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At TABLE, we select annual themes to guide our work. These are usually concepts that act as fault lines in discussions of food system transformation, and concern what a ‘good’ food future might look like. Through a series of reportsessayspodcastsevents and explainers we consider the concept from many different angles. We hope that the totality of this work helps reveal the range of values, assumptions and evidence that shape stakeholders’ views and illuminates how and why they may disagree. 

TABLE’s report at the close of our SCALE theme noted that power was at the root of many concerns about localised or globalised food system approaches. Power is of course a too-big topic, encompassing not only its operation, mechanisms, handlers and impacts, but also what it is and how it is to be identified and redistributed. We approach the concept from multiple angles and via diverse modes of analysis to give a sense of its multifaceted nature. In a collection of 17 podcasts, TABLE asked contributors from a range of disciplines, professional backgrounds and ideological positions to tell us how they understand power and see its operations in their work. Our essays and blogs expanded on these and offer case studies and personal reflections. Our events gave contributors a chance to interact: An open discussion on power asked how participants see power fitting into conversation, while in Whose knowledge counts speakers asked how power might determine what we take as evidence. Lastly, we considered TABLE’s own experience of power in Process and Power at TABLE

Power can be a slippery concept to evaluate and discuss. To give it some materiality, we took protein as a case study, exploring how power has maintained this ‘charismatic nutrient’ at the centre of ideas about nutrition, development and farming. TABLE’s reports add a historical lens to consider how power has structured cultural understandings of protein when it comes to funding, research and international development strategies and activities in Primed for Power: a short cultural history of protein. The Investment, Power and Protein in Sub Saharan Africa report examined financial investment in protein production in sub-Saharan Africa, reflecting on how those cultural narratives are still informing resource distribution. 

You can explore all the Power materials on the project page. However, this theme is not hard-edged and many other resources on TABLE deal with questions of power. You can also explore our other themes of SCALE and NATURE, and the MEAT: the Four Futures project.

https://www.doi.org/10.56661/d98edcaf

TABLE’s Power Theme: an introduction

Food and power

The food system presents a complex context for a discussion of power. The outputs of our food system are commodities and products in a marketplace, but also, like housing (shelter) and healthcare (health), vital to our survival. While there may be choice between products or their sources, participation in food consumption is unavoidable. Nor do we have an exclusively functional relationship with food – food is family, culture and identity as well as bodily sustenance, and it has an emotional resonance that gives narrative power (i.e. storytelling) an acute relevance and strength within food system debates. Food connects us to the natural world in a more relational way than leisure and craft – we exert power over nature in agriculture but are also subject to and constrained by its rules and caprices in ways that can make food systems vulnerable. This wealth of meanings around food means it engages ‘power’ in the most diverse sense. It also means that the potential reach of the power(s) in question is universal - no-one remains untouched. 

Terms of engagement

TABLE’s choice of power as a theme was based on the premise that power’s many meanings and forms are understood and valued differently by different stakeholders, and that its distribution has shaped the course of history – and will shape the future. This piece aims to synthesise, impressionistically, the work under the power theme and to offer some subjective analysis. While the synthesis will make some comparisons, the materials - podcasts, blogs, essays - are not comparable in a methodologically objective sense. They cover different topics and cases, and address different questions. Their incomparability is significant: there is enough room in the huge web of the food system for, to take an example, podcast contributors Phil Howard, author of Concentration and Power in the Food System, and Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist and author of a books on the transformative impact of technology in food, to each talk about corporations and for one to say corporations are actively destroying society and another that they are fighting to understand and address consumer wants, and for both to be right. All contributors draw on enormous fields and bodies of work within their own disciplines and interests, and also upon their own life experiences: this piece engages only with what emerges in the contributions. While the piece does not refer to or draw consciously on academic theories of power, it will inevitably wander into ideas and patterns well established in power theory. 

 

 

 

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Front page of the Power Project report
Definitions of Power
Lens 1: RESOURCES - Distribution
Lens 2: ACTORS - Responsibility and legitimacy
Lens 3: DYNAMICS - Setting the terms
Final reflections
Source material

 

Explore the Power material and share your comments below.

 

Image
birds eye view of field and pylon, Max Bottinger via Unsplash
Ruth Mattock
PUBLISHED
20 Dec 2024