The industrial food supply will be the last bastion of the luxury economy, and we might mirror the cannibals in doomsday movies before we cede our idiosyncratic eating habits to austerity. Capitalism is amazing because it inspires unrelenting competition between brands and the branding of items that should be generic — organized and categorized by which boasts the best flavor, the most sustainably sourced ingredients, or fastest-ripening produce whose side effects might include the leaching of toxic chemicals into municipal food and water supplies. Then, these same brands dutifully patent an expensive snake oil antidote for poisoning you.
The side effects of the contaminants might reveal themselves in the body as mineral depletion, heavy metal overload or lethargy (chronic fatigue, leaky gut, hyperactivity, dissociation, anhedonia). Luckily, the same system that instigated mass disease and physical and psychic atrophy can invent a market for “clean eating,” the branded backlash against factory farming’s poisoning and genetic modification of your food and soil and water and air. What makes late capitalism even more special is that it can short-circuit just well enough that the so-called clean or whole foods deter most of society from examining where their food comes from and how it reaches them.
What is a farm? What is a supply chain? Who are the farmers harvesting your food and the truckers driving it on interstates to you? Do they earn a living wage? Do you? What is .