Towards a More Participative Definition of Food Justice (original) (raw)
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A scoping review of the conceptualisations of food justice
Public Health Nutrition
Objective:The emerging concept of ‘food justice’ describes a social movement and a set of principles. It align with the goals of social justice, demanding recognition of human rights, equal opportunity, fair treatment and is participatory and community specific. The aim of this study was to investigate the conceptualisation of food justice and to explore how community participation is positioned in food justice scholarship.Design:A scoping review of peer-reviewed literature was conducted using the term ‘food justice’. This study used a five-step scoping review protocol. The databases included Scopus, Web of Science and Medline (OVID). Data were extracted on country of origin, research discipline, study type and conceptualisations of food justice. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify the themes.Results:The search identified 546 abstracts of which ninety peer-reviewed studies met the inclusion criteria. Thematic analysis identified five themes of food justice across these ...
Six Questions for Food Justice
In July 2014 the Food Justice: Knowing Food/Securing the Future workshop at the University of Reading, UK brought together over 60 academic and civil society delegates to discuss the contemporary state of food justice. While food is essential to the growth, development and health of human life, and to social well-being (Riches 2018), an array of contemporary challenges demonstrates that our food system does not ensure freedom from want and oppression, or environmental sustainability (Allen 2008). Indeed, when we consider the number of malnourished children that live in countries with food surpluses it becomes clear that a more equitable and healthy food system is substantively not an issue of production but, rather, of access and justice.
Vote with Your Fork?: Responsibility for Food Justice
Social Philosophy Today, 2014
As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethical commitments through their food choices, the imperative to ‘vote with your fork’ has become a common slogan of emerging food movements in the US. I interrogate the conception of responsibility embedded in this dictate, which has become a de facto model for how to comport ourselves ethically with respect to food. I argue that it implicitly endorses a narrow and problematic understanding of responsibility. To contextualize this claim, I utilize Iris Marion Young’s critique of a “liability model” of responsibility to demonstrate that voting with one’s fork is insufficient as model for taking responsibility for food-related injustices. Instead, I suggest that Young’s social connection model of responsibility is best suited for taking stock of responsibility for food and agriculture related injustices since they are structural and systemic ones. I conclude that although consumer choices and purchases may be important dimensions of our conduct with respect to food and eating, imagining responsibility to be centered on this type of conduct—consumer behavior—is detrimental to attempts to develop a more just food system.
Food justice focuses on social justice within the food system, which is currently characterized by the monopoly market power and globalized meat production. Its objective is to change the food system at its root and counter oppression and insecurity caused by the system. It strives to eliminate and challenge social inequities within the food system and promotes equitable distribution of resources. The paper provides a brief introduction to food justice.
Food justice: cultivating the field
Environmental Research Letters, 2018
This article provides an evidence-based review of the growing field of food justice, which seeks to understand how inequalities of race, class and gender are reproduced and contested within food systems. Analyzing a database of peer-reviewed articles and books related to food justice in the US context (n = 200), we find that food justice is a highly interdisciplinary research area organized around three central axes: social movement activism, the development of alternative food practices, and analyses of inequalities in conventional and alternative food systems. Especially since 2011, the rate of new scholarship has increased, along with increased attention from policymakers and the public to the issues of inequality in the food system. This field has developed somewhat independently of work in the physical sciences quantifying and evaluating the sustainability of local food systems, instead focusing more on social science concepts such as historic and present-day inequalities and the role of policy. However, there is room for convergence, especially as our analysis points to agro-ecology and land tenure as areas of growing interest. Considering this recent growth and potential for collaboration with physical scientists, we reflect on the development of the field to date by characterizing the field of food justice research, asking what is missing, and suggesting new directions.
‘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).
SOC 324: Food Justice Syllabus - Fall 2022
2022
Food justice includes all ideas and practices that strive to eliminate exploitation and oppression within and beyond the food system. We therefore begin the course with a structural analysis of the major inequalities people experience in their relationship to food, paying close attention to the ideological and material drivers of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, institutional racism, and white supremacy. Beginning with these broad and intersectional roots grounds our further engagement with the goals of food justice, which necessarily aim to transform economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological life. We will encounter an array of visions, tactics, strategies, and scales of action of the food justice movement, and its allies. In the process, you will discover how activists and scholars draw on movements for economic, gender, racial, and environmental justice, and more, and explore the possibilities for building innovative crossmovement ties that engage in a range of food politics. In sum, we will learn in order to act.
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.