Policing Food: Commodification, Criminalization, and Resistance in US Grocery Stores

• In Event: Carceral Violence, the Land, and the Expansion of Abolition Ecologies

Abstract

Grocery stores are the key infrastructure for accessing food in the U.S. Common sense tells us that grocery stores have nothing to do with hunger or are best understood as solutions, promoting food access. This research takes a critical look at supermarkets and retail grocery stores as an infrastructure of enclosure that produces and maintains hunger in the U.S. by preventing people from accessing the food they need. Looking closely at the intersections between supermarkets and structures of policing and punishment sheds new light on why hunger persists in a food system plagued by over production and waste. People in the United States go hungry because they do not have money to buy food in the grocery store. If they take what they need without paying for it, they risk exposing themselves to broader systems of policing and punishment, up to and including arrest, fines, court appearances, and humiliation. Grocery retailers depend on and are entangled with systems of policing, surveillance, and punishment to maintain a system in which food is treated as a commodity that must be purchased. At the same time, people’s compliance with this arrangement should not be taken for granted. This project asks how acquiescence to a system in which food is treated as a commodity is constructed, reinforced, and resisted every day in the aisles and check-out lanes of the grocery store.

Author

• Maggie Dickinson, CUNY Queens College