"What We Eat and Why: Buying and Selling Old Foods of the Future"

This paper examines the ways archaic crops have been repurposed by governments and businesses for sale, and the implications of “rediscovering” indigenous agriculture in private enterprise. So-called “lost foods” have been frequently rediscovered in the last fifty years by scientists, agronomists, and economists, a process aided by public and private relationships. This has resulted in a variety of archaic agriculture overlooked by modern farming practices in the Global North being found by scientific research teams or by businesses looking for new wunder-foods to sell to health-conscious consumers in the United States and Europe.
Fear of global famine in the mid-twentieth century led not only to the mass-scientific and agronomical efforts of the Green Revolution, but also to concerted attempts to revolutionize farming through simply finding existing underutilized crops in areas often deemed exotic. This paper sketches out the history of organizations like the Board of Science and Technology in Development, an American agency dedicated to unearthing “lost” crops like the algae spirulina, the winged bean, and amaranth, which have become commonplace in the global agricultural market.
The process of acquiring, marketing, and selling these crops, however, is not without long-term effects for the places in the Global South where they overwhelmingly have been found. Crops like amaranth and spirulina have deep histories to indigenous populations in places like Mexico, Chad, and Guatemala, where they invoke not only cultural significance, but financial importance as well. Small farmers have been priced out by multinational corporations, who have glommed onto, or created, health fads around such newly rediscovered lost crops. While many of these foods and plants survived colonization centuries ago, they have succumbed to more modern incursions, or bio-piracy, as some scholars have phrased it, through the global marketplace.