Agric Hum Values (2009) 26:335344
DOI 10.1007/s10460-009-9225-6
Discussion: moving food regimes forward: reflections
on symposium essays
Harriet Friedmann
Received: 22 June 2009 / Accepted: 22 June 2009 / Published online: 6 August 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract All authors in this symposium use a food
regime perspective to ask questions about the present
whichas these articles demonstratehave several pos-
sible answers. History suggests a time perspective of
2540 year cycles so fara food regime 18701914, an
experimental and chaotic era 19141947, and a food
regime 19471973. It has been less than 40 years since
1973, when food regime analysts agree that a contested and
experimental period began. There is no consensus on
whether it has already ended or how it might issue into a
new food regime. The conversation is more fruitful than
the conclusions. I intend these comments as an invitation to
join in.
Keywords Food regimes
International financial
system
Hegemonic transition
Actor network theory

Regulation
Social change
Introduction
Thinking about food regime transition and/or emergence is
partly empirical, partly definitional. I would like to play
with two definitions. First, it may help to bring in a precise
and limited definition of international regimes used in the
International Organization literature: a specific set of (often
implicit) relationships, norms, institutions, and rules around
which the expectations of all relevant actors converge
(Krasner 1983). This emphasizes the implicitly shared
H. Friedmann (&)
Department of Sociology and Centre for International Studies,
University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON M5S
3K7, Canada
e-mail: harriet.friedmann@utoronto.ca
ideological or discursive aspects of an operative regime,
that is, one whose historical tensions are, as McMichael puts
it, stabilized. This narrow definition can guide the inquiry:
regime or no regime (yet)? To address the question of
transition, which can be defined as a period of unresolved
experimentation and contestation, we can ask whether or
not there exists a sufficiently stable constellation of agri-
food relationships so that states, individuals, corporations,
social movements and other actors can predict the outcome
of actions. Relatedly, do actors see the present repertoire of
actions and consequences as more or less naturala key
element of legitimacy (Campbell this issue)?
If a food regime can be said to exist, the next step is
naming it. This brings into play the second definition of
food regimes. The classical definition of food regimes
includes constellations of class relations, geographical
specialization, and inter-state power (Friedmann 1993).
Friedmann and McMichael (1989, p. 95) linked interna-
tional relations of food production and consumption to
periods of capitalist accumulation. This wrote into the
world-systems perspectivein which capitalism begins
with colonial expansion in 1500a focus on the shorter
and more recent periods defined by the French Regulation
School. It shifted Regulation School focus from national
states to the system of states, and from industry to agri-
culture. It added to early world-systems theory empirical
mappings of class relations and geographical specializa-
tions related to historically specific commodity com-
plexes.1 Which relations are pivots of the stabilized
tensions which allow for predictable responses? Burch and
Lawrence and McMichael say yes to a new food regime
1
Commodity chain analysis, in turn, benefited from attention to
wider patterns of capital accumulation and inter-state power brought
by food regimes (Collins 2005).
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336
and offer different names to key relationships. Power is
stabilized (to different degrees) around either a financial or
a corporate pivot.
If there is not an identifiable set of stabilized tensions,
the food regime optic suggests another transitional per-
iodor perhaps the end of regime cycles. Transitional eras
are full of multiple possibilities. Conflicts name newly
delegitimizedi.e. previously naturalizedaspects of the
old food regime and offer competing frames for resolving
them (Friedmann 2005a). Pritchard, Campbell, and Dixon,
each in a distinct way, see the outcome as still open.
I see elective affinities in these papers: (1) between
political economy and the identification (or negation) of a
new food regime, and (2) between nature-centered aspects,
namely ecology and health, and a continuing play of ele-
ments potentially constellating a new regime. So I play
with a double focus on naming the transitions and social-
natural aspects of agri-food relations.
Political economy of food regimes: remembering
hegemony
Regime means regulation: there exist rules which ana-
lysts can infer through consistent behaviors of relevant
actors: states, enterprises, corporations, social movements,
consumers, and scientists. Rules in this sense are some-
times hard to pin down, but the effort is worth it. In food
regime analysis, they relate both to state regulation,
sometimes indirect, and to hegemony. The Gramscian
definition of hegemony adapted by Arrighi (1994) includes
much more than monetary (and military) dominance of one
state within a historically specific system of states. Still,
money is a crucial mechanism of dominanceand of the
transfer of wealth from a falling hegemon to emerging
powers. Thus, the food aid pivotal to the (capitalist) food
regime of 19471973 (and for foreign aid as a whole) was
a novel mechanism dependent on specific institutions of the
Bretton Woods monetary system2; the demise of that sys-
tem meant that aid, including food aid, has worked dif-
ferently ever since.3 I think that hegemony, particularly
monetary institutions, are a crucial missing piece of the
political economy contributions, and could enhance their
insights.
2 technologies) led to a reconfiguration of corporate organi-
I cannot include the Cold War, the Detente of 197374 and the
collapse of the Soviet bloc in these brief comments. I note, however,
that they were crucial to the rise and demise of the US-centered food
regime (Friedmann 1993), and wonder how important was the 1990s
collapse to the fate of the WTO, including the AoA. This is a research
that should be done.
3 with chemical, pharmaceutical, and seed industries. Hor-
A strength of food regime analysis is to identify when meanings of
apparently continuous institutions and behaviors change (Dixon this
issue).
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H. Friedmann
A financialized food regime?
Burch and Lawrence lay out an elegant, well supported
argument for a financialized food regime within a larger
tendency towards financialization of the whole economy.
They follow a thread of shifting power from supermarkets in
the 1990s, which they pioneered in identifying and
explaining (Burch and Lawrence 2007), to financial enter-
prises in the 2000s, which they similarly lead in identifying
and explaining. Although the financial crisis unleashed in
2008 brought hedge funds and private equity into public
vocabularies, these institutions are too little understood.
Supermarkets, they show, have been reorganized via private
equity takeovers, so that old uncapitalized property has
become real estate, and new profit centers arise by offering
financial services. This is required reading for anyone
interested in power and property in the food system.
Burch and Lawrences case for a power shift towards
financial institutions draws on a specific thread of agri-food
history. As I read it, Burch and Lawrences argument takes
up the story of capitalist power concerning industrialization
of food and agriculture, which had already gone far in
subordinating food and farming to the larger capitalist
economy in so-called developed economies. After World
War II, in the US-centered food regime, agriculture and
food industries (as they came to be called) became major
drivers of the then leading sectors (in technological inno-
vation and profit), machinery and chemicals. Far more than
automobiles and household chemicals, an industrializing
agri-food sector rescued sectors faced with the sudden end
of wartime government purchases of tanks and nitrogen
(for weapons) by demanding tractors, combines, composite
animal feeds, antibiotics, industrial fertilizers, industrial
pesticides, and the rest. However, machinery, chemical,
and agri-food sectors were not integrated at the level of
ownership or corporate organization. Downstream, farmers
became suppliers of raw materials to giant food manufac-
turers (supermarkets were still infants). The imbalance in
power between even the largest farmers and giant agri-
cultural input and food manufacturing corporations created
the famous cost-price squeeze. This encouraged ever
larger and more industrial farms, which in turn demanded
more machines and chemicals.
Then in the 1980s and 1990s a shift in leading tech-
nologies towards genetics (combined with information
zation and a new importance of agriculture and food as a
direct source of profit. Parallel with the new constellation
of Life Sciences, through mergers and acquisitions,
agriculture and food industries became tightly connected
mones and antibiotics in livestock industries, and geneti-
cally engineered seeds in maize and soy subsectors, have
Discussion: moving food regimes forward
deepened the technical and corporate integration of agri-
culture and food into the larger capitalist economy (Kuyek
2007). Indeed, the biological basis of food and farming
made it an obvious site for application of leading genetic
technologies, as Goodman et al. (1987) first argued in
From Farming to Biotechnology.
But power and property are not sufficient for a food
regime analysis. Are tensions stabilized? What institutions
provide the pivot and give meaning to a stable constellation
of relationships? For instance, is there a counterpart in a
financialized food regime to food aid as a pivot of the
194773 food regime? Legitimacy of food aid depended on
both of the following: (1) convergent interests and expec-
tations among diverse and highly unequal actors, including
US farm commodity groups and legislators, Third World
governments, grain trading corporations, consumers who
benefited from falling grain and meat prices; and (2) an
ideological framework that defined these as humanitarian,
developmental, or anything but a trade relation, even
though the scale of food aid shipments dominated world
price formation for three decades (Friedmann 1982). By the
1980s subsidized exports are universally seen as a bad
trade practice (with regime crisis, aid came to be done
differently), and continuing to do it is not legitimate.
Second, I want to emphasize the missing institutional
foundations of postwar concessionary foreign aidthe role
of the dollar in the Bretton Woods monetary system.
Although Burch and Lawrence minimize the effects of the
recent and so far enduring financial crash, it is not obvious
that the processes they carefully describe can endure. These
practices seem likely to exacerbate the volatility of food
markets. For instance, can delayed payments to suppliers
really be a stable source of profit for supermarkets? This
instance of financialization is predatory; it threatens the
goose that lays the golden eggs, and hardly suggests sta-
bilization of tensions along supply chains. Can enforce-
ment of ever shorter investment horizons by hyper-mobile
finance go on indefinitely? If these continue to destabilize
farms and other suppliers, and to sacrifice the interests of
politically mobilized ethical and consumer movements, can
such a constellation of agri-food investments stabilize?
A corporate food regime?
McMichael makes greatly expanded claims for the food
regime approach. He uses the metaphor of pivot not for
an element of a food regime, but for food regimes as an
element in capitalist history. Extending the retrospective
reinterpretation of global history through an agri-food lens
(Friedmann and McMichael 1989) into the future, he
interprets integration with new sectors, such as energy, as
defining the changing shape of capitalism.
337
Food and agriculture are superb lenses into tensions in
the larger political economy because they express the
contradictory commodification of the human (physiologi-
cal) and natural (land) foundations of society (Polanyi
1944). In past writing, McMichael (2004) brilliantly
showed how the development project, which focused
exclusively on industrialization and consumption of
industrial commodities, pushed agriculture to the margins
of theory and policyexcept where it mimicked industry.
This was a crucial flaw, as most institutionsgovern-
mental, intergovernmental, scientific, corporateare
poorly equipped at best to deal with the cascading prob-
lems associated with agri-food industrialization.
At the same time, the development project expressed a
state-centered era, and therefore the protection phase of
the cycles Polanyi identified between free markets and
protection. Agriculture, while marginal in policy focus,
was nonetheless the most state-centered sector on a world
scale (Friedmann 1993). Thus when the globalization
project replaced the development project to usher in a new
phase of free markets, agriculture had a special impor-
tance, and its integration into international trade agree-
ments was a key concern in creating the WTO (McMichael
2004). Despite increasing cracks in consensus about
industrial agriculture, and despite growing experiments in
alternatives, major institutions inertially move towards
more of the samemonocultures of a radically declining
set of cultivars and livestock, which are raw materials for
food (and fuel) manufacturing. It follows that a corporate
food regime launched in the 1980s and 1990s has met
organized transnational resistance, notably by farmers, but
also by environmentalists and consumers.
But does the food regimes approach add value, as it
were, to a Polanyian interpretation? While Polanyi made
much of the 19th century monetary system underpinning
British hegemony (the gold standard), he did not include
hegemonic powerand declinein his theoretical con-
clusions. From a food regimes perspective, British hege-
mony was enacted through an imperial economy in which
people, plants and animals were transplanted to create
neo-Europes in place of indigenous human (agri)cultures
(Crosby 1986). The gold standard operated within the
British Empire and the larger world system as a mechanism
for European settlers, cultivars, livestock and farming
techniques to colonize specialized grain export regions. It
was the farm politics in those regions that, after three
decades of world wars and depression, became the foun-
dation for a very different food regime in the late 20th
century (McMichael 1984; Friedmann 2005a). Monetary
politics were crucial to the transitional period, and a dollar
(rather than gold) standard was crucial to the US regime.
Where does international money fit into McMichaels
account?
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Hegemonic crisis and monetary crisis
If the international monetary system is not stabilized, can
there be any food regime? The early 1970s crisis of the
dollar (and the end of Bretton Woods) coincided with the
OPEC oil cartel and the first food crisis. Comparison with
that period may clarify the present. Energy and food,
McMichael shows, are ever more deeply entwined after
decades of making fossil fuels the material foundation of
industrial agriculture. Burch and Lawrence show that
finance and food are much more complexly entangled now
than in a food regime with government credit to farmers
and industrial food markets bounded by nationally man-
aged currencies. The triple links among finance, energy,
and food depend on money, and money is increasingly and
dangerously unstable. It is most directly connected to inter-
state power, that is, hegemonic conflicts which remain
unresolved.
By 1973, Third World states had become dependent on
cheap energy and food imports to support industrialization
efforts. The Bretton Woods monetary system was the
foundation for national regulation of food and agriculture,
both domestic and export, in all countries, though these
took different forms in the US, secondary grain exporters,
and the Third World (which shifted from exporters to
importers under the regime). Typical institutions of the
period included marketing boards, and domestic food and
farm subsidies. The relative protection of national planning
worked through currencies which were inconvertible. Third
World governments typically kept currencies overvalued
in order to make internal commerce more attractive and
thus set up virtuous cycles of development within the
national economy.
When the US unilaterally ended its key role in Bretton
Woods by removing the fixed relation between the dollar
and gold, nothing was predictable any more. Something
had to change. The dynamics of the early 1970s initially
promised a very different change from the one that unfol-
ded with regard to money, food, and more. The OPEC
cartel inspired imitation by rising Third World states. Why
couldnt all agricultural and mineral exports lead to similar
shifts in wealth? These cartels were expected to be sup-
ported by enhanced international public stocks, especially
of food, and by inter-governmental economic regulation,
including an international currency (Brandt 1980).
This project, now almost banished from memory, rep-
resented an alliance of Third World states, whose power
was waxing in the still respected United Nations, and social
democratic parties and movements, whose power was
waxing in the North, especially Western Europe. It was
intended to correct imbalances in international wealth and
power (Brandt 1980). It might have stabilized currencies.
One plan was to make the IMF a sort of international
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H. Friedmann
central bank whose main role would be to regulate an
emergent international currency, invented at the time and
called Special Drawing Rights (SDR). An international
currency might have underpinned parallel proposals to
create publicly managed international food stocks. All
these plans, though the alliances of the time seemed in their
favor, were trumped by what came to be called neoliber-
alism or the Washington Consensus, or the Globalization
Project.
The project to turn all this around via private trade and
finance emerged over the 1980s. A (very differently)
reformed IMF became its leading agent. It forced an end to
the state-centered, mercantile institutions of the food
regime centered on the US, but only as applied to the
indebted Third World.4 Third World states had borrowed
from private banks to continue to import expensive oil and
food, and within a decade verged on insolvency. Rather
than let the banks take the hit for bad loans (sound famil-
iar?), the IMF negotiated longer payment schedules coun-
try by country, and imposed a set of conditionalities
under the new rubric of structural adjustment. Thus the
IMF became an instrument of debt collection on behalf of
Northern banks; the dollar remained the world currency
without rules, and the US retained effective veto power via
IMF rules. As a result, Third World countries on the whole
shifted from national agri-food policies (including export
management) towards corporate-dominated exports (of
non-traditional commodities such as counter-seasonal
fruits, vegetables, and flowers, and of fish) and deepened
their dependence on grain imports.5 The US ignored with
impunity IMF criticism of its own fiscal and trade deficits;
although farm and export subsidies by both the US and
Europe came to be widely criticized, they were not subject
to IMF or other international discipline. This is what
McMichael calls the corporate food regime. It is what both
of us have noted changed the focus of food security from
hunger to trade (McMichael 2004; Friedmann 2004).
So what is the situation today? Although the Bretton
Woods system ended at the same time as the last food
regime, nothing has replaced the dollar as international
currency. Yet the dollar does not function as it did under
Bretton Woods. Instead, the US is able to run deficits in its
government account and in trade supported by the default
4
Which came to be called The South, as Cold War tensions (US and
allies = First World; Soviet and allies = Second World) gave way to
a richpoor divide. This was a project of the non-aligned countries
wishing to distance themselves from the dominant Cold War powers
and forge alliances for shifting power and wealth towards former
colonies which came to be underdeveloped in the postcolonial
world.
5
Key exceptions, notably India, reflected the contradictory tendency
towards import substitution via industrialization of agriculture known
as the Green Revolution.
Discussion: moving food regimes forward
position of the dollar as reserve currency. Not only can
other countries not do this, but the richer of those countries
are financing the US involuntarily for lack of alternatives to
the dollar. This is not stable.
Todays financial crisis is also a dollar crisis, deeper
now than in the 1970s. US trade (and fiscal) deficits have
been made possible by the holding of reserves by other
countries in dollars. The dollar expresses US hegemony,
but trade and fiscal deficits express declining hegemony.
For Britain after 1914 and earlier hegemonic declines, the
rise of new currencies (and many related institutions) has
so far been affected by wars and depressions (Arrighi and
Silver 1999). Rising states (aka emerging economies) are
today proposing a new financial architecture, beginning
with IMF reforms and increased use of SDRs as an inter-
national reserve currency. The IMF now has a legacy of
stigma (from those forced to accept harsh and counter-
productive conditions for credit) and disrespect (by those
powerful enough to ignore its criticisms), so that its funds
have remained unborrowed in recent years (its major bor-
rowers, except Pakistan and Iceland, are former Soviet bloc
nations) (Economist 2009).
But reform is difficult also because the US resists
changes which would subject it to the same restrictions that
Asian states faced in the 199798 financial crisis. China,
for instance, proposes an international currency as a
negotiated move to recognize that multiple economic
powers exist in place of one hegemon. With trade at its
lowest level in 27 years (Economist 2009), the brave pro-
nouncements of the G20 express minimal compromise (e.g.
more SDRs) and little consensus between rising and
declining powers about the future of international curren-
cies and finance. As in agri-food, the US cannot have its
way against other powers, but it can veto change and thus
borrow time in which it forces holders of dollars to sub-
sidize its debt. Instability will continue as long as no new
currency (or basket) is adopted which corresponds to the
new reality.
Financialization is a typical feature of the last phase of
hegemony. According to Arrighi (1994), it is precisely
financialization that allows capital to move from the
declining hegemon to one or more rising contenders.
Financialization underpinned movements of industry from
North to South, and helped dollars flow from the US into
factories in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and so on.
Financialization, however, does not stabilize anything.
Military power does not move between states in the same
way. The mismatch is dangerous.
Failed transition?
Pritchards essay exemplifies a strength of food regimes: he
distinguishes between old elements hung over from the
339
unraveling food regime, and new elements which became
salient to agri-food politics only after the demise of the old
food regime. The creation of the WTO, including an
Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), was an attempt to extend
the project of the GATT, which was created in 1947 with
an explicit exclusion of agriculture from its mandate. It was
an old element hanging over, along with mercantile trade,
farm, and price policies. By the 1980s, however, the crisis
of the mercantile practices of the food regime could not be
ignoredcompetitive export subsidies threatened trade
wars between powerful states (US and EU). This mattered
greatly because agriculture and food had become key profit
sectors, with dynamic genetic technologies and deep links
to pharmaceuticals. The AoA was an attempt to bring the
mercantile rules of agri-food into line with liberal rules for
manufacturing.6
Pritchard finds that the World Trade Organization,
which some have interpreted as the founding institution of
a corporate food regime, was stalemated within a few years
of its establishment. Created in 1995, its setbacks began in
Seattle in 1999, and by Cancun in 2003 the crucially
important AoA was clearly at the heart of its demise. The
fanfare attending its birth has faltered. The AoA was
agreed only with many blanks to be filled in later, and
many exceptions which have undermined its legitimacy.
Ultimately, the selective application of agreed AoA rules to
the South stalled the whole WTO.
I would extend Pritchards analysis, like the others, by
bringing in hegemony. Like McMichael, he emphasizes
NorthSouth conflict at the expense of hegemonic rivalries,
which includes the European Union when it created a
continental currency in the 1990s, the Euro. Yet the trade
and subsidy conflicts among the US, Europe, and Japan
(lets call these old rivals still in play) led the three
powers to agree in 1986 to finally bring agriculture into
international trade agreements, which would formally have
changed moribund food regime rules. These conflicts were
never resolved. The North closed ranks against a rising
South (led by India, China and Brazilnew rivals) angry
at the Norths hypocritical refusal to abide by the same
agri-food rules imposed on them. Yet their own conflicts
were multiplying, as safety issues (hormone beef, GMOs)
overtook trade and subsidy battles. Resolution came behind
the scenes: WTO dispute tribunals consistently supported
US (and other) challenges to domestically popular Euro-
pean regulations; the European Union (EU) responded
with subterfuges of various kinds to mollify citizens;
one of these was to accept that the WTO (and Codex
6
The food regime interpretation of the mercantile specifics of agri-
food is denied by the blanket criticisms of political economy
approaches by Goodman and Watts (1995, 1997), who see all as
imitating industrial sectors.
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Alimentarius, the UN standards body) would set minimum
standards; the private sector, led by supermarkets, would
offer to consumers what governments were prevented
from offering to citizens. In May 2009, the EU finally
agreed to end its expensive prohibition against hormone
beef imports (Halliday 2009) and a new US administration
appears quietly to be dropping retaliatory measures.
If Pritchard extends his analysis to include these rival-
ries, then it may turn out that some institutions of the WTO
are indeed important to the (continuing) conflict over a new
food regime. For instance, Campbell and McMichael see
that international food standards have provided the foun-
dations for transnational supply chains; moreover, the
private organization of these chains was the default when
powerful states, notably the European Union, could not
achieve politically demanded standards for livestock and
GM crops (Friedmann 2005a). Similarly, WTO intellectual
property rules underpin the move of agri-food corporations
into spaces occupied by small farmers (Tansey and Rajotte
2008; McIntyre et al. 2009). A conflict of principles exists
between the WTO and the Convention on Biodiversity, so
far resolved in favor of the former. But other moves from
above (McIntyre et al. 2009) and below (Desmarais 2007)
support culturally and ecologically embedded farming
systems. This opens the question of new elements, which
are potential pivots of a new food regime.
Conversations between food regimes and science history
If Pritchard documents one failure to institutionalize new
relationships, rules, and norms, Campbell and Dixon doc-
ument openings to ever more possible agri-food constel-
lations since the early 1970s. Each opens a fruitfuland
genuinedialogue between food regimes and histories of
science. On one side, Campbell applies ecological criteria
to contending agri-food projects, and Dixon grounds the
consumption dimension of food regimes in the history of
nutrition. On the other, food regime analysis deepens the
critical histories of nutritional and ecological sciences,
technologies and ideologies. The authors show how ide-
ologies of nutrition (nutritionism) and agricultural
industries have changed in tandem with key features of
food regimes. Thus, the UK-centered food regime of the
19th century gives political and global context both to
Cronons history of the environmental despoliation impli-
cated in the creation of present grain export regions, and to
the imperial calorie and master protein of global nutri-
tionism; and the US-centered food regime of the years after
World War II gives class and policy dynamism both to
ecological critiques of mechanicalchemical intensive
agriculture, and to analysis of international power behind
the fortification of industrial foods. These essays give a
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H. Friedmann
strong account of the shifting roles of chemistry and
genetics, with attendant technologies, hopes and anxieties;
of emergence, consolidation and multiple crises of indus-
trialization and corporate organization; of loss and efforts
to recover vernacular and contextually specific knowledge
of farming and cuisines; of class implications of changing
farming and food systems; and most of all, of the link
between loss of public faith in scientific expertise and
contention over possible futures. Most compelling, Dixon
and Campbell show how continuing politics of transition
are inflected by multiple, cross-cutting material and ideo-
logical contradictions.
Campbells feedback criterion for assessing contending
regimes
Campbell argues that two food regimes are in contention,
each serving two incipiently global classes of consumers:
quality foods, fully traceable both technically and
geographically along transnational supply chains, for
increasingly cosmopolitan consumers across the world; and
industrial food, ever more chemically reconstituted, offered
to the lowest income consumers across the globe, whose
numbers increase as farming systems in the South are
displaced by horticulture and aquaculture for sale to the
global rich. For Campbell, either has the propulsive
potential to consolidate and to legitimate class, inter-state
and regional agri-food relations for a new food regime. In
this he opens the question too quickly foreclosed by those
of us who worry about catastrophic effects of peak oil and
climate chaos: perhaps a food regime based on corporate
power and transnational supply chains can impose eco-
logical controls, monitored and enforced through audits,
contracts and brands, and convince citizens and consumers
that they are able to provide food sustainably.7 The other
possibility is harder for those new to ecological perspec-
tives to envision: regionally organized, ecologically resil-
ient agri-food systems nested into global systems able to
monitor multiple ecological dimensions.
Campbell calls these two contending agri-food systems
regimes. While this conceptual innovation may con-
fusecoexistence (and contested legitimacy) implies to
me that regime stabilization has not occurredthis strategy
allows him to bring into dialogue divergent interpretations
by McMichael and Friedmann. Campbell argues that the
two regimes are mutually constitutive: privileged con-
sumers demand distinctive foods relative to junk food,
while poor consumers are multiplied as traditional
7
My summary is no doubt inflected by my own view of a possible
corporate environmental food regime (Friedmann 2005a). Campbell
has a nuanced argument, giving more weight to the corporate food
from nowhere regime of McMichael. I retain much deeper reserva-
tions of the ability of capital to regulate itself.
Discussion: moving food regimes forward
farmers differentiate into those who can meet supermarket
quality criteria and those forced out of farming and into
(increasingly corporate) food markets. Ecological theory
offers an indicator for comparing their relative sustain-
ability, namely feedback mechanisms built into transna-
tional versus (interlinked) regional supply chains/networks
capable of identifying (lack of) ecological resiliency.
If crises in food safety continue to occur, and if public
awareness grows that fossil energy, greenhouse gas, water
pollution, and loss of soil and biological diversity are
profoundly affected by industrial agriculture, then we could
exit the cycle of food regimes altogether. Food regimes
have so far privileged power and profit by distancing
ecological effects; as self-organizing spaces reach the
limits of their ability to absorb shocks, something truly new
under the sun becomes necessary, and as Campbell shows,
paths to ecologically resilient futures appear in the mist.
Dixons diagnosis of ontological anxiety
Dixon sees a parallel conflict between two contending
ways of resolving the increasingly apparent negative health
effects of industrial diets. On one side are industries
drawing on the newly configured life sciences. Just as
genetic sciences have reconfigured chemistry, biology, and
medicine (as well as agronomy), functional foods now
offer to cure or prevent diseases. Edible industrial com-
modities, which led to sugar, fat, and salt-intensive diets
different from anything humans have evolved to eat, are
now transfigured by biochemical and genetic technologies
to cure diseases, including those related to poor diets
(Cordain et al. 2005). These integrate old food regime
practices (nutrients and fortification), with new protective
nutrients, including the anti-oxidants contained in the
very fresh foods lost to eaters of industrial foodfruits,
vegetable, and fish. Functional foods even promise to tailor
functional foods to individual genetics.
For Dixon, too, crisis deepens as legitimacy falters
among professional nutritionists and public agencies trying
to balance economic growth (often defined by corporate
lobbies) and mounting health costs of aging populations
with diet-related diseases. She brings into food regime
analysis the oft-invoked but little understood shift in offi-
cial understanding of nutrition. For instance, a food regime
perspective allows Dixon to reinterpret the influence of
Boyd-Orr, the hero of the history of food supplements to
the poor as public policynationally and through the Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Nutritionism as ide-
ology helps also to appreciate a turning point: the nutrient-
centered approach to poor diets was introduced before
industrial food became dominant; had the poor been able
to purchase enough horticulture and meats from local
farms beginning in the 1930s, their purchases would have
341
strengthened regional fresh markets in advanced coun-
tries, leaving major grains and livestock to industrial
agriculture. Instead, those farmers and markets were deci-
mated by half a century of industrialization of food and
farming, and the poor (in the US) were given surplus
industrial food, which came to dominate the diets of the
poor in the North.8 As transnational supply chains move
into the global South in the prolonged death throes of the
old food regime, both farming systems and local markets
are threatened; the growing masses of the poor who can no
longer access fresh foods find that if they can afford any
commercial food at all, it is the least healthy and most
durable commodities.
As diseases of affluence from the dying food regime
strike the poor in both North and South, nutritionists have
publicly dissented from the orthodoxy implicated with
industrial foods. Nutrition is one of several sciences in
crisis, and is especially connected to public anxieties and
mistrust of (conflicting) expert advice. Social movements
and networks, such as Slow Food and Via Campesina, offer
alternative visions of regionally embedded agri-food sys-
tems, building on longstanding critiques of industrial foods
which have new purchase as diseases and health are
increasingly defined as social consequences of food sys-
tems. As social movements, cultural figures, and public
agencies kaleidoscopically increase awareness of the health
effects of overly processed foods with concentrated sugar,
fats, and salt, the dietary response is, as food regimes help
us see, global. Dixon brings in the sociological theories of
Habermas to explore these cultural shifts. To cap her
conversation between nutritionism and food regimes,
Dixon brings in hegemony. She points out that Oriental-
ization of cuisines, which is happening in the West as well
as in Asia, not only carries all the contradictions between
industrial/transnational and artisanal/regional foods, but
also reflects an erratic shift in inter-state power towards
Asia.
Rethinking nature, society, and science: actor network
theory and food regimes
The fruitful engagement between food regimes and pro-
fessional, public, corporate, and popular understandings of
science suggests the timeliness of overcoming the mental
barrier between social and natural sciences. Latour (1993,
p. 134) demonstrates that nature has always infiltrated
social accounts and vice versa, since in reality sciences
and societies are co-produced. The task is to make the
8
Dairy figured centrally in US food programs, as nutritionalist
beliefs coincided with farm surpluses. This is another contribution,
since the dairy sector has so far received too little attention in food
regime accounts.
123
342
multiplication of hybrids visible and undertake the chal-
lenge to think differently. Networks, which figure in more
and more social and natural theories, allow for this.
Analysis proceeds by tracing networks of actants,
including bacteria as well as states, genes as well as social
movements, maize as well as corporations, watersheds as
well as cities, chickens as well as citizens, fish stocks as
well as professional scientists, laws as well as sewage
pipes (Latour 1993, p. 117).
Of course, food regimes have also included health and
ecology, mainly as social movements (e.g. Buttel 1997).9
Dixon and Campbell take food regimes in new directions
by focusing retrospectively as well as prospectively on
aspects of nature and the (constructed) sciences devoted
to agriculture and nutrition. Their essays thus belie the
inclusion of food regimes with other types of political
economy alleged to [erase] distinctive biological and land-
based properties (Goodman and Watts 1995, p. 4). Their
use of biological and land-based optics on the past opens
to multiple possibilities for completely new constellations
of class, accumulation, power, and all the institutions to
emerge. These are new elements, not existentially of
course, but institutionallyhealth and ecology were cast
into the margins by the dying regime, with its obsession on
(facilitating growth of) industry and cities. Most political
economy, including food regimes, has been caught in the
deep divisions of modernist thought. But the openness of
the approach to include new as well as old elements in
considering transitional projects of many kinds is very far
from any convenient elision of the problem of transi-
tion (Goodman and Watts 1995, p. 3).
Tracing networks of actantshuman, natural, discursive
from below complements political economy (Wilkinson
2006) particularly in times of deep change. Classes, for
instance, can be seen as dissolving (peasantry?), shifting
(incipiently global classes of workers, investors, consum-
ers?), and emerging (artisanal, pluriactive, multifunctional,
and networked agri-food enterprises?). The projects of
social movements and of multiple individual and collective
actors arise, interact, and compete in relation to the erratic
assertion of bodily and earthly limits to industrial agri-food
systems. We live in the biosphere for sure (though names for
it can change), but how real are the national states that
frame institutions, meanings, identities, even as they become
multiple (Ruggie 1993)? ANT excels in tracking changing
relations among an expanded range of actants, human, nat-
ural, and discursive. This bottom-up approach to change
follows more precisely what food regimes roughly catego-
rize as social movements, civil society, and the like, and finds
better ways to understand how specific groups of humans
9
My own forays into ecology did not use food regimes, e.g.
Friedmann (2000, 2005b).
123
H. Friedmann
respond to specific experiences of limits and possibilities set
by non-human actants. Science helpfully emerges as a con-
tested field, with some guidance about how to include it.
ANT gives food regimes more precision. It might help
resolve some of the terminological and conceptual differ-
ences expressed in these essays. Of course, food regimes
also have much to offer ANT.
Hegemony redux: power and networks in food regime
transition
These essays show the protean quality of food regimes.
Latour (1993, pp. 75, 141) represents change as a spiral; a
vertical line that traverses a cyclical trajectory shows that
two points may be closer in meaning than in time. This
compares to the cyclical times suggested by Arrighi and
Silver (1999) for hegemonic transitions: hegemonies share
certain properties, though each occupies a distinct position
on the spiral, with its unique history. Hegemony and
transitions bring into focus power, exploitation, accumu-
lation and conflicts which can animate diffuse networks.
Its full meaning according to Gramsci and writ large by
Arrighi includes the deeply naturalized beliefs, and insti-
tutions which structure those beliefs, about what exists,
what is possible, and what is right (Therborn 1980).
Latour uses a useful metaphor to interpret global and
local, which evokes the mutual determination of parts and
wholes which McMichael (1990) calls incorporated
comparison. Latour (1993, p. 117) explains that the glo-
bal is always local at each point by analogy to a railroad:
stations and tracks are fixed at any moment, though also
changing over time; the tracks dont go everywhere, but
they go far beyond the horizon visible from any station.
Food regimes can specify fields of contested power shaping
stations and tracks, when they are abandoned and new ones
built. It helps to track potential as well as actual con-
nections. It helps to track deep changes.
Food regimes shape historical inquiry by suggesting key
dates. These dates (if not rigid) recur in so many historical
accounts from so many angles, disciplines, and agendas
that either they identify intersecting turning points in
economy, politics, war, culture, ideas, natural systems,
discourse, and more, or they represent naturalized common
sense in urgent need of deconstruction. Those who balk at
any turning points prefer to see change as seamless, mul-
tifaceted, fluid, like the flow of a river. It is partly tem-
perament, partly figure-grounddoes one focus on
continuity or discontinuity? Yet these dates are subject to
(dis)confirmation. I will close with an example. Canada
sold wheat to the Soviet Union much earlier than expected,
given the importance of Cold War trade embargoes to US
surpluses, which propelled the food regime. Magnans
Discussion: moving food regimes forward
(forthcoming) investigation of that breach of the trade
blockade led to fascinating insights about USCanada
relations, including explicit pricing and grading practices
and implicit export tradeoffs between the two unequal,
closely linked countries. Specific details about mercantile
practices, negotiated tradeoffs between hegemonic and
second-rank powers, and economic dynamics of Cold War
blocs, gave nuance to regime dynamics. New insights came
from dates which were too crude, but useful guides to
inquiry.
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Author Biography
Harriet Friedmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of
Toronto Mississauga and at the Centre for International Studies,
University of Toronto. Her current research includes the politics of
food standards at regional, national, and international scales, and the
innovative community of food practice of Toronto and its surrounding
region. The latter includes the cultural dimension of renewing farming
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H. Friedmann
and food and the links between them in the context of (1) diverse
cuisines and agronomies of New Canadians from around the globe,
and (2) the food sector as key to creative urban economies. She is a
co-founder of the food regimes approach and has published widely on
family farms, regional agri-food economies and international political
economy and political ecology of food and agriculture. She works
with international agencies concerned with food and agriculture,
including the recently released International Assessment of Agricul-
tural Knowledge, Science and Technology.