Food habitus: practices among migrant farm workers in a community of Sonora, Mexico

Abstract

The objective is to analyze the food habitus and the changes in eating practices of pendulum and settled migrant agricultural workers in the city of Miguel Aleman in the state of Sonora. Based on an ethnographic approach, 21 in-depth interviews were conducted with both types of migrants from January 2016 to January 2018. We found that in these migrants, the consumption of industrialized products such as flours and sugars has increased, leading to malnutrition mainly in pendulum migrants and chronic diseases such as diabetes in settled migrants. We conclude that the food habitus is adjusted to the physical and economic availability of food and the logic of agricultural work, with eating structured as a practice of necessity. This reality materially and symbolically reproduces the subordinate position of agricultural workers in the face of the globalized economic and food production models, in which eating practices are debilitated by the difficulties of access to food.