80 The Global Food System
As a material substance with a crucial balance of nutrients and toxins, food has
immediate biological implications. Unlike clothing, piercing, or body paint, food
is literally transformed and becomes part of the human body. Thus, the saying ‘you
are what you eat’, has several layers of meaning, from the symbolic to the material.
But the absence of food has profound implications as well. The physiological need
in humans to eat every day makes access to food a crucial issue, and has compelled
human beings throughout history to develop social and technical systems of provi-
sion that aim to ensure stable food supplies through domestication, exploitation,
reciprocity and trade. It also makes us vulnerable, weak and easy to control. In this
way, food is entrenched in structures of subordination, governance and domina-
tion.
Second, as food and eating are routinized on an everyday basis, food becomes
a convenient medium for the expression of social and ceremonial distinctions, and
for naturalizing relations of community and hierarchy. As such, the symbolic
meaning of food in any given context may be seen as sedimentation of historical
structures of power and inequality that have been operating through generations
(Bourdieu, 1979; Mintz, 1985). As a symbolic system of meaning, food is there-
fore both a structured and a structuring force.
Third, humanity’s attempts to enhance bodily functions and abilities through
scientific means have paved the way for what in the field of food is captured by the
term ‘nutritional science’. As nutrition has become one of the most significant
fields of preventive medicine, it serves also as a structuring agent in relation to food
choice. In this way, scientific nutrition advice may run contrary to agricultural
interests (Kjærnes, 1993), food industry (Nestlé, 2002) and even national food
and nutrition policies (Lien, 1990). In this way, connections between food and
body also give rise to conflicts between policy interests, business and science.
The Legacy of Anthropology
As anthropologists have demonstrated since the inception of the discipline, food is
a profound medium of reciprocity that marks and distinguishes persons and rela-
tions through acts of sharing, giving and receiving (Malinowski, 1922; Mauss,
1925). Add to this the significance of food in systems of classification (Leach,
1964; Douglas, 1966, 1975; Lévi-Strauss, 1970), the social organization of labour
in food production (Richards, 1939; Evans-Pritchard, 1940), food in religious and
healing rituals (Archetti, 1997), and the precarious interplay between the extrac-
tion of food resources and the environment (Rappaport, 1968), and we have a
rough idea of the various ways in which food would make its way into holistically
oriented anthropological monographs of the 20th century (for an overview, see
Douglas, 1984; Murcott, 1988; Sutton, 2001). Food’s importance as a social
mediator, a cultural symbol and a natural resource is readily apparent in holistic
studies of small-scale societies.