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A new politics of food has arrived. Interest groups are no longer required to rely on traditional legislative means to achieve their political objectives. Instead, changes in the political economy of the food system and the economic structure of the food system make it possible to practice politics by other means, including the use of the market to achieve political objectives. The increasing transaction costs of legislative decision making, the slow growth in the demand for food in developed country markets, the increasing demand for specific food product attributes, and the highly concentrated state of most food markets can make it advantageous for interest groups to pursue their political objectives through the market rather than through legislative channels. In the new politics of food, the market, the legislature, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary are all arenas within which the art of politics will be practiced.To paraphrase Clausewitz on war and diplomacy, I hold that politics is economics carried on by other means . However, when a equals b, it also follows that b equals a. And so you might say that economics is also politics carried on by other means.-Paul A. Samuelson (italics in original)A fax machine is an odd, yet appropriate, choice of weapons to fire the first shot in the new politics of food that is emerging in the United States. Yet it was a fax machine, employed to achieve a political end that was legislatively impossible, which signaled that a new politics of food had arrived. This was politics that furthered its goals by employing nontraditional means, and it marked the emergence of a new willingness to the use of the market to accomplish political ends.