American Space of Hunger

In this dissertation I examine the United States as a space of hunger. While geographers have analyzed hunger in other places around the world, especially in the Third World, they have generally neglected to explain its occurrence in the American context. I begin by taking to heart Sayer's observation that social objects are intrinsically meaningful and examine the ways in which hunger has been conceptualized in the United States and, therefore, measured, mapped, and addressed in policy and politics. Next I develop a theoretical framework for explaining hunger, drawing upon the ideas of scholars who have studied food deprivation in the United States and elsewhere. The framework, echoing primarily the terminology and ideas of the geographer Michael Watts, is called the "sphere of food security", a historically and geographically defined social space consisting of three sets of causal forces – termed entitlement, empowerment, and political economy – that shapes the ability of people to reliably obtain food. I apply the framework to the U.S. in order to generate a multi-faceted understanding of hunger in that place context. First, I show that the ability of Americans to avoid hunger and achieve food security depends primarily on their access to food channels governed primarily by market relations and secondarily by rights of citizenship and state policies, while access to food channels governed by private relations of affinity and community (i.e. charity), though important on an individual basis, is insufficient to provide the basis for individual or household food security. Second, I show how the social relations in which food channels are embedded have changed in the decades leading up to the late 1990s. In general the anti-hunger political system forged in the late 1960s was eroded by an ascendant neoliberal ideology and the political economic shift from Fordism/Welfarism to Flexibilism/Workfarism. Third, I analyze the map of hunger in the United States, revealing its spatial distribution to be a function of three composite economic and social forces. Finally, I conclude with a case study of hunger in Washington state, a place with an unexpectedly high rate of hunger due to recent political economic dynamics and internal differentiation.