ABSTRACT
Rife with symbolism, it turns up everywhere, framing how we experience events and places, directing memories, emotions, shaping identity and conferring status. Food has the ability to focus and magnify our anxieties and fears as well as our aspirations and desires. As industrial agriculture has grown in scale and stature, geography as a constraint for what appears on the dinner table has collapsed and relationship to food has changed. With its link to local ecology and culture severed, food now functions as an input in urban diets and industrial processing plants shifting from an earlier conceptualization of food as integral to well-being. Crops grown under the industrial agriculture model are bombarded with an immense array of chemical insecticides, herbicides, fungicides. A basic understanding of ecological systems suggests farming in this manner is hardly sustainable; eventually the soil will be dead, the water polluted, wildlife numbers reduced, genetically modified crops proliferating everywhere, and the economic viability of the land substantially depleted.
