Justice of eating in the city: the political ecology of urban hunger

I can think of no configuration of socionatural relations more debilitating to human potential than the one that produces hunger. Without food, human bodies simply cannot exist. Human bodies that do not consume a sufficient quantity of food, or food that does not contain sufficient nutritional quality simply cannot function. Without enough food, the everyday processes necessary for social production and reproduction become daunting and/or impossible. Human bodies are produced through socio-metabolic processes that link their existence to external processes that produce food. The same socio-metabolic processes necessitate that human bodies produce different types of nature as the result of socio-physical processes that are themselves constituted through relations of social and political power and through a wide assortment of cultural meanings (see Haraway 1991; 1997; Chapter 1 of this book).