The University of Arizona Press
Commod Bods
Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity
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.
Food is critical to cultural survival and affirmation. For Choctaw people, the intentional demise of traditional foodways and dependence on federal food programs are specific experiences that inform part of what it means to be Choctaw today.
“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
