In this paper, I compare the formation of food regimes during British and US hegemony, which were mirror‐images in terms of the degree of free trade and state regulation as well as the direction of trade flow of grains. Many scholars recognize that the foundation for each regime was laid by the national policy and dominant political coalition in the world‐economic hegemon, but my analysis pays particular attention to the divisions and coalitions within agriculture as forces that drove the shape of each regime. Though important agricultural divisions existed in each case, the political power of the resulting agricultural coalitions – and those coalitions' relations to the nation's dominant coalition – are central to understanding the formation and spread of each food regime.
The number of animals raised and slaughtered for food in the U.S. has increased dramatically since 1945. We examine how two factors have been fundamental in this expansion of "meat" consumption: the market and the state. U.S. agricultural policies that emerged form the New Deal centered on price supports and production controls. While these policies were aimed at controlling supply, they instead spurred intensive and industrial techniques that resulted in continuous overproduction, especially in corn, wheat and soybeans. As a result, farm organizations and the state promoted "meat" production and consumption as a way to alleviate the surplus. To handle this expansion, intensive and industrial methods reshaped "meat" production, resulting in more oppressive living conditions for animals raised as "meat." We explore this connection between the market, state policy and animal oppression. We also briefly analyze how this relationship has likewise affected workers and peripheral nations in the world economy.Animal rights activists decrying the abuse of animals frequently cite the direct consumption of animals as food (Singer, 1975). Billions of other animals are "produced" in deplorable conditions, brutally killed and eaten by relatively elite groups of humans. Such critiques tend to focus on the ethics and morality of such practices, but often overlook social structural forces -such as the integral links between a "free market" economy and government economic policies and the consumption of other animals as food.In this paper we examine the links between New Deal-inspired U.S. agricultural policy and the expansion of animal oppression after 1945. U.S. agricultural policy encouraged increased "meat" consumption to help reduce the oversupply of feed grains, in particular corn. This policy expanded the oppression of animals in two ways. First, the consumption of animals
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