SAFN announces 2026 Thomas Marchione Food-as-a-Human-Right winner

SAFN is honored to recognize Mallory Rose Cerkleski with the 2026 Thomas Marchione Food as a Human Right Award for her ongoing research on food rationing, welfare, and the right to food in Kerala, India. This annual award recognizes student scholars whose work advances Dr. Marchione’s commitment to food justice, food security, and the realization of food as a fundamental human right.

Mallory is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Her dissertation provisionally titled, From Scarcity to Selectivity: A People’s History of Food Rationing in Kerala, India, 1939-1997, examines how food rationing evolved from an emergency wartime measure into an embedded system of social entitlement for all citizens. Through this work, she explores how ordinary people came to understand food access not as charity, but as a legitimate claim on the state.

Drawing on oral history, archival research, and historical anthropology, Mallory investigates how food rationing shaped everyday experiences of citizenship, welfare, and political participation across caste, class, gender, and regional divides. Her research focuses particularly on the voices often absent from official records, including women, Dalits, Adivasis, and working-class communities. By centering lived experiences, memories, and household food practices, she demonstrates how the right to food was negotiated and defended not only through policy but also through everyday acts of care, labor, and collective action.

To date, Mallory has conducted over 65 oral history interviews across Kerala and completed extensive archival research in state archives and research institutions. A central component of her project involves collaborative oral history initiatives with communities, ensuring that knowledge production remains participatory and accountable to those whose experiences are often excluded from historical narratives. In keeping with Dr. Marchione’s commitment to community-engaged scholarship, the full award will support this initiative by compensating community researchers who are conducting interviews within their own communities. Through this approach, the project seeks to preserve histories of food insecurity, rationing, and welfare while fostering more collaborative and inclusive forms of historical research.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, Mallory completed an M.A. in Food History and Anthropology at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, where she researched food, memory, and justice in Cuba. Her broader scholarship spans food sovereignty, food justice, oral history, and the cultural politics of food systems across India, Cuba, and Malawi. Through her research, teaching, and public engagement, Mallory seeks to illuminate how food policies shape everyday life and how communities mobilize to defend food access as a matter of dignity, citizenship, and human rights.