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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The Ethics of Veganism and Plant-Based Diets
Carlo Alvaro
Humans have been consuming meat and other animal products for millennia. Although people have been following vegetarian diets for just as long, for the past fifty years or so, many academic philosophers, as well as laypeople, have been arguing against the consumption of animal products and arguing for vegetarian or vegan diets. There are distinct differences between veganism, vegetarianism, and plant-based diets. There are also various ethical views in twenty-first century discussions concerning diets, as well as the ethical, environmental, and social implications of veganism and plant-based diets. As of the 2020s, lab-grown meat and the meaning and future of veganism has gained attention in the cultural consciousness.
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Family Farm Myths and the Effacement of Labor
Adam Calo
The debate on the role of family farmers in global food security often overlooks deep mythologies that shape our understanding of the food system and constrain our policy imagination. Two dominant myths present family farmers as either noble stewards of the land or as struggling, inefficient peasants. Both myths obscure the critical role of labor in agriculture. Labor relations in farming, whether involving unpaid family members, local knowledge-intensive practices, hired exploited workers, or mechanization, are the forces that shape the social-ecological balance of the food system. The myth of the family farm forces attention on who manages the land rather than the social-ecological relations that ultimately determine the fate of the food system. While objective measurements of family farm contributions are valuable, they cannot resolve the underlying power of myths. Instead, food studies in this area should focus on constructing new myths that highlight the labor and laborers in the food system, fostering a narrative that supports sustainable and equitable agricultural practices.
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Food and Philosophy
Andrea Borghini
The philosophy of food is an emerging field of contemporary philosophical scholarship, which distinguishes itself for its highly inter- and cross-disciplinary orientation as well as for the contamination of different schools and traditions of philosophy. Initially preoccupied with core issues concerning food ethics (e.g., vegetarianism and the ethics of agriculture) and food aesthetics (e.g., the nature of gustatory experience as well as its aesthetic value), the philosophy of food has since expanded to encompass a wide range of debates linked to food production, consumption, and representation. The list of topics includes, among others and in no particular order: food systems vis-à-vis climate change and environmental ethics; the ethics of dieting and obesity; food and cultural appropriation; questions concerning the identity of specific food items (e.g., natural foods, recipes, geographical indications); the aesthetic worth of specific beverages (among the most studied, wine, coffee, beer, whiskey); broad conceptions of food justice as found in local food movements, feminist approaches to the study of food, and social gastronomy. This list testifies not only to the broad spectrum of questions that philosophers have taken up, but also to the numerous methodologies that they have employed to address them.
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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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Indigenous Foodways among Native Americans
Christina Gish Hill
Native peoples of North America have developed foodways over centuries of living in relationships with particular landscapes. These foods have emerged from detailed knowledge of the landscape gained through careful observation over the generations. This knowledge includes maintaining a sustainable relationship with the environment to ensure consistent food sources in some unforgiving landscapes. The advent of contact with European settlers in North America and the eventual insertion of Native peoples into a global capitalist economy dramatically affected Indigenous people’s relationship with the environment, impacting access to food using precontact mechanisms. Colonization of Indigenous peoples throughout North America altered their access to healthy, culturally appropriate foods in many ways, leading to severely degraded health in Native communities. Beginning in the early 21st century, Indigenous people throughout North America began to reclaim and rejuvenate precontact foodways in a quest to repair physical and emotional well-being, connect more deeply with ceremony, reanimate local economies, heal damaged environments, and ultimately work toward food sovereignty.
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Natural Food
Michael S. Kideckel
The question of what makes food natural or unnatural has spawned controversy for generations. Many people desire “natural food,” but all people struggle to define it. Its definition has been the subject of marketing lawsuits and government hearings. Within Europe and the United States, especially, people have turned to the phrase “natural food” to signal religious commitments, respond to food safety regulations, market their product, and advance political objectives. The definition of natural food at any given moment illuminates much about the values, trends, and political and economic dynamics of that period.
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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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Surplus Food and the Rise of Charitable Food Provision
Charlotte Spring, Rebecca de Souza, and Kayleigh Garthwaite
Many wealthy but unequal countries have seen a significant expansion in systematized charitable food provision, usually in the form of food banks and food pantries. The use of food charity as a way to manage both food surplus and household food insecurity was pioneered in the United States at a time of cuts to cash-based welfare entitlements. It has expanded to Canada, Europe, Australia, and a growing number of middle-income countries, often in the wake of socio-ecological crisis including recession and pandemic, but also ideological shifts around effective and just solutions to poverty and inequality. While food charity is often presented as a “win-win” solution to food waste and hunger, it has been criticized from numerous perspectives that are explored in the article, including the argument that corporate-backed food charity in its currently expanding form masks structural causes and thus fails to resolve either problem, while offering a largely inadequate and undignified food offer to marginalized people. Alternative solutions include rights-based policies to ensure people’s access to basic needs, mutual aid in the face of systemic precarity, and movements for food sovereignty as means to address both ecological and social harms caused by existing food production and distribution systems.
