Beyond ‘food apartheid’: Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut

Abstract

This article illuminates the extent of community-based activism around food justice in New Haven, CT. Data was gathered through 28 in-depth interviews with civil society actors and participant observation across the food policy and urban agriculture (UA) sectors in the Fall of 2018. The paper traces the challenges that the sector faces in advancing a more democratic food agenda even when the municipality is relatively open to activist claims. Three key findings are identified. (a) Following in the American communitarian tradition, civil society groups working at grassroots level largely set the agenda for tackling food hunger in New Haven. That agenda, however, is broad-based and contradictory, incorporating initiatives aimed at addressing food insecurity and radical advocacy for food justice. (b) The efforts of civil society actors are structurally constrained by their dependence on philanthropic or grantbased funding, on the one hand, and the symbolic rather than substantive support afforded by a fiscally weak, resource-poor municipality, on the other. (c) There is an inherent tension within the civil society sector arising from the disjuncture between strategies that have the effect of depoliticizing hunger and those that increasingly demand a repoliticization of hunger. These issues have been brought into sharper relief in light of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) mobilization, which, in concert, expose deep fissures in American society. INTRODUCTIONMany cities in the United States and further afield are attempting to address the question of food democracy by challenging entrenched food production, consumption, and distribution systems that reproduce inequalities in urban settings (Mansfield & Mendes,

Farms and gardens everywhere but not a bite to eat? A critical geographic approach to food apartheid in Salt Lake City

“…Urban agriculture is rooted in a rich history of food justice advocacy led by farmers and people of color and can serve as an essential component of movements toward the disruption of food apartheid (Agyeman & McEntee, 2014;Alkon & Norgaard, 2009;Corcoran, 2021;Gripper, 2020;Heynen, 2009;Penniman, 2018;Whyte, 2017). Food justice can be defined as "the right of communities everywhere to produce, process, distribute, access, and eat good food regardless of race, class, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, ability, religion, or community" (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2012, p. 1).…”

Planning food system transitions: Exploring spatial, citizen‐driven, and agroecological approaches

“…Mary P. Corcoran's contribution, Beyond “food apartheid”: Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut , stresses the idea that re‐politicizing hunger forms part of a wider agenda underlying racial and class dynamics that perpetuate structural inequality (Corcoran, 2021). In a segregated city as New Haven, grassroots groups have largely set the agenda around food hunger.…”

“…Still, grassroot groups complain that the innovations that they incubate are later coopted by corporations, confirming that mobilizing the discourse and holding control on the narrative is critical. Mary P. Corcoran's contribution, Beyond "food apartheid": Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut, stresses the idea that re-politicizing hunger forms part of a wider agenda underlying racial and class dynamics that perpetuate structural inequality (Corcoran, 2021). In a segregated city as New Haven, grassroots groups have largely set the agenda around food hunger.…”

LGBTQ+ food insufficiency in New England

“…Food justice scholars pay explicit attention to the role of structural racism and racial inequities in the root causes of food insecurity (Bowen et al 2021 ; Garth and Reese 2020 ; Hatch et al 2019 ; Reese 2019 ). For instance, food justice activists have challenged the term food desert because it suggests such inequity is “natural” (Bell et al 2021 ) and implies barren emptiness, ignoring the cultural richness of the community and failing to acknowledge the context of structural racialization, segregation, and racial injustice that drives the lack of full-service grocery stores in communities of color (Corcoran 2021 ; Dickinson 2019 ; Usher 2015 ). Instead, some food justice activists and scholars have developed the concept of “American Apartheid” to refer to the lack of access to nutritious, affordable, culturally appropriate food in low-income communities of color (Akom et al 2016 ; Dickinson 2019 ).…”