Summary

Geographer Stian Rice demonstrates how the current solutions to fix our broken food system miss the point. He argues that our food system isn’t broken—in fact, it’s working just fine as a capitalist system that generates wealth—and that the harms it inflicts are intentional. Elsewhere examines the 250-year history of the US food system, uncovering how the country used abundance to enrich some and exploit others and how it captured, colonized, and reorganized territory to conceal its harms. To keep generating wealth, the system moves its violence around, away from privileged producers and consumers and into forgettable elsewhere: reservations, prisons, distant islands, killing floors, inner cities, rural hinterlands, and war-torn countries. Rice shows how decades of technological innovation, environmental awareness, and consumer consciousness have not, and will not, staunch these self-inflicted wounds until we can nurture a food system that does not profit from harm.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Decentralist Fever

Chapter 1 – Appalachian Localism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement

Chapter 2 – Going “Guerilla” in the War on Poverty

Chapter 3 – From Heathcote to Hamlin

Chapter 4 – Appalachia’s Heirs

Chapter 5 – Trust in the Hills

Chapter 6 – Hooray for the Outsiders!

Chapter 7 – Our Struggle Is a Barometer

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index 

Author

Stian Rice is a geographer whose work examines the origins of violence in the food system. He has written about famine, genocide, and structural violence for academic and general audiences since 2012 and is the author of Famine in the Remaking: Food System Change and Mass Starvation in Hawaii, Madagascar, and Cambodia. He is assistant research scientist with the Center for Urban Environmental Research at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and teaches geography at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland. Rice received his PhD in geography from Kent State University. 

Praise