What can be more essential for human beings’ survival and development than food? For 100,000 years of human evolution, the species has been able to adapt to a lot of changing and adverse factors: heat, cold, rain and competition with other species.

We have learned to navigate rivers and cross the seas, to overcome gravity and fly from one continent to another. We have tamed wild animals and plants, we have built machines which work for us and, in some cases, “think” for us. We have found a cure for many diseases, increased life-expectancy, built cities, bridges, roads, instant communications, printed our own history in words and images and sound-recorded it. We have reached the moon and the depths of the ocean. But to satisfy our need to eat and desire for food, we do the same as our ancestors did 100,000 years ago. We eat the food provided to us by nature: we farm the land, we rear animals, we fish.

However, the way food gets to the consumer has dramatically changed. The overwhelming majority of people not only no longer produce what they eat, but they don't even have a direct relationship with their food. Growing world urbanization concentrates thousands of millions of people in cities and built-up areas, who depend upon costly and complex transport and distribution networks to get their provisions. The place where the food is produced and the consumer’s table are often thousands of miles apart, which has given rise to a series of industries which do the processing and packaging so products keep their market value. As a matter of fact, food production has been nothing but an industrial process for over 50 years. Food is no longer pure nutrition, but also contains an astonishing variety of additives and residues from industrial production and processing. Behind a simple serving of white rice, hundreds, maybe thousands of people have taken part in the weaving of the invisible thread which links the planted seed to the dinner table.

In this “civilizing” context, marketing plays a key role in the design of the relationship between food producers and consumers, in the pricing regulation mechanisms and in the creation and upholding of consumer habits. In short, in building a societal model. Huge commercial areas (or megamarkets) are, so far, the best-adapted proposal which, from a market point of view, fully exhausts the features of the capitalist model of urban consumption. In fact, these large areas today offer everything from boxes of matches to brand-new cars. No limits exist for the consumerist dream, which has gone from the human scale to the checkbook or credit card. New scales and new logics appear.

Different aesthetic conceptions and liturgies appear as well. The ugly and inhospitable warehouses, so large, endless and tall like aviation field hangars, begin, with megamarket decoration, to look like pagan temples. Inside, you find multicolor totems arranged as showcases, refrigerators, freezers, and displays. Products are piled as obstacles which imperceptibly “channel” the “faithful”; they determine people’s speed and rhythm. Conscience is progressively overpowered by a flow of visual impressions while the audio environment publicizes offers, raffles, "news"... invitations, and even puts pressure on people to spend more and more.

Megamarkets are here to stay, so it seems, for the time they wish to stay. The question is how much space are we going to give them in our lives.

Carlos Amorín

Jointly published by Brecha/Rel-UITA

19 March 2004