Moral Boundaries of Food and Debt in Chile

• In Event: La desigualdad alimentaria en América Latina

Abstract

In recent years, food provisioning and consumer credit shifted in the global south, affecting to a greater degree poorer populations. These changes linked economic and political structures that have contributed to growing socioeconomic disparities within Latin America. I utilize the case of Chile to explore how these trends unfold as Chileans experienced an expansion of consumer credit, directed by supermarkets. This led poor and working class individuals to use credit debt as a tool for feeding their families. Yet, few scholars have focused on explore the intersections of these trends. Using interviews and secondary data in Santiago, Chile, I explore: How people navigate food debt? What moral consequences have these increasing financialization of food provisioning? Findings suggest that women in this study revealed that besides being in charge of food work inside the household, they are also responsible for the food debts that families acquired. I found differences in class and social status in how participants described why they acquired or avoided debts to buy food, but similarities in how they expressed moral evaluations around the use of credit to buy food. Food debt acted as a symbolic device of social conflict, creating moral boundaries of blame to evaluate people as “at fault” or “not-at-fault.” Some people expressed ambivalence about these boundaries; I classified them as “ambivalent.” This case stands to provide conceptual tools to understand the effects of globalizing trends in Latin America and how people make sense of them on the ground and on their plates.

Author

• Daniela García Grandón, North Carolina State University