The Consuming Geographies of Food

Diet, Food Deserts and Obesity

Hillary J. Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136679391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Dienstleistungsbranche

The consumption and distribution of food, as well as its production, has become a major public policy issue over the past few decades; what we eat is no longer merely a private matter but carries significant externalities for wider society. Its increasing significance within the public arena implies a dissonance regarding the boundaries of food; where do we draw the line between food as private and food as public? What are the rights of society to impinge upon individual food consumption, and what conflicts will ensue when this boundary is disputed?

The Consuming Geographies of Food explores these multiple issues of food across different regions of the world from the consumer's perspective. It uniquely explicates the factors that lead customers towards certain typologies of consumption and towards certain types of retailing, offering a comprehensive review of the obesity problem, the phenomenon of food deserts and the issue of exclusion from a healthy diet. It then considers the effects of food on the consumer, the dynamic relationship between food and people, and the issue of food exclusion before concluding with possible futures for food consumption, from low-technology projects to high-technology scenarios.
Based on original research into food access, ethics and consumption in both developed and less-developed countries this book will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the fields of geography, economics, hospitality health, marketing, nutrition and sociology.

1 Accelerate to impact

DOI: 10.4324/9780203387801-1

Man as innovator: from hunting to farming. When tillage begins, other arts follow

Homo sapiens has secured its place as the dominant species on Earth not by natural strength but by its ability to invent and make use of tools. This has enabled us to appropriate, according to Sundquist (2008), some 45 per cent of terrestrial biological net primary production (NPP) and a further 5–10 per cent of marine NPP, far more than any other species. NPP is defined as the total chemical energy captured by plants, principally by vascular plants on land and by algae in the oceans, minus the energy liberated by plant respiration. All our bodily energy comes directly or indirectly from plants; ultimately ‘we are all grass’. Humans are not unique in using tools to enhance their food supply; primates and birds use sticks to dig for insects, rocks are widely used in the animal kingdom to break open food sources; and dolphins have been seen using conch shells to catch small fish. Learning to use new tools is also a trait not confined to humans. Elephants have been observed dropping large rocks onto electric fences to cut off the electricity (Poole, 1996). What distinguishes humans from other animals is the ability to improve tools over time; overcoming the limitations of mortality on such improvements, where acquired experience dies with the individual, by passing on the information gained from tool-use innovation, and ultimately to improve tool use to the point where tools can be used to produce other tools, a process known as technology. This process is accelerative because the more technology you have the more tools you can invent to advance technology yet further. Passing information, or technology, down the generations (across time) or down a river valley (across space) requires language; not just any language, and not even written language, but the capacity for abstract language. Many animals possess rudimentary language, to communicate and express warnings, attraction, dominance and other immediate needs; only humans have, so far as we know, the capacity for highly abstract thought. A bird can warn its companions of an intruding cat, but only so long as the offending feline is in sight of all birds. However, as Lorenz notes (1977: 160–1), if cats make no appearance for a whole generation of crows, there is no corvid form of the signifier ‘k-a-t’ to convey the concept of an absent yet existing soft furry four-legged animal with pointy ears, claws and sharp teeth that eats small birds. Only humans can pass abstract concepts such as ‘otherwise’, ‘if’ or ‘probably’ across time and space.

The point when man advanced from being a tool-user to a tool-innovator cannot be defined, but it probably was the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture that began the process. Hunting requires a wide range of tools, from spears, blowpipes and nets to the construction of pits and fish traps, as well as a certain level of forward planning; driving animals into snares for example. However, agriculture, with its seasonal harvest times, its lumpy food outputs, demands a far more regulated and anticipated future and with it a more sophisticated programme of tool use to produce ever more specialized tools. Spears can be produced directly from stones or animal bones, and blowpipes from bamboo, but a horse-drawn iron plough requires several stages of production. Agriculture requires a high level of anticipatory abstract planning. Calendars are necessary to measure out and keep track of time, water storage and irrigation systems must be constructed in advance of any drought, and seed must be divided between that for consumption and that for saving and replanting for next year's harvest. Farmers can also accumulate possessions, whereas to hunter-gatherers excess baggage is an impediment to their mobility. Once material accumulation begins, luxuries are acquired, and an immobile lifestyle becomes virtually obligatory. The gauchos, cowboys of the Argentine pampas, eschew forks because if you use a fork then you need a plate, a table, a chair, then you are living in a house with a family; better to eat with your hands and remain mobile. The invention of cooking has also been argued to be crucial to mankind's progression. Cooking, demanding the taming of fire, breaks down molecules in the food to simpler, more easily digested forms. Cooking food makes digestion more efficient; without cooking, more nutrients are lost to gut bacteria and excretion. Cooking food means one can survive on less, or feed an energy-hungry brain; the brain accounts for over a quarter of the body's calorific requirements. Humans who cook their food can expand into food-poorer regions. Cooking sterilizes the food, killing parasites and reducing the disease burden. Cooking also softens the food; our brain judges the appeal of food not just on its taste but on its mouth-feel, its softness. With modern diets, replete with soft calorific processed foods, this feature has become a liability, encouraging us to eat unhealthily, although in prehistoric times it would have steered us towards juicy meat and away from chewy gristle. However, fire can be easily made and controlled; it demands little innovation, and even occurs naturally. Farming is what really set technology in progress.

Innovation: social and technological. Build no more fortresses, build railways

Accelerative innovation is social as well as technological. Hunter-gatherer communities tend towards a single dimensional division of society between men (hunters) and women (gatherers); in other respects the cooperation necessary to secure a successful kill produces a very egalitarian society. Farming, however, produces work specializations and class divisions. Trades such as plough-maker, guardsman, builder, fencer, woodcutter, accountant and administrator split off because specialists are more productive than generalists. Some farmers do better than others due to different skills and random weather events and social inequalities emerge. Specialization of trade requires an effective transport system, which links smaller communities into united regions, and roads transport armies just as they do goods, as the Roman Empire knew well. The famous Prussian field-marshal, Helmuth von Moltke, echoed this when he said ‘Build no more fortresses, build railways.’ Societies may resist this trend towards inequality: for example, the ancient Israelites had rules for avoiding concentration of land ownership. However, greed usually outweighs law and power elites are adept at changing norms and rules to legitimate any departure from ancestral customs. Roman law had the opposite effect to that of the ancient Israelites, tending towards concentration of land ownership. Under the Romans, abandoned land could be claimed by anyone (Seymour and Girardet, 1986: 59). Farms might be left untended because their proprietors died in war; only the Roman nobility possessed the resources to take up this land, using as labour the slaves garnered from these wars. Small family-owned farms were replaced by the latifundia; these ranged in size up to about 100 hectares, and were worked by landless labourers and slaves whose employment system laid the foundations for medieval serfdom.

Successful (or fortunate) farmers need employees; unlucky ones become landless labourers. Very good farmers control more of the food supply, perhaps ultimately the water supply through expanded land control and irrigation projects, and their eldest sons become absolute rulers of the valley kingdom. As with technology, social innovations beget more innovations; a standing army is raised to defend the granaries; the king acquires a coterie of courtiers; the rural shamans become priests and move in with the king to reinforce control of the peasants. The king's castle begets a walled town where traders gather, and urban life begins with all its luxuries and travails and complexities. Farming introduced profound social changes but mostly these changes were local or regional. Without fossil fuel-based bulk transport and away from the pre-industrial centres of civilization, communities largely practised subsistence agriculture. Surpluses from the peasants’ labour enriched the local aristocracy until climate change, famine, pestilence or war with the next valley kingdom disrupted the archic order and reset to zero the agriculture-driven inequality mechanism. Even hunter-gatherer societies might develop a ruling elite and complex class system if the (uncultivated) food supply was plentiful. Ponting (1991: 31) describes a remarkably stratified non-farming society on the Pacific coast of North America where sea lions, otters and salmon supported a settled society. They lived in communities of around a thousand, with village chiefs, barter, food storage, even slaves. Their society endured until the arrival of an industrial people from a smaller continent far to the east. Even in the twenty-first century, hunter-gathering persists in the high Arctic, the remote African rain forests and a few isolated areas of Australia and India. Subsistence agriculture continues today in the less-developed regions of Africa. The key words are ‘isolated’ and ‘less developed’; most of the world has been transformed from some imagined pristine garden into an interconnected agrisystem; transformed not merely biologically, but also societally and technologically. Farming also set us on the road to domesticating animals, not just keeping them as a food source but using them for other purposes too. Dogs would have been useful for herding cows as well as being living burglar alarms, and horses have many uses in warfare; cats were deified by the Egyptians because they preserved grain stocks from rats. Our millennia-old pet-keeping habit is less useful today when meat is becoming more expensive to produce.

Hunter-gatherer societies may have been (almost) rural, ruler-free and egalitarian but they were no Garden of Eden. Rising human populations forced many species into extinction, starting with the big slow-bree...