Introduction: Food and Sovereignty

This special issue had its origins in the spring and summer of 2020, a moment in which the stakes of food, gender and sovereignty were particularly visible. Pandemic-related shortages, shutdowns of restaurants, marketplaces and stores and sudden food insecurity for millions of people – all inescapably changed the daily experience of eating and provisioning. To get by, people created new networks to bypass the systems they had counted on in the past, sometimes retreating into their own DIY systems for producing food (e.g., home baking) and sometimes rediscovering local food systems. Food work was one significant source of the increased inequities of care and carework as lockdown made the tasks of cooking, provisioning and feeding that are traditionally considered ‘women's work’ more important, more visible in people's homes and more difficult. For many, these inequities, including barriers to food and precarity of supplies, were not new; they had been facts of life for a long time. In other, often wealthier, communities, the pandemic revealed and accelerated the impossibility of the status quo. It demanded new ways of thinking about food, gender and who has the right to exert authority over them.

In the USA, where three of the four editors were located, food and sovereignty resonated with special force in the wake of a wave of uprisings and global protests for racial justice following the incendiary and unjust murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed when police were called after an altercation at a corner grocery store. Renewed attention to Elijah McClain's death in Aurora, Colorado the previous year, killed by police and paramedics while he was on a trip to a convenience food store, also reinforced the danger incurred by people of colour in the everyday work of provisioning and sustaining themselves. The uprisings that summer also mobilised food, as networks of mutual aid made food accessible in neighbourhoods that lost, or perhaps never had had, safe food access.

In Canada, where one of our editors was located and where, in June 2021, the symposium that preceded this special issue was held, the discovery of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children murdered at residential schools – which were state-funded and run by the Catholic church and various Protestant churches – caused us to rethink our themes entirely. Acknowledgement of these centuries of child abuse, in which diet, forced labour, hunger and denial of food nourishing to soul and body were used as tools of cultural genocide, compels all of us to recognise that food and sovereignty were and are routinely, structurally denied to Indigenous peoples. Moreover, as scholars we must think about the ways that colonialism operates not only in the past but also in our midst. Our relationship to history must involve ethical relationships with the people whose stories we claim to write and represent. As recent cases have revealed, ethnic fraud, primarily perpetrated by white scholars purporting to be Indigenous or Black, misappropriates resources, dismisses real struggle, and undermines the sovereignty of Native people and all communities of color. When we break trust by falsely representing ourselves as members of an aggrieved group, whether intentionally or unintentionally, we perpetrate harms reminiscent of colonial violence. Continuing to read and engage with Indigenous and Black scholarship is as urgent as it has ever been; scholars in these fields are also leading the way in developing frameworks for thinking about ethical relationality and honest self-representation. Even as these scholars develop robust standards for ethics and research, we must also recognize that this labour is unequal, diverting BIPOC scholars away from other kinds of possible work and the broader struggle for justice.¹ [Correction added on 16 December 2022, after first online publication: This paragraph has been revised in this version.]

The immediacy of these contexts cannot be overlooked. We wrote the call for submissions during Zoom chats with the sound of police helicopters in the background. We worked out the symposium and special issue over the following eighteen months as we and our authors navigated the hopes, incredible losses, fascist tendencies and liberatory imaginings of these moments.

No doubt you will hear reverberations of these circumstances through this issue, which analyses the stakes of food for, in the words of our call, ‘control of bodies, spaces, states, institutions, identities and the self’. Using a broad definition of sovereignty that incorporates states and formal political entities and also ‘the everyday politics of survival and self-determination’, we and the article authors have worked to establish the particular importance of food to autonomy and authority. In an issue that spans Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and North America, and runs from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, the particular importance of food as an instrument of institutional, communal and bodily power is a consistent theme.

We crafted this issue within a scholarly community where concepts of food and sovereignty have steadily been gaining critical attention. Framing the two words together as one concept, ‘food sovereignty’ is central to many key environmental, social and political justice movements.² And as a theoretical concept, the term is critical to and prominent within studies of Indigenous foodways.³ Definitions and understandings of ‘food sovereignty’ are multi-dimensional and wide-ranging, and they hold different kinds of attention – featuring concepts like culinary self-determination, commonly-held food rights, community mobilisation, ecological sustainability, economic independence and interdependence and heirloom and ancestral seedkeeping – depending on the people and groups using them. As food sovereignty has grown as both a movement and a concept, most who use the phrase agree that it is a changing and changeable process, rather than a fixed or specific term, and that it is rooted in processes of empowerment and challenges to inequality.

Thinking of ‘food’ and ‘sovereignty’ as connected but independent concepts, we recognise and have drawn upon the many incredible scholarly works exploring power and its relationship to how and what we eat. Foundational in this regard is Sidney Mintz's 1985 Sweetness and Power, which inspired generations of scholars as it demonstrated how a foodstuff – in this case, sucrose derived from sugarcane – could become inextricable from violent systems of enslavement, extraction and empire.⁴ Attention to the social, political and cultural power of the things we put on our plate has been investigated in a number of crucial studies. Food has the potential, scholars have shown, to shape national identity.⁵ It can reflect religious and spiritual practice.⁶ It can tell people how to behave right alongside telling them how to eat.⁷ It can fuel empire.⁸ And it works in tandem with capitalism, enriching the few while holding the many in a state of want, impotence and defencelessness.⁹ But food can also be a tool of resistance, helping communities to remember their histories, reaffirm their values, experiment and innovate and push back against colonisers, enslavers, bosses and oppressors.¹⁰ While food is bound up in and marked by structures of power, it also has the capacity to challenge and dismantle them.

We, and the authors, have also insisted on the importance of gender to those systems. In doing so, we drew upon the growing body of work by feminist food studies scholars, particularly those who take up questions of race or inequality.¹¹ Indeed, attending to gender – by which we mean also attending to the ways that gender is embedded in systems of race, sex and class – often reveals the importance of food as a site in which policy butts up against nationalist and anti-colonial struggles, in which economies are enacted or resisted or shaped via households.¹² Attending to the presence of food and food spaces with a gendered lens – particularly women's domain of kitchens and households – reveals sovereignty's precarity, both in the sense that food itself can be quickly and suddenly withheld or offered generously, and also in the sense that the question of who controls food can be much less settled than one might assume.¹³ Spaces in which gender and food are apparent also highlight visions of survival, freedoms and autonomy.

The resulting special issue supports the idea that food, sovereignty and gender are inextricably entwined. We have organised the issue thematically, with close attention to our historical actors’ relationships to sovereignty. The issue begins with nationalist narratives and efforts to consolidate formal political power, and it ends with a movement that uses food to reclaim Indigenous sovereignty. In between, you will find articles on non-elite people's efforts to survive and exercise self-determination, on women's efforts to use food to claim sovereignty over space, on the workings of economies and the feelings of people and on individuals’ efforts to use their food work to exert control over others. Each thematic cluster of articles is bracketed by a ‘short piece’: a brief, thought-provoking essay exploring a key source, a fascinating person or a momentous time period. These shorter explorations each offer exciting new directions for studies of food and sovereignty.

The special issue opens with a reconsideration of ‘sweetness and power’: Marta Manzanares Mileo offers us a close exploration of the ways that tropes about sweetness and femininity shaped urban women's confectionery businesses in early modern Spain. As both an economic and social history, this work details the rise of women confectioner–entrepreneurs who, in making sweets widely available, changed consumer tastes and eating practices while redefining appropriate feminine comportment. This article offers a new reading of sweetness and power that also encourages us to think transnationally about women's labour in local sugar economies, and to situate their commercial agency within a broader context of enslavement, capitalism and empire.

We then shift to a cluster on national sovereignty and its limits. Articles by Leslie Wolff and Rachel Hope Cleves address the role of gendered presentations of food in constructing (and challenging) national narratives. Wolff presents a nuanced discussion of chefs’ contrasting strategies for navigating Mexico's financial and cultural investment in Indigenous foodways. She emphasises how even the visual aesthetics – perhaps especially the visual aesthetics – of contemporary Mexican cuisine need to be understood as part of the politics that food enacts in the world. In this retelling, food offers conflicting visions of indigeneity, of the women who are associated with Indigenous food knowledge and of how consumers might access each. Continuing explorations of food nationalism and national identity, Cleves addresses the efforts of queer chefs in the USA to claim a distinctively American, masculinist nationalism that encompassed ‘queer’ foods such as quiche. As a whole, these articles establish the centrality of the gendered politics of food preparation, and the presentation of cooking, to the nation–state's governance. Histories of reifying or countering heteropatriarchal, white supremacist modes of making and presenting food were also histories of ongoing efforts to claim, expand, modify and deflect nationalism.

Two articles on carcerality reinforce the disciplining work of food. Alice Mulhearn-Williams and Nadja Durbach each investigate the ways that food was used to punish, but also to produce, young women and men. These articles privilege differing perspectives on imprisonment. Whereas Mulhearn-Williams lifts up the sensory experience and oral histories of women who were forced to stay in Magdalene Laundries, Durbach examines the nutrition guidelines that British authorities used in young men's prisons. For the women who were imprisoned in the laundries, food reinscribed their abject status. Monotonous diets and strictly surveilled and disciplined mealtimes served as daily occasions to reinforce their isolation and lack of rights. Prison authorities in metropolitan Britain, on the other hand, used food both to punish young men but also to help them grow into the ‘productive’ masculine citizens that the British imperial state so desired. In both cases, food that produced the right gendered citizen (abject, obedient young women, ‘healthy’ young men) was a part of punishment. The articles additionally suggest that food might have been an object of resistance (for instance, via hunger strikes in laundries). Through food, the process of carcerality combined the most intimate kinds of control (e.g., over what went into one's mouth) and the largest scales – governing authorities’ top-down efforts to create gendered subjects.

The ways that food could be used to both change and chastise is explored in Jessica Kenyatta Walker's meaningful short piece on Black domestic citizenship and the USDA's propaganda films of the 1920s−1930s. Through these films, US government agencies attempted to impose their own vision of ‘civilisation’ and ‘productivity’ on Black women, children and men. But, as Walker shows so powerfully, Black homemakers held fast to their own ideas of health, nutrition and community. She encourages food studies, as a field, to centre the role of food in struggles for autonomy.

The next section takes up themes raised by Walker about the necessity of attending to people's efforts to use food as a tool of liberation, by studying food in highly dispersed food networks. Focusing on the very different social spaces of early modern kitchens in Dutch households in South Africa, civil rights struggles in the 1960s US South, leftist feminist movements of twentieth and twenty-first-century Chile and the contested politics of food aid in late twentieth-century Haiti, the articles in our next cluster all establish the importance of expansive transportation structures to very local struggles for survival. Kathleen Burke describes the complex politics of nationhood, modes of enslavement and identity within colonial Dutch kitchens and homes, and how these foods were grown, provisioned, cooked and served by enslaved men and women. Laura Dudley Jenkins documents the ongoing reverberations of colonisation in the form of neoliberal development policies in twentieth-century Haiti. In both cases, food sent transnationally did not reflect the needs of local populations, but could be used to enforce the bonds of empire or be repurposed by them in the kitchens in which they were forced to work. Two articles that treat women's social movements also highlight the role of non-domestic spaces, for example, communal kitchens, post offices and mailboxes. Food that emerged from these non-familial spaces sustained households in times and places when poor people's survival was particularly precarious. Pamela N. Walker's article and the co-authored article by Hillary Hiner, Anita Peña Saavedra and Alondra Castillo Delgado show how poor women crafted relationships that sustained their families by going outside of typical sites of distribution, such as stores, government programmes and household kitchens. Racial hierarchy could still inform these movements, whether in the ‘othering’ of immigrants’ food in pobladores or the limitations of white women's knowledge of poor Black women's needs. Nonetheless, Hiner et al's focus on historical memory and intergenerational knowledge transfer, and Walker's on the transfer of resources from white civil rights sympathisers in the north to poor Black working women in the South, establish the importance of food shipments and networks to survival.

As transnational as women's work around food has been, studying food and sovereignty also – inevitably – directs us to the local, the intimate, the specific. Nowhere is this clearer than in the cluster of articles on the work of ‘housewives’ – women who did domestic work in spaces they considered their own homes – as they struggled to establish their own identities and authority. Marie Pellissier's short piece on Mary Randolph's cookbook moves us into a series of articles that discuss the contested politics of kitchens. Pellissier untangles how Randolph erased the presence and knowledge of enslaved workers in her kitchen to establish her own status as a cook and hostess. Today, institutions like Colonial Williamsburg continue to circulate Randolph's cookbook as an example of ‘American’ cooking, linking Randolph's erasure and white supremacy to American national identity. Then, a series of articles on women's efforts to wrest political and social recognition based on their domestic food work confronts the question of how states, and women, measured the economic importance of their home cooking. Two articles on home economics show that in the early twentieth century, women's housework emerged as the target of reformers and state authorities. As Carolyn Taratko's and Mire Koikari's articles make clear, the international (and internationalist) world of home economists allowed women to both claim political importance and, for a few women, to build professional autonomy and the privileges that came with it by exerting authority over other women. Both authors also point to the limits of these efforts, establishing food as a site for wives’ and mothers’ exertion of their own ways of working and identities. This idea is taken up even more clearly by Anny Gaul and Arianna King, whose articles delineate the possibilities and challenges of procuring and preparing food. In these articles, women's home cooking and market selling offer opportunities to speak back to structural adjustment policies and the rejection of homogeneous culinary national identities, but also to bend these rules to suit individual purposes. To finish the cluster, Jessica Douthwaite's short piece on a single letter voicing concern about radioactive milk speaks to the granularity of domestic provisioning and, simultaneously, the range of objects and tasks that could be encompassed by it. As a whole, these articles establish the charged nature of the most intimate of food work.

Shayne Leslie Figueroa and Lillian Tsay focus on a different space in which women asserted their sovereignty over food – the space of waged work. By comparing the very different sites of early twentieth-century Japanese factories and mid-twentieth-century school lunchrooms, we see the ways that women's paid work opened doors for their claims to their own rights. Importantly, both articles also point to the relevance of working-class women's paid work for other projects – the aesthetics of the modern girl, the profits of factories and the everyday workings of schools. Like home kitchens, workplaces contain and shape contests for authority. Tsay's confectionery workers faced extraordinary efforts to control their image, their movements and their ambitions. Similarly, Figueroa's cafeteria workers’ demands to be treated with respect and to have consistent work assignments ran up against their employer's and union's expectations that women would be willing to accept intermittent employment, intrusive supervision and the authority of men. In these articles, we recognise that, even as the site of struggles over sovereignty shifts to the paid workplace, expectations of women's allegiance to family and home continue to constrain their rights in and to these public spaces.

Two articles further extend knowledge about spaces in which food became a site of gendered control through their shared focus on milk. Milk has long been understood as a particularly charged food in western culture, invested with enormous cultural importance, thought to contain essential nutritional elements and also a site for the assertion of authority by science, the state and nursing parents. Andrea Ringer's investigation of zoos’ efforts to develop effective substitutes for mothers’ milk, and Conor Heffernan's discussion of the surge of interest in non-pasteurised milk among bodybuilders, offer new perspectives on milk's particular significance. Animal mothers’ milk was embedded in systems of gendered exploitation and colonial systems of alienation and destruction of families. Zookeepers mobilised the labour of humans and animals gendered female in their efforts to build their reputations and their stocks. Heffernan's bodybuilders linked raw milk consumption to men's ability to control and reshape their own bodies. These insights point to the ways that a particular food operated as a key point of authority, around which animals, mothers, scientists and forces of capital asserted themselves.

This is also true, as Becca Dower shows us in our final article, of bison. As we move through the articles, we have disassembled the state as a site of sovereignty. The issue thus ends with Dower's powerful narration of the reintroduction of bison to the Fort Peck Reservation. Dower directly takes up the language of sovereignty, pointing to how collective communal efforts, as well as individual diets, have allowed Indigenous people to reclaim foodways and identities that authorities had tried to strip away. The importance of femaleness and the labour done by female members of ‘Buffalo Nation’ sustains the redefinition of sovereignty as the property of collectives, rather than states or even individuals.

Taken together, these articles offer a thorough, wide-ranging exploration of networks of global and translocal trade, the authority of states and governments, the stability of social and cultural norms, authority within households and families, the work that people did, the control they exercised over their bodies and their ability to imagine and enact different futures. The articles show that food's relationship to sovereignty – to control over one's body – meant that it was key to systems of racialisation and enslavement and equally to resistance against those damaging systems. This was because, we suggest, food sovereignty was a key index of gender identity. For instance, what one ate indicated, and could also determine, whether one ‘counted’ as a ‘real’ citizen. In other words, these articles suggest that questions about food are inevitably also political questions about who has the right to determine what other people do with their bodies.

This vigorous and comprehensive special issue, big in size as well as scope, comprises twenty-one interdisciplinary articles on time periods from the early modern era through to the present day and features historical actors from many corners of the globe. Such a rich collection would not have been possible without the extensive community of scholars whose creativity, intellectual generosity and enthusiasm led to more than ninety applications for the ‘Food and Sovereignty’ symposium sponsored by Gender and History, the forty papers presented at that virtual event and the brilliant keynote lecture by Nigerian food explorer, culinary anthropologist and food historian Ozoz Sokoh. The topic of food and sovereignty clearly resonated with many people!

As comprehensive as the special issue might be, there are time periods, peoples and places absent from -- or underrepresented -- in the articles that follow. The medieval period, queer communities, wide stretches of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa – these lacunae speak to both stubbornly old and frustratingly new barriers to scholars from marginalised groups. Several contributors had to withdraw during the publication process because of the sheer difficulty of doing this work during a pandemic, the impossibility of sustaining research in disconnected locations or the urgency of political or familial commitments. We feel the loss of their articles while wholeheartedly supporting their shift of focus. The articles that have come to fruition in this special issue convey the energy and sharpness of thinking, writing and research being done around gender and food, rather than representing the totality of work that is or needs to be done.

Although we have never all met in person, and although the symposium and editing process for this special issue were conducted entirely online, we have been heartened by the energy of our collective efforts. We especially want to thank the North American editorial office for their steadfast and skillful support, which has brought creativity, articles, and energy to the journal. Without this collective, this Special Issue would not have happened. These articles fully respond to the questions raised by historical scholarship and, most movingly, by conversations engendered by our interactions. At the symposium, and throughout the editorial process, we and the authors have learned things from each other. We hope you see some of that synergy in these articles. This special issue speaks to the centrality of food as a tool for sovereignty, sovereignty's reliance on gendered systems and the possibilities food has offered to resist and reconfigure both. [Correction added on 16 December 2022, after first online publication: This paragraph has been revised in this version.]