Eating ourselves safe: intersections of food, militarisms, and national security in Sweden

This paper takes up the ‘question’ of military power (Basham, Belkin and Gifkins 2015: 1) by inviting the reader to accompany us on the most mundane of tasks: our weekly shop. A recent advertising campaign launched by Lantbrukarnars Riksförbund, Sweden’s agricultural association, compels shoppers to buy Swedish produce ‘for Sweden’ – declaring it Sweden’s best / tastiest defence – thereby depicting Sweden’s agricultural sector as the first line of defence in a larger quest for national security. Curious about the effect of such a narrative on the everyday innocuity of the supermarket, we began to ask how processes of militarisation might (re)configure the Swedish family, what relations of power this enables / conceals, and for what purposes. Drawing from an established tradition of feminist critical military scholars seeking knowledge of militarisms far from the battlefield, we use this campaign as a jumping off point to interrogate the ways in which militarisation functions in Swedish society. In particular, we investigate the role of homemaking – and associated dynamics of gender, race and class – in the politics of national security and the implications of this for Sweden’s global security ambitions.