Scaling Ultra-Processed Foods: Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the U.S.

• In Event: Edible Imperialisms: Food, Capitalism, and Late-Stage American Empire?

Abstract

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are an issue of growing interest and anxiety among policy makers, health professionals, scientists, and consumers concerned with their deleterious effects on health. Among these concerns is an intensified focus, evidenced by recent scientific research and media coverage, on the potential effects of high UPF consumption on fertility and reproduction. However, such discourse rarely exceeds the scale of the body to consider what infrastructures and technologies bring the UPF into being.

My paper, tentatively titled “Scaling Ultra-Processed Foods: Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the U.S.” seeks to extend beyond the body and commodity to interrogate the diverse origins, histories, profits, and modes of destruction that make the UPF possible. With a focus on settler colonialism, I trace an alternative genealogy of UPFs that foregrounds their links to histories of chemical engineering, agricultural policy, and indigenous dispossession. This approach explores the UPF – characterized by processes that include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modification of substances, and assembly of modified and unmodified food substances — as a complex technoscientific object that exists at the intersection of food production and highly technical industrial processes.

The links between UPFs and settler colonialism compound and reverberate. First, many of the additives designed to make UPFs cheaper and more shelf-stable or enhance their aesthetic qualities are derived from corn and soy, two overproduced crops whose excesses might otherwise go to waste. Practices of monocropping and the environmental degradation it causes are characteristic of industrialized agriculture, and I am interested in drawing out the histories of land theft and indigenous displacement that make settler agriculture possible. I also aim to explore the nationalist and racialized settler desires, as well as colonial epistemologies, that shape the agricultural and chemical research which has enabled intensified agriculture and food processing, some of which has taken place at land-grant universities. Processed foods have also constituted a mainstay in governmental aid to indigenous and other colonized peoples, whose ability to grow for self-sustenance has been disrupted through settler colonial violence. These links recast the issue of UPFs’ effects on reproduction as a form of toxic exposure that both reflects and sustains the logics of empire. As such, the stakes of my project are to move beyond consumer-centered, market-oriented solutions to the harms of UPFs to acknowledge the interconnected structures which condition their existence and must be dismantled for more livable futures.

Author

• Jennie Jiang, Rutgers University