Abstract

Based on a case study of Washington State prison food policy and practice, this article traces the use of nutritionism as an enabling epistemology of mass incarceration in the neoliberal era in the United States. To develop this argument, the author develops the concept of carceral nutrition, or ideologies of food and eating that reduce complex relations of nourishment to biopolitical calculations of nutrition in the interests of discipline, punishment, control, and confinement. Under the pressures of neoliberal austerity, narrowly defined nutritionism ensures cheap sustenance and biopolitical control while maintaining a veneer of scientific legitimacy and liberal beneficence. This article also considers recent efforts to improve prison food through state-based reform and enhanced nutritional standards. These reforms, however, reinforce reductionary nutritionism and cede epistemic authority over “good” food to the carceral state. Drawing on the political theory of prison abolitionism, the author calls for non-reformist approaches to food justice that foster non-carceral relations of food and eating and support collective liberation and human flourishing.

摘要

本文基于华盛顿州监狱食品政策和实践的案例研究，追溯了营养主义作为美国新自由主义时代大规模监禁的支持认识论的使用。为了发展这一论点，作者发展了监狱营养的概念，或食物和饮食的意识形态，将营养的复杂关系简化为出于纪律、惩罚、控制和监禁的利益而对营养的生命政治计算。在新自由主义紧缩政策的压力下，狭义的营养主义确保廉价的生计和生物政治控制，同时保持科学合法性和自由主义慈善的外表。本文还考虑了最近通过国家改革和提高营养标准来改善监狱食物的努力。然而，这些改革 加强减少营养主义，将“好”食物的认知权威让给监狱国家。借鉴废除监狱主义的政治理论，作者呼吁对食品正义采取非改革主义的方法，以促进食品和饮食的非监禁关系，支持集体解放和人类繁荣。