Available From UC Press

Based on ethnographic fieldwork from Santa Barbara, California, this book sheds light on the ways that food insecurity prevails in women’s experiences of migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. As women grapple with the pervasive conditions of poverty that hinder efforts at getting enough to eat, they find few options for alleviating the various forms of suffering that accompany food insecurity. Examining how constraints on eating and feeding translate to the uneven distribution of life chances across borders and how “food security” comes to dominate national policy in the United States, this book argues for understanding women’s relations to these processes as inherently biopolitical.

Megan A. Carney is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, The Conversation, and Civil Eats.

"The Unending Hunger is a lucid, hard-hittting, and gripping ethnography of Mexican and Central American women migrants in Santa Barbara County, California. Carney unveils the harsh indignities and structural causes of their food insecurity as well as their creative and defiant struggles to eat and live well."—Carole Counihan, coeditor of Food Activism: Agency, Democracy, and Economy

"In this beautiful and incisive ethnography, Carney debunks common conceptualizations about food security and insecurity; in the process, she exposes immigrant women’s formidable capacity to survive structural constraints, deep social inequalities, and assaults from neoliberal politics and the inhospitable contexts where they arrive. This is an important and highly recommended book."—Cecilia Menjívar, author of Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala

"In this beautifully crafted book, Megan Carney gives voice to the suffering of immigrant Latinas expected to provide care for their families while being systematically denied the means to do so. At once a theoretical intervention in the debates on the biopolitics of food in/security and a passionate call for a new, gender-sensitive politics of food, Carney’s book represents the best of the new ethnographies of migration, food politics, and slow death of vulnerable populations in our neoliberal times."—Susan Greenhalgh, Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University and author of My BMI, My Self: The Hidden Costs of America’s War on Fat