In “Political Portions,” I assert that women’s food preparation, consumption, and abstinence are political actions, regardless of their appearance in public or private spaces and despite their typical coding as mundane or even repressive. I use hunger as an organizing principle, analyzing examples of abstention in Anglophone literature and works in translation. I treat hunger both as an individual choice that may afford agency or signal rebellion, while also considering large-scale, systemic forms of involuntary hunger in fiction from the Eastern region of the South Asian subcontinent, West Bengal, Northeast India, and Bangladesh, among others. After an introductory chapter, Chapter Two locates instances of breastfeeding in literature, primarily Mahasweta Devi’s “Breast-Giver,” first establishing its traditional usage as a symbol of women’s exploitation, then arguing for a reconsideration of the breastfeeding trope: one that negates prior conceptions of breastfeeding and not only nourishes one’s family, but also one's self, as the mother circumvents hierarchical systems of cooking and food preparation. Chapter Three traces moments in which women “weaponize” food, eating, and even hunger itself, such as in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, ultimately arguing that these women successfully redirect food-related violence against both individuals and organizations that seek to perpetuate it. My fourth chapter expands the definition of food weaponization set out in Chapter Three, placing it in the context of narratives centered around Bangladesh-India border conflicts and mass migrations, such as Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja and Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Story of Felanee. I argue that food serves as the occasion for verbal and physical violence against these women, as well as their resistance to it; women’s mutual food aid evidences a radical form of coalition building among women and a refusal to participate in government-sanctioned acts of food weaponization against migratory communities. Where my first chapter begins with the most personal of women’s food experiences, breastfeeding, Chapter Five ends with both the most communal and most overtly political, arguing that instances of famine in literature, such as in Sulekha Sanyal’s The Seedling's Tale, serve to catalyze women’s participation in revolutionary political movements.