This is a provocative thought: The spread of western cultures can be compared to the spread of monocultures in agriculture where imported, hybridized fertilizer dependent seeds, produced at a profit for multinational corporations, crowd out indigenous local varieties.

This is an idea that I have run into in Environmental Anthropology and would like to explore further in the context of Globalization and its effects on identity [and food].

Globalization, the global spread of Anglo-American knowledge, values, and practices, rather than indigenous knowledge and wisdom, drastically influences our ideas about food and health. Globalization like colonization is disempowering most to those removed from western knowledges causing UNESCO to warn that the mass export of the cultural practices of the industrialized world including languages, entertainment, food, and unsustainable consumerism contributes to a sense of dispossession and loss of identity among those who are exposed to it.

I wanted to begin by writing a bit to the importance of deep ecology or biocentrism in our world and practices of growing food. The belief that nature does not exist to serve humans and biodiversity is a value in itself is essential to human and non human life. We need to think critically as a society about the oppression of farmers and what is happening to the food that they produce within a capitalist patriarchy. Patriarchy is one of the oldest forms of oppression in the world. It is so deep that we are discouraged from naming it and seeing the connectedness of oppression of women and the degradation of the earth. This intersectionality needs to be addressed. Ecofeminism points to the parallel between the way that patriarchy treats nature and the way it treats women.Vandana Shiva is most famous for her work on the effects of Globalization and degradation of agricultural communities and how women bear the burden of corprotization of food production.

I found this article by Shiva informative and insightful:

• Geopolitics of Food: America's Use of Food as a Weapon

• Vandana Shiva
• Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 23, No. 18 (Apr. 30, 1988), pp. 881-882

http://www.jstor.org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/stable/pdfplus/4378423.pdf

“Starting from the very reasonable but unfortunately revolutionary concept that social practices which threaten the continuation of life on Earth must be changed, we need a theory of revolutionary ecology that will encompass social and biological issues, class struggle, and recognition of the role of global corporate capitalism in the oppression of peoples and the destructions of nature.” Judi Bari