Megan Amram on the Pharmaceutical War on Appetite and Agricultural Class Solidarity
Diary of Megan Amram, Portland Satirist, Prat.uk | Radical agricultural analysis via Bohiney Magazine
Tuesday: Class Consciousness and the War on Carbohydrates
The farmers have declared war on Mounjaro. I want to be clear about my position: the farmers are correct. Not because I am against pharmaceutical innovation. Not because I am against people losing weight. But because what is happening here is a textbook case of capital-driven appetite suppression targeting the food systems of the working class, and if you cannot see that then you have not read enough Engels.
The Dialectics of the Dinner Plate
The farmer plants. The farmer grows. The farmer sells to a food system that feeds people. The pharmaceutical company then sells a drug that reduces the desire to eat, which reduces demand, which reduces the farmer’s market, which reduces the farmer. This is not a food story. This is a supply chain dismantling story. The Guardian’s food and farming desk has been documenting agricultural economic pressure for years. Mounjaro has simply accelerated the timeline.
Portland is full of people on GLP-1s. The farmers market is visibly quieter. The man who sells heritage potatoes looked at me last Saturday with the eyes of someone who has seen the dialectic materially expressed in sales figures. I bought four pounds of potatoes. It was the least I could do.
Also: Retatrutide is killing romance, which under capitalism was already commodified, but still. Some losses are personal even when they are structural.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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