that was associated with this, and the diversity of people involved. Moreover, these methods and bodies of data are also contributing to the identification of the spices and aromatics that were being consumed, adding more detail to the sometimes hazy picture provided by ancient authors.
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Weight-Loss Diets
Evangelia Kindinger and Katharina Vester
Weight-loss dieting refers to purposefully regulating, usually limiting, food intake in order to achieve a specific goal, typically focused on weight management. Weight-loss dieting practices can involve reducing calorie intake, limiting portions, or following a particular eating pattern or regimen—for example, cutting carbohydrates and fats while preferring proteins. Yet dieting is much more than an individual activity. It is influenced by and mirrors a society’s power dynamics and social hierarchies that are also determined by weight and body shape. Looking particularly at the history of this phenomenon in modern industrialized societies like the United States, developments in weight-loss dieting are closely intertwined with gender and citizenship. Weight-loss dieting was a male practice in the 19th century and became a decidedly feminized practice in the 20th century. Furthermore, there have been concerns about the negative effects of weight-loss dieting as voiced by anti-diet nutritionists and the academic field of fat studies. Weight management is expressive of public discourses around health, capitalism, and body politics.
