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Whose adequacy? (Re)imagining food security with displaced women in Medellín, Colombia

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Abstract

Food security scholarship and policy tends to embrace the nutrition status of individual men, women and children as the end-goal of food security efforts. While there has been much value in investigating and trying to ensure sufficient nutrition for struggling households around the world, this overriding emphasis on nutrition status has reduced our understandings of what constitutes food adequacy. While token attention has been paid to more qualitative ideas like “cultural appropriateness,” food security scholars and policy makers have been unable to understand the broader value of food, which exceeds its caloric and nutrient counts. Drawing on empirical work from Medellín, Colombia, the paper argues that having adequate food means much more than simply sufficient nutrient intake, perhaps especially among marginalized groups. Exploring the case of food insecure women from Colombia who were forcibly displaced from rural to urban, we demonstrate how understandings of food adequacy must consider the social and environmental imaginaries of marginalized groups.

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Notes

  1. This meal was not conducted as a one-time ‘intervention’ but rather as a shared experience that simultaneously enabled the co-creation of data and the strengthening of bonds among the women.

  2. The negativity refers to the women, and not necessarily the children, as many mothers expressed worries that their children enjoyed and were quite accustomed to processed urban foods, e.g., chips.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded in part through a grant from the Temple University Faculty Senate.

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  1. Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Allison Hayes-Conroy & Elizabeth L. Sweet

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  1. Allison Hayes-Conroy
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Correspondence to Allison Hayes-Conroy.

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Hayes-Conroy, A., Sweet, E.L. Whose adequacy? (Re)imagining food security with displaced women in Medellín, Colombia. Agric Hum Values 32, 373–384 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9546-y

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