As the world recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, political instability and conflict exacerbate the global food security crisis. While international organizations define food security in a material sense, indicating that food be effectively omnipresent, smaller scale measures of food security – and food insecurity – incorporate affective experience. Thus, food (in)security is an illusion created by individuals’ sense of their capacity to reliably access food, not by the permanent material presence of food itself. This dissertation defines food access – a critical component of food (in)security which is more often defined by measurements than by conceptual development – and situates it within the political economies of rural and urban life in Municipio Cabrera, Provincia Maria Trinidad Sanchez, Dominican Republic. Through ethnographic research spanning nearly a decade, I demonstrate that reflexive relationships between consumers and food resources shape the material world through market expectations, gender dynamics, mobility, history, and more. Local decisions and circumstances reflect and refract larger iv scale policy decisions as informal economies and impermanent food resources arise to fill the gaps that policy does not cover. This work concludes with a discussion of political approaches that anticipate or encourage impermanent and informal solutions to food insecurity by cultivating opportunities for food access – a place where alimentary and economic forces meet and interact.
