How power is created and exercised—often invisibly

Abstract

First paragraph: The steady drumbeat of headlines this year reveal­ing the harms caused by concentrated ownership in the food system (Anderson & Weaver, 2022; Gutman, 2022; Hope-D’Anieri, 2022; Krupnick, 2022; Qiu, 2022; Snodgrass, 2022) shows renewed interest in a topic that was a central concern of American politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The revised edition of Philip Howard’s Concentration and Power in the Food System comes just in time to help us understand not only the degree and nature of concentration in our food system, but also how various kinds of concentra­tion enable the exercise of power in ways that were unantici­pated by earlier anti-trust legislation and which need to be addressed in new ways.