e-flux Food and Agriculture Reader

Maybe it’s time to see how the sausage is made. Chances are that in the last couple years, your life has been turned upside down by a pandemic, a war, an economic meltdown, or some combination of these. And you may feel that whatever you were lucky enough to avoid may already be on its way to you. As the coming years are sure to bring more uncertainty, maybe it’s time to prepare? Let’s try to consider how our basic needs are met, as the individual and collective bodies that we are. Many of us have grown accustomed to an era in which a global logistical orchestra serves our needs and whims, bringing food to our mouths with surgical precision. Especially for cosmopolitan urbanites used to traveling, sampling exotic cuisine, or spending money freely, these delivery mechanisms may appear to have created the ultimate hostage situation. Is it time to bite the invisible hand that feeds us? This fragile political ecosystem has something in common with the fragility of the natural ecosystem when forced to supply illusions of abundance. Maybe it’s time to see how the sausage is made. In e-flux Food and Agriculture Reader, authors from around the world reflect on food and agriculture as foundational expressions of life—as sociality, history, and entanglement. By attending closely to something that is the bedrock of security and survival, a world emerges where power over production and consumption can be organized less like a hegemonic system and more like a daily routine. Attending more closely to systems of survival opens the door to another kind of abundance, one that always evades scarcity. Food is absolutely political, but food is also fundamentally pleasurable and social. Hannah Arendt allegedly asked her students about the difference between love and desire. She then answered her own question: If you desire strawberries, you eat them. If you love strawberries, you grow them yourself. Contributors Autonomous farming collectives, Genaro Amaro Altamirano, Mary Walling Blackburn, Carolina Caycedo, Sophie Chao, Lia Dostlieva, Alix Guibert, Mythri Jegathesan, Ou Ning, Christian Nyampeta, Elizabeth Povinelli, Enrique Del Risco, Martha Rosler, Vivien Sansour, Pelin Tan, Rachel Vaughn, and others. Copublished by e-flux journal