Eight - New Foodscapes

Summary

In light of the far-reaching consequences of the pandemic, there are few areas of social and economic life around the world that have been as profoundly affected as the foodscape. As Peter Jackson notes, contemporarily food has become an increasingly potent source of anxiety and worry for many. Yet the early days of the crisis played host to a more fundamental threat of the food supply collapsing, or unravelling, in its entirety. Images of these fears playing out on the ground became hallmarks of the emergence of the crisis, with pictures of shoppers stockpiling household essentials and ‘vulnerable’ customers browsing desolate aisles widely circulated through media platforms. While these fears have largely abated as supply chains have stabilized, the fallout of the pandemic seems likely to further economic hardship, which in turn appears likely to deepen the UK hunger crisis that has been fuelled by more than a decade of pernicious austerity measures following the global financial crisis of 2007–08. As three million British people report going hungry in the first three weeks of the lockdown, foodbanks have struggled to manage demand while neighbourhoods up and down the country have established informal emergency food-provisioning networks.

The crisis has brought into sharp relief many ills of the current foodscape. We might ask how neoliberal governance has conditioned foodscapes by continuing to displace the responsibilities of the state on to the charitable sector. We might question how we have come to treat that most intimate of commodities that sustains us as if it were not somehow distinctly different from other commodities. Relatedly, we might also ask why much of the world now relies on a handful of powerful corporations – which exist by legal definition to deliver profit to shareholders – to supply populations with the nourishment they require. Further, these ubiquitous images of empty shelves raises questions around the supposed ‘flexibility’ underpinning the complex supply chains that bring food from disparate geographical contexts to supermarket shelves ‘as if by magic’. Ultimately, it has raised innumerable questions around how we understand our current juncture and what foodscapes ‘after COVID-19’ might be like.