Filming the Future of FOod
The Subject Matter
In 2016, two films about the future of food and agriculture were released:
Seed: The Untold Story: This documentary follows passionate seed keepers who are protecting a 12,000 year-old food legacy. In the last century, 94 seed varieties have disappeared. A cadre of 10 agrichemical companies, including Syngenta, Bayer, and Monsanto, controls over two-thirds of the global seed market, reaping unprecedented profits. Farmers and others battle to defend the future of our food.
Food Evolution: An exploration of the controversy surrounding GMOs and food, using a pro-science position to challenge the “fear over facts” campaigns that have led to GMO bans. Esteemed science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson wrestles with the emotions and the science driving one of the most heated arguments of our time.
The Article
Myself and two colleagues, Susannah Chapman and Xan Chacko, authored a piece that explores these films: ‘The cosmopolitics of food futures: imagining nature, law, and apocalypse’ in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. The article appeared in a special issue fo the journal entitled ‘Precarious Futures.’ The editors’ introduction to the special issue is open access (available here) and summarises our article as follows:
“Performances in relation to climate crisis, food insecurity, and uncertain futures are precisely what Bosse, Chacko and Chapman interrogate in their article, which analyses the imagined futures in the documentaries Food Evolution (2016) and Seed: The Untold Story (2016). Both films present catastrophic futures that may await us should we not follow particular paths of seed preservation or scientific innovation. Yet, as Bosse, Chacko and Chapman ask, what particular worlds, and futures, do such films construct, and why? The authors invite us, alongside them, to consider ‘slowing down’, of pausing in these worlds, as a means of unpacking our Anthropocene moment, and the possible futures that we are currently offered as escapes from this moment. Bosse, Chacko and Chapman’s article explores four spaces within the worlds these films create – apocalypse; the natural; law; and cures for the future – as a way of understanding the impetus behind such world-creation. Bosse, Chacko and Chapman show us how the world-making practices present in both films leave little room for imagining other futures, or acknowledging apocalypses already present, like those experienced by Indigenous people through colonization around the globe.”
Abstract
The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, 'Seed: The Untold Story' and 'Food Evolution,' weave different – though sometimes similar – accounts of the past in order to present precarious futures that are best served through particular interventions.
To the extent that both films render accounts of precarious futures saved by science or conservation, we argue that they provide compelling spaces, following Isabelle Stengers’s ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’, to slow down: to pause and consider the types of worlds that are brought into being – and those that are foreclosed – in their portrayal of the crises of climate and food. We follow this worlding practice through four threads developed in each film: the momentum of apocalypse, the boundaries of the natural, the politics of law, and the cures for precarity. Focusing on the politics of representation mobilized in each film, we enact a feminist praxis of slowing down.