Talking about COVID-19: contributions to the construction of a collective memory of the syndemic through the lens of food

Abstract

This article explores the question of why the nine pandemics prior to COVID-19 – which have affected millions of people since the second half of the 20th century – were not recorded in collective memory despite their magnitude and extent. Thus, it proposes a reading of the pandemic as one component of a wider syndemic made up of contagious diseases, climate change, and malnutrition. This piece offers a narrative of the origins, development, and prospects of the pandemic within the dynamics of the global food system and national economic and political systems, highlighting components and connections. It includes a warning that – along with climate change and malnutrition (undernourishment-obesity) – pandemics are known and expected outcomes of the workings of a socio-political system that, as in the case of other components of the syndemic, by naturalizing causes and individualizing consequences, conspire against the creation of narratives that go beyond cosmetic changes.