Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the "taste" of power in the global almond sector. Comparing California's bland, irrigated monocultures with Spain's bitter, rainfed refugia, we show how food’s organoleptic qualities are not mere consumer preferences or biological attributes but active political ecological agents

Presentation long abstract

While work on the political ecology of food and agriculture has long illuminated visible landscapes of power, this paper turns to the visceral terrain of taste. We offer a sensory political ecology of almond agriculture, illustrating how organoleptic qualities both shape and are shaped by agrarian worlds. We examine California’s irrigated monocultures aside Spain’s rainfed polycultures. In California, the industry has perfected a hegemonic plantation taste—bland, consistent, crunchy—which relies on ecological simplification, intensive irrigation, and the erasure of biological difference. In Spain, diverse and occasionally bitter almond varieties are cultivated in polyculture landscapes that resist industrial capture, enabling the persistence of rural livelihoods on the margins. Over the past decade, Spain’s almond industry has rapidly embraced irrigated monocultures in a rush to ‘modernize’ the sector in pursuit of the standardized almond taste that global markets have come to expect. Yet, rainfed orchards persist, bolstered by local markets that tolerate diverse tastes and artisanal markets that celebrate them. We argue that food’s organoleptic qualities are not merely consumer preferences but lively forces that recruit labor, capital, and nonhumans into specific political ecological configurations, with implications for environmental sustainability and justice. Analyzing the political ecologies of food and agriculture through the palate reveals how the standardization of sensory experience underpins extractive regimes, and how cultivating a taste for difference offers a pathway for multispecies resistance.