The specter of productivism and food democracy

The productivist paradigm we have inherited from fifty years ago was shaped to respond to a very different set of problems than those we are facing today. The resulting dominant food system in rich countries succeeds in doing one big thing: it is well equipped to produce large volumes of commodities for the food-processing industry, which in turn does reasonably well at ensuring a relatively stable availability of cheap calories to the populations. But this has come with huge costs- externalities that have been borne by the collectivity rather than accounted for in the price of food.