The story of how the emerging food justice movement is seeking to transform the American food system from seed to table. In today's food system, farm workers face difficult and hazardous conditions, low-income neighborhoods lack supermarkets but abound in fast-food restaurants and liquor stores, food products emphasize convenience rather than wholesomeness, and the international reach of American fast-food franchises has been a major contributor to an epidemic of “globesity.” To combat these inequities and excesses, a movement for food justice has emerged in recent years seeking to transform the food system from seed to table. In Food Justice, Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi tell the story of this emerging movement. A food justice framework ensures that the benefits and risks of how food is grown and processed, transported, distributed, and consumed are shared equitably. Gottlieb and Joshi recount the history of food injustices and describe current efforts to change the system, including community gardens and farmer training in Holyoke, Massachusetts, youth empowerment through the Rethinkers in New Orleans, farm-to-school programs across the country, and the Los Angeles school system's elimination of sugary soft drinks from its cafeterias. And they tell how food activism has succeeded at the highest level: advocates waged a grassroots campaign that convinced the Obama White House to plant a vegetable garden. The first comprehensive inquiry into this emerging movement, Food Justice addresses the increasing disconnect between food and culture that has resulted from our highly industrialized food system.
One crucial way to expand the reach and breadth of the environmental justice movement and environmental justice action and research agendas would be to extend the environmental justice slogan that the environment is "where we live, work, and play" to include "where, what, and how we eat." The linkages between an environmental justice and food justice approach can extend beyond traditional notions of environmental or food issues to address issues of health, globalization, worker rights and working conditions, disparities regarding access to environmental (or food) goods, land use and respect for the land, and, ultimately, how our production, transportation, distribution, and consumption systems are organized. 7
Angeles were ready to hear a class presentation in nutrition education. Instead of the classic lecture on why students should eat five fruits and vegetables a day, the students were presented with a box of fruits and vegetables that had been delivered that morning from a farm at the urban edge of the huge Southern California metropolitan region. The fruits and vegetables had been picked the previous day and dropped off at the classroom by the farmer. A lesson had been prepared by the teacher that included not only an understanding of where the food came from but also the value of farmfresh food. Tasting the food was part of the lesson, providing a way to talk about the benefits of fresh fruits and vegetables. The students marveled at the strawberries, for example, sweeter than any they had ever tasted. Some students had never previously seen some of the greens that were provided. The students made a salad with the greens, then added the carrots and tasted the strawberries. They compared what they made favorably to salad bars they had seen at restaurants and began to discuss the nutritional value of all the foods from the box. Teachers from some of the other participating schools also described how students tried foods they "wouldn't normally try" and how the class was "much better than just talking about what healthy is" (Center for Food and Justice 2003).What the students might not have known was that while learning about nutrition and farming, and eating food fresh from the field, they were on the cutting edge of a new farm-to-school movement. In low-income schools like Widney that participated in this program, where in some of those schools more than 90 percent of the students qualify for a free or reduced-price school lunch, health and nutrition were the immediate benefits of this specific farm-school connection. But the importance of this new farm-to-school movement also extends to a wide range of other issues. These include the viability of small farms, including those at the urban edge, innovative strategies to preserve farmland and combat sprawl, and a "food systems" approach that emphasizes local and seasonal as opposed to food that is produced anywhere and that is highly processed: the very opposite of "fresh and seasonal." AbstractFarm-to-school is a new, innovative strategy with multiple planning-related objectives. The article evaluates the significance of farm-to-school in relation to improving the health and nutrition of school-age children, particularly low-income youth; strengthening the capacity of local farmers, particularly those engaged in sustainable practices; adding to the toolkit of strategies designed to contain and ultimately reduce sprawl-inducing developments by helping preserve farmland; and helping establish a community food systems approach no longer entirely dependent on the global food system that has come to dominate food growing, processing, distribution, and consumption patterns around the world.
Environmental justice and community food security represent parallel though largely separate movements whose linkage would help establish a new community development, environmental, and empowerment‐based discourse. Environmental justice has been limited by its risk discrimination focus, even as environmental justice organizations have shifted to a broader social justice orientation, eclipsing their earlier environmental focus. Community food security advocacy, while offering a concrete example of linked agendas and constituencies, has yet to effectively outreach to environmental justice groups. Coalition building efforts, such as the Community Food Security Empowerment Act, presents that opportunity.
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