The cosmopolitics of food futures: imagining nature, law, and apocalypse

ABSTRACT

The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, Seed: The Untold Story and Food Evolution, weave different – though sometimes similar – accounts of the past in order to present precarious futures that are best served through particular interventions. To the extent that both films render accounts of precarious futures saved by science or conservation, we argue that they provide compelling spaces, following Isabelle Stengers’s ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’, to slow down: to pause and consider the types of worlds that are brought into being – and those that are foreclosed – in their portrayal of the crises of climate and food. We follow this worlding practice through four threads developed in each film: the momentum of apocalypse, the boundaries of the natural, the politics of law, and the cures for precarity. Focusing on the politics of representation mobilized in each film, we enact a feminist praxis of slowing down.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary film
• genetically-modified organisms
• agriculture
• seed saving
• science and technology studies
• controversial issues
• worlding

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Elizabeth Stephens and Karin Sellberg who first supported our suggestion to screen Seed: The Untold Story at the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia and then invited us to contribute to this special issue. Thanks also to Holly Arden and Sophie Munns who participated in an engaging panel discussion, which helped clarify our reactions to the film. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments on the manuscript that helped us clarify our intention to slow down.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For examples of works that embody Stengers’s call to slowing down but stay present with crises and ruin see Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Tsing 2015; Stoler 2008; Haraway 2011

2. For more documentary films on food, agriculture, and nutrition see: Dominion (2018); Rotten (2018); The Magic Pill (2017); What the Health (2017); Cooked (2016); Eating You Alive (2016); Food Choices (2016); Sustainable (2016); The Kids Menu (2016); Cowspiracy (2014); Bite Size (2014); Fed Up (2014); Food Chains (2014); That Sugar Film (2014); Just Eat It (2014); A Place at the Table (2012); Genetic Roulette (2012); Hungry for Change (2012); In Organic We Trust (2012); More Than Honey (2012); Forks Over Knives (2011); Vegucated (2011); Fat Head (2009); Fresh (2009); Ingredients (2009); Peaceable Kingdom (2009); Food Fight (2008); Food Inc. (2008); Killer at Large (2008); The World According to Monsanto (2008); King Corn (2007); Black Gold (2006); We Feed the World (2005); The Future of Food (2004).

3. This is a small error in the film. The most recent study to track loss for U.S. seed diversity was published in 2012 (Heald and Chapman 2012) and the figure of 94% loss comes from the 2012 study. The 1983 study presented in the film documented 97% loss, as reported in the book Shattering (Fowler & Mooney 1990).

4. On the politics of self-help that allows for choices as long as they are the right ones see Nally and Taylor 2015.

5. For critiques of these narratives of success, see Patel 2009; Cullather 2004, 2010; Pilliod v. Monsanto Co., 2019 Cal. Super. LEXIS 843.

6. It should be noted that although utility patents are limited to a period of 20 years in most other jurisdictions, it is increasingly common for patent owners to effectively extend this period via the enforcement of related trademarks and patents of subsequent modifications to the original invention. Nonetheless, patents do not last forever.

7. For example, in the interview with Claire Hope Cummings, she emphasizes how the J.E.M. Ag Supply majority opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who was a former lawyer for Monsanto. While Monsanto was not a party to the litigation (a point which is not clear from the film), the implication is that Justice Thomas and the five other judges who agreed with him, were acting in the corporate interests of his former employer. The key finding in the Supreme Court decision in J.E.M. Ag Supply was that newly developed varieties of sexually reproducing plants were patentable subject matter, and therefore, J.E.M. could be liable for patent infringement for re-selling Pioneer’s patented hybrid corn varieties. While the case is an important development in intellectual property jurisprudence, the film does not acknowledge the precedent for allowing patents on genetically-modified organisms in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), the patentability of plants in Ex parte Hibberd, 227 U.S.P.Q. 443 (1985), and it ignores the history of the US Plant Patent Act of 1930 (35 U.S. Code § 161 et seq.) and the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 (7 U.S.C. § 2321 et seq.).

8. See Heald and Chapman 2012; Jaffe and Lerner 2006; Schiff 1971; Machlup 1958; Machlup and Penrose 1950.

9. Patel 2013 shows that this argument, called the Borlaug hypothesis, that the only way to feed the world with organic food would entail having to fell all the world’s forests, is fallacious because it assumes that the replacement for conventional monocultures will be organic monocultures. He claims that results from agroecological multicropping are disproving the mythology of increased yields and have the benefit of providing enduring improvements to soil health.

10. Among proponents of GM technology, this is a common line of argument. See also Paarlberg (2008).

11. Donna Haraway pointed toward the irony that while the calls to emergency lead to the collection of biodiversity in banks, the ‘nature that feeds the storehouses disappears’ (1995, 65).

12. This quote from Donna Haraway (1997, 137) is used by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa in the title of an essay about the ethical obligation and practical labour in care practice (2012). For the pitfalls of taking seed elementarity for granted, see Chacko 2019a

13. On walking away from discomforting realities see Le Guin 1973.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Australian Laureate Fellowships funding scheme (FL150100104), ‘Harnessing Intellectual Property to Build Food Security’; and the Future Fellowship (FT170100214), ‘Understanding Collaboration between the Arts and Sciences.’

Notes on contributors

Jocelyn Bosse

Jocelyn Bosse, Xan Chacko, and Susannah Chapman are members of the ARC Laureate project ‘Harnessing Intellectual Property to Build Food Security’ at the University of Queensland. Jocelyn Bosse’s research explores the role of intellectual property law in shaping the circulation of native Australian plants. Xan Chacko’s current research compares different approaches to seed banking by studying the everyday tasks of collecting, sorting, and saving seeds, as well as, the organisation of physical, digital, and intellectual property of the banked seeds. Susannah Chapman studies the relationship between law, science, and society, with a particular focus on human-plant relations, intellectual property, and histories of state seed regulation.