Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Geology and Geography

Committee Chair

Bradley Wilson

Committee Member

Cynthia Gorman

Committee Member

Brent McCusker

Committee Member

Jamie Shinn

Committee Member

Amy Trauger

Abstract

Produce prescription programs, interventions operating at the intersection of food access and public health, are steadily increasing in number across the United States since 2010. I leverage key informant interviews, participant observations, and event ethnographies to form a four-year institutional ethnography of the implementation of produce prescriptions within West Virginia alongside a legal-policy archaeology methodology to understand how produce prescriptions have been institutionalized and funded within the US Farm Bill. While much of produce prescription program growth is attributed to an expansion of federal funding starting in 2014, this dissertation demonstrates that these programs and the federal legislation which has come to fund them are part of a prolonged struggle over federal welfare and the construction of nutrition policy. In fact, four discursive frames have structured what problems policies are constructed to address, transforming federal policy to see nutrition and then certain bodies as the ‘problem’ in need of correcting. The research examines an assemblage of social relations, discourses, and practices throughout the implementation of produce prescriptions, why these programs have become popular in West Virginia, and how United States federal nutrition policy has come to focus on these initiatives – and their interventions into specific bodies – as a solution to negative health outcomes and lack of food access. The research finds that while programs meet some acute needs for program participants and provide income for small-scale producers, a decontextualization from wider systemic inequities creates an adherence to certain logics and discourses – namely paternalism, deservingness, and health.

Embargo Reason

Publication Pending

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