Abstract

The North American culinary landscape is scarred with deep rifts between consumers, producers, the food we eat and the soil it comes from. Those disruptions in natural flows are shaped and cultivated for profit by the capitalist interests that dominate our food chain. My aim in this thesis is to consolidate knowledge from different areas of research into a robust critique of modern food production. As a theoretical reference point, I propose a multidisciplinary critical naturalistic framework based on the work of Barkow, Bhaskar, Bookchin and Latour. Then, using reinterpretations of Marx's work on commodification, fetishism and the metabolic rift by geographers, evolutionary psychologists and other (r)evolutionary thinkers, I highlight some of the disruptions that define the current state of food in North America. First, I show how the web of relations that constitute agricultural ecology is parceled out to conform to the rationality of the modern capitalist mode of food production. Finally, I argue that those disruptions are reproduced in the North American popular food culture, as evidenced by the spectacular, 'pornographic' imagery that dominates contemporary food media.