Description
Food and beverage encompass visceral dimensions of being (taste, texture, smell, sight, temperature) and security (from identity and belonging, to scarcity and access) that bring interconnected challenges into focus, speaking directly to the UN Secretary-General’s report, Our Common Agenda. For this paper, I focus on implications for ontological security given us/them dynamics of inclusion and exclusion around food. This includes politics and power (for example grain shipments out of Ukraine), cost and access (for example implications from climate change and inequality), and individual expression and collective identity (for example debates over who “belongs”, who is “authentic”, and what historical memories are voiced, or silenced, to legitimize political claims). Temporally, identities are often associated with foods that maintain a past, authenticity politics asserting present selves, or challenges to tradition through future innovation. In spatial terms, food labels are associated with specific geographies and traditions, through legal and discursive paths. Through this paper I employ an interpretive relational discourse analysis to better understand us/them identity dynamics and ontological (in)security, responding to the question “What can International Studies contribute to a Summit of the Future?” by engaging with the international politics of food, authenticity, and (non)belonging.
