ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together the themes from the stories across the province to create a critical dialogue of power, critical consciousness and survival within poverty, through which the author illustrates how food insecurity is never only about food. Within this dialogue, she discusses how food insecurity in the Free State Province is deeply enmeshed in the constructs of race, class, power and culture that shape the multidimensional poverty of the people in the province, in post- apartheid South Africa. Through people’s narratives, we can see how they make meaning of their lives and within this meaning making, the forms of agency they have constructed to confront their food insecurity. The author analyzes the overarching themes that unite the people, as well as their points of divergence within the complexity of societal dynamics in South Africa. Among these themes are: poverty is the new apartheid; the food insecure as theorists of their own realities; the new democracy; the central role of religion; HIV/AIDS, poverty and food security; alcohol abuse, dependence and food insecurity; the central role of multigenerational households; and educational processes within their agency.
