The link between James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) and current conditions
Retired cannon at Marie Curtis Park in Toronto featured at May 4, 2012 post entitled: Retired heavy gun at Marie Curtis Park was earlier located at Riverdale Park. Photo was taken before construction of boardwalk along this stretch of beach. Jaan Pill photo
I became interested in the link between James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) and current conditions – in particular with regard to climate change – when I began reading Alice Mah’s Petrochemical Planet (2023).
In the latter study, which I learned about from reading Red Pockets (2025), Mah calls upon the metaphors of (1) seeing like a state; (2) seeing like an oil company; and (3) seeing like the petrochemical industry.
Seeing like a state; seeing like an oil company
The concept of seeing like an oil company is from an article by James Ferguson, “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capital in Neoliberal Africa” (2005). Ferguson’s discussion is available in a series of articles devoted to the work of James C. Scott:
American Anthropologist: Volume 107, Issue 3, September 2005
The above-noted issue includes an Afterword in which James Scott offers comments, outlined below, in response to the articles.
A previous post addresses Scott’s concept of seeing like a state. In his 1998 study, Scott refers to the “pernicious combination” of four elements of a series of historical twentieth-century disasters:
- Development of a state-level way of seeing
- High-modernist ideology
- Authoritarian state
- Civil society incapable of resistance
Element No. 3, an authoritarian state, had to be willing and able to use its coercive power. The potential for lethality arose when Element No. 1, state simplification, and Element No. 2, high modernity, were combined with Element No. 3, an authoritarian state. Element No. 4, a civil society incapable of resistance, would be brought about through war, revolution, or economic collapse. Late colonial rule occasionally gave rise, Scott notes, to such a condition of incapacity of resistance.
Scott argues that state-socialist and free-market systems were equally capable of bringing together the four elements of state-initiated disasters.
He also cautions that what he calls high modernism is not to be confused with scientific practice. Instead, it was a belief system – based on a form of faith – which borrowed the legitimacy of science and technology. The high-modernist ideology was uncritical – driven by an unwarranted optimism – with regard to the possibilities of comprehensive state-level planning.
The ideology was strongly in evidence, according to Scott, in the national economic mobilizations by the opposing sides in the First World War.
Ferguson’s critique of Seeing Like a State (1998)
In the 2005 article, Ferguson lauds the analytical power of Scott’s concept of seeing like a state.
“The power and clarity of Scott’s analytic vision,” Ferguson observes, “make it easy to apply his theoretical schemes to a wide range of cases; indeed, once we have learned about ‘moral economies,’ ‘weapons of the weak,’ or ‘state simplifications,’ we tend to see them almost everywhere we look.”
Having said this, Ferguson adds, however, that concepts associated with seeing like a state, such as standardization, homogenization, and grid making are not, in fact, of great utility when we seek to make sense of what is happening in a contemporary world of “downsized states and unconstrained global corporations.”
In the article, which focuses on resource extraction – in particular, the extraction of oil – Ferguson describes how capital investment in Africa has been “territorialized.”
In explaining how such a form of capital investment functions, he favours the concept of seeing like an oil company, rather than seeing like a state.
In the twentieth-first century, in Ferguson’s view of things, we are no longer dealing with schemes for the planned improvement of “developmental or socialist states” – an area of state-level planning that Scott focuses upon in Seeing Like a State (1998).
In the article published in 2005, Ferguson speaks of the end of most state socialisms, skepticism about development (I assume with reference to what is called the Global South), and the dominance of neoliberalism.
State capitalism compared to developmental states described by James Scott
Ferguson opposes the notion that “globalization” is now the agent – as the “developmental or socialist states” were previously the agents – of a worldwide process of increasing abstraction and standardization.
He counters the notion that “development,” “the state,” and “globalization” qualify “as different aspects or moments of a single process.”
He disagrees with the concept “that contemporary global capitalism works through a fundamental mechanism of homogenization and the gridlike standardization of space.”
Writing in 2005, Ferguson observes that investment in Africa had increased in previous years, prior to 2005, but only in certain countries, and overwhelmingly in the area of mining and oil extraction. The investment “has been largely concentrated in secure enclaves, often with little or no economic benefit to the wider society.”
Ferguson underlines that the “political-economic logic of the privately secured enclaves” is vastly different from the “universalizing grid of the modernist state described by Scott.”
He describes offshore oil extraction in Angola, in which very little of the resulting oil revenue reaches the wider society in Angola. The industry employs very few Angolans, relying on short-term foreign workers living in gated communities.
He observes that private armies and security forces, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, serve to protect territorial enclaves of mineral extraction.
He refers, as well, to the Republic of Sudan, where oil concessions are advertised as existing on “uninhabited land” – rendered uninhabited by paramilitaries systematically driving off residents.
“But this,” the article notes, “is only an extreme version of a very common maneuver, in that enclaves of mineral-extraction investment on the continent are normally tightly integrated with the head offices of multinational corporations and metropolitan centers, but sharply walled off from their own national societies (often literally walled, with bricks and razor wire).”
“Rolling back” of state; governance by NGO
The movements of capital in the enterprises Ferguson describes are “global” in the sense they cross the globe, but they do not cover contiguous geographical space. Rather, the movements jump point to point, with vast areas bypassed. Such investments do not involve construction of national “grids” of legibility as occurred in the era to which James Scott refers.
Ferguson comments that in late-colonial and early-independence periods in Africa, mining investment often brought with it extensive social investment. Copper mining in Zambia, for example, initially brought with it extensive social investment such as the construction of “company towns” – with workers who were skilled, unionized, and highly paid.
These town were “classic examples of colonial-era corporate paternalism” in which “the business of mining – as exploitative as it undoubtedly was – entailed a very significant broader social project.”
When the copper industry went into decline in the mid-1970s, however, previous gains – such as higher wages, good social services, and nation-state control over national wealth – “were identified by the advocates of privatization and neoliberal reform as ‘inefficiencies’ responsible for the industry’s decline.”
Ferguson speaks of a “mythology of globalization” according to which reforms of Africa’s “structural adjustment” were enacted in order to “roll back oppressive and overbearing states and liberate a newly vital ‘civil society.'” The outcome,” Ferguson says, “was to be a new sort of ‘governance’ that would be both more democratic and more efficient.”
Things did not work out that way: “the best scholarship on recent African politics suggests that the ‘rolling back’ of the state provoked or exacerbated a far-reaching political crisis.”
As functions of the state were “outsourced” to NGOs, state capacity deteriorated. State officials in turn set out a “privatization plan” of their own leading to what has been called “the criminalization of the state.”
The article speaks, as well, of two forms of governance in Africa. One is concerned with “usable Africa,” which involves secured, policed enclaves that are linked in a selective, point-to-point fashion.
The other form is concerned with “unusable Africa,” which most often amounts to “a kind of governance by NGO, often in a humanitarian mode, with a hodgepodge of transnational private voluntary organizations carrying out the day-to-day work of providing rudimentary governmental and social services, especially in areas of crisis and conflict.”
Such a “global” model of resource extraction is not new
In some respects, according to the article, the “global” model of resource extraction is not new. Private companies with their own armies, such as in King Leopold’s Congo, pioneered resource extraction in the absence of modern state institutions.
The article observes that “mineral-extraction investment in ‘unstable’ environments is seen as a ‘growth industry,’ and the use of private military and security firms appears as a ‘cutting edge’ new technology of spatial and social regulation.”
We can say, based on the article, that seeing like an oil company entails the pursuit of oil-extraction opportunities, even in the midst of chaos and disorder: the pursuit of oil is the primary consideration. In this context, Ferguson quotes an oil executive who says, in response to a question about political volatility, “You’ve got to go where the oil is. I don’t think about it very much.”
In conclusion, Ferguson underlines that his purpose is to enhance understanding of the “emergent forms of specialized order and disorder” in the world. He emphasizes that the logic inherent in such forms “is not one of ever-expanding homogenization and standardization.” As a result, in his view, new tools such as the concept of seeing like an oil company are required.
Cannon at Old Mill Toronto in the Kingsway neighbourhood. Jaan Pill photo
Response from James Scott
I was interested to read the Afterword by James Scott to the American Anthropologist journal special forum devoted to his work: “Afterword to ‘Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence.'”
First published: September 2005 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.3.395
The abstract reads:
This Afterword is a discussion of commentary and criticism of my books, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and Seeing Like a State (1998). I examine the relation of moral economies to globalization, and hegemony to power and resistance, in agrarian societies and in contemporary U.S. politics. I debate contemporary neoliberal projects of governance in extractive, enclave economies and in current development practices in Indonesia. I question the use and misuse of high modernism as a term in my work. I discuss neoliberal internationalism and the immanent project of “harmonizing” institutional orders throughout poor countries.
Scott was a political scientist who conducted anthropological research
Scott begins his response by commenting that he’s a political scientist not an anthropologist. He began doing his anthropological research, in his role as a political scientist, after closely reading a series of mimeographed lectures by F.G. Bailey, aimed at novices, about how to proceed with anthropological field research.
Scott felt he had no choice but to perform this field research, so that he would be in a position to speak – on the basis, in part, of a good measure of first-hand acquaintance – about “peasant culture and religion in the context of early revolution.”
(We may add that a series of oral history interviews outlines how Scott launched his career combining political science and anthropology. The interviews underline that from his earliest student days, Scott was engaged in variations of intensive, self-directed, independent study of each of the topics that strongly appealed to him.)
Given events in the late 1960s and early 1970s during an era of “peasant revolutions,” Scott comments that he wrote The Political Economy of the Peasant (1976) “in an attempt to explain the social and economic preconditions of peasant unrest.” He spent a year, after the book was published, seeking to further increase his understanding of peasant culture and religion. The search resulted, among other things, in a two-part article in Theory and Society (1977), entitled “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition.”
He adds in an endnote that the 1976 study was “not meant to be read, as I explained at the time, as a theory of peasant rebellion – let alone, revolution. For discontent to develop into rebellion requires a whole series of contingent, mediating factors that are beyond my – and I dare say most other observers’ – capacity to formulate simply.”
The latter study owes a great debt, Scott reports, to his colleague Edward Friedman at the University of Wisconsin. “It was,” he adds, “a curious hybrid of politics, economics, and history with most of the data concerning Vietnam drawn from the Archives d’outre mer in Paris and that concerning Burma drawn from the India Office Library in London.” Anthropologists asked him where he’d done the fieldwork for the book. His response was that none had been done. His fieldwork began after the book was published.
Scott’s comments, regarding Ferguson’s article
In the Afterword, Scott speaks about a whole series of articles in the September 2005 American Anthropologist special forum. I will focus on just one aspect of his observations, regarding the article by James Ferguson. Scott’s comments – I have added paragraph breaks, for ease of online reading – read as follows:
James Ferguson makes one large, powerful, and convincing claim with respect to my argument in Seeing Like a State (1998). I assert, almost in passing, that the force behind high-modernist standardization after 1989 is global capitalism. I still think this assertion is broadly correct, but Ferguson demonstrates that, in the context of weak states in Africa and mineral-rich resources, capitalist firms have no interest in refashioning whole states and societies; instead, they create small, tightly controlled enclaves to facilitate extraction. Why, indeed, should global oil companies take on the costs of society-wide governance when all they require is easy access to “point-specific” resources?
This claim seems absolutely right. The interesting question becomes, then, what economic and social order does global capitalism require? The answer, I think, depends very much on what sector of global capitalism we are discussing. Ferguson has examined the sector most favorable to his case. Oil extraction alone, once set up, requires little in the way of a domestic labor force and, if the wells are offshore, they are well nigh extraterritorial. In some cases, as in the case of the Arab Emirates, little statelets have been drawn around the pools of oil to give the enclave itself the trappings of a nation-state.
What about mining? Depending on the technology, mining may require a larger labor force and a decent road system, thereby implying a need for “order” beyond a tiny enclave. The classic and tragic examples, of course, are the great Spanish colonial silver mines at Potosi, which, over three centuries, took the lives of eight million Indians. Organizing this holocaust required that the Spanish control a vast hinterland just to force-feed the mine its quota of victims. Modern strip mines require far less labor but still more, generally, than oil wells.
And what about plantations for export crops: cacao, oil palm, rubber, tea, and so forth? Here, the conditions for profit necessitate a still wider span of control.
If, further, we consider the global producers of consumer (durable or nondurable) goods, the social and political conditions for profit become still more rigorous. Whether it is Toyota selling cars, General Electric selling washing machines, or McDonald’s pushing hamburgers, each enterprise requires something beyond the hothouse order of an enclave to thrive.
My point is simply that although Ferguson is clearly right about oil enclaves, in particular, global capitalism, in general, may require far more in the way of complicit nation-states and social engineering. I take up this theme again below in the discussion of [Tania] Li’s article.
Much of what Ferguson points to, however, is still valid in a different sense. One has the impression that in increasingly neoliberal China and India, large swaths of the countryside and the urban slums are considered simply irrelevant to the current project of economic growth and progress. We are talking, between the two countries, of perhaps a billion people. They are the functional equivalent of what has been called “l’Afrique inutile.” Such areas and populations may be monitored for potential signs of unrest, but they are not the objects of any positive projects of social engineering.
Scott’s response, in summary
Scott thinks his assertion is broadly correct – that the force behind high-modernist standardization after 1989 is global capitalism.
He adds that in the context of weak states in Africa and mineral-rich resources, capitalist firms will, indeed, stick to the creation of small, tightly controlled enclaves; they are not about to refashion whole states and societies.
But then the question arises: what economic and social order does global capitalism require? In Scott’s view, Ferguson has examined the sector most favourable to the latter’s case. Another example, indeed, might be the Arab Emirates where “little statelets,” in the presence of “pools of oil,” feature the “trappings of a nation-state.”
But, Scott says, consider mining. Depending on the technology, a larger labour force and a decent road system may be required – which in turn implies an economic and social order of a magnitude larger than what a tiny enclave would require.
The “classic and tragic examples” are the Spanish colonial silver mines at Potosi, “which, over three centuries, took the lives of eight million Indians.” The organizing of this holocaust “required that the Spanish control a vast hinterland.” Modern strip mines require less labour, but generally more than oil wells. As well, plantations for various crops require “a still wider span of control.” In addition, global producers of consumer goods, aiming to market their products in Africa, also require a larger economic and social order.
Thus, argues Scott, if we step beyond the small oil enclaves, “global capitalism, in general, may require far more in the way of complicit nation-states and social engineering.” That having been said, however, Scott adds that much of Ferguson’s argument “is still valid in a different sense.”
He cites the example of “large swaths of the countryside and the urban slums” in “increasingly neoliberal China and India” – which are considered irrelevant “to the current project of economic growth and progress.” He sees these as the functional equivalent of “unusable Africa” (in Scott’s term, “l’Afrique inutile”). Such parts of the world may be monitored for signs of potential unrest, but are not, Scott argues, the sites of “positive projects of social engineering.”
I look forward to learning through ongoing reading, whether major changes have occurred since 2005, with regard to “positive projects of social engineering” in the “unusable” parts of the world.
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Investment in Africa’s minerals and metals industry
A Dec. 2, 2025 BBC article, entitled “Devastating toxic spill seen as test of whether African countries will stand up to China,” addresses topics that also tie in with the current post.
An excerpt reads:
Chinese companies like these provide jobs and much needed revenue in Africa. Although the US has recently become the biggest foreign investor across the continent, China is still one of the largest investors in Africa’s rich minerals and metals industry – not least in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province, the scene of the dam collapse.
More than 30,000 jobs have been created by Chinese companies across Zambia, according to the Chinese embassy. Investment from China was estimated to be worth $1.7bn (£1.3bn) last year. And – in a sign of the close links between the two countries – Chinese Premier Li Qiang visited Zambia late last month, ahead of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in South Africa.
But China has also been accused of neocolonialism, with critics arguing that its infrastructure loans trap African countries in unmanageable debt, that it doesn’t upskill local workers, preferring to bring its own in instead, and that its focus on mineral extraction sometimes comes at the expense of safeguarding the environment.
In September, 176 farmers filed an $80bn (£58bn) lawsuit against Sino Metals and NFC Africa, the Chinese firm that owns the land the mine is on. It is one of the biggest environmental lawsuits in Zambia’s history, with the farmers alleging the spillage has already affected 300,000 households.
They say the dam’s collapse was caused by a number of factors, including engineering failures, construction flaws and operational mismanagement.
Capitalism and Its Critics (2025); Capitalism: A History (2025)
One of the books about capitalism that I’ve read recently is reviewed in a May 21, 2025 Guardian article entitled “Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy review – brilliant primer on leftwing economics: From Marx to Piketty, a sprawling but marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s naysayers.”
I look forward to reading Capitalism: A History (2025), after reading a Nov. 26, 2025 New York Times book review entitled “How Capitalism Took Over the World: In a bold new history, Sven Beckert traces the origins of our modern economy, from global port cities to the halls of power.”
An excerpt reads:
By mapping the diverse origins of capitalism, Beckert reveals its protean and resilient character. Over hundreds of years, merchants created small enclaves of capital within port cities and elaborate networks of trust that stretched over long distances. Such connections, Beckert observes, helped them outflank and survive resistance from above, by landed aristocrats who thought “making money from money seemed closer to sin, sorcery or plain theft,” and from below, by “cultivators and craftspeople” who were loath to give up their local conceptions of prices set by “a shared sense of morality.”
In the 17th century, the sugar-producing island of Barbados became one of the first capitalist societies, and silver-producing Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) became one of the first capitalist cities. As many as a quarter of the people who descended into Potosí’s mines died in them, Beckert writes, but “wealthy Potosíans could buy Ceylonese diamonds, Neapolitan stockings, Venetian crystal and Chinese porcelain.”
In these remote corners of the world European investors conducted a kind of civil experiment, extending the logic of the market to all aspects of life. Everything, especially human labor, was commodified and could be bought and sold for money.
Many histories of capitalism are abstract, structural and narrowly economic, but Beckert enriches his story by recreating for the reader the places where his subjects made their fortunes — the medieval merchant hubs of Central Asia, the sugar plantations of the Indian Ocean and the “production floors of 20th-century industrial behemoths” that pumped out cars in Detroit. He travels to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he interviews a textile worker at the factory gate and then weaves her experiences into his epilogue.
Capitalism and Its Critics is written in a a straightforward style reminiscent of the work of James C. Scott; Capitalism: A History is written in a style reminiscent of National Geographic magazine and similar publications. These are two contrasting ways of seeking to connect with readers. The latter style entails use of emotive adjectives which establish a characteristic tone of authorship. The same contrast in styles of writing – and, consequentially, methods of framing – is evident when a person reads about the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Seeing like a viewer of terrain; seeing like a tree
In a symposium on Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025), a post by Jedediah Britton-Purdy refers to Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1975), where Williams notes that when we speak of a landscape, what we’re really invoking is a kind of person who views the terrain in a certain way.
Thus, it occurs to me, we can speak of: Seeing like a viewer of terrain.
Also in the symposium, a post by Alyssa Battistoni refers to an article by Christopher Stone:
This, in turn, can help us see both political projects and policy tools in new light. The rights of nature framework, for instance, was motivated not only by recognition of nature’s sheer intrinsic value, but as a response to none other than Coase’s problem of social cost: Christopher Stone’s landmark 1972 article “Should Trees Have Standing” suggested that locating rights in natural entities could help solve the problem of transaction costs associated with pollution. If a lake could bring a claim against a polluting factory nearby, it could effectively aggregate the interests of all the people living around the lake — as well as those of the fish and birds and plants living in the lake. The rights of nature, then, might be understood less as an extension of human rights than multispecies collective bargaining rights.
In this case: Seeing like a tree; etc.
We can underline, with regard to Scott’s analytic vision, that global capitalism increasingly drives standardized food production worldwide, as the headline for a Dec. 4, 2025 Guardian article outlines:
“‘One bite and he was hooked’: from Kenya to Nepal, how parents are battling ultra-processed foods: Five families around the world share their struggles to keep their children away from UPFs [ultra-processed foods].”
An excerpt reads:
Carlos Monteiro, professor of public health nutrition at the University of São Paulo, and one of the Lancet series’ authors, says that profit-driven corporations, not individual choices, are driving the change in habits.
For parents, it can feel like the entire food system is working against them. “Sometimes it feels like we have zero control over what we are putting on to our kid’s plate,” says one mother from India. We spoke to her and four other parents from around the world on the growing challenges and frustrations of providing a healthy diet in the age of UPFs.
Also of interest in relation to topics discussed at this post:
Madison Condon, Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons from History, 48 Seattle University Law Review 277 (2025).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4016
The abstract reads:
As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of today’s scenarios in corporate governance. Scenarios are a useful tool, but who makes them matters.
An excerpt (I have omitted footnotes) reads:
Recently, the most widely used financial climate scenarios have come under attack for a host of methodological reasons, including their gross underestimation of climate damages. These critiques often focus on the quantification assumptions underlying the scenarios, as well as the influence and predominance of neoclassical economics at the expense of other disciplinary expertise, including climate science. This Essay joins the growing number of voices calling for scenario analysis to go back to its narrative and interdisciplinary roots.
A Dec. 8, 2025 Guardian article is entitled: Canada’s environmental ‘realism’ looks more like surrender: At a time when the UK and other countries are finally taking bold steps for climate, Canada is preparing a new oil pipeline.”
An excerpt (I have omitted embedded links) reads:
But, at the exact moment the UK stepped forward, Canada stepped back.
Ottawa signed a new Memorandum of Understanding with Alberta to support a new oil sands pipeline that would facilitate increased production of fossil fuels. The deal would delay methane regulations, cancel an oil and gas emissions cap and exempt the province from clean electricity rules. All this comes as leaders are lifting environmental-assessment requirements for major projects, preparing to weaken greenwashing laws and suspending Canada’s electric vehicle sales mandate. The MP Steven Guilbeault resigned from Mark Carney’s cabinet rather than defend the retreat.
The contrast could not be sharper: while climate effects intensify and economies pivot, Canada is reinforcing the very industries driving the crisis.
Supporters insist the prime minister is being pragmatic – that expanding oil and gas is simply being “realistic”. Instead, it’s a twisted notion that ignores reality – the catastrophic flooding across south-east Asia and Sri Lanka; the mounting toll of drought and heat, fire and storm.
Government and industry point to carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the technological fix that can allow Canada to keep expanding oil. But CCS has underperformed for decades, despite billions in public funding, as documented by the International Energy Agency.
Recently I came across an April 7, 2025 New Yorker article by Nikil Saval entitled: “James C. Scott and the Art of Resistance: The late political scientist enjoined readers to look for opposition to authoritarian states not in revolutionary vanguards but in acts of quiet disobedience.”
It’s of interest to read such a comprehensive, wide ranging overview. I look forward to reading In Praise of Floods (2026).
An Aug. 5, 2025 Noema article by Marianne Dhenin is entitled: “The Gulf World That Air Conditioning Wrought: From Saudi Arabia to Qatar, rulers have used modern air conditioning to control landscapes and lives, forgoing traditional methods of keeping cool.”
A Dec. 14, 2025 CNN article by Sandee LaMotte is entitled: “Your grocery store is a bewildering sea of overly processed food. Here’s why and what to do.”
An excerpt (links are omitted) reads:
NOVA splits food into four categories. First are minimally processed foods — whole foods which we may slightly “process” by cutting (slicing up an orange or apple) and cooking (sautéing vegetables). The second group includes processed culinary items used to prepare, season and cook whole foods — think spices, herbs and oils. Group three consists of processed foods that combine groups one and two — canned or bottled veggies and fruits, salted nuts, and unpackaged, freshly baked breads are examples.
Group four are ultraprocessed foods — which now make up to 53% of an American adult’s diet and 62% of foods eaten by an American child, according to a recent report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to Monteiro, the products in group four contain little to no whole food. Instead, they are manufactured from “chemically manipulated cheap ingredients” and often use synthetic additives to make them “edible, palatable and habit-forming.”
An additional excerpt (a link has been added) reads:
I’m not aware of any studies that answer that question, although research is underway. But according to some food scientists I’ve spoken to, it doesn’t matter — manufacturers just add back missing vitamins, fiber and protein during manufacturing and voilà! It’s as good as new.
Or is it? Is a patched-up Humpty Dumpty really the same Dumpty that fell off the wall?
Let’s get back to the slurries: Next, with the help of artificial colorings, flavorings, texturizers and glue-like emulsifiers, ingredients are mixed, heated, pounded, shaped or extruded into any food a manufacturer can dream up.
“It’s an illusion of food,” Dr. Chris van Tulleken told me last year. He is a BBC contributor and professor of infection and global health at University College London.
“It’s really expensive and difficult for a food company to make food that is real and whole, and much cheaper for food companies to destroy real foods, turn them into molecules, and then reassemble those to make anything they want,” said van Tulleken, author of the 2023 book “Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?”
The links I have shared are concerned with a question James C. Scott poses, namely: What economic and social order does global capitalism require? The links concerned with air conditioning, ultra-processed food, and commodification of pain offer clues regarding the economic and social order that global capitalism appears to require.
A Dec.14, 2025 Guardian article by Katherine Rowland is entitled: “‘They’re selling everything as trauma’: how our emotional pain became a product: In an economy that rewards confession and self-labeling, pain is no longer something to survive – but something to brand, sell, and curate.”
An except reads:
However, the gesture was much in keeping with the rash of diagnostic claims and self-labeling that have swept the internet and mass-market publishing, creating a space where confessional zeal and memeified pseudoscience – sometimes abetted by therapists who should know better – have become almost routine.
Today, an entire industry has spawned around the idea that everything is trauma. Once understood as the psyche’s confrontation with genuine catastrophe, trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated and curated by the individual.
This drift marks the entrance point to a broader cultural shift: the commodification of pain.
It is evident on #TraumaTok, where across more than 650,000 posts creators variously rant, weep and recast traits as symptoms – “Perfectionist? It’s your trauma!” – to great algorithmic reward.
The same sensibility crowds bookstore shelves. Barnes & Noble lists more than 3,300 titles under the “anxiety, stress and trauma-related disorders” category, from memoirs of resurfaced memories to healing manuals and neuro-pop analysis. (One author calls trauma “an out-of-control epidemic”, transmissible among family and friends.)
The discussion brings to mind Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (2003) by Victoria Sanford. This informative study outlines the role forensic anthropology can play in the study of history. The book describes (p. 239) a therapeutic testimonial model (an alternative to the PTSD model) for dealing with the trauma of the genocide in Guatemala documented by Victoria Sanford and other observers.
The model “challenges the core assumptions of homogenized culture underlying the very concept of universal diagnosis (and its emphasis on individual autonomy) and in particular the relevance of PTSD (which is based on symptoms and treatment of individuals) to cultures in which individual personhood is based more in the identity of community culture than in that of the identity of the individual.”