Food Systems and Social Organization
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
“Ecology is an important determinant of social organization” (Marlowe, p. 39)
We all need to eat. This is a biological fact, but it’s also a sociological fact. Sociology is the study of how people are organized in a particular time and place and thus, applying that lens to food means exploring how we organize access to food: when do people eat, what do people eat, and how do people eat, in the United States in 2022?
How we organize food makes everything else that we’ve come to cherish possible: shopping malls (who am I kidding — Amazon!), education, the ability to doom scroll Twitter, democracy.
Here’s the nerdiness behind it all:
Humans historically have eaten only that which the earth provides. This system of hunting and gathering required that people followed their food source, and thus, were highly nomadic. As food technologies advanced, we started raising livestock (pastoralism) and eventually developed agriculture. It was with the development of agriculture that humans started settling into what we now call towns and cities — we followed the food source, but this time the food was staying in one place.
Humans have always organized themselves, but it wasn’t until agriculture that those systems of organization began to grow into what we now call government:
“…agriculture paved the way for dramatic changes in human societies, including new technologies, increased population size, larger communities, and the possibility of specialization in different tasks, such as farming and fighting, within society. These changes in turn led to the spread of diseases, the development of writing as a way of keeping records, formalized government structures, and eventually to modern nation states” (Krebs 13–14).
Why this relationship between agriculture and a bureaucratic governmental structure? Because with agriculture we can feed more people reliably and we need more people to do the labor, so agriculture results in population increases. With more people who are also now living in a shared geographic space, we need more complex tools for organizing our relationships. If you have one million people (just as an example) sharing space the question becomes: How we will live together? What rules will govern our relationships to each other? Who will make these decisions and how?
Thus, food in general and agriculture in particular shaped the emergence of governments and eventually gave birth to democracy. This is a reciprocal relationship: food shapes social organization and social organization shapes food. Access to food and food production is truly sociologically transformative, so while the idea of government emerged from the agricultural revolution(about 12,000 years ago), the idea of democracy in the West began to flourish in the 1700’s, along with the Industrial Revolution.
Industrial agriculture (the mass production of food) and the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment Era further increased food production and choices. Ultimately this began the process of creating what Michael Pollan calls “food like substances,” such as Pop Tarts and the boatloads of cereal choices we find in our grocery stores. Industrial agriculture, however, comes with some costs. One cost is ecological, which leads to questions about the long-term sustainability of our current food system.
How do we increase our cattle production when that comes at such a huge loss in terms of deforestation? How do we address the reality that increasing land space for grain production actually puts us at more risk in drought and flood conditions and increases run-off? These are some of the questions that are being explored in the context of the relationship between the food system and the climate crisis — how we organize food is one of the significant drivers of this crisis.
We can also see how interconnected our daily lives are to the food system through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning of the pandemic, people waited in crowded lines for food donations as a result of unemployment. The supply chain disruptions and inflation we are currently experiencing make clear how our ability to eat is shaped by the global food system.
Thus, back to the beginning: the necessity of food is not simply a biological fact. As sociologists, we explore how we come to have access to food, and how the larger economic context shapes that social organization (hence the differences between hunting and gathering economies and capitalism). The economy as a social institution is meant to organize food production; the government is meant to ensure that our collective needs are met. The two institutions work in conjunction to shape what we eat as well as the conditions in which we eat. Thus, when people go hungry, that’s not a just a “personal trouble,” it’s also a “public issue” (Mills).
As Herbert Gans highlights, hegemonic ideologies encourage us to scapegoat the poor and blame the pattern of hunger on those who are hungry. Using the “sociological imagination” (Mills) we can see how this hegemonic ideology functions to maintain inequality and the larger capitalist system of social organization. This knowledge helps us to see more clearly, and to think through how we might (re)organize towards collective well-being.
We all have value and we all deserve to eat.
As always, please take good care of yourselves and each other.
Dr. Monica
