Global food supply chains, we have been told often in recent
years, are in crisis. How much, though, does this language of crisis-as
particular, contextual, temporally bound-suffice to describe the conditions
of the present? This chapter, and the book it introduces, take the
COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard to interrogate a larger set of structural,
environmental and political fault lines running through the global
food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution
and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth,
just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, we examine the pandemic
not simply as a particular and acute moment of disruption but rather as a
lens on a deeper, longer set of structural processes within which disruption
is endemic. At a time when it is more likely to be grasped in terms of speculative investment than as a common good, food offers a vital prism
for grappling with the logics by which power circulates in the world.
Attending to this constellation of forces calls for attention to supply chains
as key mechanisms in the organization of the capitalist food system but
also demands that we extend our thinking beyond the bounded linearities
of supply chain models.