Edible Empire

This is episode 6 of a six-part series on food imperialism. Welcome to Edible Empire, a podcast by Planet Pulse Pacific about the hidden cost of our food.
Food isn’t just taste—it’s power. This podcast explores how empires and corporations built control through agriculture, reshaping cultures and feeding some at the expense of others.
This episode explores visions for a fairer food system that support producers, ensure diverse food choices, and challenge the intensive nature of current supply chains.
Having heard about the deep history of extraction and exploitation inherent in globalised food supply chains, what does a fair food system look like? How could we ensure sufficient, diverse food choices for all whilst supporting those who produce it? This episode dives into proposed futures that challenge the intensive nature of traditional agrifood systems and the supply chains that deliver it, eventually, to our homes.
Our final episode shifts focus toward practical frameworks, hopeful visions, and grassroots models for establishing a more equitable, localised, and sustainable global food system. Here, the discussion moves from macro-level economic theory to community-led action.
Degrowth scholar Professor Anitra Nelson details how dismantling profit-driven corporate commodity markets can create needs-based local economies that respect ecological boundaries.
Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, explains how reclaiming community control over seeds, land, and traditional knowledge allows populations to resist corporate dependency and build resilient agricultural systems.
Turning to localised solutions within the United Kingdom, Shrewsbury Food Hub co-founder Ali Thomas demonstrates the power of volunteer-led redistribution networks that intercept supermarket surplus to foster social solidarity and tackle the systemic absurdity of food waste.
Finally, author and smallholder Chris Smaje makes a compelling case for a decentralised network of diverse smallholdings, arguing that a return to small-scale agroecological farming is a modern necessity capable of restoring degraded landscapes, revitalising rural economies, and breaking the entrenched grip of transnational agribusiness.
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Resources from this episode:
https://anitranelson.info/food-for-degrowth/ 
https://www.routledge.com/Food-for-Degrowth-Perspectives-and-Practices/Nelson-Edwards/p/book/9780367436469
https://ipes-food.org/people/million-belay/
https://afsafrica.org/meet-the-team/
https://www.agroecologyconference.eoai-africa.org/Dr_million.html
https://afsafrica.org/14083/
https://www.shrewsburyfoodhub.org.uk/
https://chrissmaje.com 
To view all the links to the websites and documents, visit the show notes on our website.

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This is episode 5 of a six-part series on food imperialism. Welcome to Edible Empire, a podcast by Planet Pulse Pacific about the hidden cost of our food.
Beyond recipes lies a story of power. From colonial plantations to modern agribusiness, this podcast reveals how the pursuit of food has redrawn maps, exploited people, and still shapes who holds control today.
This episode explores how New Zealand’s dairy industry links local landscapes to global extraction, ecological harm, and the wider machinery of food imperialism.
New Zealand’s image of clean, green pastures hides one of the world’s most intensive dairy industries. Behind each glass of milk there is a hidden web of global extraction: phosphate mined from occupied Western Sahara, palm kernel imported from deforested Southeast Asia, and polluted rivers flowing through Māori ancestral lands. This episode traces how New Zealand’s dairy boom reshapes both local ecosystems and distant economies, from illegally occupied territories in West Africa to political power in New Zealand. Through the story of “white gold”, we uncover how even the purest landscapes are bound into the machinery of food imperialism.
Here, we discuss the environmentally destructive and geopolitically fraught supply chains connecting intensive dairy production in Aotearoa New Zealand with phosphate mining in the illegally occupied territory of Western Sahara. Our three expert guests detail how New Zealand’s export-driven commodity model creates intense global market pressures for corporate profit and high-yield volume. 
Freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy exposes the catastrophic local consequences of this system, explaining how excessive synthetic nitrogen and fertiliser inputs poison rivers, disrupt aquatic ecosystems, and contaminate drinking water. 
Geographer Dr Milena Bojovic unpacks the structural traps forcing farmers into continual intensification, which in turn fuels a dependency on rare, internationally contested mineral resources.
Finally, researcher and artist Dr Crystall Bennes traces the physical journey of this phosphate rock, revealing how Western agricultural high yields rely heavily on wealth extracted under colonial conditions from the Boo Cra mine, highlighting the profound human and environmental costs borne by displaced Sahrawi populations.
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Resources from this episode:
https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/pq/article/view/9629/8507
https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/mike.joy 
https://www.gofundme.com/f/almasar-library-education-centre-for-children-and-women 
https://wsrw.org/en 
https://www.crystalbennes.com/ 
To view all the links to the websites and documents, visit the show notes on our website.

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This is episode 4 of a six-part series on food imperialism. Welcome to Edible Empire, a podcast by Planet Pulse Pacific about the hidden cost of our food.
We celebrate flavours, but rarely the people behind them. This podcast uncovers how food—once shaped by empire and now by corporate power—has long been used to control land, labour, and cultures.
This episode explores the hidden links between salmon farming in northern Europe and tomato production in southern Spain, revealing the human and environmental costs behind cheap, year-round food.
What connects salmon farming in northern Europe with tomato farming in southern Spain? These two, seemingly distinct food supply chains ensure that our supermarket shelves are stocked with cheap, year-round food. What we don’t see, however, are the hidden links - the overfishing along the coast of West Africa that destroys local communities’ livelihoods and drives migration to Europe; the dangerous journeys by small boat where 1 in 5 people die; the entrapment of migrants arriving in exploitative agricultural labour in Spain’s intensive greenhouses. This episode examines the story of salmon farming and tomato greenhouses - and highlights the hidden costs of commodified food.
This episode uncovers the destructive and interconnected global supply chains linking northern European salmon aquaculture to southern Spanish greenhouse agriculture. Through interviews with four expert guests, the episode traces how the booming Norwegian salmon farming industry relies heavily on wild-caught ocean feed extracted from West Africa.
Investigative journalists Simen Sætre, Hazel Healy, and Brigitte Wear expose the ecological crises, corporate opacity, and false sustainability narratives surrounding aquaculture, whilst Dr Aliou Ba of Greenpeace Africa details how this industrial plundering has collapsed local artisanal fisheries and triggered a profound food security crisis in Senegal. This environmental degradation ultimately forces thousands of displaced West Africans to undertake a perilous sea voyage to Spain, where researcher María Alonso Martínez reveals they are heavily exploited as undocumented migrant labourers, working under inhumane conditions within Almería’s vast "Sea of Plastic" to harvest the cheap winter vegetables that stock European supermarket shelves.
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Resources from this episode:
https://norla.no/en/books/1286-the-new-fish-the-global-history-of-salmon-farming
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735421/the-new-fish-by-simen-saetre-and-kjetil-ostli/
To view all the links to the websites and documents, visit the show notes on our website.

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Follow us on Instagram and Facebook, subscribe to this podcast, and share this episode with your friends and family.

This is episode 3 of a six-part series on food imperialism. Welcome to Edible Empire, a podcast by Planet Pulse Pacific about the hidden cost of our food.
Food isn’t just about taste—it’s power. This podcast explores how empires and corporations built control through agriculture, reshaping cultures and feeding some at the expense of others.
This episode traces the global impact of the palm oil industry from its indigenous roots to modern supply chains through three expert interviews.
Dr Jonathan Robins opens by detailing the pre-colonial history of oil palm in West Africa and explaining how European empires weaponised the crop to fuel the Industrial Revolution, establishing structural patterns that mirror today’s agribusiness models.
Dr Helena Varkkey then unpacks the political economy of Malaysian production, exposing how entrenched relationships between political elites and conglomerates shield the industry from regulation.
Farwiza Farhan brings a frontline conservation perspective from Indonesia, documenting how government-incentivised monoculture plantations drive deforestation, threaten endangered species, and violate Indigenous land rights. 
Together, the experts critique the effectiveness of voluntary sustainability certification schemes like the RSPO, debate whether palm oil can ever be truly sustainable at scale, and highlight the efforts of local communities fighting back against corporate food imperialism.
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Resources from this episode:
https://www.mtu.edu/social-sciences/department/faculty/robins/
https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/about/jonathan-robins/
https://theconversation.com/profiles/jonathan-e-robins-1227071
https://seapeat.wixsite.com/home
https://cgsea.org/
https://umexpert.um.edu.my/helenav 
To view all the links to the websites and documents, visit the show notes on our website.

Please support our work and enable us to deliver more content by buying us a coffee or becoming a member of Athletes for Nature.
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook, subscribe to this podcast, and share this episode with your friends and family.

This is episode 2 of a six-part series on food imperialism. Welcome to Edible Empire, a podcast by Planet Pulse Pacific about the hidden cost of our food.
Beyond recipes lies a story of power. From colonial plantations to modern agribusiness, this podcast reveals how the pursuit of food has redrawn maps, exploited people, and continues to shape who holds control today.
This episode explores how an increasingly monopolised system of multinational corporations operates as de facto states within the global food system, exercising power over land, labour, trade, and policy in ways that rival or exceed nation-states.
If empires once flew flags, today they file annual reports. This episode examines how large agrifood corporations increasingly function as sovereign actors within global food systems. From controlling vast transnational supply chains and shaping trade rules, to influencing national policy and disciplining labour across borders, corporations now wield powers historically associated with states. Focusing on agribusiness, food traders, and retailers, the episode asks how corporate concentration has reconfigured food imperialism, turning companies into the new “nations” of food empires, and what this means for accountability, democracy, and food sovereignty.
In this episode of Edible Empire, Professors Phil Howard and Jennifer Clapp unpack how intense corporate concentration has transformed global agriculture into a system dominated by a few powerful transnational firms that operate much like sovereign states. Using the analogy of an hourglass, Professor Phil Howard illustrates how millions of farmers and billions of consumers are squeezed through a dangerously narrow bottleneck controlled by these massive agribusinesses, which deploy specific power plays to manipulate trade rules, capture government subsidies, and avoid accountability for environmental and labour exploitation. Meanwhile, Professor Jennifer Clapp highlights how mega-mergers in the agricultural inputs sector allow a small cartel to exercise immense structural power, locking in an industrial model that dictates what society views as "normal" food practices, while trapping countries in the Global South in dependency loops that prioritise luxury exports over local food security. Despite the immense political and economic inertia behind this consolidation, both experts close with a message of hope, emphasising that because this extractive system was constructed by humans, it can be dismantled through active political engagement and collective action.
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Resources from this episode:
https://philhoward.net/ 
https://ipes-food.org/people/phil-howard/ 
https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/jclapp/home
https://ipes-food.org/people/jennifer-clapp/
https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-resources-and-sustainability/profiles/jennifer-clapp
To view all the links to the websites and documents, visit the show notes on our website.

Please support our work and enable us to deliver more content by buying us a coffee or becoming a member of Athletes for Nature.
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook, subscribe to this podcast, and share this episode with your friends and family.