Abstract
The Industrial Diet is a new work from a scholar with a long and distinguished track record within the sociology of food. Anthony Winson has been working within a political-economy framework on the relationships between food (mostly agriculture), politics, and development. In this book, Winson extends the scope of his analysis to include population health. This extension allows Winson to address issues that all readers will recognize as recurrent news stories: the obesity “epidemic,” the crisis of diabetes, high rates of coronary disease, and more. Winson lays out the shifting political-economic foundations of the systems under which the foods that comprise our diets are produced. Covering the time span from the Paleolithic period to the present, this book examines the connections between the ways we eat today and the mass-market forces that structure the options available to us.
Winson begins by rooting his analysis in prior research on food regimes. The study of food regimes is a macro-political-economic approach to understanding the ways in which agriculture has played a unique role in the development of the world capitalist economy. This approach prioritizes the mutually influential relationships between independent nation states (and the regulations and institutions they support) and the industrialization of food production in order to understand both the nature of food production and the paths of global capitalism. Winson adapts this approach to propose the concept of “dietary regimes” for the purposes of explaining not only which foods are produced and in which ways, but also the nutritional characteristics of those foods. “The concept of dietary regimes is a tool with which we may build upon the insights of the food-regime approach to better understand the constitution, reproduction, crisis, and transformation of mass diets” (p. 18).
Indeed, the concept of dietary regimes does good work in organizing and framing the production-level factors that have evolved to coordinate the contemporary American diet. And because some aspects of the American diet have diffused to other rich countries and to some parts of developing countries, the concept can be usefully employed to illuminate diets globally.
The research tradition of political economy eschews the collection of survey or interview data and instead relies on organizing and framing historical, economic, political, and sociological information that is already available. The value of this tradition lies not in producing novel data, but in reframing and recombining existing data in order to support new claims and new ways of seeing the available information. Within this tradition, Winson’s efforts are quite successful, not least because of the sheer volume of evidence he marshals. Among other things, The Industrial Diet provides a comprehensive account of the business and regulatory environments in which our food is produced on the one hand, and the nutritional aspects of contemporary foods on the other. Accordingly, the book is a valuable reference for readers who want to know all the facts on these topics.
The central question the book pursues is why the contemporary diet is nutritionally degraded. Many readers will already be aware that much of the population eats a lot of food that is not healthy. However, it is not obvious how and why this has come to be the case. Winson argues that there are three processes through which political-economic imperatives in food production are creating food that is nutritionally degraded. First, producers aim for maximum speed in turnover time. The economic origins of this process are obvious; if the capital invested in food production can be turned over more quickly, the capital can be reinvested and start working again earlier to produce more profit. Winson shows how the food industry has developed technologies to speed up turnover time. Chief among these are the technologies associated with confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where animals are bred to mature quickly and are fed and managed to maximize and expedite their growth. One of the many externalities of these processes is the introduction of nutritional deficiencies in animals and the eggs and milk that they produce. Relative to animals within the CAFO system, animals raised and fed outside that system produce meat that has healthier kinds of fats and lower levels of unhealthy fats. In addition, milk and eggs from CAFO animals are relatively deficient in certain vitamins and antioxidants.
Second, producers strive for the simplification of foods for efficiencies. Simplification has two versions. It refers to the reduction in biodiversity of food varieties (think of the standardization in the mass market for bananas or potatoes) and also to the processing that makes some foods more palatable or malleable for production purposes. The simplification of wheat is perhaps the best known example, as white flour dominates the marketplace. White flour is easy and versatile to work with, but lacks the nutrients that abound in the bran and germ of wheat.
Third, the process of macro-adulteration principally involves the addition of sweeteners, fats, and salt to foods. Whereas in the distant past food processors adulterated foods to trick consumers into thinking they were getting an expensive foodstuff when they were getting a cheap substitute, in the current dietary regime foods are adulterated to make them “more durable, palatable, and easier to handle” (p. 173). With some basic and some sophisticated food chemistry, sweeteners, fats, and salt can make foods shelf stable and, some would argue, addictive at the same time that they create choices that are nutritionally problematic. The problems of excessive salt intake and the harmfulness of hydrogenated oils, trans fats, and high-fructose corn syrup are well known.
The Industrial Diet persuasively demonstrates that we have arrived at our current systems of food production through historically dependent pathways that must be understood through a political-economic lens. The book will be most valuable to readers who are seeking to understand the history and contemporary dysfunctional nature of the production side of the foodscape. However, because the book is written within the political-economic perspective, there is virtually no attention paid to the cultural or structural forces that condition the dietary choices people make. The meanings of foods and the ways that people “use” food for cultural purposes are absent. Readers seeking an analysis of food consumption, therefore, must look elsewhere. However, for those trying to understand the production side, the book will prove to be well-researched and clarifying.