The Social Construction of Food Security: The Israeli Case

” Food securitization” refers to the process by which food supplies are linked to larger security issues or broader notions of human security. While this study is built on the surge of food policy studies that acknowledge the importance of discourse, rhetoric, and labeling in shaping the notion of security there is no empirical research that explicitly examine how securitization process of food policy takes place, why, when and the implications of this. The aim of the study was to examine the contextual events that triggered the securitization of food policy: the actors who used food security rhetoric, and the institutional measures they suggested for solving food insecurity. By taking a discursive approach, the study quantitatively examined how and why food was securitized during debates on Israeli food policy took place during two time periods: 1948–1950, the years of the implementation of the austerity laws; and 2008–2017, the years of global recession, and the rise of obesity. The study found that the notion of food security was strategically used to define a variety of food-related issues. Each definition of food security was triggered by a variety of events and social contexts such as war, increases in the cost of living, the rise in obesity rates, and global warming. These frames, used throughout the debates, then influenced the actor’s choice of solutions. The study shows that most Israeli actors reacted to food security frames using institutional welfare measures.