From authenticity to attitudes of survival: toward a postcolonial feminist pragmatist ethics of food

This paper advances a postcolonial feminist pragmatist rethinking of food ethics, pivoting from the ethics of choice toward an ethics of necessity. Drawing on a pragmatist account of attitudes as socially formed habits, I conceptualize survival attitudes as relational and affective modes that sustain life under constraint. I critically engage with Uma Narayan and Lisa Heldke, arguing that their frameworks remain anchored in the reflective position of a privileged eater. Consequently, they overlook the material and affective labour through which marginalised subjects endure conditions of coloniality, caste, gender, and migration. Grounding this analysis in narratives by Bene Israel, Jewish women in India, the paper demonstrates how food practices emerge not as expressions of authenticity, but as sites of ethical creativity and responsiveness. Ultimately, survival is presented as generative: ethical life is constituted through embodied practices that sustain worlds amidst deprivation, contradiction, and erasure.