Science and Food Fictions: Agricultural Technologies, the Evolution of the Modern Industrial Diet, and Calls for a Food Revolution

[First paragraph] Individual food choices are culturally and historically contingent practices that arise through an amalgamation of often hidden political, scientific, and economic policies that shape desire and influence access. Food, like all other man-made mechanisms of control and authority, has been used “as a political tool for […] subjugating (either economically or politically) other nations” according to William A. Dando, a professor at the University of North Dakota, who in 1975 urged American agricultural officials not to use food as “a weapon” against starving nations, something he feared was eminently possible given the economic and political climate of agricultural production (13). Dando, among those wearily emerging from the chemical stupor created by the Green Revolution, argued that “famines are a facet of the agricultural revolution and man’s cultural biases” rather than simply natural phenomenon resulting from droughts or the unpredictable invasions of pests (14). He warned other scientists and agricultural officials in attendance that future “food shortages and famines [would] be contrived for economic, political, and ideological purposes” (18). Dando’s dystopic vision was not an apocalyptic warning, but an impassioned recognition of the growing disparity in world food supplies resulting from political, economic, and cultural practices that often ignore the moral and ethical implications of industrial food production