Vote with Your Fork?: Responsibility for Food Justice (original) (raw)
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Food Justice Now! Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle
2018
Order: https://bit.ly/2rCkJOp The United States is a nation of foodies and food activists, many of them progressives, and yet their overwhelming concern for what they consume often hinders their engagement with social justice more broadly. Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. It calls on the food-focused to broaden and deepen their commitment to the struggle against structural inequalities both within and beyond the food system. In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than just a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Focusing on carceral, labor, and immigration crises, Sbicca tells the stories of three California-based food movement organizations, showing that when activists use food to confront neoliberal capitalism and institutional racism, they can creatively expand how to practice and achieve food justice. Sbicca sets his central argument in opposition to apolitical and individual solutions, discussing national food movement campaigns and the need for economically and racially just food policies—a matter of vital public concern with deep implications for building collective power across a diversity of interests.
‘Food is fundamental to life’ (Sbicca 2012: 456) and this shared need establishes food as a site of potential for connective and convivial practices and relations. Yet, when we realise that more than one billion people are undernourished worldwide (Food Ethics Council 2010), despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed billions more than the current global population of 7 billion (Holt-Gimenez, Shattuck et al. 2012), the social, political, economic and environmental challenges posed by contemporary food systems start to become apparent. Given current global production levels – whether we agree with the social and environmental implications of these or not – it is clear that malnutrition rates worldwide are not simply an indicator of agricultural praxis but demonstrate the continued, broader social and structural issues of access, equity and justice. Recognising that many feel increasingly disenfranchised from formal political representation, marginalised by a hegemonic neoliberal capitalism or disconnected from ‘healthy’ social or environmental relations, food offers an opportunity to re-engage individuals and society with critical questions and practices of justice because, as Allen (2008: 159) notes, ‘no other public issue is as accessible to people in their daily lives as that of food justice. Everyone – regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or social class – eats. We are all involved and we are all implicated’. The multiplicity of ways in which we can engage with food – including growing, buying, eating, cooking, writing, processing, marketing, selling and watching – enacts its radical potential as a set of dynamic socio-material relations (Alkon 2013, Alkon, Block et al. 2013) that can both conform to and subvert existing practices and understandings, enabling food to ‘speak’ to many different people in a range of different contexts. Although this multiplicity has its dangers (Heynen, Kurtz et al. 2012), it also means that food matters and matters in complex and diverse ways: ‘It rallies people and it often induces unexpected changes in society’ (Van der Ploeg 2013: 999).
Getting Political and Getting Organized : A Call to Repoliticize the Food Movement
2018
Getting Political and Getting Organized: A Call to Repoliticize the Food Movement Alison Hope Alkon and Julie Guthman have each individually pushed the conversation in agrofood studies forward in critically important ways. As a result, I was particularly enthusiastic about a product of their joint effort. In their edited collection, The New Food Activism, Alkon and Guthman bring power and collective struggle front and centre to the food movement, a movement that has faced strong criticism for resorting to individual and market-based solutions to address what are in fact deep systemic problems (see, for example, Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Bradley and Herrera 2016; Busa and Garder 2015; DeLind 2011; Guthman 2008). Their central argument is that the food movement has become largely depoliticized and disengaged from food justice issues related to class, power and capital. In the words of Alkon and Guthman, their aim is to “expand the possibilities of food activism” by cultivating a food mo...
Towards a More Participative Definition of Food Justice
This paper argues that the definition of food justice must be defined in more participatory terms. Current accounts of food justice tend to emphasize distributional inequalities. However, there is broad recognition that these distributional inequalities are the result of participative inequalities and that the participation of marginalized groups in advocacy plays an important role in creating just food systems. In addition, thinking of food justice in more participative terms also suggests a more well-rounded and comprehensive approach to dealing with inequalities within the food system. One manner in which the concept of food justice can be redefined to better capture the importance of participative justice is by considering what is required for informed consent.