James Miller

A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat

Eric Holt-Giménez’s book is at the intersection of capitalism and our modern food
system. His argument is that each offers valuable insights into the other. That fluency in
understanding capitalism is essential to understanding why malnourishment continues
to plague modern society despite great advances in agriculture and reflectively how the
commodification of food highlights deep cracks in neoliberalism and the inequities that
result from its expansion into basic human needs.

His diagnosis of modern agriculture draws heavily on Marxist theory and its idea
of land and labour as fictitious markets. His account of early farming in New England
shows strenuous state intervention forcing small farmers off of their land to toil in early
American cities, an prototypical model of the consolidation of modern agriculture.
Ultimately he is critical of capitalism's ability to extract value from surplus labor and
notes the ways that capitalist agriculture has circumvented this shortcoming. Instead
corporations focus on the lucrative upstream and downstream exploitation of the
farmers ties to the land. Selling them the seed and inputs needed to be viable on the
open market while simultaneously controlling the buyers and refining mechanisms
necessary to sell their products. Holt-Giménez likens the process to “modern
sharecropping” and notes that the system is even able to defer the “costs of
reproduction”, or the costs of developing an agricultural laborer up to adulthood, to
developing countries. Essentially corporate interests can dominate food markets without
the risk of heavy investment required to do so directly.

Marxist theory is an interesting lens to view many of these structural problems

and many of his criticisms are extremely valid. Yet I feel as though his Marxist theory
results in oversimplification of many of the problems facing the global food system
today. He argues that food waste is a result of overproduction brought on as a result of
capitalism’s tendency to overproduce and notes that 40% of food goes to waste. He
does not however discuss the intricacies of food waste and how much waste might be
unavoidable due to the vagaries of weather causing bumper crops or how shifting
ecological challenges contribute to pest outbreaks or disease. Additionally, he argues
that land access is a purely political and not technical issue despite famine and land
access challenges occurring in a variety of political systems in the last century.

Ultimately I agree with most if not all of the author’s criticisms of our modern
agricultural system yet I disagree with the rigid framework that he diagnoses these
problems. With the enormous challenges to food security coming in the next few
decades as a result of climate and other ecological changes, not just political but also
technical solutions must be considered. I would still recommend the book but I do not
believe it to be a full prescription to modern food challenges.