Book contents
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction: Marx’s Field as Our Global Present
- Chapter Two Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on Researching Class
- Chapter Three Marx’s Merchants’ Capital: Researching Agrarian Markets in Contemporary India
- Chapter Four The Ties That Divide: Marx’s Fractions of Capital and Class Analysis in/for the Global South
- Chapter Five Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India
- Chapter Six Thinking about Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States
- Chapter Seven Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/Integrated Circuits of Capital
- Chapter Eight Learning Marx by Doing: Class Analysis in an Emerging Zone of Global Horticulture
- Chapter Nine Understanding Labour Relations and Struggles in India through Marx’s Method
- Chapter Ten Investigating Class Relations in Rural South Africa: Marx’s ‘Rich Totality of Many Determinations’
- Chapter Eleven From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour
- Chapter Twelve The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s Historical Materialism
- Chapter Thirteen Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa
- Chapter Fourteen Marx In Utero: A Workers’ Inquiry of the In/Visible Labours of Reproduction in the Surrogacy Industry
- Chapter Fifteen Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee
- Chapter Sixteen Postcolonial Marxism and the ‘Cyber-Field’ in COVID Times: On Labour Becoming ‘Working Class’
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter Thirteen - Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2022
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction: Marx’s Field as Our Global Present
- Chapter Two Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on Researching Class
- Chapter Three Marx’s Merchants’ Capital: Researching Agrarian Markets in Contemporary India
- Chapter Four The Ties That Divide: Marx’s Fractions of Capital and Class Analysis in/for the Global South
- Chapter Five Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India
- Chapter Six Thinking about Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States
- Chapter Seven Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/Integrated Circuits of Capital
- Chapter Eight Learning Marx by Doing: Class Analysis in an Emerging Zone of Global Horticulture
- Chapter Nine Understanding Labour Relations and Struggles in India through Marx’s Method
- Chapter Ten Investigating Class Relations in Rural South Africa: Marx’s ‘Rich Totality of Many Determinations’
- Chapter Eleven From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour
- Chapter Twelve The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s Historical Materialism
- Chapter Thirteen Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa
- Chapter Fourteen Marx In Utero: A Workers’ Inquiry of the In/Visible Labours of Reproduction in the Surrogacy Industry
- Chapter Fifteen Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee
- Chapter Sixteen Postcolonial Marxism and the ‘Cyber-Field’ in COVID Times: On Labour Becoming ‘Working Class’
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Across Capital, Marx is attentive to food consumption and nourishment as conditions of the reproduction of labour and as manifestations of the immiseration of the working class. In chapter 25 of Volume I, Marx illustrates the general law of capitalist accumulation by analysing the living conditions of labourers in Britain in 1846– 66. Drawing on public health investigations, Marx discusses the deficient diets of labourers as resulting from expanding capital accumulation as well as capital centralisation and concentration. Marx reports nutrient tables indicating low consumption of food rich in nitrogen (i.e. meats, fish and fruit and vegetables) among the working class, with agricultural labourers and women suffering from the most deficient diets. This chapter builds on Marx's analysis of nutrition and health depletion of the poor occurring through the expansion of capitalist production with two aims. First, it investigates whether food consumption among the poor in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa presents similar patterns to the British labourers’ diets described in Capital. Using primary data collected in Mozambique and Ghana, it shows that scarce consumption of protein-rich food continues to be a defining feature of the poor's diets. However, another key aspect is the penetration of packaged and processed food, which is a manifestation of a globalised food regime and the expansion of capital in food production. Second, this chapter provides insights on the methodological approach used to collect data on food consumption and the linkages with the food system, which requires multiple levels of analysis and data sources.
Introduction
In the past few decades, the study of nutrition has come to be dominated by medical sciences, which promote a biomedical, individualised and technical understanding of nutritional outcomes (O’Laughlin 2013; Jaspars et al. 2018). Nutrition narratives have become detached from the analysis of systems of commodified food production, trade policies and labour regimes, endangering our understanding of nutritional issues. Further, the expropriation of nutrition of its socioeconomic and political content has paved the way to the entrance of the food industry in shaping nutrition narratives on a global scale, which contributes to deepening the problem, precipitating a crisis of malnutrition (Winson 2013; Street 2015; Sathyamala 2016).
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- Marx in the Field , pp. 175 - 188Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021