82 The Global Food System
An Ethnographer who sets out to study only religion, or only technology, or only social
organisation cuts out an artificial field for inquiry, and he will be seriously handicapped
in his work. (Malinowski, 1922, p11)Malinwoski’s advice to anthropologists in the early 1920s captures what could be
seen as the most significant lesson to be learnt from anthropology in the field of
food studies today: one who sets out to study food only as consumption, produc-
tion, globalization, embodiment, nutrition, family life or economics is likely to be
trapped by the same boundaries that structure the very field that she or he tries to
illuminate. Fresh insight into contemporary dilemmas requires research that chal-
lenges such sectorial boundaries. I am proposing an approach to food which resists
such preconceived distinctions and follows instead the connections that food
allows humans to make. Just as Appadurai (1986) suggests we might study the
‘social life of things’, food may be followed through its various entanglements,
across boundaries both legal and moral, beyond and between nations, bodies, per-
sons and nutrients. If we do that, we will find that what appears as controversies
about food often turns out to be controversies about something else.
Mary Douglas once said, referring to consumption more generally, that ‘the
essential function of [food] is its capacity to make sense’ (Douglas and Isherwood,
1979, p40). I argue that the essential function of food is its capacity to make con-
nections. Approached holistically, food effectively dissolves most preconceived dis-
tinctions between nature and culture, production and consumption, morals and
markets, family and society, the individual and the collective, body and mind. At
the same time, it remains a profound medium of reciprocity, constituting mean-
ingful relationships at different levels and of different kinds. It is precisely through
this capacity to make connections that food has become a highly charged political
object.
To state that food is a political object is another way of drawing attention to
the fact that many relations that are constituted by and through the medium of
food are also power relations, and should be analysed as such. Our approach to
power relations goes beyond, or even bypasses, a focus on the formal institutions
of the state (Gledhill, 1994; Vincent, 2002). In light of the crisis of legitimacy
characterizing political life in general, and the deregulation and liberalization cur-
rently affecting food in particular, a focus on policies, bureaucracies and politicians
would simply be too narrow to grasp significant issues and changes. Politics, like
food, is embedded in social practice, discourse, controversy and conventions that
are not always labelled ‘political’. Thus, our approach to the politics of food is
based on the premise that ‘action which contests existing power relations may take
many forms’, and that much of this is ‘in constant danger of slipping from view,
simply because of its everyday and inchoate quality’ (Gledhill, 1994, p23). Draw-
ing attention to some of the less obvious ways in which food is politicized, we seek
to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of both politics and food.