Yield: (agri)cultural production and commodity fetishism in the twenty-first century

This dissertation contends that the food system, as it stands, obscures the way we grow, distribute, and sell food. Because of these conditions, this dissertation examines how writers and artists represent technological changes in agriculture in ways that either further obscure how food is produced, or provide alternative means of imagining and understanding global food systems even as they grow increasingly intensive and harmful to global and local ecologies.

Amidst ongoing debates over the safety and sustainability of our global food system due to both longstanding and more recent industrial production practices, this dissertation argues that we must reevaluate the ways we produce food. The game developers, artists, and writers with whom this dissertation engages address the challenges facing our food system to varying degrees of awareness and concern, in some cases demonstrating an oversimplification of food production, and in others embracing the complex interrelations between humanity and nature constituting a body of work representative of the varied media environments we, the public, inhabit. This dissertation argues that the cultural production with which the public engages can affect what agricultural processes, economies, and relationships are thought possible.