dissertationFood encapsulates the entire circuit of production that connects field to fork. The biological necessity of food is always already enmeshed within complex relations of capital. Access to a safe, nutritious, and socially acceptable food supply co-conditions how food is grown, processed, exchanged and transported, and ultimately consumed. Discursively, food security signifies relations of sustenance via flows of comestible capital, subjectivating populations through regimes of governmentality, vulnerability, and visibility that exploit the biopolitical insertion of bodies into the late capitalist economic machine. As an issue of environmental justice, food security reveals the disparate impacts of foodways, regimes, and practices on marginalized groups, and the limitations of late capitalism in accounting for environmental degradation. This dissertation theorizes food security by tracing its articulation in farm/food policy, living wage activism, and anti-hunger advocacy discourses. My first chapter frames, via Marxian political economy, Foucauldian biopolitics, and articulation theory, the relations of sustenance by which this project is driven. In my second chapter, I take up the Marxian concept of social metabolism to consider the ways the farm bill arranges the circuit of comestible exchange. Analysis of Congressional deliberations reveals how, in an entrenched agriculture/nutrition war of position, food security is articulated as risk, valorizing the fertility of agribusiness and re-employing the wasted poor. Chapter III explores the subjectivation of the working poor; tipped restaurant workers living wage activism functionally antagonizes the hegemony of employment-based notions of food security. In Chapter IV, the Food Stamp Challenge is taken up in terms of a bio/politics of visibility, and considers how food operates as an element in class relations. My fifth and final chapter brings themes across all of the chapters into sharper focus. It directly addresses my research questions about food security and (bio)political economy, explicates the rhetorical dimensions of food security across policy, activism, and advocacy contexts, and concludes with implications for critical praxis
