‘Staying With the Trouble’ of Food Security in Social Work

Climate change and disaster events has brought heightened awareness of the fragility of food systems and the need to ensure all people have consistent access to affordable and nutritious food. Food security is a foremost example of the closely intertwined relationship between humans and nature. However, despite our reliance on food, much of the scholarly literature on food security relegates ecological systems merely as the means to support self-sufficient, independent human-life. These longstanding colonial, modernist assumptions of humans as separate, exceptional and superior to nature are bound up with the pressing problem of food system degradation in the Anthropocene. Eco-social work scholarship disputes the separateness of human and more-than-human life and calls on social workers to draw on ecological justice principles in their practices. In this paper, I utilise feminist posthumanist concepts to examine a local food security example in the post-disaster context of Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. This case study analysis demonstrates how environmentally just practices are inextricably connected to human concerns and biopolitics in food security. Accounting for the entanglement of humans and nature, the paper also makes vital contributions to posthumanist reformulations of justice, care and ethics in social work.