Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South

The role of food and hunger in contemporary South African and Indian environmental writing

From GMOs to vegetarianism and veganism, questions of what we should (and shouldn’t) eat can be frequent sources of debate and disagreement. In Precarious Eating, Ben Jamieson Stanley asks how recentering global South representations of food might shift understandings of environmental precarity.

Precarious Eating follows the lead of writers and thinkers in South Africa and India who are tracing the production and consumption of food, exploring ways to reconnect our narratives about climate change, global capitalism, and social justice. Taking up a diverse range of novels, films, scholar/activist writings, intellectual histories, and cookbooks, Stanley connects the ethics of eating to histories of empire and apartheid, uneven globalization, gender and sexuality, and global South experiences of climate change. They shift the lens of environmental humanities from climate-focused paradigms developed in the global North to food-focused environmental culture and activism in the South, addressing topics that range from foraging and farmer suicides to disordered eating and queer intimacy.

By highlighting authors, activists, and environments of the global South, Precarious Eating joins with scholarship from postcolonial, decolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies to underscore how capitalism and empire shape our planetary environmental crisis.