Elsewhere

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.