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Based on ethnographic fieldwork from Santa Barbara, California, this book sheds light on the ways that food insecurity prevails in women's experiences of migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. As women grapple with the pervasive conditions of poverty that hinder efforts at getting enough to eat, they find few options for alleviating the various forms of suffering that accompany food insecurity. Examining how constraints on eating and feeding translate to the uneven distribution of life chances across borders and how \"food security\" comes to dominate national policy in the United States, this book argues for understanding women's relations to these processes as inherently biopolitical.

As evidenced by classroom experiences in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, microbes are “good to teach with” not only within microbiology and related fields but across a variety of academic disciplines. Thinking with microbes is not a neutral process but one shaped by social, political, and economic processes. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic introduced unique challenges to teaching at the university level, while also heightening awareness of existing social and health disparities as these shaped interactions and influenced learning outcomes in class settings. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic data, this article reflects on teaching about human-microbial relations in the context of the course “Anthropology of Food” and specifically at the start of the pandemic. Data demonstrate how students shifted from demystifying microbes to distrusting microbes to reacquainting with microbes through a hands-on experiment with fermentation. The article introduces a microbiopolitical perspective in interpreting students' learning trajectories and ultimate course outcomes. IMPORTANCE As evidenced by classroom experiences in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, microbes are “good to teach with” not only within microbiology and related fields but across a variety of academic disciplines. Thinking with microbes is not a neutral process but one shaped by social, political, and economic processes. Imploring students to contemplate how power dynamics and patterns of inequality are detectable at the microbial level may offer a unique opportunity for transforming one’s view of the world and our relatedness with both humans and nonhumans.

Global climate change and the continued neoliberalization of food systems have exacerbated levels of food insecurity and hunger, producing an ever-expanding population of displaced persons who are also nutritionally vulnerable. Restrictive immigration policies in post-arrival and resettlement contexts compound with other cultural, social, political, and economic conditions to negatively affect the food security and health of displaced persons. This article engages a comparative ethnographic perspective for examining the migration-food security nexus. Drawing on ethnographic research with Mexican and Central American im/migrants in the Western United States, Haitian im/migrants in the Dominican Republic, and African im/migrant populations in Italy, this article analyzes local experiences of food insecurity in restrictive immigration policy contexts through an intersectional lens. Finally, this article examines the possibilities for engaged research oriented toward generating “healthy publics” and addressing food insecurity across disparate geographical and political settings and amid structural and social constraints.

For years now, the United States has faced an \"obesity epidemic\" that, according to the dominant narrative, is harming the nation by worsening the health burden, raising health costs, and undermining productivity. Much of the responsibility is laid at the foot of Blacks and Latinos, who have higher levels of obesity. Latinos have provoked particular concern because of their rising numbers. Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Campaign is now targeting Latinos. Like the national anti-obesity campaign, it locates the problem in ignorance and calls on the Latino community to \"own\" the issue and take personal responsibility by embracing healthier beliefs and behaviors. In this article, we argue that this dominant approach to obesity is misguided and damaging because it ignores the political-economic sources of Latino obesity and the political-moral dynamics of biocitizenship in which the issue is playing out. Drawing on two sets of ethnographic data on Latino immigrants and United States-born Latinos in southern California, we show that Latinos already \"own\" the obesity issue; far from being \"ignorant,\" they are fully aware of the importance of a healthy diet, exercise, and normal weight. What prevents them from becoming properly thin, fit biocitizens are structural barriers associated with migration and assimilation into the low-wage sector of the US economy. Failure to attain the normative body has led them to internalize the identity of bad citizens, assume personal responsibility for their failure, naturalize the conditions for this failure, and feel that they deserve this fate. We argue that the blaming of minorities for the obesity epidemic constitutes a form of symbolic violence that furthers what Berlant calls the \"slow death\" of structurally vulnerable populations, even as it deepens their health risks by failing to address the fundamental sources of their higher weights.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic introduced unique challenges to teaching at the university level, while also heightening awareness of existing social and health disparities as these shaped interactions and influenced learning outcomes in class settings. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic data, this article reflects on teaching about human-microbial relations in the context of the course “Anthropology of Food” and specifically at the start of the pandemic. Data demonstrate how students shifted from demystifying microbes to distrusting microbes to reacquainting with microbes through a hands-on experiment with fermentation. The article introduces a microbiopolitical perspective in interpreting students' learning trajectories and ultimate course outcomes. IMPORTANCE As evidenced by classroom experiences in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, microbes are “good to teach with” not only within microbiology and related fields but across a variety of academic disciplines. Thinking with microbes is not a neutral process but one shaped by social, political, and economic processes. Imploring students to contemplate how power dynamics and patterns of inequality are detectable at the microbial level may offer a unique opportunity for transforming one’s view of the world and our relatedness with both humans and nonhumans.

In this article, I examine the various meanings of Mexican and Central American migrant women's utilization of private food assistance programs. I present findings from 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2011 with migrant women, public health workers, and staff and volunteers of food assistance programs in Santa Barbara County, California. I discuss the barriers undocumented women face in accessing formal health care and the social and moral obligations that underpin these women's role in feeding others. I also document the ways in which private food assistance programs are orienting toward a focus on health in service delivery, and how women depend on provisions from these programs to support feeding practices at home. I argue that these findings are significant for current engagement by critical medical anthropologists in studying framings of \"the clinic\" and cultural beliefs about \"deservingness.\"

Social and political policy, human activities, and environmental change affect the ways in which microbial communities assemble and interact with people. These factors determine how different social groups are exposed to beneficial and/or harmful microorganisms, meaning microbial exposure has an important socioecological justice context. Social and political policy, human activities, and environmental change affect the ways in which microbial communities assemble and interact with people. These factors determine how different social groups are exposed to beneficial and/or harmful microorganisms, meaning microbial exposure has an important socioecological justice context. Therefore, greater consideration of microbial exposure and social equity in research, planning, and policy is imperative. Here, we identify 20 research questions considered fundamentally important to promoting equitable exposure to beneficial microorganisms, along with safeguarding resilient societies and ecosystems. The 20 research questions we identified span seven broad themes, including the following: (i) sociocultural interactions; (ii) Indigenous community health and well-being; (iii) humans, urban ecosystems, and environmental processes; (iv) human psychology and mental health; (v) microbiomes and infectious diseases; (vi) human health and food security; and (vii) microbiome-related planning, policy, and outreach. Our goal was to summarize this growing field and to stimulate impactful research avenues while providing focus for funders and policymakers.

This article examines how state practices around food contribute to the militarization of the migration experience. Specifically, I argue for more attention to the feeding practices of detention centers in particular, as the topic of food has been relatively absent from critical analyses of surveillance, detention, and deportation of unauthorized migrants. In the case of detention centers, depriving detainees of food is a primary mode of constructing detainee subjectivity. I present evidence of how detention systems both reinforce the logic of contemporary biopolitics by exacting discipline on migrant bodies through the provision of “border meals,” and extract value from detainees’ bodies in the form of profits for private industry. In looking to identify possible pathways toward change in this system, I suggest that there are problems with attempting to dismantle current detention practices by relying on a discourse that foregrounds detainees’ “trauma.” Instead, I argue that we may find migrants’ enacting resistance to the larger structures in which a system of detention in embedded through re-interpreting everyday expressions of affect.