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Food and Foodways
Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gfof20
Food and carcerality: From confinement to
abolition
Ashanté M. Reese & Joshua Sbicca
To cite this article: Ashanté M. Reese & Joshua Sbicca (2022) Food and carcerality: From
confinement to abolition, Food and Foodways, 30:1-2, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2022.2030931
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2022.2030931
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FOOD AND FOODWAYS
2022, VOL. 30, NOS. 1–2, 1–15
Food and carcerality: From confinement to abolition
Ashanté M. Reesea and Joshua Sbiccab
aAfrican and African Diaspora Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA; bSociology,
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
ABSTRACT
Carceral spaces—such as neighborhood zones of police sur-
veillance and plantation prisons that exploit incarcerated
labor—reflect and reproduce systems of oppression that are
also present in the food system. The state regularly polices
poverty instead of addressing how racial capitalism perpetuates
the lack of access to basic needs like healthy food. Conversely,
the food system relies on carceral practices to secure disci-
plined labor by weaponizing the possibility of deportation and
wielding the threat of violence to maintain control over racial-
ized undocumented workers. But there are also seeds of strug-
gle for the abolition of penal logics and institutions by
incarcerated people and their allies on the outside. These
include efforts to transform eating and food work in prison,
reimagine food justice as an anti-carceral social movement,
and use resistance tactics like hunger strikes. In this special
issue introduction, we address these connections and set the
stage for all the articles by asking: What does carcerality offer
to theorizing and understanding the food system, food cultures,
and food relations? And, what does a critical look at food offer
toward understanding—and eventually abolishing—carceral
systems? We offer theoretical touch points that connect food
justice work to long-standing prison abolition organizing while
introducing the major themes and contributions of each article
included in the issue. We end with a reflection on our aspira-
tions for the future of food studies.
Introducing the need for critical food and carceral studies
We begin this special issue from the premise that diagnosing the function
of carceral institutions and practices through food requires deep engage-
ment with a range of critical academic and social movements that study
and resist carcerality. Carcerality refers to the punitive institutions, prac-
tices, logics, and ideologies of social control. Not only does carcerality
matter for how those in the penal system experience and participate in
agricultural and food practices and use food as a site for resistance, but
https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2022.2030931
© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
CONTACT Ashanté M. Reese ashante.reese@austin.utexas.edu African and African Diaspora Studies, The
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, 78712 TX, USA.
KEYWORDS
Carcerality; abolition;
food justice; prisons;
agriculture; food
consumption
2 A. M. REESE AND J. SBICCA
also for how systems and technologies of control like policing and methods
of surveillance structure the foodways of historically marginalized groups
through labor regimes, how food consumption is monitored and measured,
and punitive steps to inspire healthier eating habits. In this introductory
essay we explain the pressing need for this work on food and carcerality,
set some of the parameters for investigating their connections, and intro-
duce the significance of the articles that make up this special issue to the
budding field of critical food and carceral studies.
In August 2016, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) published an
extensive policy platform. In part inspired by the police murder of Michael
Brown and subsequent uprisings, this assemblage of more than 50 Black-
led organizations produced a vision that is no doubt within the tradition
of the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program.1 M4BL’s policy platform
was organized into six themes: Economic Justice, Reparations, Invest-Divest,
Community Control, Political Power, and End the War on Black People.2
While a primary thrust of this platform centered around policing and
prisons, a less talked about aspect was the demand for land and food
justice, essentially arguing that carcerality and food are intimately con-
nected. For example, the reparations demand, in part, reads: “Reparations
for the wealth extracted from our communities through environmental
racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination and racialized
capitalism in the form of corporate and government reparations focused
on healing ongoing physical and mental trauma, and ensuring our access
and control of food sources, housing and land.”
Carceral systems contribute to the dispossession of racialized and classed
groups of such basic means of survival and serve to concentrate resources
such as land and food into white and wealthier hands and mouths.
Moreover, carceral institutions reproduce structural racism. Ruth Wilson
Gilmore argues that racism is “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production
and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”
(28), which is driven by institutions like prisons and police. The resulting
crises—hunger, houselessness, competition over land—are manufactured
rather than a reflection of true scarcity, creating the context in which
neoliberal values of hard work and individuality are peddled as the pre-
eminent pathways to having one’s needs met. Instead of addressing capi-
talism and structural racism, the state relies on carceral institutions to
manage the resulting fallout from economic, environmental, health, and
social inequalities.
These connections between food, carcerality, and resistance emerged
clearly in 2020 after the police murders of Breonna Taylor in March and
George Floyd two months later. While millions of protesters and activists
took to the streets, food businesses in major US cities boarded their
FOOD AND FOODWAYS 3
windows and closed their doors, fearing damaged property—despite the
documented food shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Guynn 2020).
At the same time, some restaurants around the country provided donations,
protest kits, and food for racial justice protestors (Boscamp 2020). Many
activists also engaged in mutual aid work to meet spikes in hunger in the
wake of the pandemic’s economic fallout (Donnelly 2020; Morrison 2021),
in part confirming the need to adopt M4BL’s policy platform. Prison
abolition efforts that organize to dismantle carceral institutions and imagine
and work toward life-affirming institutions that advance the education,
health, and opportunity for all people seem more promising now—and
gravely needed—than in recent memory. Activists link anti-carceral work
to a range of liberation struggles as there is a pressing need to trace the
prison industrial complex in all its connections to other systems of oppres-
sion and consider how the work of abolition reaches beyond prisons to
also include things like food.
Racist state violence and capitalism’s exploitation of ethnoracial hierar-
chies are not new (DuBois 1998 [1935]). Neither is resistance to these
conditions (Robinson 2000; Taylor 2016; Estes 2019). Yet, as Ruth Wilson
Gilmore has often proclaimed, capitalism’s job is to save capitalism, and
one way that it has sought to save itself is through the growth and exten-
sion of the penal system, perhaps most prominently in the United States.
In his work on carceral geographies in Chicago, Rashad Shabazz (2015)
argues that systems of control and surveillance become part of the archi-
tectural design of neighborhoods and housing projects, creating a symbiotic
relationship between prisons and communities that have suffered most
from state neglect. This has resulted in not only increasing prison popu-
lations, but also a growing number of people under state surveillance
through parole systems and immigrant detention centers—most of whom
are managed through advancements in carceral technologies that expand
surveillance well beyond prisons through things like crime maps and
closed circuit cameras (Benjamin 2019).
With this context in mind, there is a growing effort to focus on how
carceral conditions intersect with economic, political, and social life in
myriad ways and how abolition is informing new arenas of struggle.
Indeed, prison abolitionist, Angela Davis (2005), notes, “imprisonment is
the punitive solution to a whole range of social problems that are not
being addressed by those social institutions that might help people lead
better, more satisfying lives” (37). From our vantage point as critical food
studies scholars and activists, attention to food can further highlight such
carceral relations and opportunities for abolition. As this special issue
reveals, food is a site for interrogating traditional carceral spaces like
prisons by focusing on the ongoing significance of plantation systems in
4 A. M. REESE AND J. SBICCA
the structures of farming and nutrition; critically examining the eating
and cooking practices of incarcerated people; and seeing hunger strikes
and agriculture-based restorative justice work with formerly incarcerated
people as resistance strategies. In brief, the punitive response of the prison
industrial complex to economic and political failures to provide basic
needs compels us to look differently at food.
While there is robust literature that explores how powerful groups use
food to assert and reproduce their structural advantage (Du Bois 1998
[1935]; Guthman 2014; Holt-Giménez 2017; Dickinson 2019), as well as
how food becomes a site for resistance (Patel 2009; Alkon and Agyeman
2011; White 2018; Smith 2019), explicit attention to the interplay of food
and carcerality is limited. Therefore, one of our contributions is describing
and theorizing the everyday carceral food experience. Food can tell us
something about prisons as institutions and how those in prison use food
for extraordinary purposes. Following the lead of critical prison and abo-
lition scholars (Gilmore 2007; Burton 2018; Story 2019; Haley 2016;
LeFlouria 2015; Sojoyner 2016), we recognize that the carceral transcends
material and embodied inside/outside spaces and as such, food also reveals
the extent to which connections between institutions and people either
reinforce or upend the prison’s stability within society. If we take Ruth
Wilson Gilmore’s assertion that prisons are not on the margins of society
as they are often imagined, then actions like hunger strikes by incarcerated
people that are supported by people on the outside are one example of
how carcerality is challenged through a disavowal of manufactured bound-
aries (see Hernandez-Chalit’s paper in this issue). This special issue high-
lights carcerality as a set of relations that gets concretized and challenged
through food-related policies and practices inside and outside of prisons.
Building collaborations, developing questions, and dening
parameters
As we set out to find authors, we had a sense that there was current
research broadly interested in connections between food and carcerality.
Joshua Sbicca and Becca Chalit-Hernandez organized two sessions at the
American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in the spring of
2020. While most papers were from geographers, there were also people
trained in sociology and agricultural education, and others who had the
direct experience of incarceration. Of note, there were no tenured scholars,
an indication of the new interest in this area of study. The AAG session
brought us into conversation, as Ashanté Reese had also embarked on a
project related to carcerality, publishing an Op-Ed with Randolph Carr
about prisons and plantations on Juneteenth (Reese and Carr 2020).
Bringing together our knowledge of food justice movements and our
FOOD AND FOODWAYS 5
growing knowledge of food and farming in prisons, we cast our net widely
for this special issue and received an overwhelming response.
In this special issue, there is a broad representation of disciplines. The
authors reflect training in American studies, anthropology, arts adminis-
tration, ethnic studies, geography, sociology, sustainable agriculture, and
women’s and gender studies. Reflecting the vibrancy of this multidisci-
plinary interest in food and carceral intersections, most authors are grad-
uate students or junior scholars. And many are activists. We want to
acknowledge that research on carcerality and abolition is not devoid of
risks—especially when the work challenges powerful institutions, many of
which support or are connected to the universities we work for. That
junior scholars—some of them scholars of color and/or women who nav-
igate additional perils in the academy—take up the mantle of researching
carcerality and the food system is noteworthy.
To pull together these various themes and scholarly orientations, we
put critical food and critical prison studies in conversation around a set
of key questions:
• What do we mean by carcerality? Relatedly, how does it inform how
we understand everyday life and foodways within and beyond prisons?
• What does carcerality oer to theorizing and understanding food
systems, cultures, and relations?
• What do we mean by abolitionism? Relatedly, how does it inform
how we understand everyday life and foodways within and beyond
prisons?
• What does abolitionism oer to theorizing and understanding food
systems, cultures, and relations?
In the process of exploring these questions below, we also discuss the
range of contributions made in this special issue. As might be expected
given the many backgrounds of the authors, there are different starting
points for jumping into the study of food and carcerality. Regardless of
the starting point, all the articles, including this essay, take seriously the
need to engage with critical bodies of literature focusing on carcerality.
In this way, the special issue pushes food studies scholars to see food as
connected to and a lens for understanding facets of life heretofore largely
hidden. Relatedly, we invite food studies scholars to engage critical prison
studies—alongside analyses of race and racism—as one way to theorize
food to examine and critique institutional structures.
Reflecting the carceral structures of food and agriculture, authors address
disciplinary technologies and logics (McKeithen; Williams and Freshour);
neoliberalism and nutrition science (McKeithen); plantation legacies and
6 A. M. REESE AND J. SBICCA
systems (Rice; Williams and Freshour); policy fields (Rice); prison agri-
culture systems (Rice); and how racial capitalism intersects with food
production and food justice (Black; Williams and Freshour). In line with
a commitment to building a just food system, which is in line with abo-
litionist commitments to build a radically different society more broadly,
there is also an explicit focus on resistance and imagination. Authors
address hunger strikes (Chalit-Hernandez) and the liberating creation of
recipes while imprisoned (Underwood Marek); food and restorative justice,
especially for formerly incarcerated people (Black); oppositional discourse
communicated through food consumption practices (Chalit Hernandez;
Underwood Marek); prisoner solidarity (Black; Chalit Hernandez); and
the tensions of carceral food reforms that reproduce the power of carceral
institutions (McKeithen) and reform/abolition work that leverages or iden-
tifies food and agricultural practices for socially transformative purposes
(Black; Underwood Marek; Williams and Freshour).3
There are also many different carceral spaces to consider. Authors center
particular places, such as state prisons (McKeithen; Rice), immigrant deten-
tion facilities (Chalit Hernandez), Indian reservations (Rice), and struc-
turally excluded and divested communities (Williams and Freshour). The
scale of analyses also varies from single carceral facilities (Chalit Hernandez;
Underwood Marek) to states (McKeithen; Black), regions (especially the
South) (Rice; Williams and Freshour), and the entire United States (Rice).
Authors also reveal cross-scale urban/rural linkages (Black) and the carceral
geographies of the food industry itself (Williams and Freshour).
Together the articles in this issue engage with food as a carceral object
and means to imagine abolition. The authors provide touchstone examples
of a growing interest in critical food studies. And, importantly, these
articles offer a space for thinking with critical prison studies. Instead of
going one by one, we integrate the insights of the articles into our analysis.
But first, we provide an overview of how we understand carcerality. Then
we theorize the connections between food, carcerality, and abolition before
ending with reflections on the future of food studies.
Carcerality and food
Food intersects with well-established domains of carceral control, so we
take this opportunity to bring carcerality more to the forefront of analyses
of the material conditions under which food is produced and consumed.
If one of the defining characteristics of carcerality is how surveillance,
discipline, confinement, and punishment get normalized and legitimized
in everyday life, then food, which is often depoliticized, is an avenue for
understanding the how of carcerality.
FOOD AND FOODWAYS 7
One avenue through which carcerality has mapped its way from the
past to the present, connecting prisons to food cultures and systems, is
through plantation geographies, which include historical plantations and
their remnant economic, social, and spatial arrangements. Katherine
McKittrick (2011) writes, “The prison–plantation connection thus provides
us with an almost perfect, and thus disturbing, conceptual pathway, poised
for analytic profit: as the blueprint for the prison industrial complex, the
plantation anticipates—and empirically maps—the logic that some live,
and some die, because this is what nature intended and therefore that the
practice of incarceration is the commonsense underside to the teleological
evolution toward normalized white emancipation” (956). As scholars and
activists have noted, modern-day policing and prisons have roots in plan-
tation geographies, and as such, we continue to live in what Saidiya
Hartman (2008) calls the afterlife of slavery: “skewed life chances, limited
access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impov-
erishment” (6).
Though infused everywhere, carceral practices and structures do not
have universal impact (Shabazz 2015). Historical plantations and their
accompanying technologies of terror confined and exploited Black labor
and ingenuity, while reifying hierarchies of citizenship that privilege white-
ness. McKittrick (2011) writes, “The plantation evidences an uneven colo-
nial–racial economy that, while differently articulated across time and
place, legalized black servitude while simultaneously sanctioning black
placelessness and constraint” (948). In other words, the plantation was not
only a labor regime but also a spatial one. Embedded in place, plantations
normalized two seemingly contradictory phenomena: constraint and con-
finement in place and Black placelessness, delegitimizing rights to own-
ership, privacy, and protection. Though chattel slavery has been abolished,
plantation logics as a set of violent economic, spatial, and bodily practices
continue to operate.
Historical plantation geographies not only shaped agricultural produc-
tion, chattel slavery, and sharecropping in the US South as Brian Williams
and Carrie Freshour argue in this special issue, but as Stian Rice notes,
they also impacted US agricultural and land policy that constrained the
extent to which Indigenous and Black people specifically and poor people
generally can participate in food production as owners and stewards of
land rather than workers subjected to surveillance or violence.
Plantation logics furthermore inform the practice of “working the land”
as an acceptable form of exploitation and rehabilitation within prisons
themselves (Chennault and Sbicca, n.d.). From rebuilding the “New South”
after the Civil War and through the early twentieth century (Cobb 1994;
Williams and Freshour) to contemporary prison farms and gardens across
the US (Chennault and Sbicca, n.d.) to private companies hiring prisoners
8 A. M. REESE AND J. SBICCA
to pick produce (Rice 2019), carcerality’s intersection with food production
is a through line in US history.
Food consumption also links to carcerality (Kingham 2021). Long used
in a disciplinary role, prisoners have been given poor quality food or no
food at all. The notorious Nutraloaf, sometimes called “prison loaf” or
the “disciplinary loaf ” is one example. Purportedly including all the nutri-
ents and calories a person needs, Nutraloaf is a dense, processed food
product that combines wheat bread, carrots, spinach, nondairy milk, and
beans in a baked loaf. As Will McKeithen contends in this special issue,
technological interventions (like Nutraloaf) are forms of disciplinary control
through food, and reveal what pressures to cut costs and increase efficiency
in prisons has meant in food provisioning. Similarly, Impact Justice’s recent
report finds, food can be a site for punishment in the US and reflects
how the penal system views incarcerated people as undeserving of basic
life necessities (Soble, Stroud, and Weinstein 2020). High concentrations
of industrially processed foods, rampant dietary health conditions, struc-
tural food safety gaps, foodborne illness outbreaks, little to no respect for
differences in food culture, psychological trauma from constant surveillance
during eating, low to no wages for kitchen and cooking work, price goug-
ing of food by corporately controlled commissaries and privatization of
prison food more broadly, and constrained opportunities to hold prisons
and jails accountable together reflect the carceral plantation logics meant
to confine and control people through food technologies.
But carceral logics permeate the experience of eating in general for poor,
Black, and Brown people. Although certainly a condition of prison life,
the carceral modes of control embedded in accessing food on the outside
compel reliance on the state for often inadequate food provisions (Dickinson
2019), an irony given how the state in concert with agricultural and food
business interests produce hunger as a carceral means to shore up control
over land and labor at the cost to racialized groups (Williams and Freshour).
The food system reflects the everyday realities of state-sponsored nutrition
programs and the indignities of interfacing with emergency food sources.
But where there is the disciplinary role of food, there is also the creative
role. As Sylvia Wynter writes, even enslaved Black people used small plots
of land to grow vegetables of their choosing. In one way, growing was a
necessity; but in another, these plots, or what she calls “secretive histories,”
cultivated freedom dreams and autonomy in plain sight (Wynter 1971;
McKittrick 2013). In her work on art in the context of mass incarceration,
Nicole R. Fleetwood (2020) defines carceral esthetics as “the production
of art under the conditions of unfreedom; it involves the creative use of
penal space, time, and matter” (25). Extending this definition to food,
many of the articles included in this special issue are engaging food as a
form of carceral esthetics but not simply to make something pleasing to
FOOD AND FOODWAYS 9
the eye. As Elissa Underwood Marek’s article demonstrates, cooking food
in prisons is a creative process that involves what Fleetwood (2020) refers
to as “fugitive planning” to “clandestinely construct other worlds, ones
that speak to and through captivity” (25). In the following section, we
elaborate on how these fugitive planning and worldmaking practices pro-
vide an avenue for thinking and theorizing food through the lens of
abolitionism.
Abolitionism and food
As many activists and scholars note, food justice offers a vision for elim-
inating systems of oppression both within and beyond the food system
(Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Cadieux and Slocum 2015; Penniman 2018;
Sbicca 2018; Garth and Reese 2020). One of our aims here is to connect
the ongoing work of food justice to theories of abolition. As Sara Black
argues in this special issue, abolitionist thought is not only already inform-
ing food justice activism grounded in decolonial analysis and the Black
Radical Tradition (e.g., DuBois 1998 [1935]; Robinson 2000; McKittrick
2006) but also should be more deeply integrated into critical food schol-
arship to center experiences of collective trauma and the need for healing
work, the significance of struggles over land, and the value of building
solidarities across difference.
There has long been a current within food justice and food sovereignty
praxis of iteratively imagining and working toward transformative change
(Patel 2009; Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011).
This critical food studies body of work partially responds to the broader
food movement focus on environmentally sustainable food practices by
explicitly attending to capitalism and racism in the food system (Goodman,
DuPuis, and Goodman 2012; Guthman 2014). In this way it shares some
similar observations and political commitments with abolitionists’ conten-
tion that we have to “change everything” if we want a prisonless society—
that is a society free of all oppression—and that it will take concerted
organizing to get there (Kaba 2021; Gilmore 2022).
This kind of work is important to provide a foundation for thinking
about what DuBois (1998 [1935]) and later Davis (2005) refer to as “abo-
lition democracy,” namely a condition that not only entails the dismantling
of institutions, but their replacement with socially just alternatives. This
process of abolition, which would entail revolutionizing food systems,
cultures, and relations, is therefore relational. “An abolitionist approach …
would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and
institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social
and ideological landscapes of our society” (Davis 2003: 107). Abolitionist
10 A. M. REESE AND J. SBICCA
thought offers a radical horizon for reimagining the study of food beyond
only fighting against what is but rather to working toward collective lib-
eration wherein all people’s needs are met with care. With that in mind,
Savannah Shange (2019) cautions against using abolition as a synonym for
resistance, instead arguing that abolition “encompasses the ways in which
Black people and our accomplices work within, against, and beyond the
state in the service of a collective liberation. As an analytic, abolition
demands specificity” (10). In this special issue, we turn to food as an
avenue for exploring abolition as a radical horizon, offering the analytical
specificity that Shange argues is essential to abolitionist praxis.
Like Black radical imaginations that have enriched the understanding of
many forms of liberation, abolition can offer the chance for what Robin
D.G. Kelley (2002) calls “freedom dreaming.” If prison and its carceral
tentacles link institutions to produce unfreedom then it is important to
consider how food becomes a site for advancing freedom, and as Charlene
Carruthers (2018) and Savannah Shange (2019) suggest, ultimately libera-
tion. There is a small body of literature on prison foodways and resistance
that offers an inkling of why abolitionist thought can push forward these
conversations (e.g., Smith 2002; Godderis 2006; Ugelvik 2011; Smoyer 2016).
For much of this literature, food becomes a site for incarcerated people to
exert agency in an otherwise restricted context. Smuggling food from the
kitchen and commissary, preparing meals in cells that provide a taste of
home, constructing dishes that reflect agentic ethnoracial and gender iden-
tities, and fostering conviviality across social differences are just a few of
the ways that incarcerated people hold onto a vision of freedom.
Abolitionism can drive this analysis further with respect to how the
prison food industrial complex structures eating and starving in prison.
Instead of seeing food in prison in isolation, it is important to connect
it to outside flows of capital that maintain a corporate hold on prison
food. Divestment campaigns to cut off institutionalized carceral linkages
offer an opportunity to think about radical politics outside of prisons in
solidarity with incarcerated people. For example, Uprooted and Rising—a
people of color led coalition of campus and community-based networks
fighting for food sovereignty—pushes universities to cut contracts with
Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass Group, all of which provide industrial
food both for the penal system and educational system. By imagining food
and penal systems free of corporate consolidation and control, ethnoracial
and gendered forms of exploitation, and violence, these activists open
space for radical alternatives. As a radical praxis that assumes a carcer-
al-free society is best for all, abolition does not require having all the
“right” answers. Instead, abolitionists like Mariame Kaba remind us that
a society in which carceral institutions and practices are not the answer
FOOD AND FOODWAYS 11
to social problems is something that none of us have known in our life-
times. As such, abolition is necessarily experimental.
Abolitionism challenges food system models that privilege corporate and
state power by centering alternatives based in the situated knowledges of Black,
Indigenous, Latinx, queer, women, and other marginalized groups. Too often,
food activists, especially those with greater privileges, frame the food system
as broken and failing people and the environment. This leads to deficit focused
solutions, like when the way to ameliorate a lack of healthy food in poor
communities of color is to simply drop in a grocery store. Food sovereignty
and justice activist and scholar Eric Holt-Giménez questions this type of ahis-
torical thinking: “To call the food system broken is to believe that it once
worked well … . This would mean ignoring the three centuries of violence
and destruction characterizing global food systems … . The food system is
not broken; rather it is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed
to work” (56). Part of the violence referred to in this quote is carceral in
nature. As Rice shows in this issue, the US federal government purposefully
structured extraterritorial spaces like Indian reservations and prisons to control
agricultural systems and access to food for Indigenous and Black people.
Abolitionist analyses begin with these kinds of histories to trace opportunities
to create self-determined alternatives that recover cultural foodways and access
to land to build food systems predicated on care and healing (c.f. Mihesuah
and Hoover 2019; White 2018). Similarly, in this special issue we offer grounded
analyses of carceral modes of control related to food and how food can become
a tool for liberation.
Abolitionism also politicizes liberation struggles through the body and
mind. This emerges from the analyses of people who have direct encounters
with what Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five,4 refers to as the “crim-
inal injustice system” (c.f. Shakur 1987; Abu-Jamal 1996). One of the main
carceral functions of this system is to produce a disciplined and obedient
subject. The body and mind become frontline spaces for resistance, spaces
to repel penal authority and take flight beyond the embodied and psycho-
logical layers of cages. Food plays prominently in these efforts. Hunger
strikes, which as Becca Chalit Hernandez notes in her article in this special
issue, are a tactic long used by incarcerated people to protest inhumane
conditions and work toward broader political goals. Using the case of Latinx
immigrants imprisoned in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma,
Washington, she reveals that while people have engaged in hunger strikes
to target the violence, poor food, and terrible wages wearing on their bodies,
hunger strikes can also elevate consciousness by making claims that invert
criminal responsibility onto the state and imagine abolition alternatives to
a racist immigration system. In another way, Underwood Marek shows
through an analysis of cookbooks developed and written by incarcerated
12 A. M. REESE AND J. SBICCA
people that recipes are a means for radical storytelling and imagining worlds
of care and conviviality. By reinterpreting the cookbook as a tool for con-
sciousness raising and political education about the criminal injustice system,
incarcerated people reach free people through their stomachs.
Carcerality, abolitionism, and future food studies?
How can we push the importance of focusing on food for abolition orga-
nizing? given the history of policing and prisons and recent well-docu-
mented and publicized extrajudicial killings and assaults, mass attention
has necessarily focused on these punitive institutions. But beyond the
handcuffs and cages are many everyday forms of violence that shape lives.
Abolitionists theorize abolition as a total transformation of society because
they understand that the carceral will not disappear just because we do
not have police and prisons. Plantation logics could still permeate the
food system. Carceral modes of control and discipline could still structure
who lives and who dies via their relationship to food.
So perhaps we can start not only asking what future prison abolition
anticipates and creates, but also of carceral-free food systems. By opening
space for critical research and conversation that links our analyses of what
is to what might be, we can begin to break out of the mental and con-
ceptual constraints that obstruct working toward liberation. This is as much
a political project as it is a project to restructure knowledge production.
One of the goals of this special issue is to explicitly tie food justice
efforts to the decades-long liberation work that abolitionists have led.
Abolition gives us an opportunity to make life sustainable more broadly.
Even if we abolish prisons we still have to eat. Instead of thinking about
food as an afterthought, how do we make it central to the work of abo-
lition and conversely, how do we make abolition a central organizing
principle within food justice movements?
Notes
1. For more on the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program and its inuence see: Alon-
dra Nelson’s Body and Soul: e Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical
Discrimination; Mumia Abdul-Jamal’s We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther
Party; and Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiacas’s Liberation, Imagination, and
the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Black Panthers and eir Legacy.
2. M4BL updated their policy platform in 2020, reorganizing it as a list of demands along
with key actions and legislation: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/
3. For more in-depth analyses exploring debates over reformist reforms and non-reformist
reforms/abolition, see Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? Naomi Murakawa’s e
First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, and Mariam Kaba’s We D o i s
‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.
4. Formerly known as the Central Park Five
FOOD AND FOODWAYS 13
ORCID
Ashanté M. Reese http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2071-4636
Joshua Sbicca http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8106-4713
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