Introduction

Food and Famine Futures, Past and Present

The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

— William Gibson (1999)

For me, speculative fiction author William Gibson's quote evokes the dreams of a future of high technology: robots, "smart" homes, powerful personal gadgets, dinosaur-sized autonomous mechanical harvesters, and flying, self-driving cars. While the debates over the significance and implications of such technologies can veer into the abstract for those of us in the Minority World — a term coined by Bangladeshi artist Shahidul Alam (2008) to refer to the minority of the world's population living in the richest countries — they might seem positively irrelevant to the billions of the world's refugees, poor, violently oppressed, and disenfranchised. The disconnect between technologies like these and the actual challenges facing the poor and the hungry might even strike some as a cruel joke.

However, the truth is that the future will be based not on the promises of whiz-bang technology, but on the more mundane features of the decisions our societies make about what we will do, how we will do it, and who will get to decide. That is, our future fates are based on our institutions. "Institutions," as a technical term, refers to the rules prevalent in a society. They are essentially about how we run our lives individually and collectively, and the many conscious, and unconscious, mechanics underneath the surface. Our ancestors would likely be just as shocked at these institutional foundations of our current societies as they would be at the tools and technology that support them. Institutions, in this way, are as much the stuff of sci-fi fantasy as bleeding-edge plant breeding techniques and the Dick Tracy wrist-radio/watches some of us now wear on our wrists.

Despite the core functions that institutions embody, they are definitely not what first comes to mind for most people when they think of the Matrix trilogy. The Wachowskis' turn-of-the-twentieth-century cinematic series is remembered more as a lead-in to a new age of computer-augmented special-effects action and elaborately choreographed martial arts set pieces. For some (me excluded) it is remembered as disappointing and artistically unsuccessful. Rarely appreciated is that the series undermined some of the typical tropes of Hollywood and contemporary capitalist society more broadly. The Matrix movies are some of the few films that are fundamentally about institutions, and not just about the "good" and "bad" people in them. This is an important distinction, as changes in institutions are fundamental to the core story of this book: how the food security policies of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, show us how we may begin to end hunger.

The plot of The Matrix and its sequels revolves around a dystopian future where humans have been completely subjugated by sentient machines. The human race, save for a small resistance, are trapped in a virtual reality simulating late twentieth-century Earth. In order to keep humans docile and amenable to the deception, there are multiple "systems of control." These extend beyond the virtual Matrix and into schemes-within-schemes by the oppressive Machines. Importantly, the Machines have contingencies deployed such that those humans who "wake up" from the Matrix, or try to do so, end up playing into a larger cycle designed to control human rebels in the real world, channeling otherwise unpredictable human tendencies into a repeated pattern of rebellion, defeat, and reinsertion into new versions of the system of control the Matrix represents. All that said, over the course of the movies, we learn that the Machines are not necessarily villains. They, too, are trying — and have a right — to survive.

So while Western popular culture has long focused on individual choice and the characteristics of singular "bad guys" and "good guys," the Wachowskis' trilogy puts these choices in the context of people's (and machines') interactions with institutions — that is to say, of their interactions with the underlying mechanics of social behavior. As used by social scientists, the term "institutions" is used to group together the norms, rules, and values behind our actions and reactions. There are numerous examples of institutions at work in our everyday lives, from our conceptions of a nuclear family to how to behave in public, how we drive (or don't), and the natures of our schools and workplaces. These structures map out a lot of our actions so that we don't have to think consciously about our behavior every moment and in every social situation. For a broad range of institutions, we have internalized their dictates to the extent that we rarely question or even notice them.

This is not to say that the written and unwritten rules of institutions don't change. They can gradually evolve, or be changed rapidly as individuals and groups resist, ignore, or enforce any particular set of institutions. To illustrate, let's briefly consider the institution of marriage. The meaning of marriage has changed fairly significantly over the past decades and centuries, particularly in the Minority World. The expectations and practices built around the putative superiority husbands hold over their wives have thankfully declined in many places, increasingly (if fitfully) replaced by a sense of the romantic joining of equals. The increasing acceptance of same-sex marriages aligns well with this latter sense, but clashes with some of the rules, norms, and values understood as traditional (and either unchanged or unchangeable) by others. At the same time, many common elements extend across differing understandings of marriage. Some broad, but not universal, norms for marriage include assumptions of sexual fidelity, cohabitation, and coparenting children. Any one of these need not hold for a particular marriage, but just as for any other rulebook or tradition, such differences are widely recognized as varying from mainstream expectations (regardless of whether those expectations are thought to be positive, negative, or neutral).

This book, however, is precisely about positive deviations from the norm: changing the rulebooks around food from where they are now to where we need them to be if we are to end hunger. Referring to just such a gap, one of the peer reviewers for an article by geographer Jesse Ribot suggested that "the institutions, processes and forums that could enable the fundamental changes you call for do not yet exist." Ribot responded:

They do exist in some places at some times for some people. ... If we,...