Ernährung im Zeitalter der Globalisierung

„A World without Famine?” International Food Politics in the era of the World Wars

This paper analyzes the emergence and trajectories of global food policies from the late 9th century to the post-Word War II era. For a long time, scholarship has focused on the question how domestic governments and nationalist movements have responded to the challenges of globalizing food markets through protectionist policy agendas. It has been argued that ‘first’ globalization came to end with the World War I. This paper takes a different view. It argues that since the early 20th century, the provision, distribution and consumption of food became a mayor problem of international politics. This process was accelerated by the First World War which dramatically revealed the global interdependence of food markets. At the same, a new notion of food policies emerged, embracing problems of nutrition, demographics and economic development on a global scale. The discussions and experiences of the two Word Wars had a deep impact on international food and development policies after 1945.

Globalizing the Local and Localizing the Global. Coffee Trade and Consumption in imperial Germany as an Example for the Interdependence of Production, Trade and Consumption

During the second half of the nineteenth century, coffee became one of the world’s most valuable internationally traded commodities. As such it underwent a transformation in European countries from a product of luxury to a product of mass consumption. The article focuses on the question how the interdependence of production, trade and consumption in a globalizing world affected local coffee consumption and trade in imperial Germany. Therefore the article examines processes of homogenization and differentiation, by taking a look at the international coffee trade in Hamburg, national trade and mass consumer culture, the political dimension of coffee consumption and the images connected with coffee. Rischbieter argues that the relationship between globalization and homogenization is more complicated than often assumed. Globalization implies both a process of homogenization and of differentiation.

Beef around the World. The Globalization of Beef Markets before 1914

Between 1870 and 1914, beef became part of an international trade network between Argentina, Great Britain and the United States. The driving forces behind market integration were the transport revolution, a growing demand for high quality food and a reorganization of trade policies in the transatlantic world. The transport revolution led to a substantial decrease in freight rates and linked distant markets. After the invention of mechanical refrigeration (ca. 1880) not only grain but also ‘dead meat’ could now be shipped at competitive prices. Based on a growing population and increasing incomes the British and North-American consumers developed a higher demand for this high value food. Mass-production and economies of scale in the United States and Argentina created new forms of vertically integrated production, enforced further economic expansion and compelled a novel system of finance and distribution.

Migration, Culinary Transfer, and the Internationalization of Food Consumption in West Germany after 1945 Addressing both the economic and cultural dimensions of the internationalization of food consumption, this paper deals with the emergence of ethnic restaurants in West Germany after World War II. Migrant entrepreneurs appear as the central agents in the process of changing food consumption habits. The essay offers a short outline of the spread of ethnic restaurants, followed by a chapter on the growing popularity of ‘foreign’ food consumed both in restaurants and at home. In discussing transnational transfers of food items, but also of culinary knowledge, finally, the discourses and images of ‘foreign’ food and thus its cultural meanings are analysed as they are produced (and consumed) in restaurants, but also in the mass media.

An increasing number of studies have appeared that together come under the label of governmentality. The topics show that an analysis related to practices can integrate a broad spectrum of social phenomena that is out of the range of conventional theories of the state. Less well known is the founding text of governmentality studies. Foucault‘s “history of governmentality” is a genealogy of liberal governments, ending with the rise of the recent so-called neoliberal transformation of the 1970s. The weakness of that text is that it fails to show the connections of the concept of governmentality to epistemology. Also, recent studies mention the power relations of knowledge only globally, leaving science in a sphere of its own. However, originality and strength of the analysis of governmental power depends on its linkage to a history of knowledge.