Abstract
Sociologist Shamus Khan writes about life of the modern food system, and how it may well be the greatest triumph of capitalism.
Keywords
There is, perhaps, no greater triumph of capitalism than the culinary realm. Consider supermarkets. Immediately upon entering we are confronted with produce. How refreshing; healthy foods for a healthy lifestyle! But take another look at that banana and recall the recent news about Chiquita providing 3,000 AK-47s and millions of rounds of ammunition to militias that murdered their farm laborers. Bananas are ubiquitous in grocery stores because they have one of the highest profit margins of any food product (and are among the highest gross sale items in grocery stores). Produce overall has the highest gross profit margin; it’s first as you enter not because markets wants you to be healthy, but because they want profits. Even though bananas often must be shipped across the globe, it costs mere pennies to cultivate and bring them to market. Why? Armed insurgencies against workers help keep labor costs down and the savings are passed on to the consumer.
Strawberries, whose back-breaking, finger-pricking picking is done by temporary migrants, sit nearby the bananas, as do tomatoes that are picked at their height of green firmness and then treated with gas in the shipping process so they appear bright red and ripe as you stroll by. A walk through a grocery story belies the fact that foods have seasons; the global flow of goods means that tomatoes can and will be there for you year-round, and not simply during the two months they actually grow in your region. The pictures of green fields that surround you on the produce section banners are absent of farm laborers, who, brutalized by low wages and terrorized by foremen, are kicked out of our nation the moment they stir up trouble or have the misfortune to physically suffer from their labor. There is a grave cost to our uninterrupted access to year-round cheap produce, and it is the laborers at the base of the production process who suffer it.
Armed insurgencies against workers help keep labor costs down and the savings are passed on to the consumer.
It is also our environment. Next in our supermarket tour is the animal, far removed from any hint of the festering stench of the feedlot and the routinized violence of the slaughterhouse and sanitized for you in its plastic wrap. The cheapest way to feed livestock is through monoculture: the rotation of just two crops—corn and soy. Countless acres of land have been ruined by this practice, but it’s cheaper. And the food makes the animals sick, but the pharmaceutical industry has stepped in to keep them alive long enough to pack on the pounds so that we can kill and market them quickly. In the long run it’s terribly inefficient. But in the short-run, the profits are incentive enough to justify the absurdities.
“But I buy locally sourced foods, ethically raised, from my local market,” you might protest. So do I. It’s nice to be able to afford this. What about the (cheap) food items the poor buy to feed themselves? The average person on food stamps receives $5 a day for food. Next time you’re at your farmers’ market, try to buy enough food for a week for $35. Or ask yourself, “how far is the market from my neighborhood?” For me, it’s about a block and a half away. Poorer New Yorkers would have to travel miles. Capitalism provides the wealthier a way to buy moral purity by periodically participating in specialty markets. We don’t transform the system, but we do feel better about ourselves.
Responsible food shopping can be exhausting, so let’s not cook tonight. We’ll go out to eat. Perhaps we’ll go to an authentic Chinese restaurant, say in Queens, where a delicious bowl of soup is put before me for a mere $5. Why so cheap? Probably because the workers have had their passports seized by their employers and will work for years paying off their migration debt in a modern form of indentured servitude.
Food can create community. It can also be a celebration of culture, artistry, and a daily enticement of the senses. But let us not forget that every time we eat we are implicated in the great capitalist triumph that is our food system. And that system is a deeply violent one.