Empires of Waste and the Food Security Meme

• Published in: Geography compass 2013-09, Vol.7 (9), p.622-636
• Main Author: Cloke, Jon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1749-8198; 1749-8198
• DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12068

Through a brief review of the literature in which the concept of food security has developed since the first use of the term in 1974, this paper suggests that the ‘food security’ appearing extensively in governmental, official and academic analysis is a social construct that acts to conceal the reality of corporate food production mechanisms dominating global food systems. Since the date of the first World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, representations of both food security and insecurity have increasingly become a meme, a vehicle for conveying and performing a set of socio‐cultural beliefs relating to a neoliberal view of global food production that excludes the biopolitics of corporate, systemic global food production. The analysis focuses particularly on a range of forms of waste produced by global food systems, to suggest that in a world over‐producing food of which over a third is wasted and in which waste has become a mechanism for profit, no presentation of food security that fails to take into account this systemic reality can produce valid or effective policy. The food security meme that has evolved over nearly 40 years portrays at best a partial analysis, which as a consequence continues to proffer a range of market‐based solutions, ignoring issues of dominance and control. In considering the memetic representation of food security, the paper also examines briefly the biopolitics presented by corporate systems of dominance and control in global food production, as well as the systems of waste (vastogenic systems) that they produce. In conclusion, the development of what are effectively empires of waste has fuelled an urgent need for a radical re‐think of food security issues, based on proposals for food regime and food systems analysis that have begun to emerge in the literature.