Food

Food as a Global Commodity

The emergence of food as an important domain of global studies can be traced to the pioneering work of the anthropologist Sidney Mintz. Mintz was among the first to present the social history of a single food commodity—in this case, sugar—at a global scale. In his 1985 book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Mintz follows the transformation of sugar from medicine, spice, and luxury food of the wealthy prior to 1650, into a dietary staple of working people by the late 19th century. Mintz explains how colonial powers continually reconfigured the geography and social organization of sugar production, using it as an engine of colonial expansion and wealth accumulation. As sugar was introduced to wider and wider segments of European society, its use shifted from spice and condiment to sweetener (e.g., in tea) and preservative (e.g., in jam), serving as a cheap source of calories in working-class diets. The social history of sugar, therefore, revealed how a single food commodity had come to embody changing, sometimes contradictory, social relationships and meanings.

Mintz's work set the template for the large number of global food commodity studies that followed. There have been social and ecological histories of coffee, cocoa, potatoes, tomatoes, and spices, just to name a few. Likewise, there have been numerous social histories of world cuisines and diets, including several focusing on 20th-century fast food. Each of these traces the social relations, meanings, and ecological patterns bound up with particular foods and cuisines through time and space.

Beginning in the 1980s, food scholars developed new concepts and methodologies for making sense of an increasingly globalized food system. One important example is the use of global commodity chain analysis, which traces the series of geographically dispersed “links” involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of a given commodity. Steven Sanderson, for instance, described how the internationalization of beef production in the 1980s linked Latin American cattle producers to international feed manufacturers, slaughterhouses, and markets, with increasingly standardized products distributed to different countries based on market demand and consumer purchasing power. Sanderson referred to this phenomenon as the “world steer” (in parallel to the “world car,” assembled from globally sourced components and marketed internationally), and his approach inspired many others to trace the increasingly globalized commodity chains involved in food production. These types of studies revealed the growing importance of transnational corporations in organizing and coordinating food production, with involvement in all aspects of the food chain, including seeds, chemical inputs, processed and packaged foods, distribution, and retailing.

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