The Ecopolitics of Consumption: The Food Trade

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Todays 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.

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

Author Bio

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.