This is the yearly issue of Politics and Culture produced from Australia, the fourth since the journal started. The content of this issue much as for our others reflects the closeness of the historical ties politically, economically, culturally – and militarily – between Australia, and the United States and Britain. These have been foregrounded by the coincidental presence of the Australian Prime Minister John Howard in the United States at the time of 9/11/2001, and in Britain at the time of the suicide bombings of the public transport system in London in early July 2005. The Prime Minister used both occasions to make statements about the military and other support that Australia would continue to offer to both countries. Our editorial last year talked of the ways in which the conservative Liberal-National government from the 1990s seemed to be reviving 1950s mentalities and mindsets, and the indications now seem stronger.
The London Sunday Times of July 9 reported:

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Introduction to the Special Evolutionary Issue of Politics and Culture

I’m grateful to Michael Ryan for inviting me to serve as guest editor to this special evolutionary issue of Politics and Culture. Michael and I share an interest in integrating evolutionary research with literary and cultural theory. While discussing our shared interests, we have identified a number of important points on which we do not see quite eye to eye. So, Michael should not be held responsible for any of the ideas I express, though of course, he can be held responsible for giving me this opportunity to express them. Similar considerations apply to the relations between the guest editor and the contributors to this volume. We are all independent thinkers working in complex theoretical areas that have not yet been reduced to precise measurement. The chance that we would all agree on every main contention is vanishingly small. Even so, most or all of us would agree that humans have evolved in an adaptive relation to their environment and that as a result they share many species-typical dispositions that constrain their political and cultural behavior. Within that broad area of consensus, the essays here offer a good many divergent and sometimes conflicting ideas. Clearly, not all these ideas could be correct. Nonetheless, in my own judgment, all the essays are serious, well-informed, and thoughtful. They should richly reward the reader’s attention.

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I. The problem, once again…

At risk of being obviously unfashionable or unfashonably obvious, the problem with food in the world today is capitalism. Particularly, it is a form of capitalism that imposes uniquely local but ubiquitously global forms of market sovereignty over more and more aspects of our lives. Food, which names the spectre of one of the great crises of the 21st century, offers a particularly acute nexus of the power of and struggle against this omnicidal sovereignty. After all, everyone eats (or is prevented form eating) and the thematic of food stretches from our most basic ontological and epistemological categories (nature/culture, raw/cooked, wild/civilized, internal/external, tradition/science) to the infinitely complex and bitterly material relations of power in a globalizing world. Food speaks to the way emerging forms of global power influence all levels of life, from the genetic makeup of seeds to the ownership of land. From the gendered dynamics of agricultural labour to the persistence of neocolonial monoculture and cash-crop cultivation. From the infuriating inequalities of global trade to the tension between transnational corporation, international organizations, the transforming nation-state, and global and local social movements. From the homogenized foodscapes of urban Wal-Mart Supercentres (where Americans buy the single greatest proportion of their food) to the cultural and body politics of (over/under)eating (fast and slow). We encounter all of these and everything in between through the prism of questions of resistance, as unavoidable as they are inexorable: collectivist or individualist? Localist or globalist? Reformist or revolutionary? Utopian or apocalyptic?

Read more on Max Haiven, Food, finance, crisis, catalyst: global capitalism and the revolutionary value of food sovereignty…

“In every case, the geography of anger is not a simple map of action and reaction, minoritization and resistance, nested hierarchies of space and site, neat sequences of cause and effect. Rather, these geographies are the spatial outcome of complex interactions between faraway events and proximate fears, between old histories and new provocations, between rewritten borders and unwritten orders” (100).
-Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger

Since the subject of this issue of Politics and Culture is food and the continuing struggle by the dispossessed and disenfranchised to manage their own food, the diversely disciplined contributors to this issue have necessarily persuaded themselves that it is important, now, to intervene in what Walter Benjamin called the “fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist” (Benjamin 254). Demanding food sovereignty means taking food seriously as a question of justice, survival and sustainability, and of how to imagine radically democratic registers of political and economic participation. It also means thinking about food in terms of the pedagogical. As Julie Guthman notes in her interview in this issue, food is becoming an increasingly important object of study among the privileged class of educators and intellectuals who, Guthman insists, bear the responsibility to “reflect on potential levers of transformation” rather than gorging on the capital which accompanies the rhetoric of prescribing what to eat.
The privatization of social concern that has driven neoliberal cultural politics at the “end of history”, or what Giorgio Agamben terms the “lasting eclipse of the political” (Agamben 121), has left a social and cultural vacuum in which the collective agency required to build living alternatives to contemporary global gastropolitics is left gasping for air. Filling this vacuum are, on the one hand, radical movements like Via Campesina that assert the “right to have rights,” or the right to “act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each,” (Arendt 296) in relation to the vital labour of growing and raising food. On the other are notions of consumer sovereignty which offer what we might call an “informational” model of imagining the subjectivity of the consumer: if consumers are informed adequately and accurately about the sublimely large networks of neoliberalized and protectionist profit and supply that constitute the global food system, if they are educated in the exploitative conditions of food production (as well as revolutionary efforts to undo these conditions), they might adjust their consumption habits and, in so doing, effectively join in the “crude” struggles whose absence stunts the growth of “refined and spiritual things.”

Read more on Scott Stoneman, Learning to learn from the food crisis: consumer sovereignty and the restructuring of subjectivity…