What Is Agriculture For? Archetypes for Future Food Systems

What Is Agriculture For? describes four contrasting rationales for technical and policy change in agriculture and food systems. Technological Modernization applies an ethic common to every sector in the industrial economy: production should seek greater efficiencies in order to lower consumer costs and secure adequate supply but should not do so in ways that harm third parties or the environment. The other views single out a feature of agriculture giving it unique moral significance. Sustainable Intensification emphasizes future challenges to the global food supply, and Rural Resilience places special value on the social role of farmers and other producers. Urban Agriculture highlights cities' growing vulnerability to rurally based supply chains. Each perspective leads to distinct policy goals and suggests different priorities for technical innovation. At the same time, the argument for any particular innovation may draw on two of more of these archetypal rationales. The book does greater justice to the complexity of food politics, providing tools for critical evaluation of implicit value commitments and greater understanding of opposing points of view.

Chapter 1 - Four Archetypes for Future Food Systems
Chapter 2 - Archetypes, Imaginaries, and the Philosophy of Technology
Chapter 3 - Technological Modernization and Industrial Agriculture
Chapter 4 - Science and Sustainable Intensification
Chapter 5 - Rural Resilience and the Food Movement
Chapter 6 - Urban Agriculture: The Food Movement Moves On
Chapter 7 - Gaps, Overlaps, and the Political Ecology of Food Systems
Chapter 8 - Deep Agrarianism

Paul B. Thompson is Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University where he was the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food, and Community Ethics from 2003 until 2022. He held the Joyce and Edward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Ethics at Purdue University from 1997 to 2003. All of Thompson's academic positions have been joint appointments between philosophy and each university's college of agriculture and natural resources.