Food and agriculture permeate every aspect of our lives, from individual nutritional health and social gatherings to national economic and political stability. Most importantly, the food system is an intimate relationship between man and nature, with man completely dependent on nature for his survival. Over the centuries, however, Western science has sought to defy this relational dependence by exerting power and control over nature in order to provide more security and certainty to their survival. While this approach no doubt worked at some level to increase food security and support population growth and cultural progress, one could argue that it has reached its limit and is now resulting in a rate of environmental degradation that is quickly outpacing Western science’s ability to develop alternative sources for survival. And while Western science could continue to search for non-natural sources for survival or alternative planets, it could also simply admit that this line of thinking has run its course, and begin to explore alternative ontologies for relating with nature. In fact, the turn toward acknowledging and exploring indigenous knowledge is one attempt to do just that. The degree to which the domination of man over nature is ingrained in the political and economic systems, however, proves incredibly problematic in the probability to effect change by attempting to shift this ontology, meaning that the path of least political resistance may in fact be to continue the search for non-natural survival sources. By focusing on changing just the ontology by which our food is produced, distributed, and consumed, however, and given food’s broad influence on environmental, social, economic, and political structures, there is potential for this ontology to permeate throughout all hegemonic systems more quickly and effortlessly than by addressing other industries or structures one at a time.
Once man began cultivating plants and domesticating animals for food production, they gained leisure time, which allowed them to begin contemplating ways in which to avoid or prolong the inevitability of death and gain control over the likelihood of their survival. This led to the quest for knowledge about the nature on which they depended and the attempt to explain the unknown through the divine. While human development up to this point seems to follow a universal trajectory, different cultures and civilizations after this began to cultivate different understandings and ways of knowing nature and the divine, which becomes starkly clear as contemporary knowledge and religion are compared across regions. What remains constant, however, is the desire to have some degree of understanding about the world in which people live. In Europe, Christianity arose as the dominant way of knowing, attributing the unknown to the will of God, and thus debating how best to gain God’s mercy and prolong their survival on Earth or guarantee a favorable afterlife. Nature on the other hand, was more directly manipulatable as people were able to observe and experiment with cause and effect to counteract nature’s detrimental effects on their survival. In this way, Europeans developed a hierarchy that called for man’s obedience to God and control over nature, giving power to those who claim to best understand God’s will, in order to control for their survival.
This hierarchy, however, transfers the agency of nature to the divine and relegates nature as an inanimate resource provided by the divine for the benefit of man. This also removes any responsibility man might have in preserving natural resources for their future needs, as the future supply of these resources is at the mercy of the divine. In addition, this hierarchy gives power to those who have control over natural resources and how they are used, again shifting responsibility for unequal distribution and access to the will of the divine. In the food system, this ontology results in short-term resource depletion as resources are used to maximize current consumption and social, economic, political, and personal benefit, without consideration or responsibility for the long-term consequences of resource use for society as a whole. If the divine does not replenish certain resources, then man will develop new technologies using other resources to provide for their continued earthly survival. This ontology has encouraged the manipulation of food sources by Western science, and technological solutions to resource depletion and other production challenges, while also justifying unequal distribution of food and control over the means of production.
The shift from explanation through the divine to a focus on knowing through the observation of nature meant shifting the hierarchy so that knowledge through nature was prioritized over the divine, but man was still separate from nature, and the purpose of observation was still to control nature through knowledge. In this way, Western science gives primacy to man in his ability to observe, interpret, and manipulate nature, while downplaying or even eliminating the role of the divine. This shift also justifies the primacy of man and his capacity to observe and interpret by identifying this process as supremely objective in discovering true knowledge, especially if validated by his peers. Western science also begins to adopt generalizability and predictability as the ultimate goals of natural observation, again as a way to control nature. With these goals then comes the effort to quantify and measure nature and reduce natural phenomena to basic laws that can be used to predict outcomes and understand how the universe works. While this method proves useful for observable natural phenomena, it ignores that which is not quantifiable, predictable, or generalizable. In addition, there is still an antagonist relationship between man and nature, as man strives to conquer and control nature through the scientific method. Thus, the primacy of the scientific method gives power to those with the tools and resources in which to make sophisticated measurements, conduct controlled experiments, and have authority within the social circle of “credible” peers who deem such findings valid.
Since the scientific method was developed within the elite social circles of Europe, it was necessarily removed from the lived experiences of farmers in rural communities that still practiced traditional farming methods and derived much of their farming knowledge from personal experience or oral histories from past generations. Given the power disparity between elite intellectuals and rural farmers, the knowledge produced in elite scientific circles was legitimated through scientific authority and valued above the personal knowledge of farmers, and thus often proscribed to farmers in order to improve yields, simplify production, and increase profit. While much of this knowledge led to increased food security and the mechanization the agriculture, it also shifted power and control over the means of production from farmers to scientists, who were far removed from the daily practice of farming, the environment on which the farmer relied, and the external costs of industrialization. In this way, the Western ontology of man versus nature legitimizes the scientific method over personal experience and oral histories, while also removing the responsibility and consequences for undesirable outcomes resulting from the application of scientific knowledge away from the scientist and onto the “uneducated” and “fallible” farmer.
The generalizability and predictability of natural science methods break down when applied to social science. While the scientific method assumed the infallibility of man’s peer reviewed observation and interpretation, it also maintained a strict separation between the human and the natural, assuming all natural observations were free from human interference. While the development of the social sciences maintained the strict separation of man and nature, it attempted to apply the same scientific rigor of natural science to the examination of human behavior and relationships. This proved problematic as nature was assumed to be inanimate, and consciousness and agency could not be measured and quantified as one would an inanimate object, thus exponentially complicating the method’s ability to predict and generalize social behavior. In a way, the shift toward social science equalizes the hierarchy between man and nature, acknowledging both as objects of examination in the quest for knowledge and control over our survival, but the methods used for natural science are still given primacy over that used to understand human behavior. In the food system, this ontological shift toward the social begins to consider the cultural, economic, and political aspect of food production, but continues to separate the cultural, economic, and political aspects from the environmental aspect and external costs associated with food production. In this way, families and communities are conceptualized as behaving not within and in coordination with their natural environment, but rather despite their natural environment as nature is still a force to be conquered and controlled.
Additionally, in the quest to understand human behavior, scientists became more aware of the fallibility of the human capacity to observe and know an absolute truth. While this realization seemed to cause pause in the social science world, natural scientists continued to be convinced of the validity of their methods. Feyerabend (1975) calls the natural science bluff, however, by arguing that what was considered truth before Galileo became a falsehood once Galileo questioned the “knowledge” that bound scientists to a certain way of thinking. Thus, although the elitism of natural scientists takes pride in its ability to predict, generalize, and discover absolute truths, naturalist methods and knowledge are only as valid and true as the belief one invests in them. For in order to generate new knowledge, one must question everything one thinks they know. Furthermore, what one thinks they know is influenced by their social and cognitive preconditions, which vary from person to person, so what one person experiences and considers true may be very different from the next person. While this knowledge revolution questions the primacy of naturalist methods over social science methods, it retains the separation of man and nature, claiming that knowledge about nature is no more true than knowledge about humans. However, it also ignores the problematic conceptualization of nature and man as separate non-interacting entities. In the food system, epistemological equalization between the natural and the human allows for situational and experiential knowledge to return to food production practices, but the ontological division continues to disassociate the need to produce food for human consumption and the long-term costs associated with that production on the environment.
Environmental scientists bound their research purely in the natural, while social scientists bound their research in humanity. While there may be some slight overlap or lip service to other disciplines, my experience has been a strong resistance from environmental scientists to fully integrate humans into their ecological models or attempt to conceptualize large-scale natural ecologies that include humans as an actor. Likewise, however, the environment is often treated as a commodity or right of ownership by social scientists that again strip it of its agency and force it into a human-centric ontology. This lack of coordination results in separate bodies of knowledge that lack points of mutual penetration, resulting in issues like climate change being addressed by environmental scientists in a way that is fully incompatible with the political and social worlds, and vice versa. This issue comes to a head in the food system when environmental scientists promote a technological strategy for solving agricultural problems that is consistent with their ontological presuppositions to conquer and control nature. These solutions then run contrary to social interests when they conflict with cultural tradition, economic resilience, or the politics of food distribution. Likewise, the solutions encouraged to address the social, economic, and political issues related to food often involve utilizing environmental resources for short-term human benefit while exacerbating the long-term environmental costs.
In the postcolonial world, as Western science is becoming aware of the degree of subjectivity and uncertainty embedded in its methods for producing knowledge, it begins looking toward the global South, not only for new questions and problems to solve, but also for new perspectives on old problems. Aikenhead and Ogawa (2007) categorize these new perspectives as Indigenous and neo-indigenous science, differentiating these perspectives from Western science in their ontological approaches, and differentiating them from each other through their (lack of) colonial history. While this is a serious oversimplification of the variety of non-Western perspectives, it illustrates the basic point that the man-versus-nature dichotomy is one of many possible ways of conceptualizing our world, and given the environmental degradation and climate change that is destroying nature beyond repair, it may be time to take these perspectives more seriously. For example, contrary to Western science’s assumptions of dualism, reductionism, and anthropocentricism, Indigenous knowledge is based on the assumption of monism, holism, and relationism.
Thus, instead of approaching the world through a perspective that focuses on man’s ability to understand single causal relationships and then extrapolate that understanding and apply it to the world with a goal of controlling the natural and social world in which he finds himself, it is possible to approach the world through a perspective that focuses on collecting and combining the understanding of past generations with a goal of knowing the relationship of all beings to each other as an intricately functioning single entity. In this way, the ontological dichotomy of man-versus-nature is transformed to man-with-nature interacting within a single ecological entity. By re-conceptualizing scientific inquiry as a goal to find an internal equilibrium between dependent forces, rather than as a way to contain nature’s wrath from interfering with human survival, science can better tackle global issues. In the food system, the combination of man and nature into a single sphere of relations will provide a better balance between what is taken from the earth for human nourishment and what is returned to the earth in order to maintain the productive capacity of both actors. It will include the environmental costs of food production, along with the economic needs of the food industry, the nutritional needs of consumers, and equal access to food for all. As a major contributor to climate change, as well as a significant cause of human suffering and a requirement for cultural progress, an ontological shift in the way food is produced has the potential to improve environmental resilience, support a growing population, and provide for the future progress of humankind.
Given the deep entrenchment of the Western scientific ontology, the political consequences of an ontological shift teeter on the impossible, as powerful actors have significant interest in maintaining the status quo as well as the resources necessary to weather any short-term consequences from continuing along the current path. Moreover, there is no real evidence that the Indigenous ontology can provide the solutions needed for complex global issues nor is there certainty that this ontology does not have critical unforeseen consequences of its own. Additionally, as mentioned above, the Indigenous ontology identified by Aikenhead and Ogawa (2007) is only one of many different non-Western ontologies, each likely to have their own benefits and downfalls. So, if we agree that an ontological shift away from Western science is necessary, how do we decide which new ontology to adopt? Furthermore, how do we know there are no other possible ontologies outside of existing non-Western ontologies that might also work? While we can never be certain of what we do not know, and we can only make the most informed decision possible given the available information, we must also continue to be aware of alternate perspectives, wary of certainty, and open to adapting our current knowledge to an ever-changing world. In the current food system, this means acknowledging our mistakes, and adjusting our trajectory in order to balance the multiple veins in which the food system impacts our life. Conceptualizing food not just as a commodity to be produce for human consumption, but as the conduit that inextricably binds us to nature, and through which both our and its survival are intricately intertwined.
References
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