Abstract

In market economies food is a commodity that is distributed through market exchange. Indeed, Karl Polanyi takes the degree to which food, together with land and labour, are marketable commodities to be a measure of the degree to which an economy is fully developed as a market economy:

The rise of the market to a ruling force in the economy can be traced by noting the extent to which land and food were mobili zed through exchange, and labor was turned into a commodity free to be purchased on the market.

(Polanyi, 1957: 255)