Beyond solutions: Curating sustainability through plant-based milk and meat

Keywords: sustainability, plant-based, agrifood system, political ecology,
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 34

Abstract

“Plant-based” milk and meat are promoted as fixes to environmental problems associated with industrial livestock systems. This paper examines the political ecology of these “alternative proteins” (APs) through a study of plant milk and Spain's transforming almond sector. I illustrate how APs broker new knowledge networks that legitimize food companies as sustainability experts. I argue that this results in technology-led and market-oriented solutions that maintain existing industrial food regimes. While plant-based milk and meat are promoted as "niche" products that confront dominant food regimes, empirical material on Spain's almond sector shows that almond milk has led to the corporate enclosure of land and water at the expense of rural livelihoods. Based on 47 interviews with people across the almond value chain, I show how APs deepen the financialization of agri-food systems by enabling food companies to capture new ‘green’ value while simultaneously reducing risks and cutting costs through simplifying value chains. APs thus appear a logical step for a global industrial food system that prioritizes low-risk growth and market expansion. As eco-modernist ‘solutions,’ APs afford little space to reflect on core environmental and social challenges of food systems and risk counteracting food movements that seek to build place-based coalitions by emphasizing sovereignty, social equity, and agroecology. In mapping how APs have formed assemblages of discursive, institutional, and material power, this paper contributes to a growing literature on the political ecology of food.