Women and the Gendered Politics of Food

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, Vandana Shiva argues that, from seed to table, the food chain is gendered. Moreover, she locates her gender analysis within a critique of the globalization and commoditization of agriculture, particularly by means of corporate control of the seed supply. She argues that women’s traditional and local seed and food economy has been discounted as “productive work,” and that women’s seed and food knowledge has been discounted as knowledge. Globalization, she argues, has led to the transfer of seed and food from women’s control to corporate control by means of patenting and genetic engineering, for example. She further argues that food is transformed in corporate hands. It is no longer nourishment; it becomes a commodity. And as a commodity it can be manipulated and monopolized. If food grain makes more money as cattle feed than it does as food for human consumption, it becomes cattle feed. If food grain converted to biofuel to run automobiles is more profitable, it becomes ethanol and biodiesel. Finally, Shiva argues that a counter-revolution is underway, based on women’s food and agricultural knowledge, to promote a just, sustainable, healthy, and secure food system.

This chapter is excerpted from Vandana Shiva (2009) ‘Women and the Gendered Politics of Food,’ Philosophical Topics (37): 17–32. It appears here by permission of the University of Arkansas Press and the author.