Stowe Boyd on Hacking the Food System: Social Food - Taking Food Back From Corporations

I wrote a piece for Danielle Gould’s Food+Tech Connect, in a series on Hacking The Food System. A Sample:

We have treated food as a commodity for centuries, however, and the dangers associated with that no longer surprise, but are instead simply taken as a given. Farmers farm, and their output is swept into global markets managed by multinational corporations, converted into foodstocks, and distributed as the money flow decides. We have lived in market-based economies so long that we almost cannot imagine alternatives.

However, the growing local food movement has started to bring human scale back into how we think about food. Instead of simply accepting the global agribusiness markets as being fundamental, people have started to see them as social conventions organized around certain political and financial conventions. The worldwide food markets that dominate the production and distribution of food are not gravity: it is a part of the current social contract, and no more a given of the universe than driving on the right hand side of the road, or starting the calendar from the birth of a certain religious figure approximately 2000 years ago.

So, what is the alternative, if any?

A philosophical shift is happening, at an almost invisible aspect of our society, where wholesome and safe food is being reconsidered as a foundation of life, like other rights we have come to expect like free speech, clean air and water, and public education. (Note that these other aspects of a free society are under stress, with economic forces leading to dramatic impacts on US education, and the wholesale fear of terrorism curtailing free speech. And I won’t even start on ecology.)

A growing but diffuse food movement is trending toward a return to local and personal food production. It is my belief and hope that the use of purpose-built social tools — food tech — will accelerate the trend toward personal and regional food self-sufficiency.

Go read the piece, and the others in the series.

7 notes

rosasay liked this
selloutsamizdat said: You’re missing the big issue: cost. Locally produced food is a luxury for many people. For $25 at my neighborhood farmer’s market, I can buy eggs, apples, lettuce, a steak and a squash. I can get the same food at my supermarket for $15.
politicsplus liked this
frankcampanella liked this
continuum liked this
purplegem reblogged this from stoweboyd
hopinbitch reblogged this from stoweboyd
stoweboyd posted this