Edible Entanglements : On A Political Theology Of Food

Obesity in the Global North and starvation in the Global South can be attributed to the same cause: the concentration of enormous power in the hands of transnational agricultural corporations. The food sovereignty movement has arisen as the major challenger to the corporate food regime. The concept of sovereignty is central to the discursive field of political theology, yet seldom if ever have its theoretical insights been applied to the concept of sovereignty as it appears in global food politics.

Food politics operates simultaneously in several registers: individual, national, transnational, and ecological. A politics of food takes a transdisciplinary approach to analyzing Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty in each of these registers, employing Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy to elucidate vulnerability in the national and transnational registers; Jane Bennett’s vibrant materiality, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and nutritional science to describe the social production of classed bodies in the individual and national registers; data from climate science and the political ecology of Bruno Latour to examine the impact of sovereignty in the ecological register. Catherine Keller’s theology of becoming and Paulina Ochoa Espejo’s people as process will be explored for their capacity to enliven a democratic political theology of food.