Bodily capacity and food (in)security

• In Event: The Body in Biomedical Knowledge

Abstract

Scholars addressing the recent turn to food security have viewed this global initiative alongside programs and policies developed after World War II against global hunger (Cullather 2010; Patel 2012). Understood in conjunction with developments in the nutrition sciences, these scholars have noted the implications of food as a kind of ammunition influencing conditions where U.S. foreign policy decisions were at stake. Meanwhile, pointing to contemporary discourses on biological security, Melinda Cooper (2008) has articulated a new security agenda that is directed towards underclasses in the United States while at the same time targeting developing countries. But in the midst of this history of the nutrition sciences and the bioeconomy that Cooper describes, developments in the information sciences are altering the way we think about life processes, unsettling the presumption that a self-contained, individual human body is the target of technologies aimed at securitization. In line with discussions in STS on how scientific and technological developments transform the way we understand and articulate life, in this paper I note implications of the different way of thinking about the body in relationship to the environment in the field of epigenetics for discourses on food security. Evidence of a reorganization of governance and economy, I suggest food security be viewed as a “technical solution” whose target is not the individual, human body but rather as an affective mechanism whose goal is to insure the conditions required for its continuance.

Author

• Elizabeth Bullock, Graduate Center, CUNY