May 27, 2015

In ‘Unending Hunger,’ poverty knows no borders

As a graduate student and food justice activist in Santa Barbara, California, Megan Carney became aware that many migrant women in the area struggled to feed their families. Her recently published book “The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders,” examines the personal and political aspects of hunger and tells the stories of the women she met through her research.

Carney, now a lecturer in the University of Washington’s anthropology department and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, answered a few questions about her book.

A central theme of the book is that food insecurity continues to plague women migrants once they arrive in the United States. Why is that? Is it simply a function of poverty, or is there more to it?

MC: Food insecurity is pervasive in migrant women’s lives because they continue to live in poverty once in the United States. Migrant women are also the targets of intense scrutiny and discrimination. This compounds with the ways that these women are socially and politically excluded and interferes with everyday attempts to acquire the most basic of resources, including food.

Your book focuses specifically on women migrants. Do challenges around food insecurity affect women migrants differently than their male counterparts?

MC: Food insecurity does affect migrant women differently because they are often charged with the bulk share of responsibility for overseeing food resources within households and families. This responsibility can be extremely burdensome and stressful for people living in poverty. Research across populations shows that this gendered division of labor around food leads to disproportionate suffering among women in the form of chronic anxiety and even depression around not fulfilling social roles.

Women also compromise their health in other ways in trying to meet household and familial nutritional needs. They will often deprive themselves of meals or particular foods in order to provide these for others. There are also instances of compulsive eating linked to everyday stress that can have an effect on one’s propensity for developing certain diseases, such as type 2 diabetes.

You point out in the book that food security, at least as it pertains to women, has been largely overlooked in migration literature. Why do you think that is? 

MC: There are several explanations to account for here. One of the arguments waged in the book is that food insecurity is a form of violence, but that the migration literature has previously underscored more extreme, explicit forms of violence in describing people’s movements across borders. Another possible explanation is that we as researchers have not taken seriously enough people’s claims that they didn’t have enough or anything to eat, a statement that the women I met while writing the book frequently mention in talking about their experiences of migration. 

You note in the book that food insecurity is sometimes “a label to infer the competencies of individual human beings.” Can you elaborate on that?

MC: I make this statement in the context of discussing the historical emergence and technical definitions of “food security” and “food insecurity.” Food security approaches can be characterized by top-down interventions that target the individual and her or his dietary requirements. The globalized society in which we live, with its emphasis on markets and individual consumers especially, touts food security as an individual responsibility, so any failure to live up to this responsibility would suggest that individuals are incompetent.

It is basically another way of talking about “bootstraps” approaches to individual wellbeing without recognizing the ways that food insecurity is actually a collective problem, a reflection of how as a society we have failed to provide for all.

The book argues that food insecurity should be viewed as a biopolitical issue. What do you mean by that? 

MC: Biopolitics is about the ways that life itself is made into an object of political maneuvering, specifically in allowing or denying life. In stratified societies organized by class, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, etc. biopolitics comprises a form of governmentality, a way of managing people and resources. Food insecurity is a reflection of how resources are distributed unevenly and how individual lives are differentially governed. 

How does the global food system factor into migration and food insecurity?

MC: Neoliberal economic policies and the globalization of capitalism have shaped the global food system in distinct ways. There’s trade liberalization in the form of trade agreements like NAFTA, deregulation and privileging of private interests in expanding transnational markets, privatization and rollback of welfare programs. All of these processes deprive communities carrying out subsistence agriculture and agrarian livelihoods of sustaining these livelihoods, while at the same time creating their food insecurity. This is what I call in the book “the biopolitics of food insecurity.”

What role do U.S. government policy and food assistance programs play in the food insecurity challenges migrants face? 

MC: The short answer here is that U.S. government policy, and policies around food assistance, play a huge role. The U.S. engages many governments around the world in the processes of trade liberalization and commodification of the food system via expansion of transnational agribusiness, such as Monsanto, and retail, such as Walmart. The reasons people must migrate can be traced back to these policies, as the challenges they face with food insecurity in the U.S. are also complicated by government policies, especially those policies that exclude individuals who lack formal status, such as undocumented immigrants.