Description:
This book explores the ways that shifting participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly obesity and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation.
Review Quotes:
"Jernigan's eloquently written book is a significant contribution to southeastern American Indian studies, and it offers wider insights into how the field of Indigenous studies has theorized the precarity of Indigenous women. Focusing on the structural inequity of transformed foodways and health outcomes in the daily lives of Choctaw women in Oklahoma, this book historicizes the embodied violence of colonialism even as it emphasizes the adaptability of Choctaw resilience grounded in community, narrative, and cultural heritage."--Jodi A. Byrd, author of Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession
"Commod Bods is an exciting new contribution to Indigenous studies and medical anthropology. This impressively detailed study with individuals from the Choctaw Nation reveals the vital connections between food systems designed to produce poor health outcomes and food necessary for survival. Through shared storytelling and detailed study of historical trauma, structural violence, and questions of the meaning of obesity, Jernigan fosters critical questioning of binaries and enters into a nuanced conversation about the intersections as exhausting and vital to understanding personal and embodied experience."--Juliet McMullin, author of The Healthy Ancestor: Embodied Inequality and the Revitalization of Native Hawaiian Healt