Capitalist Agriculture, Cuisine, and the History of Modern War

The politics of war and of presidential elections are perhaps the most conspicuous examples of the ways in which Iowa is in the world it so fervently denies; but, of course, Iowa has long been in the world long before Iowa was a place one could point to on a map, long before the contemporary borders of the state had been laid down; long before settlers arrived to carve their cruel grammar into the land. This particular piece of land was once fought over by far distant imperial powers, each seeking to leverage their position in the region to realize some kind of competitive advantage over the others. These late to arrive empires were never not in dialogue with the Indigenous nations who lived on this land, who stewarded the land over untold generations. Upon their arrival, the agents of foreign empires were quick to realize that one of the surest strategies for establishing and maintaining control of the land and its resources was to stoke the jealousies that obtained among Native peoples, to establish alliances between European and Indigenous nations that would encourage competition among disparate peoples over a necessarily finite and dwindling resource base, thus establishing commerce as a hedge against forms of alliance and confederation among Natives, or between Natives and settlers. The violence of this process was very much in the world, of the world, and it made the world anew, a new world of settler fantasies of mobility and desire, of wish-fulfillment as infinitely capacious, of never being denied that which one wants. From the first, these fantasies were tethered to an economy organized largely–though not exclusively–around agriculture. While the earliest settlers arrived as traders and trappers, part of the luxury economy built around the capture of game for the harvesting of furs, the growth of extractive industries and a corresponding market in land as property, encouraged the development of settler agriculture, particularly around grain and livestock. For settlers, as it concerned the business of sustaining life and expanding trade, domesticated farm animals were infinitely preferable to wild game animals, the populations of which, in addition to be mobile and thus notoriously unreliable as a source of food, were dwindling in the face of an increasing settler population, and the commercialization of the hunt among Native peoples. These processes were abetted, and new structures enforced, as a consequence of the regional lead industry, and the rising industrial production of munitions, small arms, and bullets. Rock Island, site of the primary village of the Sauk nation, was captured through a series of military engagements between 1831 and 1832, culminating in the so-called Black Hawk War. Fortified by the US military since 1816, in the 1880s, as the US was poised to enter into a new era of foreign conquest, Rock Island was converted into an armory and a weapons plant. As of 2022, the Rock Island Arsenal remains the single largest–as it is the only–federally-owned weapons manufactory in the United States. In Iowa, we prefer to think of agriculture as something quaint, if not antique; the image of farm and family provides agreeable cover for a whole lot of nefarious doings. The legal fiction of US sovereignty over this particular piece of the continent is invested with the affective power of this image, and we hold it dear. To think about the overlapping histories of violence by which this land was acquired, the histories of violence by which its peoples have been party, demands that we attend to a far more ugly history than the one we like to entertain, one whose complications cannot be easily accounted for, much less resolved. That the United States came to assume dominion over this piece of land because France was about to lose control of sugar production in the colony of Saint-Domingue, and the Mississippi River was less and less necessary to the provisioning of France’s territories in the Caribbean, presents us with a difficult truth. We did not do it on our own, we did not, and we never have. Settlers could flock to the banks of the river and make it over in the perverse image of their insatiable hungers only because a bunch of Black insurgents on an island two thousand miles away succeeded in liberating themselves from what was–at the time–the most powerful and strategically canny military force in the world. This fact does not sit well. Because we are a free people and we worked for what we had, it must not be true. It cannot be true, because it does not feel right. So we should ignore it, just as we should probably ignore the price Haiti paid for its freedom, the indemnity it was forced to pay to France as the cost of its freedom being perhaps the single most profound cause of the impoverishment of the island over the past two centuries, of the underdevelopment of its resources, and its peoples. That many of our relations showed up in this place because of the underdevelopment of another island nation, of a small place in the North Atlantic, by another imperial power should perhaps prompt some sense of kinship with the people of Haiti. It does not. This too is ironic, and another reason why we Midwesterners do not appreciate irony. The business of Midwestern agriculture–the expansion of agricultural production across the plains, the destruction of old growth forests and prairie lands, the emergence of markets and transportation infrastructures, was always about the world, about feeding the world. This seems like an eminently laudable goal until one begins to account for all that was destroyed, all the forms of life, respirant and inert, that were upended in service to the imperatives of capital, its accumulation and maldistribution. Zea mays, the grass plant Americans call “corn,” was engineered by Indigenous agriculturalists well over a thousand years ago; the multifarious varietals of corn are preserved, still, by Indigneous nations throughout the Americas. It fell to settlers to embark upon the commodification of maize through ever-expansive industrial scale agricultural practices, and the transformation of corn into a staple in the diets of humans and animals around the world. Processed as a sweetener, corn is an ingredient in virtually every food product humans consume. Those of us who eat meat or who are dependent upon infrastructures of electrification consume corn far less inconspicuously, inasmuch as corn provides fodder for livestock, or is processed for fuel as ethanol, or consumed in the form of methane derived from animal excrement. One of the single largest contributors to greenhouse gasses and planetary heating, cattle farming in the Midwest is presently as much about the production of manure as it is about the production of meat. The image of the farm as bucolic idyll is part of the stockpile of delusions by which we have come to ignore the ways in which the very practices of industrial scale agriculture undermine the very possibility of the family farm and its long-term survival, the practices that undermine the possibility of farming as an act of ecological stewardship. Capitalist agriculture was always about feeding the world, in making a new world for capitalism by sustaining the reproduction of workers, increasing the supply of available workers and sponsoring competition among them by rendering them disposable, thereby undermining wages and inhibiting the formation of class-based solidarities. Which is to say it capitalist agriculture was always about class domination and sex, about gender and sex as terrains of class warfare, and about war as a technology of population management and resource control. Provisioning the military, feeding the troops, has always been a notoriously fraught aspect of war, just as the waging of war, the distribution of troops across different zones of conflict, has of necessity allowed for exchanges among different food cultures, introducing soldiers to unfamiliar forms of food, uncommon cuisines, and unusual modes of food preparation. The history of conquest is written into the history of food culture. Corn, potatoes and tomatoes all became staples of European food cultures through the conquest of the Americas; forms of Mexican cuisine enter the American diet after the US-Mexico War of 1846-48. Cane sugar is, of course, a relic of a long and torturous history of colonial warfare throughout west Africa and the colonization Indigenous lands in the Caribbean. American GIs developed a taste for sushi during and after the US occupation of Japan. Sushi chefs in the US would later develop the California roll and the Philadelphia roll, which would be exported back to Japan during the US war in Vietnam. Those workers who built the infrastructures necessary to the production, circulation, and distribution of agricultural produce, those tens of thousands of immigrants from the Chinese province of Guangdong, adapted elements of Cantonese cuisine to the tastes of miners who flocked to the West in pursuit of mineral wealth. James Beard contended that it was amateur chefs among Chinese workers who first developed the Denver omelet, which was–he believed–a distant cousin to the St. Paul sandwich, a long-time staple of Chinese restaurants in St. Louis, composed of an egg foo young patty, served on two slices of white bread, slathered in mayonnaise, and garnished with lettuce, tomato and pickle. The entanglements of capitalist food cultures are expressions of what Lisa Lowe has referred to as the intimacies of four continents, the asymmetrical relationships that obtain between Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, the forms of extraction and accumulation sustained by the military violence of imperial warfare. As a matter of military logistics, in the modern era–or, at least, since the Napoleonic wars–going to war and feeding an army has entailed certain innovations in food preparation, of the large scale processing of fruits and vegetables and meat, and the preservation of these staples through the introduction of the metal tins, the industrialization of canning and meat packing. Again, we are back in the Midwest. We are with Hormel in Austin, which is a city in Minnesota that is not named for Stephen Austin, the Virginian-cum-Kentuckian-cum-Missourian who would become “the father of Texas” but for another settler who conscended to bear the Austin family name. We are with Agriprocessors, and the Rubashkin family of deepest Brooklyn, with Guatemalan workers and the Israeli Orthodox Rabbinate, with the producers and consumers of kosher meats. And somehow, magically, we are with energy markets. It starts with SPAM, it ends with Shabbat, and how we keep the lights on during the sabbath. And something somewhere is about inflation at the pump and who will win the election this year. This is a long and winding road, but we must drive it if we hope to figure out how to get to our destination. We do not yet know what that destination is, and how we will get to this place we do not yet know is really anyone's guess. Somewhere, we will get back to the question that set us going. Was Grandpa in the CIA?