ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the global relationship between food growing and capitalism over the past 500 years. There have been three major profit-seeking formats, beginning with mercantilism, when the relationship was dominated by trade (in slaves as well as food and fibres); through industrialism, which began by producing agricultural tools such as harvesting machines as well as its products, such as textiles. The third and present setting has abetted a separation between food’s rural production and its urban consumption that was set in motion by industrialism. Capitalism, in its leading centres, led to a de-industrialisation of cities and moved on to a stage in which primary wealth accumulation comes from a global financialisation, highlighted by investments of surplus capital. Agricultural products are commodified by industrialised and chemicalised corporate megafarms. This has incited a food resistance trend, inspired by the emergence of environmentalism and recovery from the damages of deindustrialisation. Redevelopment became a leading agenda of many cities in the global North in the latter half of the twentieth century, abetted by a green gentrification of neighbourhoods. Food now has an organic, fresh, local variety, and a new city home in community gardens and farms.
