Constituting the norm: Interrogating the anthropocene through food geographies in the more‐than‐human worlds of western Avadh, India

Abstract

The spread of modern agriculture in the third world, with the advent of high-yielding grain varieties, agrochemicals and irrigation infrastructure, labelled as the Green Revolution, is considered to be an important driver of human impacts on the earth. This transformation is considered to be emblematic of the Great Acceleration of the mid-20th century (McNeill & Engelke, 2014), the period formally approved by the Anthropocene Working Group as the commencement for the Anthropocene. 1 Meanwhile, there have been other competing formulations-the dawn of agriculture, the emergence of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Reisman & Fairbairn, 2021).

Food geographies ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene: Introducing the issue and main themes

“…The five papers in the Theme Issue are all equally critical of a singular universalising geographical perspective of the Anthropocene when applied to historical and contemporary discourses and empirical cases. They examine respectively: geographies of soy production to theorise a third planetary food regime (Beacham, 2022); the material‐technologic, political‐economic and sociocultural nexus of relations that gave rise to the modern broiler chicken within the Anthropocene (Coles, 2022); cellular dairy technologies in British Columbia, Canada (Newman et al, 2022); urban food partnership initiatives in the UK working to ‘reframe dietary power,’ that is, develop initiatives to eat less meat and adopt plant‐based diets to address the challenge of (de)animalisation (Morris et al, 2022); and an historical account of the food geographies of Western Avadh, in the upper Gangetic plains of northern India (Nagavarapu & Kumar, 2022).…”

The broiler chicken and the Anthropocene: Using critical nexus thinking to unpack the geographies of Gallus gallus domesticus

“…When it comes to food geographies in , of , and for the Anthropocene (see Maye et al, 2022), the last 100 years have greatest relevance. As agricultural production shifted to imperial models and industrial regimes (Friedman & McMichael, 1989; Nagavarapu & Kumar, 2022; Oliveira & Hecht, 2016; Patel, 2013), the 20th century witnessed continental‐scale landscape transformations and displacements and consequent declines in biodiversity and ‘agrobiodiversity’ (Zimmerer et al, 2019), as fewer species of plants and animals came to comprise a greater proportion of food production and diet (Jones, 2017; Khoury et al, 2014). This period was also marked by the wholesale enrolment of multiple species, communities, and ecosystems into the commodity and exchange relations of the (M)arket (Bernstein, 2016; Coles, 2021).…”