Political economists have been blinded by the apparent marginalization of land and food. An interview with Harriet Friedmann

Harriet Friedman is a food system analyst, writer and lecturer. This was an undefined topic in the English literature in the 1970s, when she first studied the world wheat market for her doctorate; her goal was to understand world economy inductively and holistically. Unaware of early “commodity studies,” such as the work of Harold Innis she intuited that the emergence of a price-governed world wheat market in the late 19th century would be an intrinsically important case study, from settler farms to settler state formation, railways, finance, migration, logistics and inter-state relations. Her PhD (Harvard, 1977) turned out to cross two unrelated fields of Rural Sociology and World-Systems, and led to influential articles on farming systems and a long, fruitful collaboration with Philip McMichael on food regimes. In the early 1980s, Friedmann encountered French literature on l’agro-alimentaire, régulation, and le petit producteur marchand. Since the 1990s, she also worked with the pioneering Toronto Food Policy Council and its eventual embrace of city-regional food systems. She followed the food-farming thread from Sociology into the Centre for International Studies and the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is Professor Emeritus of Sociology based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Visiting Professor of Political Economy at Carleton University (Ottawa), and formerly Visiting Professor of Agrarian, Food, and Environmental Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague (Erasmus University).