Why the way food is made matters more than what ends up on the plate
“It’s just food” is one of the most misleading phrases we use in modern life.
We say it to calm things down.
To close a conversation before it becomes uncomfortable.
To signal that we’ve gone far enough — and should return to something easier. Taste. Preference. Habit.
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And on the surface, food really is what we eat. What we cook, share, celebrate, and argue about. Plants from fields. Products derived from animals. Familiar forms shaped by culture and routine.
But that’s only the surface — the part we can see.
Food has not been “just food” for a very long time. Or perhaps it never truly was.
Food Has Always Been About Power — Just Not Like This
Long before factories and global supply chains, food shaped borders and hierarchies. Wars were fought over fertile land, access to grain, control of salt, sugar, and spices. Empires expanded not only for power, but for what territory could produce — and who it could feed.
Food has always been tied to survival, leverage, and control.
What has changed is where that power now operates.
For most of human history, food was at least simple in one crucial way: we understood it. We saw where it came from. We knew the season. We recognized its limits. Food obeyed physics. It spoiled. It traveled badly.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s not a claim that the past was fairer or kinder. It’s a description of how food behaved in a world constrained by distance, time, and biology.
Today, those constraints no longer shape the system in the same way.