Agrofoods

Sometimes spelled agri-foods, this term captures the increasingly long and complicated path food takes to our table. While we may like to think that the food we eat comes from a farm, it is only one place among many. Most farming is only possible with industrial inputs such as tractors and combines and chemical inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides. Farmers often require loans each season to buy what is needed to produce their crop. Farming also depends on energy to run the machines, pump water, produce fertilizers, and transport the finished product to the consumer. Farmers need expert information on what and when to plant, how to diagnose and treat plant diseases and destroy pests, the weather, and when and at what price to sell their crop. When one considers what goes into farming, it becomes apparent that farms are linked to [Page 59]and have become dependent on many other places, such as places of industrial production, places of petrochemical and fuel production, banking centers, and universities and government institutions. What is done with farm outputs is equally complicated.

Farm output can remain in its original form and simply be graded, washed, and shipped to the consumer. However, most of the food that we consume in the developed world is not in an unprocessed or “raw” form. Most of the food consumed has been substantially modified and processed to be made durable through canning, freezing, or other methods. This series of changes is an important stage in the agrofood system because durable foods allow the spatial separation of production from consumption and make long-distance trade possible. In fact, the distinction between agriculture and industry has become so blurred that many foods have become known by the industrial process that have transformed them, for example, homogenized milk, pasteurized cheese, refined sugar, and so on. Agricultural products can be further industrialized by breaking them down into their constituent parts. For example, a starch, a sweetener, oil, and protein can be extracted from a grain. Processors attempt to break the product of the farm into as many parts as possible and then find profitable uses for all of them. These different “fractions” of whole farm products are used as inputs for manufactured foods or in other industrial processes.

The producers of manufactured foods have an advantage over farmers because they buy the farm output and have flexibility over what ingredients to use and where to source them. For example, the manufactured food requires a sweetener but not necessarily sugar derived from the sugarcane plant. It requires oil yet not necessarily oil from corn. It requires a starch, but that could be derived from a potato or wheat or a number of other grains. The production of potato chips provides a good example of this substitution effect: Producers can fry the chips in whatever oil is cheapest at the moment of production. This illustrates why farmers are often at a disadvantaged position within the agrofood system.

More toward the consumer end of the agro-food system is food distribution. Food reaches consumers via food wholesalers, food retailers, and the restaurant and catering industry. Powerful economic entities in food distribution can shape the agrofood system with their purchasing power, such as when a fast-food restaurant chain decides to fry its french fries in healthier oil or add salad to its menu or when large grocery chains decide to carry some food products and not others.

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