The "Polycrisis" Stalking Our Food
Episode 34, in which food system scholar Raj Patel sees through the tangle of problems ensnaring the industrial food system, and points to a better future.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
By Tom Philpott Subscribe to Host Notes
In the decades since World War II, U.S. agriculture dramatically intensified. Powered by petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, hybrid seeds, and ever-larger, diesel-guzzling farm machines, crop yields boomed. The mass-scale production of cheap feed crops, along with novel drugs including antibiotics, allowed meat production to industrialize along the factory model. And it gave rise to an explosion of cheap sweeteners and fats that became the basis for ultra-processed food, the linchpin of the U.S. diet. This highly efficient food system—dominated at the top by a set of giant agribusiness firms, meatpackers, fast-food chains, and supermarket operators—became a model for food production across the globe, hotly promoted by U.S. philanthropies and supranational institutions like the World Bank.
But strains are showing. The standard U.S. diet, heavy on processed foods and meat, has emerged as a reliable trigger of chronic metabolic and cardiovascular diseases—and has generated public-health crises everywhere on the globe where it has alighted. Then there's climate change. With its massive greenhouse gas emissions, the global industrial food system is a major contributor to climate change, and it's vulnerable to its shocks, tool. Over the past decade, we've experienced the ten hottest years on record—and the planet has begun heating alarmingly faster than climate change models predicted. As a result, severe droughts have pinched harvests in crucial growing regions from the US. Southwest and the Great Plains to Australia to Central America and swaths of Africa—and will likely be exacerbated by the "super-duper" El Niño now gripping the Pacific Ocean.
As inclement weather threatens to cut crop yields, the prolonged U.S. war on Iran has squeezed the global flow of petroleum and fertilizer, boosting expenses for farmers heavily reliant on both, and putting more upward pressure on food prices. Already, some 8 percent of the world's population—around 700 million people— faces chronic hunger. After many years of steadily falling, that number has moved up over the past tumultuous decade—and will almost certainly jump anew. This year's El Niño is "likely to cause severe disruptions for millions of farmers and food producers in regions already affected by climate extremes and economic shocks," the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned in June.
The FAO's statement is a pithy summary of what some political economists are calling the "polycrisis"—the convergence of multiple interlocking, mutually reinforcing bad things all happening at once, creating a whole that's even more troublesome than the sum of all of its parts. And the global food system stands at the center of it.
On the latest episode of Unconfined, we feature Raj Patel, one of the most influential voices on the global food system, its inequities, and the movements working to change it, from rural Malawi to inner-city Houston. Raj is a research professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and author of the books Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (2008), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (2017, with Jason Moore), Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (2021, with Rupa Marya), as well a superb current Substack blog. He's also—full disclosure—an old friend of mine. (For several years, along with Rebecca McInroy, we co-hosted a food-politics podcast called The Secret Ingredient.)
In an essay from early this year teasing out the history of polycrisis discourse and how it relates to food, Raj posed a question and answer that I think gets to the heart of his work: "You know who knows all about the polycrisis? Working class communities, particularly in the Global South." He added [emphasis added]: "Impoverished and marginalised communities have been living on the frontlines of climate crisis, debt, militarisation, epidemic disease and authoritarianism for decades…. Those who have lived at the frontiers of polycrisis have had years to perform and iterate the most important experiments to survive it."
It is in these stories, he suggests, we who live in the epicenter of the industrial food system can look for inspiration as the polycrisis comes home to roost. So, tune in to hear a brilliant scholar think through some of the knottiest issues facing our food future; stay for some hard-won hope. And a few laughs—incidentally, he's a genuinely hilarious person.
In Host Notes, the voices behind Unconfined podcast deliver additional context to supplement our interviews. Their views do not necessarily reflect those of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future or the Johns Hopkins University.