Coming from a middle-class family—although, objectively speaking, I've always belonged to the top 1% earners—raised in an Arab-Northeastern Brazilian culture that places the table at the center of family and social relationships, and a frequent visitor to open-air markets, the idea of food monotony has always seemed strange to me. My daily experience is precisely the opposite: a variety of grains, meats, fruits, vegetables, preparations, spices, ways of cooking and eating. Food, in my context, has never been monotonous—it has been language, affection, identity. And, over the years, I have seen this variety not only maintained but increased and more accessible. Hence my surprise when I heard about food monotony—even more so when it came to be described as "triple."
What does triple monotony reveal?
The notion of the "triple monotony" of the agri-food system, the subject of the thought-provoking book organized by Ricardo Abramovay and Arilson Favaretto, does not refer only to diets, nor is it limited to the observation that we eat very little.[1] This is a systemic reading of contemporary agri-food technology, identifying three converging processes of homogenization. The first is productive: a decreasing number of plant crops account for a growing share of global agricultural production. The second is zootechnical: a few animal species and lineages concentrate the production of animal protein. The third is nutritional: diets are increasingly based on a reduced set of ingredients, often mediated by ultra-processed foods. The central argument is that these three dimensions reinforce each other, producing a system that is highly efficient in terms of volume, but structurally fragile from an environmental, nutritional, economic, social, and cultural point of view—fragilities that tend to be underestimated when the debate focuses only on productivity, relative prices, and apparent abundance.
The book, which enters our conversation merely as an intellectual provocation—a starting point for my own reflection on the contemporary dilemmas of the agri-food system—and not as an object of review, led me to question to what extent the lens of triple monotony is sufficient to guide difficult choices in the present, especially when it comes to reconciling hunger, food security, environmental sustainability, and productive transformations in an urban, unequal world pressured by multiple constraints.
The real dilemma: choices under simultaneous constraints.
My answer, still provisional, is negative. Not because the idea is wrong or poorly formulated, but because the problem we face resembles a system of simultaneous equations for which we have no simple solutions and, apparently, not even known solutions. How can we expand productive and food diversity, improve nutrition, and contribute to public health without raising prices, increasing risks, compromising producers' income, or reducing the predictability of supply and access to food? Is it possible to address hunger and food insecurity on a global scale without relying on so-called "blockbusters"—a few highly efficient crops and supply chains of soy, corn, wheat, rice, chicken, and pork, which today account for a decisive portion of the world's caloric and protein supply? Perhaps it is precisely the opposite, and part of the short- and medium-term productive/nutritional solution paradoxically involves the functional intensification of this basic monotony—as an energy and protein base—combined, in the best-case scenario, with additional layers of diversity according to income level, time, and infrastructure availability. It's an uncomfortable hypothesis, but not unrealistic.
Taken to its extreme, this reasoning suggests something even more disconcerting. Perhaps food as we conceive it today—diverse, identity-based, territorialized—will occupy, in the future, a space analogous to that which handicrafts occupy in relation to industry. Not as a universal norm, but as a cultural, symbolic, and distinctive value, socially important, but without the function of meeting basic survival needs. This hypothesis is not a defense of monotony, nor a denial of the diversity agenda. Rather, it is a recognition that, in a world pressured by simultaneous restrictions and demands, food diversity is desirable and relevant, but not universalizable in the short and medium term. The discomfort of this idea perhaps says less about its inappropriateness and more about how much we still resist admitting the real harshness of the dilemmas that structure the agri-food transition.
It is worth remembering that the productive concentration and standardization that we now associate with the monotony of the agri-food system emerged as historically successful responses to very concrete challenges: feeding growing urban populations, reducing costs, stabilizing prices, decreasing production risks, and ensuring predictability in increasingly long and complex supply chains. In this sense, monotony was a condition that made possible the very expansion of access to food. This arrangement enabled significant productivity gains, sustained the relative reduction in food prices, and contributed decisively to tackling hunger on a global scale. At the same time, it produced significant side effects—environmental, sanitary, and nutritional—whose severity and importance are precisely highlighted by the thesis of triple monotony.
Diversity for whom? At what cost?
In many instances, the public debate about the monotony of the agri-food system is framed as if we were facing a relatively simple choice: more diversity versus less diversity. This framing is misleading. Within this complex framework of interdependent variables, monotony is not an isolated choice, but rather the historical result of a tangle of persistent constraints and demands—demands for cheap, stable, standardized, and widely available food; constraints associated with urbanization, labor organization, logistics, income inequality, and the need for predictable supply. The real problems and constraints not only persist but have intensified in recent decades, and the risk is that responses based solely on criticism and demonization of the agri-food system will cater to niche social groups but will be poorly equipped to address the concrete constraints and demands that the system needs to meet.
Food monotony cannot be treated as a uniform or socially homogeneous experience. It manifests itself in radically different ways depending on income, territory, available time, and access to markets. For higher-income groups, connected to diverse supply circuits, markets, restaurants, and nutritional information, monotony tends to be reversible—something that can be corrected with individual choices, albeit at a cost. For significant portions of the population, however, monotony is not a choice, but a structural constraint, and, in many cases, a "functional solution." It results from insufficient income, long working hours, precarious urban infrastructure, and a limited food supply in the territories where they live. In this context, diversity is not a frustrated individual decision, but an absent material possibility.
This is where an even more delicate problem emerges. Criticism of monotony tends to carry, often implicitly, a normative notion of desirable diversity that rarely makes explicit its costs, scales, and conflicts. Diversity for whom? In which territories? At what prices—and paid by whom? Expanding productive and food diversity involves risks, requires coordination, financing, public policies, and difficult distributive choices. It is not just a matter of desiring more diversity, but of deciding who bears the costs of the transition, who wins, who loses, and in what time frame. In this sense, diversity, like productivity, is not a self-evident value: it is a political choice, traversed by conflicts that need to be explicitly brought to the debate.
The idea of triple monotony undoubtedly serves as a powerful warning. It illuminates real weaknesses and exposes economic, environmental, and health costs that have long remained hidden and normalized in the functioning of the agri-food system. The truth is that the thesis took me out of my comfort zone and deepened my discomfort. Perhaps because it made me see that the problem is much bigger, harder, and more conflictive than I—with my productivist bias, my training, and my trajectory—was willing to admit. Or because it helped me to see the problem better, but not the solutions.
The risk of romanticizing solutions.
Criticism of monotony, while valid, risks romanticizing solutions by ignoring the fact that the agri-food system is structured by simultaneous constraints and persistent, growing, and varied demands, traversed by complex distributive conflicts. Between denouncing weaknesses and building viable pathways lies a vast field of mediations—technical, political, institutional, and social—that cannot be filled solely by appeals to diversity. Without realism regarding costs, scales, conflicts, benefits, urgencies, and transition times, the debate risks producing good intentions but few effective answers to the dilemmas it seeks to address.
I recommend reading the book as food for thought for this—and other—difficult but necessary conversations.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[1] ABRAMOVAY, Ricardo; FAVARETO, Arilson (eds.). Pathways to the transition of the agri-food system: challenges for BrazilSão Paulo: Senac São Paulo Publishing House, 2025.
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