The University of Arizona Press
May 14, 2026
The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Kasey Jernigan author of Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity. Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She received her doctorate in medical anthropology and a graduate certificate in Native American Indigenous studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s in public health from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
When asked about how hearing stories from her grandmother helped her connect to women she interviewed for the book, Jernigan said, “Growing up in an Indian community in Oklahoma, I watched people I loved like my grandmother, mother, and father struggle with things like diabetes, high blood pressure, and poverty—illnesses that felt like they were just part of life. We normalized it. When someone died at an early age from a heart attack, it was like we just expected it, no one asked questions, no one asked why. And the stories I heard growing up definitely came through in this ethnography. This book is my attempt to make the argument in full that colonial policies get written in our bodies across generations.”
Listen to the full podcast here.
About the book:
The term “commod bod” is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs.
In Commod Bods, Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of 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 of Oklahoma.
Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as “Food and Fellowship” and “Heritage, Embodied” center personal stories that show how food is not only sustenance but also a site of connection, resistance, and meaning making.
