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Chapter 3 Analyzing Commodity Chains: Linkages or Restraints? Shane Hamilton “Eating,” writes the modern-day agrarian intellectual Wendell Berry, “is an agricultural act.” An eloquent defender of the ecological and social benefits of small-scale farming, Berry is disturbed by the distancing of food consumers from farm producers in industrialized agriculture. Food, according to Berry, has become “pretty much an abstract idea—something [urban consumers] do not know or imagine—until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.”1 The increasing distance from farm to fork and the complexity of the industrial food chain have led to what the writer Michael Pollan, following the sociologist Claude Fischler, labels the “omnivore’s dilemma.”2 In a world in which affluent consumers can eat almost anything at all—whether it be Chilean grapes in North America in midwinter or grass-fed beef served in a Manhattan steakhouse—we are confronted with a constant sense of unease about what exactly we are eating, where it came from, and what the implications of our diet choices are. Fears of contamination—from “mad cow” disease to organic spinach tainted with E. coli—only heighten the urgency of these questions. The fact that Pollan’s book has spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list to date indicates that quite a few modern consumers want to know more about what happens to their food before it appears on the grocery shelf. If eating is an agricultural act, however, it is also an act of intensive commodi fication in modern societies dependent on industrialized agriculture for their foodstuffs. A supermarket consumer’s choice of what to eat is articulated through a vast chain of individuals and organizations woven together by technological networks—from farmers to processors to scientific researchers to wholesalers to retailers to government regulators to truck drivers to supermarket employees to consumers, and so on. The chains through which raw agricultural products become saleable foods are built upon economic structures and technological systems, but they are continually shaped and reshaped by business and political decisions and by shifting cultural patterns of diet, agrarian ideology, environmental concern, and scientific knowledge. Eating, then, is an act of extraordinary consequence—not only for agriculture but also for entire edifices of modern capitalism. Although such issues have only recently gained much attention in the popular press, they have been carefully studied for quite some time by scholars. Since the early 1980s sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers have produced a substantial body of literature examining the nature of commodity chains in modern food systems. Commodity chains analysis—the subject of this literature review—seeks to identify and illuminate the individuals, institutions , technologies, forms of knowledge, and forms of capital involved in transforming raw agricultural products into consumable foods. All of the essays in the present volume are either explicitly or implicitly in conversation with this literature, and yet much of the work remains unknown or unfamiliar to scholars in historical food studies. In the pages that follow, then, I offer an introductory (and by no means comprehensive) review of the genesis, advantages, and disadvantages of commodity chains analysis. As a rough guide to a complex and dynamic field, this essay aims especially to reach historians and other scholars interested in interdisciplinary approaches to food through the lenses of political economy of agriculture, science and technology, and globalization. The rural sociologist William H. Friedland generally receives credit for establishing commodity systems analysis. After writing extensively on mechanized tomato and iceberg-lettuce harvesting, Friedland conceived of commodity systems analysis as a means of invigorating rural sociology.3 By the early 1980s, according to Friedland, rural sociologists were so focused on issues of rural identity that they had become estranged from their original interest in the material and social worlds of agricultural producers.4 Rectifying the oversight , Friedland argued, required sociologists to pay careful attention to the commodity systems that structured rural peoples’ lives and livelihoods. These systems, according to Friedland, were composed of five interlinked components : production practices in modern agriculture, grower organizations, labor supply and labor practices, scientific research in agriculture, and marketing and distribution beyond the farm gate. Taking such a systemic, empirical approach to the study of food production and consumption, Friedland hoped, would boost the relevancy of rural sociology in an era of rapidly declining rural populations. By the mid-1990s Friedland’s call to arms was effectively answered , as important articles and books on...

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