Abstract
Gerardo Otero’s Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People is a remarkable, comprehensive book that gives the reader the sense of attending an advanced lecture series on global food politics led by a seasoned expert. Focusing primarily on the United States, Mexico, and Canada—the NAFTA countries—adopting a world systems, “food regime” approach focused on legal and institutional frameworks, and relying on quantitative methods and secondary literatures, the book asks and provides nuanced and empirically supported answers to a wide range of hot-button questions, such as: What are the core elements of, driving forces behind, and internal dynamics of the globally dominant food regime, and who are the main winners and losers in this system? How does agricultural biotechnology reinforce this regime? How has the global expansion of this regime, and the foods it promotes, reshaped diets and led to negative outcomes in food security, health, inequality, labor rights, migration, and beyond? What kind of resistance has it encountered? How have globalization and free trade affected wealthier and poorer countries differently, as well as shaped the divergent diets of upper and lower classes in an increasingly unequal world? What role do states play in propping up the food regime, and what is required to move in a more progressive direction?
Otero defines the neoliberal diet as the global spread of industrially produced, highly processed, cheap, energy-dense foods that originated in the United States. It spreads through the efforts of mostly U.S. agribusinesses and supermarkets, who control the production and distribution of these foods and have pressured states to adopt forms of “neoregulation”—most notably subsidies, free-trade regimes, and patent protections and lax regulations for genetically modified plants. A key argument is that the obesity crisis has little to do with individual choice and that framing it in those terms, an error made by many otherwise critical food scholars, limits our thinking about the structural determinants of diets and the structural changes necessary to change them. Otero argues that “It takes a societal actor like the state to modify which agricultural products become the raw materials that shape food choices in the first place” (p. 7). Otero echoes criticisms of the normalizing use of concepts like obesity and health and the tools that measure these, such as BMI, but argues that they nevertheless remain critical to understanding changes in the way we eat and the effects on health.
An important feature of the neoliberal diet is inequality. Nontraditional imports from poorer countries enable wealthier consumers to access fresh fruits and vegetables, while rising numbers of economically precarious urban dwellers in all countries are exposed to high-calorie, high-fat, processed foods that are engineered to be addictive. And everyone is eating more processed and subsidized chicken, which Otero calls the “neoliberal meat” (p. 95), and vegetable oils. In addition to democratizing the food system by subsidizing production for consumption rather than for energy-dense, genetically modified crops for export, defending the rights and livelihoods of small farmers, and promoting agroecological, subsistence-oriented production—along the lines of social movement conceptions of food sovereignty—state interventions must also target inequality, the universal legacy of neoliberal policies that dramatically forecloses food choices.
A key theme in the book is that the state matters. States implement the forms of neo-regulation that allow the neoliberal food regime, and they are the main actors that can make the kinds of changes that are needed. Otero also lends nuance to influential conceptions of food regime analysis to highlight nation-state dynamics of policy adoption and resistance.
A central strength of the book is the skillful application of qualitative methods to new statistical data to provide insights on widely relevant questions, such as how diets have evolved through neoliberal reforms and whether free trade has had positive or negative overall effects on food security. Although some of the methodological discussions are fairly complicated, they are clearly presented so that a patient reader with minimal quantitative background can follow the arguments. One of Otero’s key methodological points is to disaggregate national dietary data by class to see the contrasting effects of the neoliberal diet. Several chapters draw heavily and creatively on FAOSTAT data—the statistical database of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. He also creates a five-pronged Neoliberal Diet Risk (NDR) index to measure relative exposure to the neoliberal diet.
Otero summarizes literature on a range of topics from various disciplines—sociology, political science, and economics—introducing readers to critical perspectives often missing from policy discussions, such as using ethnographic evidence to describe the hardships faced by migrant workers in agriculture and chicken factories and social movement alternatives like food sovereignty. The chapters follow a logical consecutive order but provide enough explanation of concepts and conclusions from other chapters to stand on their own. The combination of these efforts is a serious and rigorous challenge to the intellectual justifications of the neoliberal food system, which adds nuance and empirical data to sharpen critical understandings.
Focusing on NAFTA countries as the empirical base for most of the chapters, which Otero presents as a microcosm of neoliberalism, allows for comparisons between the effects of neoliberal policies on wealthier and poorer countries. Although free trade was promoted in the name of food security, Otero explains how these reforms deepened Mexico’s food import dependency, as the planned transition away from peasant agriculture made it, like many countries in the global South, vulnerable to price shocks in 2007–2008. By contrast, the dependency of the United States and Canada increased only slightly, owing to the same subsidized overproduction that enabled them (unfairly) to promote their crops worldwide. Instead of “comparative advantage,” Otero argues that free trade regimes enable agribusiness to exercise “competitive advantage” through sophisticated marketing, production, and distribution systems (p. 155). In several core dimensions—import dependency, food security, labor rights, and diet—poorer countries like Mexico have borne the brunt of negative outcomes from the neoliberal model. This is evidenced in the expansion of protest against free trade and genetically modified crops in poorer countries. The book makes clear the conditions that enabled the leftist Andrés López Obrador to win the 2018 presidential elections in Mexico.
The Neoliberal Diet is critical reading for food studies scholars, but it is also useful for anyone interested in understanding transformations in the global political economy over the last several decades and their effects on food production, diets, migration, labor rights, and social movements. It will be a welcome addition to advanced courses on the politics of food, food policy, agricultural economics, and critical global political economy. Because the book provides a clear, even-handed, and trustworthy explanation of so many important concepts, eye-popping facts, histories, laws, institutions, organizations, and debates, it makes a handy desk reference. It deserves a wide readership far beyond the academy, especially among professionals working in fields related to food politics or international economics, particularly in Mexico and Latin America.
My main criticism regards the scope of transformative change prescribed to deal with the problems we face today, of which the neoliberal food system is only one, albeit critical, dimension. The excellent extended discussion of Via Campesina’s conception of food sovereignty in Chapter Six does not appear in the conclusion—“What Is to Be Done?”—which instead calls for more research about how movements can “nudge” states (p. 192), Thomas Piketty’s capital tax, and engaging with corporations like Walmart. Walmart should be a site for politics, but their commitment to social responsibility is dubious, considering that leveraging their oligarchic buying power to squeeze producers to drive down prices, wages, and working conditions and shredding environmental and legal protections, as well as crushing unions, is the crux of their low-price business model. A demand from social movements to break up, or nationalize, such monopolies seems in order. Furthermore, Otero mentions the environmental externalities of the neoliberal food regime several times but rarely with enough urgency or detail to understand how environmentalism is a key site for resistance to neoliberalism. The discussion of alternatives would have benefited from examples of alliance-building, as well as engagement with indigenous alternatives to neoliberalism, such as Buen Vivir, and scholarship on post-growth, which work well alongside food sovereignty. But these are minor criticisms of a book that takes us very far in understanding the origin and scope of the problems we face and where we need to go.