Postmodern Conceptualizations, Modernist Applications: Rethinking the Role of Society in Food Security

Edward Carr, University of South Carolina

Abstract

Food security studies, while giving ever more attention to issues of perception and local knowledge in food outcomes, have yet to engage in a systematic discussion of the role played by society in food outcomes. While contemporary studies of food outcomes address issues of the social, especially as social structures relate to access to and production of food, this literature lacks an accompanying theory of the social that might lend it broad, cross-contextual coherence. This article identifies a means of systematically approaching how actors apprehend and negotiate the complex factors and connections from which they fashion food outcomes by applying postmodern theories of power and knowledge to the study of society's role in food outcomes. In developing this approach, I employ postmodern theory not merely to critique current approaches to the study of food outcomes, but to further a modernist goal, a world with less hunger. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.