Metabolic Colonialism: How the Food System Consumes Us

Food Sovereignty and the Hidden Legacy of Colonialism in the American Food System

When we talk about the American food system, the conversation often stays surface-level: calories, nutrients, labels, trends. But beneath ingredient lists and grocery aisles is something far older and more entrenched—a system built on the same extractive logic that once powered colonial empires.

Food sovereignty offers a lens to see this clearly. It asks not only what we eat, but who controls food, how it is produced, and whose bodies absorb the consequences.

This isn’t abstract theory. It shows up daily in our soil, our health, and our sense of agency around nourishment.

What food sovereignty really means

Food sovereignty is the right of people and communities to define their own food systems.

That includes:

• Control over land and water

• Control over seeds and agricultural knowledge

• Culturally meaningful food

• Ecologically regenerative practices

• Fair and dignified labor

At its core, food sovereignty is about self-determination.

Colonialism, historically, was about stripping that self-determination away.

The shared logic: extraction over relationship

Colonial systems were organized around a few core principles:

• Land treated as a resource, not a living relationship

• People reduced to labor inputs

• Nature stripped for profit

• Wealth extracted upward, harm pushed downward

The modern industrial food system follows the same blueprint—just without flags or ships.

Today, land is optimized for yield, not vitality. People are framed as consumers, not participants. Health costs are externalized. Profit concentrates at the top.

The structure stayed. The language changed.

Land, monoculture, and erasure

Before colonization, Indigenous land stewardship emphasized biodiversity, reciprocity, and long-term resilience.

Colonial agriculture replaced this with:

• Monocultures

• Enclosure and private ownership

• Export-driven production

Modern industrial farming continues this legacy. Corn, soy, and wheat dominate not because they nourish communities, but because they fit industrial and financial systems.

Soil becomes a medium to hold chemicals. Biodiversity becomes “inefficient.”

This is not cultivation. It is extraction.

Seed control is power control

In colonial economies, controlling crops meant controlling survival.

Today, a handful of corporations dominate the global seed supply. Patented seeds cannot be saved or replanted. Traditional, Indigenous, and heirloom varieties are marginalized or lost.

When seeds are owned, futures are owned.

Food sovereignty insists that seeds are a commons—not a commodity.

Cheap food and invisible labor

Colonial wealth depended on coerced and racialized labor hidden from those who benefited.

Modern food abundance depends on the same invisibility:

• Migrant labor under dangerous conditions

• Pesticide exposure and wage theft

• Little access to healthcare or legal protection

Cheap food is not cheap. Its true costs are displaced onto bodies that are kept out of sight.

Metabolic colonialism: the body as the final frontier

Perhaps the most insidious parallel is what ultra-processed food does at the biological level.

Colonial systems extracted gold, sugar, spices, and bodies. Modern food systems extract attention, dopamine, and metabolic health.

Ultra-processed foods are engineered to:

• Override satiety

• Encourage overconsumption

• Normalize chronic illness

This isn’t nourishment. It’s management.

Communities most affected by historical dispossession are again hit hardest—this time through diet-related disease rather than famine. The violence is slower, quieter, and easier to deny.

Food sovereignty as resistance, not perfection

Food sovereignty is not about purity, elitism, or moral superiority. It’s about reclaiming agency within a system designed to remove it.

It’s resistance through relationship:

• Relationship to land

• Relationship to culture

• Relationship to one another

And importantly, it’s not all-or-nothing.

Small, actionable steps to live differently within the system

You don’t need land, wealth, or total freedom from processed food to begin shifting your relationship to nourishment.

1. Shorten your food chain where you can

Buy even one item regularly from:

• A local farmer

• A farmers market

• A CSA or food co-op

Shorter supply chains mean less extraction.

2. Learn one ancestral or cultural food practice

This could be:

• Cooking one traditional dish regularly

• Fermenting something simple

• Learning the seasonal foods of your region

Knowledge is sovereignty.

3. Support seed and land stewards

You can:

• Buy from companies that protect seed diversity

• Donate to Indigenous land or food sovereignty projects

• Grow even one heirloom plant

Seeds are futures.

4. Reduce ultra-processed food gently, not rigidly

Focus less on elimination and more on addition:

• Add whole foods

• Add fiber

• Add real meals

Perfection is not required. Direction matters more.

5. Talk about this openly

Name the system without shame or blame. Conversations create cultural pressure—and culture shapes policy.

A final grounding truth

You are not failing because this system is hard to navigate. It was designed that way.

Awareness is not guilt. It is orientation.

Food sovereignty begins not with purity, but with remembering that nourishment was never meant to be extractive—from land, from people, or from our bodies.

Every small act of reconnection is a quiet refusal to be consumed by a system that profits from our disconnection.

And quiet refusals add up.