Notes on the practice of food justice in the U.S.: understanding and confronting trauma and inequity

Abstract

The lexicon of the U.S. food movement has expanded to include the term 'food justice.' Emerging after approximately two decades of food advocacy, this term frames structural critiques of agri-food systems and calls for radical change. Over those twenty years, practitioners and scholars have argued that the food movement was in danger of creating an 'alternative' food system for the white middle class. Alternative food networks drew on white imaginaries of an idyllic communal past, promoted consumer-oriented, market-driven change, and left yawning silences in the areas of gendered work, migrant labor, and racial inequality. Justice was often beside the point. Now, among practitioners and scholars we see an enthusiastic surge in the use of the term food justice but a vagueness on the particulars. In scholarship and practice, that vagueness manifests in overly general statements about ending oppression, or morphs into outright conflation of the dominant food movement's work with food justice (see What does it mean to do food justice? Cadieux and Slocum (2015), in this Issue). In this article, we focus on one of the four nodes (trauma/inequity, exchange, land and labor) around which food justice organizing appears to occur: acknowledging and confronting historical, collective trauma and persistent race, gender, and class inequality. We apply what we have learned from our research in U.S. and Canadian agri-food systems to suggest working methods that might guide practitioners as they work toward food justice, and scholars as they seek to study it. In the interests of ensuring accountability to socially just research and action, we suggest that scholars and practitioners need to be more clear on what it means to practice food justice. Towards such clarity and accountability, we urge scholars and practitioners to collaboratively document how groups move toward food justice, what thwarts and what enables them.Key words: food justice, trauma, food movement, alternative food networks, antiracism

The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

“…Finally, many scholars and activists alike frame urban agriculture as a springboard for practitioners to increase their self-determination, contest dominant forms of property ownership, experiment with more communal forms of land management, and engage in other political efforts for food systems change (Levkoe, 2011 ;Staeheli, Mitchell, & Gibson, 2002 ;Travaline & Hunold, 2010 ). Some practitioners see their urban agriculture activities as an explicit rejection of the capitalist, corporate food system ( McClintock, 2010 ;McClintock & Simpson, 2017 ;White, 2011 ).…”

What does it mean to do food justice?

“…For comments on an earlier draft, we are grateful to Arun Saldanha as well as Stephen Carpenter and Tracey Deutsch, colleagues from the Agri-Food Collaborative at the University of Minnesota. We would not have been able to write this article, and the companion one that follows in this Issue (Slocum and Cadieux 2015) without the food activists and scholars who willingly considered our ideas as part of the difficult work of developing equitable research and practice relationships. distracciones de los problemas "reales"-los académicos y los activistas necesitan ser más precisos respecto a lo que supone la justicia alimentaria.…”

“…There, we introduce the points around which food justice organizing seems to cohere: trauma and inequity, exchange, land, and labor. The article following this one considers in more detail how food justice practice might address trauma and inequity (Slocum and Cadieux 2015).…”

“…We call for a more rigorous body of scholarship on food justice, and increased accountability in food activism. We suggest this as a research agenda as well as offering suggestions for actual practice in a companion article that follows this one, Notes on the practice of food justice in the U.S. (Slocum and Cadieux 2015).…”

“…This continuum is awkward, with many actors clustering in a region of the distribution characterized by claiming to do food justice without actually having changed what they do and how they do it. Others will have understood and applied those critiques of AFNs we have discussed, but they face barriers difficult to overcome that we outline in our second article (Slocum and Cadieux 2015). Studying their practice, as we suggest is necessary, provides not a thumbs-up or -down conclusion, but an analysis of how transformative food work gets stuck and what might enable it to move toward socially just food systems.…”