Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile

Abstract

Chilean food politics are perhaps best associated with images of the March of the Empty Pots and Pans, led by middle- and upper-class women a year into Salvador Allende's presidential term. Yet, as Joshua Frens-String demonstrates in Hungry for Revolution, the close association between food and politics in modern Chile began long before Allende's “road to socialism.” Hungry for Revolution documents the importance of food politics in the creation of the welfare state, the development of mass politics, and the advent of dictatorship in twentieth-century Chile. This highly readable and engaging narrative is suitable both for experts in Latin American and food history and for students looking to learn more about food politics and modern Chile.Hungry for Revolution examines how changes in political regimes affected state attempts to address social inequality and activism around food sovereignty. Using state documents, newspapers, memoirs, and speeches from political activists, Frens-String identifies food's central role in the making of Chile's welfare state, which was one of the strongest in Latin America until the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. In doing so, he places the origins of food politics in Chile well before the neoliberal deregulation of the 1970s and 1980s. He seeks to address the “question of whom national development efforts have historically been set up to benefit, and at whose expense” (p. 11). With a focus on state actors as well as social activists, which provides a well-rounded account of politics from both above and below, he does an admirable job of answering this question for the Chilean case and suggesting connections to other contexts.The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on a different time period. The first, “A Hungry Nation,” covers the twentieth century's first decades. Chapter 1 analyzes how food shaped Chile's place in the world economic system and how awareness of the link between global economic prosperity and economic marginalization at home drove political mobilization around food access. Building on the first, the second chapter explains that working-class politics merged with concerns about food security, leading workers to mobilize specifically as consumers, not just as workers.The second part, “Containing Hunger,” addresses the 1930s through the 1960s. Chapter 3 details the rise of the welfare state as a response to concerns about food sovereignty and working-class activism. Specifically, it explores programs designed to raise Chileans' standard of living and nutritional levels in relation to both national concerns and international trends. These events prompted social reformers to propose agrarian reform to address structural inequities, stimulate agricultural production, and reduce dependence on food imports, which is the subject of chapter 4.The book's pace slows in the final part, “Recipes for Change,” and centers on Allende's presidency (1970–73). Chapter 5, “When Revolution Tasted Like Empanadas and Red Wine,” documents the successes of Popular Unity's first year in office, when household goods and foods were available in large quantities and accessible to Chileans of various social classes. Chapter 6 moves on to grassroots activism and worker control of the food supply. This chapter is the book's most historically significant; it describes the establishment of the juntas de abastecimiento y precios (supply and price control boards), local organizations started by activists that monitored the prices of staple items, distributed foodstuffs to lower-income residents, and helped keep items reasonably priced despite inflation. This chapter's focus on consumer activism and grassroots organizing shows how local communities can affect food supply and distribution in a way that goes beyond supply and demand economics and for-profit consumerism. It highlights a different way of thinking about participatory democracy based on joint consumer-worker control of the food economy. The final chapter traces the way that the anti-Allende Right and the Chicago Boys changed the nature of food politics; they moved the discourse away from social welfare and the idea that nutrition was a fundamental right of citizenship and toward a free-market belief that food should be treated like other consumer goods. This chapter emphasizes conservative women's essential role in this process alongside other economic and political actors.Hungry for Revolution's strength is the connection it makes between the past and the present and its contribution to thinking about food politics beyond twentieth-century Chile. The epilogue concludes with recent Chilean protests against the Pinochet-era constitution, citing a protest sign from 2019 that declared that “neoliberalism was ‘born in Chile’ but would ‘die’ there as well” (p. 201). The connection between Chile's twentieth-century food politics and contemporary challenges to neoliberalism emphasizes history's importance for contextualizing the present. As Frens-String asserts, the question about the state's role in determining fundamental rights and standard of living is as relevant as ever; as people around the world challenge austerity and late-stage capitalism, the Chilean case provides an alternative way of merging economic concerns and social welfare.