Beyond the Minimally Adequate Diet Food Stamps and Food Sovereignty in the U.S.

Re-framing food sovereignty in the urban U.S. means grappling with the messy politics of consumption in ways that put poor consumers and urban poverty at the center of our analysis. I argue that focusing on the state, and food subsidies in particular, can help us ask more coherent questions around how principles of food sovereignty might be realized in an urban context in ways that build intra-class alliances between small-scale, sustainable producers, food justice activists and poor urban consumers. This paper draws on 18 months of ethnographic research in a North Brooklyn food pantry and food stamp outreach program.

Maggie Dickinson is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center. Maggie Dickinson’s dissertation, “Re-Calibrating the Welfare State: Food and the New Politics of Poverty”, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, uses the messy politics around food, poverty and welfare as a lens to explore larger concepts such as emergent articulations of the political, urban class formation, neoliberalization and the state. She has published on food and protest at Occupy Wall Street, women, welfare and food insecurity and graffiti, race and the urban commons.