Food security and knowledge politics in rural Oaxaca

Abstract

This study uses an embodied political ecology framework to evaluate the structural, discursive, and visceral effects of government food assistance policy in an agrarian community in southern Mexico. During the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the government’s efforts to resolve the growing double-burden of under- and over-nutrition included the expansion of food assistance programs alongside cash transfers conditioned on health and nutritional education. A parastatal company sourced and distributed foodstuffs to community and school kitchens, where mothers prepared them into meals. This research explores how women participating in government food assistance in the agricultural community of Santa Inés del Monte, Oaxaca, evaluated the foods they received and conceptualized broader changes in their food system and community health. Qualitative research methods, including interviews, focus groups and a community survey of 87 households, were conducted in the community in 2015, 2017 and 2018. Through attention to visceral experience, this study demonstrates how sensations of taste, embodied knowledge, nutrition discourses, gendered development programs, and structural marginalization combined to produce an outcome in which mothers accepted and prepared foods in the community kitchens that did not meet their standards of food quality. However, this study also finds that participating mothers and other residents continue to conceive of direct food production—especially organic production of local heirloom crop and animal varieties—as the best way to access good nutrition. These findings suggest the need for attention to knowledge politics in the design and evaluation of culturally appropriate food security policy.