Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

This paper examines the production and dissemination of texts by international governing institutions concerning the relationship between food and gender as objects of knowledge that need to be managed, in particular as they are heralded by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Through a discourse analysis of gender perspective in contemporary international food policy, I argue that the current confluence of the health and agriculture sectors under the term “food security” obeys a global political economy that allowed the rise of nutrition science as a discursive machine that transforms nutrients into commodities. The global discourse on “food security” shifted in the early 1990s from world food security to household food security. Here I bring gender to the center to explore how this shift of scale away from the global and into the individual has had effects on the ongoing medicalization of childcare and motherhood. Building on biopolitics scholarship, the understanding of human life as biological that favors the creation and exploitation of nutrients as biovalue allowed nutrition to gain prominence in the international policy landscape. International agricultural trade had centered in the biotechnification of the reproduction of foodstuff, leading to the massive production and commercialization of nutrients. A new discourse on nutrition provided a biological understanding of care, where nutrients became central objects of development policy, parallel to rural women. A new subjectivity of women as caregivers was set in motion that was congruent with the expansion and abundance of nutrients in the marketplace.