Carceral nutrition: Prison food and the biopolitics of dietary knowledge in the neoliberal prison

Abstract

Based on a case study of Washington State prison food policy and practice, this article traces the use of nutritionism as an enabling epistemology of mass incarceration in the neoliberal era in the United States. To develop this argument, the author develops the concept of carceral nutrition, or ideologies of food and eating that reduce complex relations of nourishment to biopolitical calculations of nutrition in the interests of discipline, punishment, control, and confinement. Under the pressures of neoliberal austerity, narrowly defined nutritionism ensures cheap sustenance and biopolitical control while maintaining a veneer of scientific legitimacy and liberal beneficence. This article also considers recent efforts to improve prison food through state-based reform and enhanced nutritional standards. These reforms, however, reinforce reductionary nutritionism and cede epistemic authority over “good” food to the carceral state. Drawing on the political theory of prison abolitionism, the author calls for non-reformist approaches to food justice that foster non-carceral relations of food and eating and support collective liberation and human flourishing.