Dec 17, 2025

Imagine All the People: Food, Freedom and What It Means to Be Human

Colin Todhunter

Fifty-four years ago, John Lennon asked us to imagine a world with no borders. But he did not foresee a world where the only thing left to colonise would be our own humanity.

Today, the ‘dream’ has become a civilisation crisis, a cage of standardisation, designed to strip us of our culture and our biological autonomy (the corporate and geopolitical forces behind this are set out in Corporate Power, Imperial Capitalism and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty).

Most critiques of the global agrifood system, even those that describe themselves as radical, remain confined within the system’s own language. They argue over efficiency versus sustainability and yields versus biodiversity.

These debates often assume that the underlying framework of industrial development is given and that the task is to optimise outcomes within it.

But what if you refuse this paradigm? What if you expose what is usually kept beyond the bounds of policy debate? What if you argue that the crisis of food and agriculture is not primarily technical, environmental or economic but strikes at the heart of what it means to be human?

And what if we ask: what kind of humans are prevailing societal structures producing?

Food systems are not neutral mechanisms for delivering calories. Industrial, corporate-controlled food systems cultivate compliant consumers trained to accept abundance and convenience without knowledge or responsibility.

They produce farmers locked into cycles of debt, dependency and technological obedience, compelled to follow protocols designed elsewhere and measured by metrics they did not choose.

Even resistance is repackaged as ethical consumption, some barcode-scanning app that tells you how ‘healthy’ a product is or niche markets that leave the underlying logic intact.

Modern agrifood systems exemplify a world governed by Max Weber’s notion of instrumental reason. Decisions appear inevitable, justified by science, markets or returns on investment logic. This ‘iron cage’ is internalised and normalised and results in the type of food we eat daily.

But if Weber described the structural walls of this cage, it was Fyodor Dostoevsky who foresaw the psychological toll of living within it. Dostoevsky wrote of the ‘Crystal Palace’—a future of total rationalisation where every human need is calculated and every risk managed. He warned that in such a world, where life is reduced to a mathematical table of efficiency, the individual would eventually rebel. They would do so to assert independence and prove they are still human and not just data points in a master plan.

This is one reason why farmers reject corporate seeds, communities defend land and local foodways and movements insist on food sovereignty. Rather than clinging to the past or acting irrationally, they are asserting freedom and agency in a world that increasingly denies their legitimacy.

The likes of the Gates Foundation and the agrifood conglomerates have spoken of a one-world agriculture; here, a handful of transnational corporations and technocratic institutions will centralise control over seeds, inputs, markets and knowledge. This model prioritises uniformity and profit and imposes a monocultural logic worldwide: a move towards total control of nature and human labour under a global industrial paradigm.

Alongside this, we also see a trend towards the one-world human, a push to standardise humanity itself in terms of culture, tastes, habits, conformity and compliance. In other words, shaping humans to fit the needs of globalised systems.

But it goes much further than this. The tech giants (who are also heavily invested in the food system) have a vision of humans ‘enhanced’ or ‘optimised’ by biotechnology, AI or genetic manipulation. This too is designed to produce controllable and ‘efficient’ beings. It mirrors Weber’s rationalisation but applied to biology and cognition: humans become instruments that strip them of their capacity to act freely.

This is a civilisation crisis as cultures surrender their relationship to land, food and community to systems of control. In this light, food sovereignty is more than a political demand: it is a defence of human freedom. It is about the right to connection and choice.

We face a crisis that no amount of technology can remedy. It is not a question of better metrics or smarter technologies.

The answer lies in a recovery of imagination. This involves the capacity to envision forms of life that dominant power structures declare impossible. This is the ‘art of the impossible’. And, as discussed in the recent open-access book The Agrarian Imagination: Development and the Art of the Impossible, it is not some utopian fantasy.

Everyone eats, and therefore everyone participates in the order that food systems impose. To question food is to question how we relate to each other and to the land. It also involves how we relate to ourselves.

Do we want to increasingly live within a system imposed from above? Given the choice, most of us would say no. It comes down to whether people have the capacity or even the will in an age of state-corporate propaganda and censorship to recognise the world for the power play it is. Do they want to reclaim the freedom to imagine and enact different ways of being human?

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. His open access books on the global food system can be accessed via Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).