The cover of the study “The Elephant at the Table: Policy Pathways to Confront Power in Food Systems,” worked on by Emma McDonell, courtesy of the New Institute.
Who controls the food on people’s tables?
For University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Assistant Professor of Anthropology Emma McDonell, this was the central question she examined this past summer.
During her fellowship at the New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, McDonell joined the Future of Food: Power and Biodiversity program, collaborating with an international cohort to examine how power shapes global food systems.
McDonell’s previous research on quinoa and its entry into consumer consciousness laid the groundwork for the institute’s study, “The Elephant at the Table: Policy Pathways to Confront Power in Food Systems.”
In the introduction, the study stated that “food systems must feed everyone, not only those who can afford it. They must regenerate ecosystems, not deplete them, and they must provide decent livelihoods to those who nourish us, not consign them to hunger and exploitation.”
Her cohort focused on power and the significant challenges facing future food systems. The power explained by the study is the “concrete control” over markets, labor, land and narratives that shape food systems.
“The idea was to foreground how power and power inequities shape our food systems and then to develop agencies and folks working in these international nongovernmental organizations that help navigate the power inequities in our food system,” McDonell said, “rather than shying away from dealing with these power inequities that inevitably shape who has access to food and who controls how our food system works.”
Her work focused on neglected and underutilized crop species.
“There are thousands of crop species, and yet our food systems are based on a very small number of species in terms of the number that actually get into people’s diets,” she explained. “My chapter was about utilizing these many different crop species that are often very hardy in the face of climate change. They’re often highly nutritious.”
McDonell’s book, “The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop,” informed her chapter on agricultural diversity.
“There are all of these interesting, highly nutritious crop species,” she said. “Increasingly, there are markets for them in high-end grocery stores where there’s a trajectory where they become sort of superfoods, for wealthy, health-conscious eaters in the global North.
“How can we leverage the nutritional benefits of these species and also their agronomic characteristics in terms of climate change adaptation for those who need the most, rather than just turning them into luxury foods for already very well-nourished people?”
According to McDonell, crops like quinoa haven’t received the investment and support that more traditional and powerful crops like wheat and rice have.
“Quinoa was a neglected species and now is on the tables of wealthy consumers across the globe, but it hasn’t had the impact on food security for undernourished populations that we would hope,” she said.
Power, she explained, lies at the core of the problem.
“Power is shaping the food system,” McDonell said. “Our policy was not to pretend that it doesn’t exist. It’s touchy because national-level government policymakers and policymakers at these international NGOs often rely on corporate donors. In some sense, they’re caught in difficult positions where they don’t want to tick off powerful food corporations.”
What excited McDonell about her role at the New Institute was the chance to impact change through her work by presenting the institute’s findings to stakeholders and policymakers.
“What was so attractive for me about not just the New Institute broadly, but this specific call about power and biodiversity in food systems, was that it was all about developing this report for policymakers,” she said. “I could help inform better policy on food and agriculture for the future so that we don’t have the same quinoa boom-bust trajectory happen with other neglected and underutilized species.”
The opportunity to work with academics, journalists and other experts from the field also intrigued McDonell.
“I learned so much from these colleagues because they’re experts in their own specific sectors,” she said. “One person is an expert in what we call blue food systems, so basically fisheries and aquaculture; it was interesting for me to learn about these aspects of the food system that I’m less well-versed in.
“I also found it a really invigorating challenge as an academic who’s used to analyzing. In my field, we do ethnographic fieldwork, so we spend a lot of time in a specific cultural context, immersing ourselves in it and then trying to understand it—analyzing it and writing about it. It was a different thing for me to then basically have someone say, ‘Yeah, your critiques are valid.’”
One area of change that McDonell said interests her is the growing interest in locally procured food through public procurement.
“We can think of school lunch programs and breakfast programs,” she said. “Many countries have other kinds of public food procurement programs, and historically, they’ve focused on low-cost commodity crops.
“I mean, that’s how it is in the U.S., how our school lunch program is. But increasingly there is interest in incorporating locally relevant foods, locally produced foods and these sorts of neglected and underutilized species into these public procurement initiatives.”
This issue is worldwide and will affect this country, state and city, McDonell said.
“Our food system is sort of reaching a breaking point in a lot of ways in terms of projections with climate change,” McDonell said. “Many crops that have been produced in certain regions within 15 to 20 years may not be able to be produced in those same regions in terms of our global food systems, in trade and things like that are also at a moment of change. It’s something that many of us saw during the pandemic when supply chains often quickly fell apart.
“Many people know that this system is broken. When we look at nutritional and health outcomes, the fact is that the quality of what we eat often tracks very closely with our economic status. Poor people eat much lower-quality diets than rich people. Many people know this system is broken, and there’s the question, ‘How do we fix it?’ What this report is doing is trying—in a small way—to get us towards something better.”
Learn more
UTC Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Geography
“The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop”
