Benjamin Schrager

Utsunomiya University · Agricultural Economics

Local food is often explained by drawing on fixed ideas of scale or value, but such fixed notions of local food inevitably oversimplify the diversity of situated local food mosaics. This paper develops the application of scalar politics to strengthen analysis of the situated initiatives, institutions, discourses, and practices that shape scalar imp...

Covid-19 precipitated a food crisis that reconfigured food systems in unprecedented directions. While much research on Covid-19 and food crises focuses on food insecurity, we argue for a critical agrarian approach to food crises that extends beyond food insecurity. We emphasize how food crises enact disruptions that can lead to the reconfiguration...

The growing problems associated with industrial agriculture have led to a greater recognition of the significance of alternative agriculture beyond Anglophone and European countries. This article explores Utsunomiya University’s Eco-programs, which combine a pesticide-free and synthetic fertilizer-free community garden with an educa­tional lecture...

Outbreaks of avian influenza spread across political boundaries, and migratory birds are often scapegoated as vectors for the disease. This paper develops the vice of biosecurity to explain the tendency for conventional biosecurity to urge for greater restrictions on life that prove difficult to reverse and at times hazard increasing the risks aris...

Over the past decade in Japan, consumption of raw chicken dishes increased after the government placed restrictions on raw beef and pork. This article explores the lax regulations on raw chicken, a high-risk food with a devoted following, especially among young consumers in Japan. Historically, raw chicken was mostly limited to particular regions a...

During the pandemic, many prominent global leaders and scholars have called for placing science above politics. This commentary argues that such rhetoric dangerously oversimplifies science and politics as insular from democracy and geographical context. The theory of co-construction from science and technology studies reveals the pandemic's geograp...

As digital media grows increasingly pervasive, cultural geographers continue to engage with new mechanisms for conducting and sharing their research. This article discusses a collaborative ethnography project that I conducted on artisan chicken in Miyazaki prefecture, Japan, and shared as a playlist of six YouTube videos. Although inexperienced wit...

This dissertation explores Japanese chicken meat to examine how the political ecology of food production informs eaters’ perceptions and practices. Food systems continue to grow increasingly complex and relations within them increasingly inscrutable. Despite the growing opacity of food networks in advanced capitalist societies, consumers face overw...

This review uses the concepts of place and space to provide insights into recent critical geographic approaches to food and agriculture. For alternative foods, the use of the term “alternative” has changed markedly from indicating a contrast with conventional food to signifying a broader commitment to progressive politics. In contrast, everyday mea...

This article analyzes how strategies for capitalist accumulation drove the industrialization of chicken husbandry and increased consumption of chicken products in Japan. By the start of the Showa era, leaders in the Japanese chicken industry sought to promote larger and more productive operations through the adoption of Western breeds. Following th...

What are the challenges to the food system in Hawai‘i? Food and Power explores issues facing the way we eat and produce (or do not produce) food in Hawai‘i. Given Hawai‘i’s island geography, high dependence on imported food has been portrayed as the primary problem and localization has been the dominant solution proposed. But the book argues that m...

"Our analysis situates Hawai‘i’s seed corn industry within the development of industrial corn, the technological change in corn breeding, the organizational restructuring in the seed corn industry, and the changes in Hawai‘i’s agrarian landscape. We draw upon David Harvey’s (1989) concept of “flexible accumulation” to explain the rapid shifts in se...

My thesis traces the emergence of Hawaii's seed corn industry (HSCI), an industry that consists of seed corporations conducting seed corn improvement. The second chapter follows the political economic development of corn and the emergence of contemporary seed corporations. The third chapter investigates the technoscientific development of commercia...