Understanding the Anthropocene—as both a set of physiological phenomena and as an existential crisis of modernity—requires interrogating Earth-changing transformations in food and agriculture. Agri-food systems are not only at the core of alarming environmental trends; they also offer opportunities to directly engage important challenges to the Anthropocene concept. Many human geographers and other social scientists have raised critiques of the Anthropocene designation as glossing over social inequities, codifying a separation of humans from their environments, and naturalizing current transformations as complete and irreversible. In this article we interrogate the intersection between agri-food studies and critical Anthropocene scholarship, arguing that agri-food systems serve as a through line to competing Anthropocene origin stories, a source of theoretical insight for the complexity of human–environment relations, and a site of agency for engaging alternative futures. First, we examine four of the most commonly proposed starting points for the Anthropocene epoch, arguing that a focus on food and agriculture at each historical moment reveals the limits, frictions, and social unevenness of anthropogenic change. Second, we highlight theoretical tools from critical agrarian studies that help build a more complex understanding of agriculture and the Anthropocene, emphasizing the active role of agroecosystems and the centrality of structural inequalities to agroenvironmental change. Finally, we examine how food- and agriculture-related social movements are working to forge more livable futures by accounting for precisely the matters that characterizations of the Anthropocene as an epoch of global human dominance frequently overlook: socioecological unity and political economic difference.

理解人类世-既是一种生理现象，又是一种现代性的生存危机-需要对粮食和农业的改变地球的变化进行审问。农业食品系统不仅是令人震惊的环境趋势的核心；它们还提供了直接应对人类世系概念重大挑战的机会。许多人类地理学家和其他社会科学家对人类世称谓提出了批评，称其为掩盖社会不平等现象，编纂人类与周围环境的分离，并将当前的转变视为完全且不可逆转。在本文中，我们探讨了农业食品研究与关键的人类世学者之间的交集，认为农业食品系统可以作为人类世间起源故事相互竞争的直通车，为人类与环境之间关系的复杂性提供了理论上的见识，并且是从事替代性期货交易的代理机构。首先，我们考察了人类世纪最普遍提出的四个起点，认为在每个历史时刻关注粮食和农业都揭示了人为变化的局限性，摩擦和社会不平衡。其次，我们重点介绍了农业研究的理论工具，这些工具有助于建立对农业和人类世代的更复杂的理解，强调农业生态系统的积极作用以及结构性不平等对农业环境变化的重要性。最后，