As we sit down to eat, most of us never give a thought to the wider issues associated with our food. But food is deeply political, being connected to land ownership, poverty and wealth, wars, corruption, colonialism, sexism, and so much more.
Through our food, what we eat, and even whether we eat at all, we connect to diverse local, national, and global socio-political systems. In this context, what we choose not to eat says more about who we are as people than the foods we may otherwise unthinkingly consume.
Here we examine some of the issues that are intertwined with the global food system from wars and famine to patriarchal structures, violence, and capitalism.
Who Owns the Land?
Those who own the land own the resources needed for food production, and they get to choose what to produce, whether that is meat, dairy, eggs, crops to feed farmed animals, or cereals, fruits, and vegetables to feed people.
The world’s large landowners are wealthy and politically influential. They are able to influence policy to ensure that they receive subsidies, which are funded by taxpayers, with most subsidies propping up the production of meat and dairy rather than supporting the production of fruits and vegetables. This is despite the significant environmental harms caused by the animal farming industries. This is what journalist George Monbiot calls the “pollution paradox” — the dirtiest industries lobby the hardest to get what they want, whether that is more subsidies or to ensure that no regulations are brought in that may restrict their activities.
This agri-political complicity allows huge farming corporations and retailers to bank vast profits, while citizens — now rebranded as consumers — pay to have their decisions influenced, and then pay again to clean up the environmental pollution caused by the farming of animals.
Who Gets To Eat?
Allowing hunger to take hold in a community, nation, or region, is a political decision. It can be related to many different factors, including crop failure, civil unrest, war, and corruption. Any one of these — and often they work in combination — can lead to hunger, but there is another cause that is rarely discussed: the political decision to allow vast amounts of the world’s crops to be fed to farmed animals instead of making it available to people.
When we do this, most of the calories are lost, making the consumption of meat, eggs, and dairy incredibly wasteful of the world’s resources. This “staggeringly inefficient” system means that the world’s wealthiest people continue to eat meat while the poorest may not eat at all.
Famine Is Political
We tend to think of famine as a natural calamity, often connected to poor weather leading to failed harvests. This is not so, says Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. “Famine is a very specific political product of the way in which societies are run, wars are fought, governments are managed,” he says. “The single overwhelming element in causation — in three-quarters of the famines and three-quarters of the famine deaths — is political agency.”
Food, Famine, and Colonialism: The Past
According to academics Dylan Sullivan and Professor Jason Hickel, tens of millions of Indians died of starvation in the late 1800s during several policy-induced famines, as their resources were siphoned off to Britain and its settler colonies. And this was not the last time colonizers used famine to suppress the native Indian population. Restaurateur and UN World Food Programme advocate Asma Khan told The Guardian, “I come from Bengal, where the famine of the 1940s was a deliberate act by the British government to divert rice towards the forces and starve my people.”
Famine and War: The Present
There are far too many ongoing examples of how restricting access to food is used for political ends. According to the World Food Programme, ten of the worst food crises in the world — including those in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and Yemen — are due to deliberate war tactics that include starving human populations.
In Yemen, which imports 90 percent of its food, 12 million people are facing starvation as warring parties launch airstrikes on farms and ports. Alex de Waal describes Yemen as “the greatest famine atrocity of our lifetimes.” He says: “The United States and the European countries, if they cared about it enough, have enough leverage to get the Saudis and the Emeratis to stop bombing agricultural, health, and market infrastructure, open the ports, and have a much less restrictive definition about what food is allowed in. They also need to start a peace process. This is not a war that is going to be won in any meaningful sense. It’s a political, created famine and it will have to be solved by political, created means.”
Food Security and Climate Change: The Future
In 2023, food insecurity affected 281.6 million people and, as the climate crisis escalates, this number is likely to rise. With the increase in heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts, harvests become less predictable. That coupled with water scarcity in many regions makes the production of food even more insecure.
Governments are doing far too little to tackle the climate crisis, and there is no doubt that food insecurity and famines will affect many more people, most likely in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Southeast Asia. But, while we continue to press for political action, we can each play our part in mitigating the climate crisis. The best way to reduce our food-related emissions and protect valuable resources like water, is to eat a plant-based diet.
Patriarchy and Food
In many regions, the essential work of cultivating land, shopping, and cooking keeps women confined to a very small area — the land they are often not permitted or able to own (women own two percent of land globally despite producing 50 percent of our food), the shops or markets, and their home. At the same time, the traditional skills and knowledge that women have long held have been discounted and devalued, with seed and food knowledge transferring to multinational corporations. And while women provide the vast majority of meals in homes, professional chefs are still more likely to be men, with celebrity chefs typically bringing machismo, aggression, and a lot of meat to the role. As Asma Khan says, “Male chefs have made cooking into a combat sport.”
Patriarchy, Food, and War
Two recent articles, both deeply disturbing, appeared in the press recently, which remind us how patriarchal power structures police access to food. In Sudan, it was reported that women were forced to have sex with Sudanese soldiers in order to get access to provisions. In Central African Republic (CAR), food prices are currently soaring following the rape of women and girls by Russian mercenaries, which has left women too fearful to work in the fields or go to the markets. First comes the violent abuse, and then the hunger.
Violence and Our Food
Most people do not support violence unless it is essential for self-defense. Most people would also be horrified to see a dog beaten or a cat tormented. But there is no getting away from the fact that meat, eggs, and dairy are products of violence. Meat is the body of a slaughtered animal. Dairy and eggs are only available commercially because the animals from whom those products are taken are permitted to live only so long as they can keep producing enough to make a profit for the person exploiting them. When the production of milk, eggs, or babies declines, all animals in the farming system are disposed of through violence.
Meat and Masculinity
Why is the traditional perception of masculinity and meat so intertwined? Does it go back to ancient stories of men hunting and killing animals while women gathered edible fruits, nuts, berries, and leaves? Or is it more connected to the truth that meat has been — and continues to be — the preserve of the privileged and that the perception of success and masculinity have long been connected? There is much at play here but research consistently shows a connection between people who identify as more masculine and the amount of meat they consume. Entwined in this are notions of personal freedom, tradition, a tendency towards authoritarian beliefs, and a need to display strength, power, and success. There are signs of change, with many men choosing to display their strength through compassion instead of dominance, but the link remains strong, and is actively fostered by the meat industry itself.
Feminism and Food
Meat, eggs, and dairy are feminist issues. The production of meat (babies) is only possible because a mother’s body was exploited and her young taken from her to be killed. Similarly, dairy is only possible because animals are first made pregnant, and their babies are taken away from them to stop them drinking the milk that was made just for them. Eggs are only possible because of the reproductive abilities of hens and ducks, but those mothers never get to keep or sit on their eggs.
While female animals are routinely exploited for their reproductive capacities by the meat, milk, and egg industries, so too are male animals. Males are kept as “stud” animals and killed when their fertility declines. In the dairy industry, the calves are merely a by-product of milk production, and male calves are shot at birth if their bodies cannot be monetized in other ways. Similarly, millions of day-old male chicks are slaughtered by the egg industry — ground up alive or gassed to death because male chicks cannot lay eggs.
Reproductive justice is at the heart of why so many people choose not to eat meat, eggs, or dairy.
Women Feeding Their Communities
All around the world, women come together to support their neighborhoods through community food justice programs. In the slums of Buenos Aires, for example, women work unpaid in soup kitchens, pooling their resources and giving their time to ensure no one goes hungry. They fill pots with food on the sidewalks in the freezing winter and distribute hot beverages, all while helping children with schoolwork. Together they are better able to protect themselves from domestic violence and police repression and here, once again, we see how eating becomes a political act. It is a symbol of resistance, solidarity, and community care in a system that attempts to undermine the dignity and survival of the most vulnerable. Each plate served is an act of defiance against an unjust order, and each gesture of food generosity is a step towards building a more equitable world.
Food Choice and Capitalism
Much is made of our freedom to choose what we eat, and for those of us lucky enough to have a choice, this is a gift and a privilege. But, how freely do any of us really choose? We are not only influenced by our own history, geography, culture, and traditions, but by affordability, availability, and manipulation by one of the most powerful industries on Earth.
If we truly had the freedom to choose, would we pick highly processed foods that cause great harm to us, animals, and our planet, or would we choose delicious foods that nourish us and make us feel great, while supporting a healthy environment and causing no harm?
Food is more than our own personal nourishment, it is a way for large corporations and their shareholders to get unimaginably rich, but this only happens when foods are either incredibly expensive to make (like meat from cows) or when the food is processed and ‘value’ is added. And so, vast multinationals find ways to keep us buying animal-based junk foods — including making the food ‘addictive, lobbying for subsidies which make these foods look cheaper than they are, and clever marketing that sells us a lifestyle or plays into our insecurities about belonging and identity.
Questions We Don’t Ask About Food
Popular farming and cooking shows and online channels increasingly tell us about the importance of knowing where our food comes from. But these shows are part of the marketing drive and they never tell us the full story. In the farm-to-fork narrative, we are shown clean wholesome-looking farms which do not resemble any farm that has ever been investigated by animal protection campaigners, and we are never shown the reality of how animals are industrially slaughtered.
We are not told that the meat we eat causes water and air pollution that creates mass die-offs in rivers and exacerbates asthma in the residents who live near to the farms. We are not told of the forced labor within the industry or the devastating mental health impacts of the people tasked with slaughtering animals all day long. We are not told that foods from animals — meat, fish, dairy, and eggs — are the worst foods for the climate and that we cannot hope to tackle the climate crisis while we continue to eat these foods as we do today.
These facts are backed by scientific evidence and are freely available but we have to go looking for them. And choosing to be educated on matters that impact our own lives and those of others is also a political act.
Veganism Is a Political Act
If we have the privilege of being able to choose what we eat, boycotting products associated with inequality, food insecurity, and patriarchal power because they cause great harm to people, animals, and the planet, is a highly political act.
Veganism is political in that it rejects an old, outdated, and harmful world order and instead sets our intentions on a kinder, more equitable, more just world.
It says that wealth and power do not give anyone the right to damage our planet and cause immense suffering, nor do they confer the right to eat while others go hungry.
It demonstrates our own core values of compassion and our belief that human beings are not the only ones who matter.
Veganism is a bold and definitive statement that the system we have — of politicians being manipulated by corporations and failing to act on the environmental crises we face — is unacceptable, and that we wish to have no part in it.
Veganism is more than a principle or a belief system; it is also an action. It acts by withdrawing financial support from the industries that cause widespread harm.
Finally, veganism is political in that it is changing the world for the better.
