Food Protest Research Articles

The discourse of anti-Fascism and food protest in underground women’s publications

The discourse of anti-Fascism and food protest in underground women’s publications

Review of “Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States”

Review of “Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States”

House of Hunger

Abstract In South Africa, the politicisation of COVID-19 widened structural fissures, unearthed underlying inequalities, and exposed the ‘rainbow nation’ fallacy. The pandemic highlighted the struggles faced by marginalised households whose income streams were wiped out during lockdown. Public unrest emerged in townships and manifested as food protests, which undermined the perception of South Africa as a food secure country. Whilst the state and mainstream media dismissed these protests as criminal incidences, a contextualised analysis exposes the desperation of certain groups’ experiences of hunger and disillusionment in Black South African townships. Framing ‘food as political’, this paper interrogates the weaponisation of food by the government, which violently used state security forces to subdue marginalised populations. The paper draws on Dambudzo Marechera’s 1978 novella House of Hunger to condemn the gendered and militarised state response to ‘starving black bodies.’ It exposes the ruthlessness of how the state worked with mainstream media to protect corporate capital and foreign investments in the name of ‘security’ and ‘wellbeing,’ and explores the ultimate ‘logic’ of food protests in South African urban areas. In conclusion, the paper argues that the mainstream media hyper-visualised Black bodies as unruly, criminal, and therefore disposable, in order to dismiss their human right to food.

Book reviews: Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States

Book reviews: Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States

“Working women demand peace and food”: Gender and class in the East London Federation of Suffragettes' food politics

AbstractIn this article, we foreground how gender, class and feminism underpin the aims and modes of mobilization of the food politics of a British first wave suffragette organization, the East London Federation of Suffragettes. Our discussion shows how upper and middle‐class suffragettes excluded working‐class women and marginalized their political gendered classed interests, raising questions about feminist cross‐class solidarities today. We focus on three of East London Federation of the Suffragettes quite different modes of mobilization: embodied protests, radical welfare community organizing and food protest writing, all of which foreground class politics. In discussing three quite distinct modes of mobilization, we highlight the rich package of strategies they created and the different classed identities and struggles in these. We show the diversity of gendered and classed social roles around which the women politicked, as workers, mothers, housewives and consumers. The historical focus enables us to “see” the activities and identifications over time to understand and map their range and dynamics. Moreover, suffragette politics have a “longtail” and continue to influence feminist politics and thinking, but the working‐class mobilizing and food politics have been much less recognized and yet offer potential insights for feminist activism, including the cost‐of‐living crisis today.

The Political Uses of Food Protests: Analyzing the 1910 Meat Boycott

In 1910, a meat boycott spread through the United States. Tens of thousands of people pledged not to eat meat for thirty days to demand lower prices and protest the practices of the Meat Trust. The movement, though its outcomes were limited, was supported by consumer organizations, labor unions, lawmakers, suffragists, and women's clubs. It thus intersected with struggles that were at the heart of the Progressive Era's reform movements. This article will explore how various organizations (labor unions, the Socialist Party, suffragists, the National Consumers League) used, or did not use, this event to further their own goals. It will argue that food protests constitute a site from which to analyze particular transformations of the protest landscape of the time, such as the rise of consumer politics; it will also show that as transversal spaces of mobilization, food protests should be studied through the significance of their object. Food, as a meeting point between the individual body and society, can epitomize the blurring of the lines between private and public that characterized Progressive reform movements.

Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth Century British Military

Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth Century British Military

Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States

Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States

Radical Housewives: Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada

Radical Housewives: Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada

Book Review: Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protests in the United States

Book Review: Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protests in the United States

RURAL WORKERS AND THE ROLE OF THE RURAL IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH FOOD RIOTING

AbstractNo form of English popular protest has been subject to such close scholarly analysis as the eighteenth-century food riot, a response not just to the understanding that food riots comprised two out of every three crowd actions but also to the influence of E. P. Thompson's seminal paper ‘The moral economy of the English crowd’. If the food riot is now understood as an event of considerable complexity, one assertion remains unchallenged: that riots remained a tradition of the towns, with agrarian society all but unaffected by food rioting. This article offers a new interpretation in which the rural is not just the backdrop to food protests but instead a locus and focus of collective actions over the marketing of provisions, with agricultural workers taking centre stage. It is shown that agricultural workers often took the lead in market town riots as well as well as in instigating riots in the countryside. Further, such episodes of collective protest were neither rare nor unusual but instead formed an integral part of the food rioting repertoire. It is also shown that rural industrial workers – notoriously active in market town riots – were often joined or even led by agricultural workers in their protests.

Three layers of history in recurrent social movements: the case of food reform

Using the understudied genre of food reform movements for illustration, we advocate greater attention to recurrent social movements. Analysis of these movements calls for combining three levels of historical analysis. One links the incidence and character of mobilization to long-term, large-scale historical changes; the second shows how periods of activism are also animated and shaped by specific historical contexts; and the third tracks legacies from earlier to later periods, thus both tracing additional causal influences and connecting separate cases into coherent sequences. The social movements literature includes excellent examples of each type of historical account. Combining types is much less common. Doing so, we contend, offers methodological advantages for scholars comparing and sequencing mobilization around similar problems in different historical periods. We develop the argument from three eras of food protest: Grahamites in the 1830s and early 1840s, dietary reformers and food safety campaigners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and organic advocates who gained popular support beginning in the late 1960s.

Moral economy in a global era: the politics of provisions during contemporary food price spikes

The wave of food riots since 2007 revived interest in why people protest in periods of dearth, yet research has to date failed to make sense of the political cultures of food protests. The concept of the moral economy in European history is explored here to make sense of contemporary political perspectives on how food markets should work in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya and Zambia. The concrete expressions of these moral economies are localized and politically contingent, yet there are broad areas of common ground across settings. As with the moral economies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, there is strong popular feeling against speculation and collusion in food markets in times of dearth, and an emphasis on the responsibilities of public authorities to act. But whereas the moral economy in European histories focused on customary paternalistic obligations, the contemporary emphasis is on formal and electoral accountabilities as a means of triggering public action. The paper concludes with a discussion of a research agenda on the moral economy and the politics of provisions in globalised present-day food markets.

Food riots: Media perspectives on the causes of food protest in Africa

When food prices spiked in 2007–8, urban Africa experienced more instances of food riots than any other part of the world. Problems were then encountered again during the 2010–11 food price spikes. This paper explores the cases of 14 African countries where food riots occurred during these two periods by presenting a qualitative content analysis of news reports on the riots drawn from both global and local African news sources. This analysis highlights the ways in which the media portrayed the links between food price rises and food riots in Africa. Briefly, our results show that the international media generally portrayed poverty and hunger as the factors that linked the incidence of food price rises with the occurrence of riots. By contrast, the African media tended to portray food riots as being caused by a more complex set of factors, including citizen dissatisfaction and people’s ability to mobilize. Exploring both the international and local interpretations of the drivers behind the food riots is important for the understanding of the multi-scalar and multifaceted factors that shape increasing food insecurity in urban Africa.

Explaining the African food riots of 2007–2008: An empirical analysis

A sharp escalation in worldwide commodity prices precipitated the global food crisis of 2007–2008, affecting the majority of the world’s poor, causing protests in developing countries and presenting policymakers with the challenge of simultaneously addressing hunger, poverty, and political instability. These food price shocks fomented violent civil responses in some countries, but not others, offering a unique opportunity to assess the factors that contributed to these disturbances. We explore this question empirically with specific reference to Africa, where “food riots” occurred in at least 14 countries. By examining the socio-economic and political conditions facing African countries, we attempt to answer why only some countries in Africa witnessed food riots in late 2007 and early 2008, while others did not. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that higher levels of poverty (as proxied by the Human Poverty Index), restricted access to and availability of food, urbanization, a coastal location, more oppressive regimes and stronger civil societies are associated with a higher likelihood of riots occurring. We also examine three country cases (Egypt, Mozambique, Niger) which represent different circumstances and responses to the food crisis, and identify specific factors that were associated with food protests in each case. Our study highlights the importance of pro-poor policies and investments and improved governance in addressing the problems facing the poor and in helping secure political stability. As the frequency and variability of natural disasters increase in response to climate change, such policies can serve to protect the poor from the debilitating consequences of the resulting shocks.

Cultural Modeling in Two Eras of U.S. Food Protest: Grahamites (1830s) and Organic Advocates (1960s–70s)

This article extends theories of social movement diffusion to encompass other kinds of cultural modeling. Using a comparison of two cases of food protest in the United States—the health food movement of William Sylvester Graham (1830s) and the early organic movement (1960s-1970s)—I emphasize similarities in underlying grievances and in the general advocacy of natural food alternatives. The two movements differed dramatically, however, in framing and tactics. I focus on contrasts in the religious significance they assigned to diet, in their democratic commitments, in the relationship they constructed between personal transformation and social change, and in their use of state-centered strategies. These frames and tactics transposed to food reform more general scripts associated with cultural institutions and movements of the time, particularly evangelical churches and temperance (Grahamites), and environmentalism, the New Left, and the wider counterculture (organic advocates).

The future of agriculture

At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development held in South Africa, the World Bank (Washington, DC, USA) and the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, Rome, Italy) announced that they would organize a global consultation process on agricultural science and technology (IAASTD, 2003). They showed remarkable foresight: when the International Assessment of Agriculture, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) final reports were approved in April 2008, they were released to media and governments already disturbed about biofuels, increasing food prices, food protests in developing countries, and a general concern about producing enough food to feed the world (IAASTD, 2008). In a relatively short time, agriculture has once again become the focus of politicians, consumers, scientists and environmentalists. Indeed, the main question that the IAASTD set out to answer, with some foresight, was: “How can we reduce hunger and poverty, improve rural livelihoods, and facilitate equitable, environmentally, socially and economically sustainable development through the generation, access to, and use of agricultural knowledge, science and technology (AKST)?” Now, as the report is published, such topics are not only matters of academic interest, but also issues of increasing economic, political and even strategic importance. With an intergovernmental governance structure, the IAASTD is agriculture's equivalent to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with no less a difficult task. At its first meeting as a global consultative process in Ireland in November 2002, the IAASTD brought together about 100 participants from governments, the private sector, non‐governmental organizations, farmer and other producer groups, consumers, scientists and international organizations. The goal was to share ideas and views about agriculture and develop a common understanding and vision for the future (IAASTD, 2005). The report sets the scene in which the IAASTD met: “Today there is a world of asymmetric development, unsustainable natural resource …

Does Food Make Place? Food Protests in Japanese American Concentration Camps

Does Food Make Place? Food Protests in Japanese American Concentration Camps

The politics of food and gender in occupied Paris

This article examines the origins, development and meaning of women's mobilisation around problems of food scarcity and supply during the Occupation. Memoirs, fiction and testimony of the war years show that food issues dominated the daily life of French men and women. Police and protesters saw the struggle for bread as distinctly a women's issue, but for different sets of reasons. How did defining food protest as ‘female’ serve the political agenda of the Vichy authorities on the one hand, and that of the French Communist activists on the other? Particular attention will be paid to the summer of 1942 when the collaborationist press reported that women's demonstrations for food constituted a ‘second front’.

Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-of-Living Protests

In mid-February 1917, an independent working-class housewives' movement erupted right in the heart of the Socialist party of America's great stronghold, New York City. Thousands of immigrant Jewish women burst into violent street protests against the high cost of living; they instituted a boycott on chickens, fish, and vegetables which shut down much of the city's foodstuffs marketing for two weeks, riveting public attention on the food price issue and sending public officials scurrying to and fro in panic. Yet this uprising of working-class housewives fits neatly into neither of the Socialist party's customary spheres of struggle, electoral work and trade union organizing. These were the two strategic rocks on which the Socialists had established themselves by early 1917 as a major political presence in New York City, claiming two New York State assemblymen and a U.S. congressman, as well as a major role in building many of the strongest unions of the decade, including the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.' New York Socialists seized the opportunity for agitational work presented by this women's uprising. They jumped quickly into the food protest fray of February 1917 and themselves organized an extensive series of cost-of-living protests designed to direct the movement toward Socialist goals. Forming a new consumer organization, the Mothers' Anti-High Price League, Socialists undertook daily visits to city officials to call for food relief measures, pressured Albany and Washington, D.C., for action on the issue, and staged a series of neighborhood-level protest meetings. Their activities climaxed in a Madison Square demonstration of over 5,000 women, which spilled over into an attack on the Waldorf