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This chapter argues that food activists need to look beyond the politics of their plates to engage with broader questions of racial and economic inequalities, strategy and political transformation. It grounds the examples that follow in two ongoing scholarly debates. The first regards the role of inequalities, particularly of race and class, in shaping past and present industrial and alternative food systems. The second looks to strategies and tactics. While some have argued that the provision of relatively apolitical alternatives to industrial food systems lays the groundwork for transformative change, the editors of this volume urge activists to follow those profiled in this book towards more cooperative, oppositional and collective strategic choices. The introduction ends with an overview of the chapters to come.

This chapter introduces and critically discusses the concept of food justice; broadly conceived as the inter-relation between social justice and environmental justice as these issues are expressed within food systems. The chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring food justice and builds on a range of literatures to explore the development of this important and powerful organising concept for contemporary society in challenging structural inequalities and environmental problems. The discussion explores the application of justice in relation to urban food systems more generally through focusing on particular actions within the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. However, the chapter concludes that without radical reform of the institutional arrangements and practices in this and other urban food systems the pervading structural inequalities and injustices risk remaining.

This chapter proposes the use of social justice as a guiding paradigm in assessing and addressing obesity in undervalued communities, which tend to be predominantly low-income/low-wealth, urban, and of color. In making the case for a social justice paradigm in dealing with the urban obesity crisis, the chapter looks at social justice movements and compares social justice perspectives with individual perspectives. It also considers three interrelated issues that affect obesity: food justice, environmental justice, and spatial justice. Finally, it discusses health promotion programs that utilize a social justice framework and highlights the issues that must be taken into account when evaluating the effectiveness of such programs.

The formation of food-labor alliances in Los Angeles pushes food justice politics beyond a focus on food access, culturally appropriate food, and self-determination by strategically emphasizing economic inequalities and working conditions and engaging in confrontational politics. These alliances reveal that it is important to have highly visible labor campaigns, the integration of activists with direct knowledge or experience of food work and food insecurity into the food movement, and labor activists who will combat food deserts and therefore work alongside food justice activists through the lens of poverty. In short, it is essential to build a food movement that can fight to take care of the hands that grow, process, deliver, and sell the food meant to nourish the good food revolution.

This chapter focuses on the forms of regulation that shape food habits in ways that we are often unaware of. Here, the chapter presents some of the results of a co-produced research project that explored how people experience the regulation of food habits in their communities. It explores the notion of food justice, which seeks to embed discussion of food regulation in attention to the spatial dimensions of food access. The chapter points to the ways in which the project sought to make visible invisible rules and to develop processes of ‘commoning’ in order to address the spatial inequalities of urban food spaces. It then challenges notions of ‘cheapness’ and instead present ideas of food affordability. Finally, this chapter establishes the building blocks for a ‘more-than-food policy’ by demonstrating the importance of working with assets rather than deficits.

This chapter critically applies the concept of reflexive food justice to the creation and running of a non-profit shared-use commercial kitchen, CLiCK, Inc., in Eastern Connecticut in order to critically evaluate to what degree it does or does not meet the criteria of reflexive food justice. The purpose of such an analysis is to question the ways in which shared use kitchens can act as agents of progressive social change in relation to facilitating low-income community members to have access of a commercial kitchen so that they may incubate a food business, which may or may not involve a food tuck or food cart. In many states food trucks and food carts need to be affiliated with a brick and mortar kitchen and so CLiCK makes such an affiliation affordable to those who might not be able to otherwise start a food business. Since the chapter is written by CLICK’s co-founder and Board President this critical analysis provides intimate details as to the struggles in not just running a non-profit shared use commercial kitchen, but in doing so in ways that seek to promote progressive social change, both within the organization itself and the surrounding community.

This chapter assesses the benefits and challenges of community-based food justice groups engaging in networks that extend beyond their respective localities. The extension process offered opportunities to disseminate lessons to new geographic arenas, to integrate outside knowledge, and to work collaboratively with other social justice groups toward shared goals. However, this process also gives rise to the question: Could a push in an extra-local direction endanger food justice advocates' efforts while focusing at the local level of their own communities? On that note, the chapter presents how the networked organization Rooted in Community (RIC) encouraged youth activists to recognize the systemic and geographically widespread nature of food injustice, while building capacity among the staff of community-based groups to establish collective cultural and institutional resistance.

This concluding chapter asserts that the study in this book highlights the potential of culturally driven grassroots and people-powered activism—both of which started during the age of neoliberalism—to advance food system transformation. Guided by a broader social justice vision, food justice organizations offer up food as a uniquely engaging tool that helps build critical consciousness, develop alternative institutions, promote economic development, and cultivate skills for health and well-being among those who have long been subject to food system injustice. Only through this expansive mission will food serve as an effective platform onto which leaders could advance a just, equitable, and sustainable society.

Chapter five traces the network of actors and storylines involved in creating, advocating for (or resisting), and maintaining urban agriculture in New York City. First, it describes a brief history of community gardening as a social movement in New York City since the 1970s. Then, it explores the vibrant material practices and varied narratives employed by a newer wave of civic practitioners engaging in urban agriculture from the 2000s to the present. The chapter parses this more recent trend into its various threads, which range from a focus on local food production, to commitments to food justice, to an interest in neighborhood stabilization and youth empowerment.

Food is political. Movements challenging issues of food access and security are occurring all over the world. Led by creative thinkers and targets of racism and discrimination themselves, members of radical food movements speak out for environmental and social justice, seeking to establish more democratic social systems. Food is central because its absence causes so much pain. Structural racism is manifest in the food deserts across the United States, where gas stations serve as grocery stores. Oppression is magnified in developing countries by an entire nation’s inability to control its own food supply. We meet people experimenting with new, radical forms of democracy, with food as a central dimension of their organizing strategies.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with farmworkers and farmworker advocates in California and Florida, this chapter explores the progress made by farmworker-led, consumer-supported movements for farmworker justice. It argues for the need to break down divides between producer and consumer, rural and urban, and individual and community based approaches to changing the food system. It contends that farmworker-led consumer-based campaigns and solidarity movements, such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) current Campaign for Fair Food, and The United Farmworkers’ historical grape boycotts, successfully work to challenge agrarian imaginaries, drawing consumers into movement-based actions. This research illustrates the possibilities for alternative food movement advocates and coalitions to build upon farmworker-led campaigns and embrace workers as leaders.

Whereas previous chapters discussed strategies employed by those who stayed in the South, this chapter tells the stories of the descendants of those who migrated north, focusing on Detroit. While far in time and space from the other examples of Black agricultural resistance discussed in this book, contemporary communities in Detroit are similarly turning to agriculture as a strategy of survival and resistance. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) formed in 2006, setting goals of improving education, food access, and collective buying. DBCFSN is rooted in a pan-African philosophy of pride and solidarity and draws from founders’ experiences in Detroit’s Black Power era and in city government. Central to DBCFSN’s approach to community food sovereignty are antiracist and anticapitalist principles that guide cooperative efforts, political education, and organizing designed to dismantle systems of white supremacy embedded in the food system. DBCFSN’s most well-known projects – the Detroit Food Policy Council, D-Town Farm, and the Ujamaa Food Buying Club – enact the strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis to build collective agency and community resilience.

Social justice concerns have been tied to the organic cause at least since its embrace by the 1960s counterculture, but how social justice is perceived and pursued is complicated and contradictory. One interpretation sees social justice in support for family farmers imperilled by competition from big agribusiness. In the minds of many, organic provides an avenue for these farmers to receive a fair return for their products. There is tension between this sentiment and the fact that organic goods command a price premium that places them out of reach of many low income consumers. The struggle for food justice has developed in parallel with the organic movement, yet there is little overlap between them. The matter of farm labor further complicates social justice pursuits as many organic farms employ migrant workers, underpaid interns or engage in other exploitative labor practices. The matter of social justice remains a challenge for the organic movement.

This chapter focuses on Community Services Unlimited's (CSU) efforts for community-based food justice across the United States, exploring particularly the networks and narratives that came to characterize the organization's communication ecology devoted to community-based organizing. These narratives promote food and justice, as well as articulate how systemic inequities and developing alternative community institutions through networked partnerships produce local food system struggles. The chapter also interrogates what makes food a particularly viable entry point for this type of community development and considers the obstacles faced by CSU and other food justice groups who aimed to incorporate localized activism into an agenda for sustainable community change.

This chapter examines two food hubs in Oakland, CA and Chicago, IL in light of the food justice and neoliberalism critiques explained in the introduction to this volume. With regard to food justice, the chapter argues that although alternative food systems have often been created in ways that reify white norms and cultural frames, these organizations are steeped in African American cultural frameworks that position them as part of broader anti-racist struggles. Secondly, these food hubs simultaneously reproduce and contest neoliberalism through their collective approaches to the buying and selling of alternative foods. Taken together, these examples demonstrate some of the ways that alternative food projects are affected by and position themselves within the complexities of racial inequalities and neoliberal capitalism.

The international peasant confederation La Vía Campesina has long understood land as a key battleground in the struggle against neoliberal globalization and in the construction of food sovereignty. Food movements in the United States, however, have been slow to embrace land as a key platform of struggle—this despite dramatic and rising levels of land concentration, magnified by recent trends such as financialization and climate change. This chapter argues that the injustices of the capitalist food system are directly related to dispossession and lack of control over land. As such, it suggests that a sharper focus on land among the seemingly disparate groups that comprise the US food movement could form the basis for political convergence and deeper, more long lasting transformation.

This chapter explores the challenges that arise when food justice organizations relied on media storytelling and branding to promote food and justice. It particularly argues that localized storytelling will not be sufficient to advance an effective movement agenda in the long term. One of the reasons for this claim is that if food justice groups—whose work is legitimately grounded in the needs and interests of local community members—struggle to tell their own stories of food injustice, the media tend to retell the advocates' story in versions that are too often disconnected from the realities of everyday life.