The mistreatment of workers also takes place in food retail. For example, restaurant workers “behind the kitchen door” experience poor pay, racial and gender discrimination, few benefits, and low job security. There are currently over twenty million workers in the food system, most earning low or poverty wages and more likely than workers in other industries to be receiving social welfare such as food stamps. In particular, people of color and women are more likely to earn lower wages and hold fewer management opportunities than their white and male counterparts. These food-chain jobs are in some of the most dangerous industries in the United States, especially farming and food processing, which are overwhelmingly performed by a Latino and undocumented workforce.
After World War II, fast-food corporations proliferated rapidly and were quick to lobby political elites to avoid any policies that might educate the consumer on the nutritional quality of their food. While consumers can now access an incredible variety of food, access to the highest-quality food remains stratified along class, gender, and racial lines. In cities such as Oakland, as white people moved to the suburbs and set up racial covenants, and redlining in neighborhoods with large black populations prevented economic development, disinvestment in food retail in black neighborhoods reduced access to healthy food options. These trends reflect the capitalist political economy of the food system and institutionally racist development patterns, which produce cheap food at the cost of equity and human health.
Murray Bookchin argues that “all ecological problems are social problems,” because “dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human [due to] . . . institutionalized systems of coercion, command, and obedience. ”The fact of social hierarchy suggests that those with greater environmental privilege can protect themselves from the environmental problems they are most responsible for creating. As the environmental justice movement has clearly shown, those marginalized by race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender disproportionately experience environmental problems. This is similarly the case at all stages in the food system.
Industrialization of the food system in the United States perpetuates peak oil, peak phosphorus, virtual water, pesticide toxicity, dead zones, genetically modified organisms, biofuels, and global warming. For example, pesticide dependency leads to the contamination of fresh water supplies, the death of domestic animals, degradation of fisheries, and collapse of vital bee colonies, which grows worse as pests become more resistant and necessitate greater pesticide application. Agriculture and food corporations profit not only from environmental degradation but upon the exploited labor that the system relies. To reiterate, humans dominate each other as a prerequisite to dominating nature. Low-paid precarious labor is the shaky foundation the food system is built on to deliver cheap (i.e., environmentally destructive) food. Such problems are rooted historically in the expansion of capitalism and urbanization, which set off a series of ecological rifts alienating humans from each other and from the natural environment.
As rapidly industrializing economies force farmers into cities, leaving agricultural livelihoods for factory jobs to fuel a growing consumer economy, the soil nutrient cycle collapses; food waste is often not reintegrated back into soils, and because more food has to be exported to cities, fertilizers are imported from elsewhere. One of the best examples illustrating this process is the Dust Bowl. Intensive industrial farming methods depleted soil nutrients to feed a rapidly increasing urban population and various war efforts, which simultaneously led to topsoil erosion. Humans dominating each other in the form of the expanding power of capitalists over wage laborers and the violence of war drove agricultural practices that compromised ecological integrity. Consumption of more food nutrients in the cities (and trenches) exceeded what was recycled back into the soil on farms. Entire grassland ecosystems in the Great Plains were devastated, in turn contributing to the displacement of over half a million poor people.
Conjunctures in the food system originate from colonialism, capitalism, and institutional racism and continue to refract their problems through the human need for sustenance. Together, the current production, consumption, and ecological conjunctures set the terrain of social struggle. The forces of opposition, in this case, the food movement, are responding in many ways. While each conjuncture suggests unique responses—there are obvious differences between preventing labor exploitation and environmental degradation—a common ideological, political, and semantic vantage point displays unified opposition.
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