Nourishing Networks: Alternative Geographies of Food

Abstract

The spatial imagery of a ‘shrinking world’ and a ‘global village’ are the popular hallmarks of an understanding of the limitless compass and totalising fabric of contemporary capitalism that has become something of a social science orthodoxy, known as globalisation (Featherstone 1990, Sklair 1991). No less heroic than the institutional complexes which it depicts, such an understanding perpetuates a peculiarly modernist geographical imagination that casts globalisation as a colonisation of surfaces which, like a spreading ink stain, progressively colours every spot on the map. This spatial imagery suffuses the political economy of agro-food through analytical devices like ‘global commodity systems’ (Friedland et al. 1991); ‘agro-food regimes’ (Le Heron 1994) and ‘systems of provision’ (Fine et al. 1996). In the most cogently argued versions, globalisation is animated as a political project of world economic management orchestrated by a regiment of capitalist institutions including transnational corporations (TNCs), financial institutions and regulatory infrastructures (McMichael 1996:112). But the most potent agro-food expression of this spatial imagery must surely be George Ritzer’s notion of ‘McDonaldization’. He coins the term to describe a process of social rationalisation modelled on the fast-food restaurant which he argues has ‘revolutionised not only the restaurant business, but also American society and, ultimately, the world’ (Ritzer 1996:xvii). This is social science at its most triumphant-a rhetorically seductive best-seller which serves up the world on a plate.