Moral Economies of Food in the Socialist/Post-socialist World

Abstract

The chapter is aimed at providing a practical framework for a recon-sideration of the themes behind the term " food security. " The analysis illustrates that since the term gained popular currency in the mid-1990s it has been restricted in focus to a few, narrow angles of research revolving around individual citizens, households, and the nation-state without consideration of global food production systems, the socio-environment that dominates food production globally. There is an urgent need for a relational understanding of food production and consumption in research on food security that understands how and why food is consumed; a biopolitical take based on understanding global mass consumption and the drivers of food capitalism, over-and -under-consumption. In 2013, I wrote an article on food security (Cloke 2013) analysing the difficulties involved in defining that concept. The article looked at the evolution of the term, not by taking it on its own terms, 1 but by examining what it could mean in a world dominated by corporate food production and distribution networks that waste a substantial portion of the food produced globally and profit from that waste, sys-tems referred to in the literature as global food production regimes. It seemed a logical absurdity that in a world already producing enough food to feed the global population (OECD 2009), so much academic, political and corporate effort has gone into constructing forms of food security that effectively ignore the