Women Redefining the Experience of Food Insecurity

Janet Page-Reeves

doi:10.5771/9780739185278

Summary

Women Redefining the Experience of Food Insecurity: Life Off the Edge of the Table is about understanding the relationship between food insecurity and women’s agency. The contributors explore both the structural constraints that limit what and how much people eat, and the myriad ways that women creatively and strategically re-structure their own fields of action in relation to food, demonstrating that the nature of food insecurity is multi-dimensional. The chapters portray how women develop strategies to make it possible to have food in the cupboard and on the table to be able to feed their families. Exploring these themes, this book offers a lens for thinking about the food system that incorporates women as agentive actors and links women’s everyday food-related activities with ideas about food justice, food sovereignty, and food citizenship. Taken together, the chapters provide a unique perspective on how we can think broadly about the issue of food insecurity in relation to gender, culture, inequality, poverty, and health disparity. By problematizing the mundane world of how women procure and prepare food in a context of scarcity, this book reveals dynamics, relationships and experiences that would otherwise go unremarked. Normally under the radar, these processes are embedded in power relations that demand analysis, and demonstrate strategic individual action that requires recognition. All of the chapters provide a counter to caricatured notions that the choices women make are irresponsible or ignorant, or that the lives of women from low-income, low-wealth communities are predicated on impotence and weakness. Yet, the authors do not romanticize women as uniformly resilient or consistently heroic. Instead, they explore the contradictions inherent in the ways that marginalized, seemingly powerless women ignore, resist, embrace and challenge hegemonic, patriarchal systems through their relationship with food.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2014
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7391-8526-1
ISBN-Online: 978-0-7391-8527-8
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 323
Product type: Edited Book

1. Contents No access
2. Figures No access
3. Tables No access
4. Foreword No access
5. Acknowledgments No access
1. Conceptualizing Food Insecurity and Women’s Agency: A Synthetic Introduction No access
1. 1 Another Time of Hunger No access
2. 2 Women, Welfare and Food Insecurity No access
3. 3 ‘I took the lemons and I made lemonade’: Women’s Quotidian Strategies and the Re-Contouring of Food Insecurity in a Hispanic Community in New Mexico No access
4. 4 Negotiating Food Security along the U.S.-Mexican Border: Social Strategies, Practice, and Networks among Mexican Immigrant Women No access
1. 5 ‘La Lucha Diaria’: Migrant Women in the Fight for Healthy Food No access
2. 6 Women’s Knowledge and Experiences Obtaining Food in Low-Income Detroit Neighborhoods No access
3. 7 Is the Cup Half Empty or Half Full? Economic Transition and Changing Ideas About Food Insecurity in Rural Costa Rica No access
1. 8 Salvadoran Immigrant Women and the Culinary Making of Gendered Identities: “Food Grooming” as a Class and Meaning-Making Process No access
2. 9 The Social Life of Coca-Cola in Southern Veracruz, Mexico: How Women Navigate Public Health Messages and Social Support through Drink No access
3. 10 ‘Women not like they used to be’: Food and Modernity in Rural Newfoundland No access
1. 11 Labor and Leadership: Women in U.S. Community Food Organizing No access
2. 12 ‘I would have never…. ’: A Critical Examination of Women’s Agency for Food Security Through Participatory Action Research No access
Index No access Pages 315 - 316
About the Contributors No access Pages 317 - 323