https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809231200799 International Sociology 2023, Vol. 38(6) 664–683 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/02685809231200799 journals.sagepub.com/home/iss Moral dilemmas in food provisioning: Inflation, the claim for ‘just prices’ and for ‘fair wages’ Susana Narotzky Universidad de Barcelona, Spain Bibiana Martínez Álvarez Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain Abstract The cost of living we envision here stems from an interpretation of the ‘cost of living’ phrase which addresses (1) macro indicators of inflation, (2) the difference between farm gate price and consumer price as a cost to farmers that endangers their viability, and (3) how this cost transfers to the wages of workers and endangers their livelihood. Finally, (4) we wish to highlight that the energy that needs to be invested to assure social reproduction at the scale of individuals and households – workers and employers in agriculture – and at the scale of entire political communities such as the nation-state or the European Union, is translated into moral dilemmas that mediate and produce material results – in people’s bodies, in the environment, in political mobilizations of different kinds. The ‘cost of living’ here expands into the multiple and situated meanings of what it costs to live and the practices that they support. Keywords Agricultural labor, cost of living, farm viability, food, inflation, social reproduction Introduction As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of country after country, one of the major preoc- cupations of governments was to keep the continuous provisioning of food. Preventing Corresponding author: Susana Narotzky, Universidad de Barcelona, Barcelona 08001, Spain. Email: narotzky@ub.edu 1200799ISS 0 0 10.1177/02685809231200799International SociologyNarotzky and Martínez Álvarez research-article 2023 Article