Food Infrastructure ‘Infrastructure’ is defined rather vaguely as the fundamental facilities and systems that support the functionality of households and firms. Infrastructure, Wikipedia, Accessed Jan. 4, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure Authors who attempt to explain infrastructure often do so by listing examples. Roads, bridges, sewer systems and the electrical grid are cited frequently. Schools, hospitals and social service organizations are sometimes included. On reflection, it is a little surprising that philosophers have not sunk their teeth into this idea very much, in as much as all the elements in the definitional statement are subject to wild variations in interpretation. My remarks here will explore some of these interpretive questions, but my primary focus will be on the way that changes in food system infrastructure become implicated in normative questions of ethics and political theory. Food System Infrastructure: Two Examples Well-known historical studies provide a starting point for my reflections. E.P. Thompson’s 1971 article “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” purports to be a study the role that food riots played in destabilizing the social institutions of the old order, leading eventually to the emergence of an industrial economy and capitalist social relations. I say “purports” both because this is cluster of historical transitions is itself complex and because Thompson’s readers have expropriated his analysis for a thousand other purposes, just as I am about to do now. Thompson’s expressed purpose was to support the view that the events in question were not riots, but protests grounded in the legitimizing notion of a moral economy. This was the idea that villagers had something rather like a right of first refusal with respect to the food being grown in the immediate vicinity. This feeling ran contrary to farmers’ perception that were free to seek the best price for whatever they harvested. English courts consistently resolved the question in favor of the farmer’s perspective over a period of fifty years. On the one hand, these events clarified the structure of property rights in a manner that paved the way for market society. On the other hand, they enraged artisans, petty merchants and other low-status members of village society. Part of Thompson’s point is that it is too soon to think of them as working class, but the events in question are material to that transition. Violent protests occurred, and the government was moved to support the farmers’ perspective in a series of court decisions. The losers in this turn of events viewed it as a usurpation of morally legitimate economic relationships, or moral economy. in favor of speculative profit seeking that lack any grounding in ethically defensible social relations. E.P. Thomson. (1971) The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past and Present 50: pp. 76-136 In Thompson’s analysis, the farmers’ opportunity to seek more attractive markets for their produce was precipitated by improvements in the transportation infrastructure. In short, canals and roads made it feasible for producers to transport bulky cargo farther distances. Before this transport infrastructure was in place, the difficulty and losses sustained in moving heavy perishable goods would have discouraged most producers from attempting the feat. The costs of transporting grain very far from a village would have encouraged farmers to behave in a manner that is consistent with villagers’ expectation of reciprocal solidarity. It is not as if villagers felt that they owned the grain growing in the fields around them; they would have expected to pay a baker or a miller, who would have already paid the farmer in this moral economy. However, Thompson stresses how these exchanges simultaneously reinforced a relational network and a system of moral credence. Villagers understood one another as engaged in economizing behaviors, but when farmers sought higher prices, beyond the implied community boundary, they violated this trust required by the demands of a moral economy. William Cronon’s ecological history of Chicago and its environs provides a second example that illustrates how change in infrastructure causes change in the social relations that sustain food systems. For much of the 19th century, American commodity crops such as wheat, maize, rice and other grains were bagged on the farm, and remained in bags until used as feed or delivered to millers. Millers customarily re-bagged milled grain, taking a share as their fee, while growers would then sell or trade the sacks of milled grain. The sack or bag functioned as the unit of commerce in this food economy, and Cronon describes how prices would be negotiated by taking small samples from each sack to check for cleanliness, moisture content and other quality attributes. Sacks transported on wagons, barges and eventually railroad cars might be bought and sold several times. Eventually this infrastructure gave way to automated grain elevators capable of storing and mixing large quantities of grain, and loading or unloading the grain from hopper cars. As this happened, the transport systems themselves adapted to movement of what Cronon describes as a liquefied commodity, no longer traded in sacks that could be judged for their individual qualities. Willam Cronon, 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton. Cronon does not argue that this change in the food infrastructure was accompanied by a fissure in moral expectations comparable to that of the English food riots. However, he does claim that it substantially alter the economic power relations between farmers and the grain companies that controlled the technical infrastructure. The new technology allowed the storage and handling companies to mix lots with different attributes so as to achieve a uniform product. This commodity good was identified through a technically certifiable standard defined through test weight, and minimum or maximum limits for protein, germination, foreign material or skinned and broken kernels. Any lot graded according to a specified standard was a perfect substitute for any similarly graded lot. This, in turn, allowed for trades that did not actually involve the physical movement or even possession of grain, and the eventual emergence of speculation on grain futures. Cronon argues that this empowered middlemen in the trading system, and weakened the farmer’s economic position. When tied to the further development of railroads, it sparked a period of late 19th and early20th century unrest in the rural heartland of North American that was akin to Thompson’s study of moral economy in 18th century England. In the balance of this paper, I will ask: use these two historical examples to explore two related questions in the philosophy of technology. First, what do these examples tell us about the philosophical implications of infrastructure? I will explore this question via remarks on commodification, especially in respect to its ontological and epistemological dimensions? Second, I will close by discussing some of the infrastructure shifts that may be occurring in contemporary food systems. Food System Infrastructure: What to Watch For The first thing to notice is that these shifts in infrastructure reshaped the moral and political dimensions of food system transactions by transforming some ontological characteristics of property rights. Property rights are inherently tradeable, with ownership transferring from one party to another by sale or gift. This means that these rights must be alienable, or separable both from the person of the owner as well as from other goods that would transferred independently. In the case of Thompson’s English crowd, grain is dis-embedded from a complex mélange of reciprocities and solidarities. As transportable, it is alienated from a set of social relationships. This is alienation has both material and symbolic dimensions. Apart from infrastructure improvements, a sack of grain has many obvious characteristics of a tradable good, but like other difficult to move goods (a house, a pond) it also maintains functions that are not easily separable. The strong tie to these functions weakens with improvements in the transportation infrastructure. However, the riots and court disputes that Thompson documents testify to the symbolic dimension: not everyone accepts the legitimacy of alienating this particular good from its immediate locale. The role of food as a life sustaining good plays a role in forming these expectations. Turning to the transformation grain handling infrastructure, physical characteristics of grain like purity, moisture content or broken kernels shift from being difficult to alter characteristics of the sack to being easily manipulable through mixing the flows of a liquid good. The innovation of technical standards that measure these characteristics effectively turns them into salable properties in themselves, resulting perfectly fungible or intersubstitutable tokens. Although I will not dwell on this topic in the present context, we should see the development of technical standards as a crucial part of infrastructure, and not only for food systems. Standards development is a very obvious process for the people involved in it, and one that should be subject to principles of fairness, procedural justice and beneficence. However, the role that technical standards play in shaping the world we inhabit is exceedingly obscure to most of us, and the philosophical dimensions of standardization have escaped the notice of most social and political philosophers. Paul B. Thompson, (2021) Standards in engineering. In The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering, D.P. Michelfelder and Neelke Doon, eds. New York: Routledge, pp. 569-579, Infrastructure thus partially determines what can be traded, and alters the relationships among those who can trade it. If similar transformations were effected by new laws or policies, they would fall squarely into domain of legislative politics and political philosophy. They are effectively changes in the structure of property rights. Indeed, Thompson’s crowd did object to the change as an illegitimate form of profit seeking through sale of a tradeable good, but their protests never centered on infrastructure, and infrastructure was the proximate cause of their plight. Farmers in Cronon’s Midwest objected to the power and exploitation of the railroads and grain traders, but they never honed in on the infrastructural changes that made their exploitative practice possible. One wonders, why technological changes get this kind of hall pass. One possible answer to this question marks the final thing to look for in infrastructural change. Given our retrospective standpoint, it is easy to see how changing infrastructure affected morally and politically significant elements of the food system in each of these two cases. However, it would not have been so easy for most people to detect these changes at the time they were occurring. In addition, it is at least questionable as to whether the effects could have been predicted. The importance of infrastructure and the effects of a change are just not obvious. The transformations being wrought may appear gradual while they are happening, and in both of the cases discussed, they result from several complementary developments. It is not just the roads and canals in Thompson’s case, but also the legal decisions and the shift in attitudes. It is not just the grain handling machinery in Cronon’s case, but also the boxcars, hopper cars, the technical standards and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The confluence of such developments is easier to see in hindsight, but we need a better theory of infrastructure if we expect to anticipate them. Infrastructure and Commodification At the risk of offending Marxists who have a different understanding of the concept, I would like to suggest that a theory of technological commodification helps us think through the normative implications of food system infrastructure. At variance from some Marxist interpretations, I understand commodification as a multi-dimensional process that transforms or intensifies the degree to which goods are bought and sold for money or other fiscal instruments. I realize that Marx saw the commodity form as a schema that was pervasively infecting the cognition of everyone in capitalist society, but my interest lies in the material aspects of goods and the extent to which they facilitate or resist social relationships determined by monetized trades. Commodification may have benefits, but in this context I will focus on the sense in which it replaces a complex activity or relationship with a payment that achieves the immediate end in view, but at the expense of involvements that build community solidarity. These involvements may be annoying, but ironically, they also make life meaningful. Commodification in food systems is especially problematic because food is a strong carrier of sociality, culture and the quotidian practices of identity formation. You are just going to have to trust me on this one, because developing the normative critique of commodification would send my discussion of infrastructure deep into weeds that I have discussed at considerably more length elsewhere. Paul B. Thompson, “Commodification and Secondary Rationalization,” in Democratizing Technology: Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology, Tyler J. Veak, Ed. Albany: 2006, State University of New York Press, pp. 112-135; Paul B. Thompson, “Theorizing Technological and Institutional Change: Alienability, Rivalry and Exclusion Cost,” Technè 11(1) (Fall 2007): 19-31 Paul B. Thompson, “Borgmann on Commodification: A Comment on Real American Ethics,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21 (2008): 75-84, (published with a reply by Borgmann, pp. 85-96); Paul B. Thompson, “"There’s an App for That": Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means,” Philosophy and Technology 25(2012): 87-103.. Roads and canals were commodifying because a new form of price competition altered the traditional relationships that governed food exchange. It had not existed when farmers were constrained the local market by the sheer difficulty of moving food. Money had long been involved in the relationships between farmers, millers, bakers and eaters, but their cohabitation in time and place was more determinative of their relationship than the buying and selling. In fact, prices were often fixed by status relationships. I think that this thought is behind what Thompson wanted to stress with the term “moral economy”. As farmers sought better prices, they put the food security of their fellow townsmen into jeopardy. The liquification of grain was commodifying because the perfect substitutivity of graded shipments changed the ontological characteristics of grain. Where farmers might once have been artisans, each producing a unique product, now they are more like assembly-line workers producing indistinguishable tokens of a general type. One-off goods like your house or a work of art are bought and sold, but the relationship between buyer and seller is mediated by the unique characteristics of these goods, as well as by the factors determining supply and demand. Each buyer and seller approaches the transaction with a different estimate of a good’s value, and the singular nature of the good translates into an exchange relation that is singular, as well. Economists think of houses or artworks as imperfect commodities for this very reason. In contrast, when every token in the class of goods is just like any other, the exchange is mediated solely by the collectivity of buyers’ willingness to pay and the collectivity of sellers’ willingness to sell. In the case of liquefied and graded lots of grain, even the physical location of tokens drops out of the relationship. There are other elements of commodification at work, as well. Borrowing an argument that was made by Marx, commodified grain devalues a farmer’s skill in much the same way that the assembly line devalues that of the craftsperson. Just like a wage-laborer, farmers lose much of their control over the work process. In both cases, productivity becomes defined in terms of units produced as a function of labor time. There is thus a sense that what is commodified here is the farmer’s contribution to the product, as much as it is the product itself. Interestingly, Marx himself saw that as the commodity form came to more thoroughly characterize the work of agriculture, farmers’ need to maximize their labor productivity would lead them to undervalue the fertility of their soils, a feature that James O’Connor has called “the second contradiction of capitalism.” James O’Connor. (1988) Capitalism, nature, socialism: A theoretical introduction. Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. 1: 11-38. My addendum would be that to focus solely on the causal role of technology or capitalist social relations is equally reductive. We can’t really understand “how they did it” without the technological analysis of food system infrastructure that Thompson and Cronon provide. Looking Ahead The 19th and 20th century saw many new agricultural and food technologies. Whether they all count as infrastructure is an interesting question, but let me mention two developments in my professional lifetime that exemplify the links between technical change and matters of justice. First, in 1980, agronomic traits (such as plant height, root structure, drought tolerance, flowering time, and many others) were properties of seeds. Now they are associated with gene sequences, and the ownership of these traits has changed accordingly. Some of the most hotly contested debates of the early 21st century revolved around whether this was an unjust taking of farmers’ rights to save and replant seed. Second, in 1980 dairying was firmly controlled by household farmers who ran profitable dairies ranging from as few as 6 cows to as many as 200 with mostly family labor. By the middle of the 20th century, profitable dairying required careful management of the health and milk yield from each cow, but in 1980, some farmers were keeping records with pencil and paper, while others had it all in their heads. The introduction of computers and bar code scanners on each cow’s ear tag changed that. By the 1990s, controversy over the environmental impact of 1000 cow dairies raged across the American West. By 2000, a big dairy had 16,000 cows. I leave the justice issues here to your imagination, but suggest that the debates have gone beyond the idea that injustice is exclusive to the human species. In pondering the justice issues raised by these transformations, it is important to think globally. Farmers in the industrialized world face enormous uncertainty and their financial circumstances are perilous, but as a group, they are neither poor nor powerless. Here it would seem natural to emphasize the impacts of infrastructure on farm labor, and on vulnerable food consumers. Although the global food system is rapidly industrializing, the story is different for farmers in both recently industrialized countries such as India, China or Brazil, as well as farmers throughout the world’s poorest countries in terms of GDP. When the World Bank standard of one Euro income per day is used, the ranks of those in absolute poverty are predominantly rural and dependent on agriculture. Even in the poorest countries, some of them are landless. In the future, we can expect to see food system infrastructure affected by the integration of biological and information technologies. For some time now, farm tractors have been steered by geopositioning devices that control fertilizer and pesticide applications according to the equipment’s precise location in the field. Increasingly, this kind of technology will be optimized by analysis of data collected from many different farming operations. This trend has the potential to even further tip the power balance in agriculture away from farmers and toward input manufacturers, on the one hand, and consolidators and retailers, on the other. Global grocery chains (Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Ahold and others) and other retailers (McDonalds) have already used their power over supply chains to require changes in primary production practice. Landless field laborers have long been on the shortest end of the stick that stretches across the food system, and they could bear the brunt of the coming shifts in power relations. At the same time, it is possible that retailers could exert their market power in ways that favors the interests of these historically weak parties. We will see. 7