Seeing Water in Food: A Hydrosocial Analysis of Almond Agriculture in California and Spain

This article illustrates how food is hydrosocial: a medium through which people and water are entangled, with world-shaping consequences. We bring food geography and water geography into closer dialogue, developing a framework to analyze how water becomes embedded in the production of particular foods. Our focus is the rise of irrigation-intensive almond production in California and Spain. For millennia the almond was a drought-tolerant plant supporting low-input, resilient agriculture in marginal landscapes. Now, over 90 percent of the world’s almonds come from heavily irrigated monocrops that deplete local water and are vulnerable to climatic shocks. Narrating almond intensification as a process of hydrosocial reconfiguration, we offer three insights. First, we trace how a food’s water needs are not biologically given but emerge within specific hydrosocial configurations. Second, we show how efforts toward efficient water use can exacerbate the vulnerabilities they promise to resolve. Third, we show how hydrosocial logics travel through food, territorializing new landscapes and generating uneven outcomes in distant places. We conclude by drawing out implications for geographical research on food–water relations.