Search Results

This chapter describes a partnership between churches and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a farmworker organization, in its Campaign for Fair Food, which strives for fair wages, a code of conduct, an end to slavery in the fields of south Florida, and a voice for farmworkers. People of faith have redefined a ministry of protecting human dignity by working as allies with the CIW to pressure fast-food companies and grocery stores to increase the amount they pay for tomatoes by a penny a pound, in an effort to improve the wages and human dignity of immigrant farmworkers. This chapter reveals lessons that include having faith in the improbable, integrating religious rituals into the tactics of grassroots groups, viewing the church as a partner for justice, seeing the church as a place for reconciliation, and recognizing human dignity as a component of sustainable food systems.

This chapter addresses the question of how people of faith have transformed the ministry of feeding by a focus on the environment. The stories in this chapter include two faith communities in Wisconsin, the All People’s Church in inner city Milwaukee and a community of Catholic nuns at the SUNSEED Eco-Education Center in Mount Calvary. At the All People’s Church, the sanctuary becomes a free farmers’ market after church, with produce grown by youth in the church. The Catholic sisters at Mount Calvary teach earth spirituality, vermicomposting, and food preservation to people of faith. The lessons for other churches include the spiritual act of feeding, the importance of equal access to healthful food, the use of gardening to gain life skills, the centrality of food to relationships in faith, and the power of teaching about simple living through food.

Food fortification is an especially political public health intervention. It is associated with a diversity of conceptual, vested interest, and technical challenges. This chapter outlines the structure and procedures of food regulatory systems at national and global levels where food fortification is planned, implemented, and (sometimes) evaluated. Within these food regulatory systems, food fortification politics is played out by actors, their activities, and dominant political agendas. The interplay between these political variables shapes how evidence and ethics is valued in food fortification policy-making. Power relationships within the global food regulatory system in particular are changing and certain business interest- and public interest- non-government organisations are exerting substantial influence over food fortification. They are exerting this influence through advocacy and framing activities. Among the political agendas, it is the global health governance arrangements actively promoting public-private partnerships that are most instrumental in shaping power relationships in food fortification policy and practice.

This chapter provides an overview of the central risks that have emerged as a result of food system industrialization, and describes the various alternative food initiatives—such as adding new narratives into the food system conversation—which aims to improve the economic, ecological, or nutritional health of the food system. While these movements have undoubtedly benefitted a number of food system stakeholders, their results have proved uneven. Notably, many alternative food initiatives have consistently overlooked the systemic racialized and economic components of food-related inequality, and as a result, they have failed to promote justice for all. In addition, these movements also face significant challenges in advancing sustainable community change.

This chapter acknowledges the concept of food crime within the current global industrialised food system and explores three examples of crimes of consumption. A variety of acts of citizen resistance or ‘counter crimes’ in response to food crime are discussed. Counter crimes can be seen as a spectrum of acts of crime or disobedience, which have used food to make public statements. Both opposition and constructivist politics are employed in counter crime. Constructivist activities are incubators for the emergence of new food systems, while oppositional activities focus on the current food system. Constructivist efforts involve fostering and building different food systems for consumers, underpinned by democratic processes, for example farmer’s markets and community gardens. Actions underpinned by democratic principles, constitute a participatory movement whereby citizens exert some modicum of control over their food system. Collectively known as food democracy, it offers some hope in ‘re-making’ an honest food system.

This chapter responds to the collective case made in Chapters 1–8 for reconceptualizing food policy around ecological public health. It proposes that food policy gains renewed clarity of purpose if it adopts the perspective of ecological public health but that structural challenges are awesome. The themes introduced in this present chapter are woven throughout.

Chapter six reveals the ways in which civic and public actors working outside the boundaries of PlaNYC iteratively embedded urban agriculture and food policy into municipal planning efforts. A local/regional food system framework offered one way to bridge divisions within the movement and work towards comprehensive change to food production, processing, distribution, consumption, and post-consumption. Within the void created by city hall’s lack of engagement, other figures in the municipal government seized the opportunity to advance food policy agendas for New York City. At the same time, the complete absence of food, agriculture, and community gardens from PlaNYC was contested by civic groups and residents. As a result, the 2011 update to PlaNYC included a brief crosscutting section on food, although it lacked capital funding to fuel the achievement of its stated goals. Incorporation of food issues into PlaNYC was nonetheless seen by advocates as a symbolic and political achievement.

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.

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.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the role of corporate actors in the global food system. The book examines the role of corporations in the formation of the norms, rules, and institutions that govern the global food system, and evaluates the wider implications of corporate power in global food governance for the sustainability of the global food system and for societal debates over sustainability in the global food system. It also identifies different channels through which corporations influence global food and agriculture governance and examines the implications of that influence.

Los Angeles has long had the worst air quality in the nation. Its extensive developments at the urban edge for more than 100 years had earned Southern California the reputation as the capital of sprawl. It gained notoriety as a “water imperialist” due to the city's (and the region's) search for new imported water supplies from the Owens Valley, Northern California, and the Colorado River. It faced numerous violations of the Clean Water Act due to contaminated runoff and bay pollution. Los Angeles also emerged as among the most park poor cities in the country, most notably in the low income neighborhoods of South, Central, and East Los Angeles. It encountered enormous problems of food insecurity in many of those same neighborhoods due to lack of access to fresh and healthy foods and a proliferation of fast food restaurants and liquor stores that called themselves food marts. The environmental and social justice movements that first emerged during the 1990s have forced a new discussion about the imperative need for environmental and social change, including the key issues of global trade-related freight traffic and food system policy change. This chapter profiles how these emerging movements confronted the question of how such change could be accomplished.

This chapter critiques some of the assumptions about the causes and solutions for obesity using anthropological and historical understandings of class and ethnic differences in Mexico. It unpacks Mexico’s policy response to obesity and diabetes, including its much lauded soda tax and poverty reduction policies, and demonstrates how a progressive and aggressive policy response has been stunted in ways that favor transnational food corporations, while deflecting the blame for diet-related illness onto individuals, especially women, and historically marginalized poor and indigenous populations. The chapter addresses the idea that better health and wellness can be achieved for the Mexican population through greater education and socialization into healthful ingredients and cooking styles, narrowly defined.

Despite being among the country's lowest paid workers, employees in the food system have remained largely invisible to the average consumer. But now, food system workers are garnering the support of consumers through campaigns for good jobs, wages, and food. This chapter highlights three organizing campaigns that are emblematic of this struggle: 1) the Brandworkers campaign at Amy’s Bread, an artisanal bakery in New York City; 2) the Teamsters campaign at Taylor Farms in Tracy, California, the largest salad processor in the U.S.; and 3) the OUR Walmart campaign at Walmart stores around the country. These cases illustrate how consumers can actively support workers who are organizing against everyday exploitation and oppression.

The first step in understanding the production economics side is to understand the main five sectors in our food system and how they are related. Chapter 11 gives an overview of the five main sectors in the food system -- from the field to the fork. The chapter gives data on the contribution each sector makes to the US food dollar. All of these sectors are trying to answer the same fundamental questions that all economic systems are designed to answer. Therefore, it is beneficial to couch the discussion in a larger context of economic systems and systems theory. Understanding these broader principles provides a very constructive framework for discussing the challenges facing the food system.

This introductory chapter narrates the conflict between celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Los Angeles Unified School District accused Oliver of misrepresenting the district's food service operations in order to garner more attention for his reality show. As the conflict between the LAUSD and Jamie Oliver grabbed headlines, the media conversation tried to determine which side seemed best equipped to teach children to “choose the right foods” and which side stood in the way of community health. However, it failed to report any substantive analysis of the food system, particularly on its ongoing structural failure and potential avenues for systemic change.

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.

This chapter reviews the literature on racism in the food system and demonstrates how theories of anti-blackness help to further frame contemporary food access inequities in cities. Building on literature from scholars who have framed self-reliance in the Black experience, the chapter also outlines “geographies of self-reliance,” a framework for understanding how self-reliance is not simply ideological but also becomes a spatial mechanism. Lastly, the chapter offers “quiet food refusals”—the types of food work and decisions being made outside the public gaze—to make a case for paying attention to the everyday ways Black residents are navigating the unequal food system.

This chapter identifies a system in which some of the key drivers of health inequity fuel climate change, which in turn fuels further inequity. This process is based on excessive production and consumption; it constitutes a consumptagenic system. The chapter tracks the evolution of the consumptagenic system through the globalization of a market-based and fossil fuel–dependent economic system. It describes the addiction of this system to economic growth as the ultimate goal and to forms of consumption that are highly polluting. The last parts of the chapter focus on the roles of an industrial food system and urbanization as two central cogs in the consumptagenic system that is pushing our planet toward irreparable destabilization. The subsequent impacts, from climate change and health equity, of both of these systems (industrial food system and urbanization) are then described.