The role of food and hunger in contemporary South African and Indian environmental writing
 

From GMOs to vegetarianism and veganism, questions of what we should (and shouldn’t) eat can be frequent sources of debate and disagreement. In Precarious Eating, Ben Jamieson Stanley asks how recentering global South representations of food might shift understandings of environmental precarity.

Precarious Eating follows the lead of writers and thinkers in South Africa and India who are tracing the production and consumption of food, exploring ways to reconnect our narratives about climate change, global capitalism, and social justice. Taking up a diverse range of novels, films, scholar/activist writings, intellectual histories, and cookbooks, Stanley connects the ethics of eating to histories of empire and apartheid, uneven globalization, gender and sexuality, and global South experiences of climate change. They shift the lens of environmental humanities from climate-focused paradigms developed in the global North to food-focused environmental culture and activism in the South, addressing topics that range from foraging and farmer suicides to disordered eating and queer intimacy. 

By highlighting authors, activists, and environments of the global South, Precarious Eating joins with scholarship from postcolonial, decolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies to underscore how capitalism and empire shape our planetary environmental crisis.

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Ben Jamieson Stanley is assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware. Their work has been published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The Global South, The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism Online, and the edited collections Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde and Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction.

"Precarious Eating is a richly theorized, beautifully written, and politically urgent book. As Ben Jamieson Stanley brilliantly demonstrates, contemporary South African and Indian fiction speaks to food justice and climate change by representing famine and agricultural labor, cuisine and consumption, and water scarcity and purity politics. This eloquent and timely study advances the vital role of food studies within the environmental humanities."—Catherine Keyser, author of Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions

"Precarious Eating stages a thought-provoking conversation across the fields of food studies, postcolonial thought, and ecocriticism centered on the global South. Scholars of topics as varied as hunger and famine, food commodities, the environmentalism of the poor, and the tangled politics of ethical eating will find much to admire in this book."—Parama Roy, author of Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial