How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. By Raj Patel and Jason W MooreThe most telling symbol of the modern era isn't the automobile or the smartphone. It's the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet's favourite flesh by 2020. Future civilisations will find traces of humankind's 50 billion bird-a-year habit in the fossil record, a marker for what we now call the Anthropocene. And yet responsibility for the dramatic change in our consumption lies not so much in general human activity, but capitalism. Although we're taught to understand it as an economic system, capitalism doesn't just organise hierarchies of human work. Capitalism is what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. Indeed, the way we understand nature owes a great deal to capitalism.Every civilisation has had some rendering of the difference between "us" and "them", but only under capitalism is there a boundary between "society" and "nature" - a violent and tightly policed border with deep roots in colonialism. Continue reading...