ABSTRACT
The global food system has been undergoing tremendous changes since the beginning of the twentieth century. With the production, distribution, and consumption of food being today globally integrated, these processes connect diverse and remote localities with global markets. Transnational corporate practices that were previously limited to a large extent to supply chains now reach deep into other domains, such as political decision-making structures and financial markets. The practices of shifting, outsourcing, scaling, intensifying, or accelerating the production, distribution, and consumption of food are at the same time practices of ordering, thereby producing specific overlapping spaces and dissolving existing boundaries. The current state of the agro-industrial food system and how it came into being cannot be understood without looking historically at the impact that transnational corporations have had on the system. The global food crisis in 2008 broke with the idea that food prices would continually get cheaper and would benefit the poor.
