Foodways in migrant detention

Food not only satisfies a biological need but also sits at the centre of human experience. Van der Berghe stresses: ‘Food, and what we do to and with it, is at the very core of sociality.’ Food has long been a way to read a society, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conceptualisation that culinary practices reflect social structures and culture meanings, to the popular saying ‘we are what we eat’. Food is not simply a source of nourishment, it is also a means where identities, social hierarchies, and power relations are expressed. Foodways refer to all cultural practices, traditions, and beliefs surrounding food, from how it is produced and prepared, to how is presented, shared, and consumed. Examining foodways is a way to explore how social, cultural, and political beliefs are materialised through the quotidian act of eating. 

In my most recent article, drawing on the testimonies of people who experienced migrant detention in Mexico, I look at how food functions in these settings: as a tool of physical, emotional, and symbolic punishment, as well as a space where migrants exercise their agency and resist punitive practices of control. In this blog post, I share some takeaways that go beyond the Mexican case and highlight the importance of examining the principles and logics underlying foodways in migrant detention centres.

Migration detention centres as total institutions

To understand the role that food plays in migration detention centres, it is necessary to start from a fundamental premise: these spaces function as what Erving Goffman termed ‘total institutions’, closed and highly regulated environments where one authority controls all aspects of daily life. Within those settings, separation from the outside world means a loss of autonomy in many ways, including food, which shifts from being a personal choice to something regulated and controlled by the institution. 

This is one of many ways migration detention centres resemble prisons. This resemblance reflects what is known as ‘crimmigration’: the integration of logic and tools of the criminal justice system in migration control. The result: human mobility being treated as a crime and migrants as suspects. This perspective also helps explain the trauma, emotional distress, and mental health problems detained migrants experience not simply as failures of the detention system, but as consequences of how it operates. The system is built to control and discourage migration, and it does so by making people suffer, and live in uncertainty, and vulnerability.

Food and punishment

As in other carceral settings, food is an important part of how detention centres operate and how detention is experienced. Meals are daily displays of sovereign power: what is on the plate, when it is served, and under what conditions. Within detention centres, the ordinary practice of eating, takes on extraordinary meaning. In these spaces, food is instrumentalised as a form of control, discipline, and exclusion, thereby reinforcing the ‘politics of hostility’ that governs migrants’ mobility. 

The foodways in migration detention centres show how punishment is organised and enforced through everyday bureaucratic decisions: budgets, contracts, timetables, quantities, and menus – as well as through inadequate institutional oversight and a lack of accountability. This way, food-related violence becomes more a routine practice than an exception, where violence and exclusion towards migrant populations become institutionalised. At the same time, as Irene Vega and I have explored, food allows enforcement agents to cultivate a ‘sense of morality’ about themselves by offering, on an ad hoc and discretionary basis, ‘food relief’ to some migrants.

Reclaiming autonomy

But suspicion runs both ways. Migrants notice exceptions, arbitrary decisions, and punitive practices that shape daily life in detention. They recognise these practices and develop strategies to challenge them: refusing certain foods, complaining about meals or simply eyeing certain dishes with open distrust, they claim spaces of autonomy within an environment designed precisely to restrict it. Far from being passive recipients of the conditions imposed by detention, they claim margins of autonomy and develop forms of agency that enable them to challenge, albeit partially, the mechanisms of control that govern their bodies and lives in detention.

Food, in the end, shows both sides of migrant detention: a system that punishes directly and administratively, and the persistent, everyday ways migrants maintain their dignity and autonomy within it. More than anything, foodways in migration detention speak volumes about our societies, our moral and ethical values, and the ways in which we view the ‘other’ and recognise their humanity and, by extension, our own.