Groups of thought and practice as disparate as the California organic movement, the Italian slow food movement, the eat-local phenomenon, low-carbon diets, geographically protected traditional denominations of origin like Champagne and Parma ham reflecting ideals of quality, and proponents of the French concept of terroir have all attempted in different ways to bring food back from nowhere, to celebrate that which makes it locally specific, non-industrial, non-standard, and anti-capitalist . Julie Guthman has observed that while eco-labels and place-based certifications putatively re-embed lost social values in the market economy and protect them from being further eroded by neoliberal market development, such forms of resistance also reinforce the power of market dynamics through their reaction to them, and allow further penetration of capitalism into new markets . Moreover, although these efforts continue to make important gains, they remain in their truest form at the periphery of the dominant global food system. The psychological and physical divide between mainstream food production and the food consumption still continues to grow. Food luminaries ranging from journalist and professor Michael Pollan to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver have noted that we as a society no longer seem to understand what “food” truly is. The less we know about the how our food comes to arrive on our tables—how it is farmed, harvested, processed and transported, by whom, under what conditions—the more disconnected we become from the politics associated with our food. A consumer may have opinions about how farm laborers should be treated, what amount of carbon emissions should be generated by a meal, or how fresh a salad should be, ebb and flow tables but if the farm landscape and its people and technologies are out of sight and out of mind, that consumer is unable to make a link between those values and the agricultural system.
The farther away food production feels, the less empowered consumers and even regulators are to engage with food production and its challenges. Lack of attention at many levels threatens the ability of the food system to deliver to us the food we need and the deeper values that make up our society.‘Food from nowhere’ affords the consumer an unprecedented degree of choice, freed from many constraints. Modern grocery store shelves offer consumers high degrees of cosmetic quality, standardization, multi-seasonal availability, and low price . But these benefits come with a wide array of costs, the result of producing food within a corporate capitalist structure of distribution. The stable supply, large volume, and dependable quality that must be present to create food from nowhere, in turn require longer supply chains and more industrialized production to deliver them. To reduce competition, to accomplish effective transportation of fresh products across long distances and to insulate themselves from financial shocks, food companies have grown larger and more diversified. Corporate food giants like Pepsico, General Mills, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Unilever, ConAgra and Nestle grew to their present size primarily through mergers and acquisitions of smaller brands. A handful of major corporate food firms now represent hundreds of smaller brands that are still sold under their original brand names, hiding the consolidation of the market . Some of these firms have also widened their influence into adjacent market spaces such as genetic engineering, energy, seed and pesticide manufacture, and agricultural securities, while corporations such as Monsanto and Syngenta originally based in those sectors have also begun to add food to their portfolios. During the 20th century, food producing corporations also began to actively influence both regulations and public opinion through their lobbying and advertising campaigns, focused on increasing sales and not necessarily on increasing human wellbeing . 5 The result is a cluster of agri-food conglomerates that wield immense financial and political control in the global marketplace . Soon after the American colonial period closed, market forces operating in the American free market for agricultural goods incentivized the consolidation of agri-food producers into corporate conglomerates, and spurred a pattern of vertical and horizontal integration of supply chains and financialization of the agriculture industry .
The result today is that the American food system is dominated by a highly vertically integrated, highly consolidated set of agricultural markets in which corporate food companies now control the entire life cycle of production of a plant or animal in the food system . Farmers in this type of production are increasingly corporate employees rather than free operators, constrained by production contracts, and both legally and financially controlled by the vertically integrated corporations for whom they grow food products. Fresh salad greens demonstrate this rise of corporate consolidation, vertical integration, and the shift to contract farming. As with many foods, lettuce production systems exist along a spectrum from small-scale farms to immense industrialized corporate farms. Salad mixes were initially developed in California as a luxury commodity for restaurants that made their name by offering small-scale organically-grown food and emphasizing a close connection between farm and table . This packaging innovation was then copied as part of the portfolio of large corporate farms serving audiences with less concern over organic methods or farm-to-table cuisine, and the production systems behind this new commodity began to industrialize. Scholars have described the resulting bifurcated market, in which some small alternative producers still deliver fresh salads directly from farm to table, but the bulk of the market is dominated by large corporate farms run under contract, and that now operate under increasingly industrial and conventional supply chain models . Rural sociologist Thomas Lyson describes the impact of these changes thus: “The development of supply chains means that on-farm decisions will no longer be made to benefit the long-term sustainability of the farm, the good of the community, or the health of the natural resources that sustain the farm” . In such a system, the profits of agriculture are owned by the corporate conglomerate, not the farmer, and farm management decisions are also made by the corporate conglomerate, not the farmer. Distancing of human consumers from our food is thus taken to a mind-boggling extreme: Even the dwindling percentage of the population who wake up each morning on farms or whose livelihood comes directly from growing food, are not those who are in control of the way farming takes place. At the same time, the psychological and geographical distancing of consumers results in a packaged food purchasing landscape where consumers cannot tell which products come from which of the large firms, or how those products and firms may reflect their values. In both fresh and packaged foods, corporate consolidation and control of all levels of food and agriculture presents growing regulatory challenges for ensuring that food delivers on desired outcomes such as healthy environments, fair labor practices, and safe food.The 20th century’s population explosion, increasing urbanism, and new technologies for agriculture, food manufacture and food marketing gave rise to corporate food culture in the Global North. Grocery retailers and food brands consolidated, vying for control of emerging consumer markets. Capitalist industrial development over the following half century then allowed mega-corporations like Cargill, Nestle, and Unilever to amass unprecedented financial and political resources.
Vertical integration makes these corporations some of the largest agricultural producers worldwide, managing multinational supply chains and posting yearly profits larger than many smaller countries’ GDPs. These goliath corporate entities also wield considerable political power, through their size and financial importance, as well as through lobbying and direct political involvement. As the power held by these large corporations grew toward the end of the 20th century, scholars from many disciplines began pointing to a decrease in the power and influence held by nation-states . In this globally linked world where movements of capital, goods and information now happen faster and at a scale never before seen, transnational corporate interests have gained economic and political clout in a way that crossed and almost erases borders, allowing them to escape or influence regulation of their activities. Scholars have also noted that “globalization is developing in the context of a new international division of labor” as a result of the dynamics of agrarian change and the rise of capitalist farming that have occurred in the industrialized world. Different areas of the world have come to specialize in—or be trapped within—different types of goods or services within the new global market, with differential degrees of political and societal bargaining power, industrial drying racks much of which is now exerted within supply chains by means of private standards . It has even been suggested that the rise of transnational corporations may make the concept of the nation-state economically irrelevant . Using their concept of food regimes, Friedmann and McMichael posit that transnational corporations are the owners of geopolitical power now in the emerging present-day Corporate Food Regime in the same way that national governments held this geopolitical power in food regimes prior to 1970 . These trends have resulted in a weakening of public regulatory power in favor of an increasingly diffuse array of non-state actors exerting power over food and agriculture. When foods are produced and consumed in locations so far apart that they fall under different cultures, languages, political divisions, and social norms, little can be relied upon without being codified into standards that follow supply chains rather than borders . A corporation that sources a food crop from a country that has fewer or less effective environmental and labor regulations may operate there in a way that their home country would not allow . Both governments and consumers of goods in the many countries where this product eventually ends up for sale are then left unable to influence or fully regulate the activities of the transnational corporation in its broader supply chain. There are no formal public governmental entities in this interstitial space, necessitating alternative forms of non-state governance to achieve a degree of regulatory oversight where traditional state regulation cannot penetrate . In addition to—and sometimes in place of—traditional state-led public regulation, what has begun to take shape in the modern marketplace is a devolution of regulatory power from the state to an array of non-state actors. This development is not inherently problematic, and may in many cases reflects attempts to make regulation more flexible, more responsive, and less costly to pursue. However, when regulation by state regulatory authorities is replaced by quasi-governmental regulation designed and promulgated by authorities that are not publicly accountable, and for whom there are no established codes of conduct, important questions surround the resulting regulation. Private corporations, activist NGOs, and independent certification bodies have spearheaded the emergence of an array of privately-held production and quality standards, designed to provide assurances where public regulation does not suffice or does not exist . Thus, the new landscape is marked by a network of standards and certifications maintained by private entities, some separate from industry, some industry-led or industry-influenced. Examples include certifications managed by non-profit groups like the Forest Stewardship Council, industry-led governance bodies like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, and advocacy-based campaigns to inform the consumer public through “naming and shaming” corporations like popular campaigns to hold Nike or Apple accountable to consumers for their environmentally and socially questionable overseas activities . The global rise of transnational corporations and the rise of private standards and certifications in the global marketplace coincided with a shift in how states exerted power over food and agriculture. Prior to this shift, states had sole power to control food and agriculture production within their borders. But since the late 1980s and 1990s, this power has become constrained, and shared with private industry. Transnational trade has made it harder to regulate the activities of food and agriculture because products cross borders and regulatory systems between production and sale, and neoliberal reforms in many global markets have led to public regulatory rollbacks. Against this backdrop, markets have developed and firms have sought to differentiate their products in ways that do not rely exclusively on state regulation, perhaps reflecting a new emerging economic order . Capitalist market development under this framework can focus on product differentiation through “a turn to quality”, in which products are marketed based on qualities such as environmentally friendly production practices, high food safety assurances, or other attributes verified by non-state certifiers . The result of these changes has been described as a shift from government to governance , in which states retain a degree of basic rulemaking authority and supervisory control, but private systems of certification hold much of the responsibility for defining controls and ensuring compliance.