Food, Geography of

Everyone needs to eat. This basic fact of life is complicated by the rich variety of social meanings and environmental practices associated with food. The result is a complex, almost bewildering, geography of food. Shelves at modern grocery stores around the world are stocked with a vast range of foods, including many exotic foods that were out of reach for most consumers less than a generation ago. At the same time, hunger haunts almost 1 billion people, mostly, but not exclusively, in the global South, while small and subsistence farmers find it harder to sustain their livelihoods amid intense international market competition. Food has been an important object of economic, political, and scientific calculation and manipulation in the long-term development of globalization, as well as the foundation for social movements based on the defense of locality, nature, and culture. Understanding food's multifaceted place thus requires a geographic approach that can make sense of the complexity of food in its social and environmental contexts.

Agriculture, the planned cultivation of plants and animals for human consumption, is one of humanity's oldest markers of “civilization.” It has long been the focus of new technological developments that alter the physical environment to suit human needs and has been the necessary obverse of urbanization, which facilitates the storage, trade, processing, and control of food. Geographies of food are therefore geographies of power, and the study of agricultural production in particular was of primary concern in modern geography prior to World War II. Early geographic theories and models, such as the von Thünen model, and descriptive studies of regions, all included some mention of food production and distribution, though often in narrowly economic terms. In the post-World War II period, and especially in relation to concerns with and research on population growth, environmental degradation, and development in former colonies, the study of the geography of food became increasingly interdisciplinary and, in many respects, highly technologized, as did modern agriculture itself.

Social scientists and technical specialists, including geographers, paid special attention to [Page 1145]agriculture's role in the development process in the decades following World War II, aiming to increase yields and efficiency through mechanization and green revolution technologies, such as new hybrid crop varieties. This shift produced more food, as the general lack of food in the developing world was understood as one of the main impediments to successful development. A more technologically and economically sophisticated farm sector would mean more food, more urbanization, and greater political, social, and economic stability. Peasant and subsistence food systems were deemed inadequate to meet the needs of developing societies, and the geography of food was remade to fit the models of development experts and the political mandates of Cold War geopolitics. While aggregate measures of food production and food security showed progress, rural dislocation, widespread environmental change, and irreversible changes in cultural practices indicated that the geography of food was more complex than net increases in agricultural production alone could describe.

A young man transports a load of green bananas near the town of Goma, province of North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Source: Guenter Guni/iStockphoto.

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