The Ecopolitics of Consumption

The Food Trade

H. Louise Davis, Karyn Pilgrim, Madhudaya Sinha

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216290650
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Today's 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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Oodles of Noodles
• 3 Spectacles of Revulsion
• 4 “Pets or Food?”
• 5 “Agvocates” for Industry
• 6 The Politics of Food Behind Bars
• 7 Live Feeds
• 8 What Grows in Silicon Valley?
• 9 Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
• 10 The Political Economy of Food Production
• 11 “He Who Feeds You Will Also Impose His Will on You”
• Index
• About the Contributors