A critical political theory of food that is emerging on the threshold of the Capitalocene

Abstract

The book Political Theory of Food was written by Leonardo Rossi, using as a basis the results achieved within the framework of his doctoral thesis in Political Science. The author has a degree in Social Communication and a member of the Southern Political Ecology Research Collective (IRES-CONICET) of Catamarca in which he registers his research and activism activities.

The centrality of the work is to address the ontological-political implications of the link that is woven between human communities, territories and food based on epistemological debates derived from the field of Latin American political ecology. The critical theory outlined here constitutes a substantial epistemic-political commitment (Rossi, 2023) that emerges from the meticulous theoretical, historical and conceptual investigation that the author makes of the human agri-food plot. To do this, it tracks and breaks down those milestones in the planet's food geopolitics that led us to the threshold of the Capitalocene. Likewise, in a contrastive sense, Rossi proposes to unravel a cartography of hope by examining agroecological experiences that are woven in the provinces of Córdoba and Catamarca - territories surrounded by extractive devastation -, which aim to cultivate plots of agri-food communality. For the author, it is precisely these ontological designs, based on practices of political production of the common, that offer concrete clues to retrace the deep ecological-civilizational crisis that we are going through. As Machado Aráoz describes in the prologue, this work invites us not to passively contemplate the apocalyptic course of agribusiness, but rather “to know how to look/feel and learn to care for the agrocultural practices that subsist in the margins and the counterhegemonic soils that still cultivate communality and produce the food that nourishes the horizons of other possible futures.”ecology, global agri-food model, agri-food communality.