A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism Quotes

“reformist proposals, like reducing and repurposing food waste to end hunger, never ask why people are poor or why the food system produces so much waste to begin with. Reformist policies do not challenge capitalist structures, like concentrated land ownership, the financialization of food and land, corporate concentration, or market fundamentalism. Nor do they consider whether it is socially just that a basic human need like food is considered a commodity,”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“The ability to apply nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium to agricultural soils eliminated the practices of cover cropping, inter-cropping, and relay-cropping with legumes. This separated grain cultivation from livestock production, leading to monocultures and feedlots.”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“Can farm programs ensure a stable, fair income for farmers and a healthy, affordable food supply? Of course they can. Unfortunately, capital is not invested in ensuring a fair income for farmers but in profiting from agriculture.”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“Agriculture under capitalism has a tendency to overproduce; for the last half century the world has produced 1.5 times more than enough food to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet. Overproduction in the Global North has led to a steady decline in the price of agricultural commodities. Commodities in most industries are manipulated by a handful of monopolistic corporations that try to avoid “price wars” between each other.”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“Today, despite centuries of capitalism, large-scale capitalist agriculture produces less than a third of the world’s food supply, made possible in large part by multibillion-dollar subsidies and insurance programs. Peasants and smallholders still feed most people in the world, though they cultivate less than a quarter of the arable land.”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“If the state is not providing them with any benefits, why should they? Coercion will work for a while, but unless there is a social contract, force is unsustainable in the long run. So the question was—and still is—how can the state reconcile the private ownership of the production of essential goods and services with the public good?”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“Modern-day conflicts over the patenting of life (known as genome property), corporate personhood, privatized water, and land grabs have their roots in centuries-long processes of wealth accumulation, state-making, and imperial expansion. The struggles over resources have been accompanied by heated debates over the social, economic, and ethical justification of private property. These historical arguments go to the core of political and economic power.”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“Torture a single chicken and you risk arrest. Abuse hundreds of thousands of chickens for their entire lives? That’s agribusiness.”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“the phenomenon of hunger amid plenty, and so on. But most critical for understanding food in a capitalist food system is the fact that food is a commodity, valued not just as sustenance but as potential capital. Food has a use value (to feed people) and an exchange value (as a commodity).”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

“The Global South went from a billion dollars in yearly food exports in the 1970s to importing 11 billion dollars a year in food by 2001.”
― Eric Holt-Giménez, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism