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- Convenors:
-
Anna Teijeiro Fokkema
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Amber Striekwold (Utrecht University)
James McCann (Boston University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Floor Haalboom
(Erasmus University Rotterdam MC)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Landscapes of Cultivation and Consumption
- Location:
- Room 16
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The rise of the food industry remains a black box in historical food system research, although it is central to 20th century food system transformations. This panel centres the food industry to gain a deeper understanding of 20th century food system changes: from farm through industry to fork.
Long Abstract:
Twentieth-century changes in food systems have been studied from a historical perspective by a broad range of disciplines. As a result, there is a growing body of literature on agricultural developments, consumer behavior, environmental damage and the politics and practices behind food production and consumption. Within these fields of agriculture and food studies the production and consumer sides are often studied in isolation, leaving the food industry, from food retail to agri-businesses, out of the picture. The resulting gap - and disconnect - between producer and consumer is striking because the rise of the food industry is one of the core characteristics of the twentieth-century food system. In this panel we therefore place the food industry in the centre to gain a holistic understanding of food system transformations in the twentieth century: from farm through industry to fork.
We focus on the role of different branches of industry (for example processing, manufacturing, retail) in food system transitions specifically in relation to the environment. By combining different disciplinary approaches we aim to answer questions such as: what is the role of various types of industry in the transition towards a sustainable food system? How did businesses react to environmental discussions? What role did industry take in framing environmental problems and their solutions? Through answering these questions and by integrating the food industry as an active actor in historical food system research, this panel aims to gain insight into the black-boxed food industry and their role in twentieth-century food system change.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The establishment of Optigal and Micarna fundamentally changed how chicken was produced, processed, retailed, and consumed in Switzerland from the 1960s onwards. Studying these companies allows a view into the transformation of the food system in Switzerland from various different perspectives.
Paper long abstract:
Around 1960 the Swiss supermarket chain Migros established two daughter companies that transformed the chicken industry of Switzerland in the following years. Optigal, a broiler production company, and Micarna, an industrial slaughterhouse, fundamentally changed how chickens were produced and processed as well as the waste products of chicken production disposed. Through these companies, Migros was able to produce broilers at a competitive price, while still maintaining an image of practising traditional agriculture. This was achieved through a quasi-vertically integrated production model that centralized the feed production as well as the slaughter, processing, and the distribution of chickens under the Migros, but crucially outsourced the fattening of the birds to contracted smallholders. Over the course of just a few years, Migros was able to take over more than 40% of the broiler production in Switzerland. This scaling up of the broiler production with the continuously rising consumption during the following 1960s and 1970s fundamentally changed the chicken’s role in the Swiss food system.
By studying the Migros, Micarna, and Optigal as a junction of production, processing, retailing, and disposal, I am able to examine the central transformation of the Swiss poultry industry during the second half of the 20th century. This allows me to answer questions regarding the upscaling after 1960 and the impact it had on the health of humans, animals, and the environment, bringing together perspectives from agricultural, medical, and environmental history. Thereby gaining a holistic understanding of the Swiss food system during the 20th century.
Paper short abstract:
This paper highlights the historical role of supermarkets in food system transformation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper highlights the historical role of supermarkets in food system transformation. I
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, an attempt has been made to comprehend millets' political journey from farm to plate. Further, the paper will discuss the important role millets play in strengthening farmers and food entrepreneurs, as well as its ability to contribute to sustainability and food security.
Paper long abstract:
Millets, as one of the oldest food grains known to mankind and possibly the first cereal grain used for domestic purpose from ancient time onwards. Traditionally, tribals in India were cultivating millet (jowar, bajra, ragi, and small millets) for centuries, which was also their staple diet. Green Revolution in India brought change in the dietary pattern like switching on to rice and wheat, millet is slowly losing its popularity among the tribal people of India, signaling an impending condition of starvation and death. With growing concerns of life style diseases coupled with ‘refined’ diet culture, the modern consumers are slowly, but increasingly looking at the nutrient rich millets as a suitable alternative to wheat and rice. In order to encourage production and consumption of millets, Government of India notified millets as Nutri-Cereals in April, 2018. To create domestic and global demand and to provide nutritional food to the people, Government of India had proposed to the United Nations for declaring 2023 as International Year of Millets (IYoM-2023) and United Nation's General Assembly (UNGA) declared 2023 as International Year of Millets on 5th March. In this paper, an attempt has been made to comprehend millets' political journey from farm to plate. Further, the paper will discuss the important role millets play in strengthening farmers and food entrepreneurs, as well as its ability to contribute to sustainability and food security.
Paper short abstract:
On a planet with finite land, we need to prioritize what to feed a growing population. Exploring the feed-food complex is urgent for a green transition. Through work on dairy practices, the paper looks at ways to bring production and consumption into contact addressing the challenges this entails.
Paper long abstract:
On a planet with finite arable land, we need to discuss how we share resources and what to feed a growing population. Producing food from animals takes up larger areas than plant-based food. Exploring this feed-food complex seems urgent to understand transitions of the food industry. This paper presents ethnographic work on dairy practices to reflect on ways to bring production into contact with the consumed product – and the challenges that this entails for intensive agriculture.
The paper emerges from research on dairy cows in Denmark. Cattle are often singled out for their unique ability to transform grasses, inedible to humans, into meat and milk. However, by now foraging on grassland is rarely practiced. Instead, cows are kept in barns and fed silage along with concentrate to meet their genetic predisposition for high milk yield. Seasonal oscillations and variable qualities of grasses on poor soils will not do. Seemingly both the nature of the cow as a ruminant and the nature of milk as a nurturing substance fade from view. Instead, industrial cows have become standardized efficient metabolisms, attempting maximum control of landscapes and biological processes. In recent years products that foreground connections between land and milk have been marketed. For all their intuitive qualities, the products nonetheless come at a price, showing that the agricultural system as a whole thrives through disconnecting farm, industry and dinner table. Overall, the paper argues that rethinking the food-feed ratio and reconnecting cows with landscapes are key to future animal food systems.
Paper short abstract:
The paper unpacks the geographic width of the social and environmental consequences of connections to foreign supply of oils and fats used in the Dutch economy. It highlights the often understudied global competition between places of extraction, production, and consumption.
Paper long abstract:
Industrial imports of resources affect economic, social, and environmental conditions elsewhere in the world. Netherlands’ industrialization and modernization of agriculture in the twentieth century intensified pressure on foreign social and natural environments. Dutch application of foreign fats, oils and protein of plant seeds, nuts and animals, increased in relation to food and fodders industries. This allowed the development of export driven food industries and intensive livestock farming. The paper presents an investigation into the development and dynamics of the Dutch imports of multiple resources of oil and fats. It analyses the origins and scale of these resources. By scrutinizing this data, it studies the growth, decline and spatial shifts in the supply of different oils and fats to the Netherlands. This highlights often understudied global competitions between resources. Furthermore, it also sketches issues of mutual dependence between the Netherlands and its supplying areas, evaluating the social and environmental impacts and reliance of Dutch consumption on these resources. These overviews are combined with insights in the developments of the main applications in food and fodder industries. Chemical technologies allowing more exchangeability of these resources address issues of knowledge and purchasing power of major industries. Insights in knowledge production and societal discussions on production in nutrition, food qualities and environmental issues connect to shifting interests in various oil and fat resources. The paper unpacks the geographical scope of the social and environmental consequences of connections to foreign supply of oils and fats used in the Dutch economy.
Paper short abstract:
Changes in the diets of farm animals enabled major shifts in human diets and industrial livestock farming. This paper focuses on the import of Thai cassava meal to Europe, and to what extent the origins of the cassava feed were (in)visible in industry and public discourse in Europe/the Netherlands.
Paper long abstract:
Historical changes in the diets of farm animals enabled major shifts in human diets and industrial livestock farming. These shifts were accompanied by entangled social and environmental impacts in both production and consumption countries. In recent decades, soy in particular has attracted a lot of attention as a globally traded commodity for feeding animals. Soy connects large-scale destruction of living environments and ecosystems in South America to industrial livestock farming in consumption countries, such as the Netherlands. However, soy is not the only animal feed ingredient. In the 1980s, Thai cassava meal (tapioca) actually surpassed both soy and maize imports for feeding European chickens, pigs and cattle. This situation was created through a European price policy nicknamed ‘the hole of Rotterdam’, which protected European grain farmers from the world market, while creating an import tariffs ‘hole’ for substitutes of grains, like cassava. As cassava is also an important global subsistence crop, this shift is important for understanding the global environmental impact of industrial livestock. In this paper, we will discuss this radical change in European animals’ diets using the Netherlands as a consumption country where the use of cassava in animal feed has an older colonial history, and where the ‘hole’ was designed and located, had consequences and was criticized by NGOs. Our paper focuses on two questions. First: the role of the Dutch and European feed industry in establishing the ‘hole of Rotterdam’, and its consequences for livestock farming. Second: to what extent the Indonesian and Thai origins of the cassava feed were visible or invisible in industry and public discourse in Europe/the Netherlands.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will focus on the modernisation of pig farming in the region of Brittany (West of France), which accounts today for nearly 60% of the French pig herd. It will stress the importance of pig cooperatives, feed merchants, and pig farmers' unions, between 1940s and 1990s.
Paper long abstract:
After the Second World War, the region of Brittany became the biggest pig production region of France, and accounts today for about 60% of the total French pig herd. This story can be told from various points of view : the state's, local authorities, but also scientific institutions dedicated to research on pigs, pig cooperatives, feed and counsel merchants, and the farmers themselves. By combining all these perspectives, the 1940s-1990s modernisation period divides into two : a first period of progressive intensification (1940s-1970s) characterised by DIY and fumbling, and a second period (1980s-1990s) characterised by a deeper integration of the farmers in an industrial production logic. This paper will show, thanks to both written documents and oral history interviews, the evolution and the differences between the two periods, by focusing more specifically on pig farm buildings, pig feed, and pig genetics. It will talk about the role of the French state in promoting a certain type of industrial pig production, but will stress out the capital role of pig cooperatives, feed merchants, and pig farmers' unions in the development of industrial pig farms in Brittany.
Paper short abstract:
This proposal analyzes how livestock farming in Europe has moved from manure management to slurry overproduction driven by policies and market mechanisms and accompanied by pollution. We further identify policy interventions to tackle these pollution problems using regional approaches in Spain and G
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this contribution is to analyze how national and international politics and the feed and food industry pushed livestock farming in Europe from manure to slurry based production systems accompanied by excessive slurry accumulation.
The foundations of the European industrial livestock system have been laid in the second food regime as a result of industrial state policies and food push-market strategies and consolidated in the third food regime by neoliberal, free market policies in a global market.
Resulting emissions of pollutants have been tackled by international agreements and European policies since the 1970s, for example the Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in 1979, the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992, or the EU Nitrates Directive in 1991.
Yet, legislation ends up being implemented with difficulties at the local level, generating conflicts due to the difficult adaptation of norms to specific agrarian contexts. We reflect on how regulatory changes and market mechanisms of the second and the third food regime shaped livestock farming and how environmental policies affect livestock farming at the regional level. To this end, we use regional approaches in Spain and Germany focusing in intensive livestock regions in dairy, pig and poultry farming.
As sources we use (i) for environmental regulation, the international rules of States and organizations and (ii) for the impacts of policies and the food industry on the case study regions, fieldwork, Oral History, state archive material, newspapers and specialized farming magazines as well as online resources.