SOC 808 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Soil Fertility, Food Miles, Vegetable Oil
11 Apr 2014
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Chapter 7 a political ecology approach to industrial food production. As with all commodities, food is shrouded in mystery, with consumers having limited knowledge about what went into making them and their prices. The fact that these relations and costs are hidden and largely incomprehensible is something marx called commodity fetishism. Political ecology gives attention to the political economic tendencies, power imbalances, and ecological instabilities in how systems operate. Intercropping patterns (planting multiple crops in mutually beneficial combinations) helped soil loss, pests, and drought. Another way of understanding the locally oriented nature of agricultural landscapes is that they had to be based upon relatively closed-loop" cycles of biological and physical materials: Soil is the living skin of the earth", a combination of biological and physical materials that ultimately underpins all human civilizations; without great care it tends to be lost much more quickly than it develops. The industrial revolution in agriculture: scale, mechanization, and standardization.
