Abstract
Food justice calls for relationships of equity in producing, processing, distributing, and consuming food to replace the corporate hierarchy of mistreatment of farmers, farm workers, and farm animals, which also ignores consumer and environmental health. As the authors state, “food justice has the capacity to reorient the food movement in [two] ways—to prioritize the need to address inequities while seeking to change the system as a whole” (p. 7). Because the food justice movement comprises all aspects of food from “farm to fork,” it integrates readily into other social justice movements, such as fair housing or environmental justice, to foster a broad, dynamic social change agenda.
Working toward food justice reconnects the intimate link between food and culture, for without sustaining culture, we lose our food. In contrast to the manufactured fat/sugar/salt (that some of us now call “doof,” food spelled backwards) overflowing our grocery store shelves and freezers, diverse cultures cultivate biodiverse foods for greater nutrition. They breed and name the new seeds, and if the native name for a seed or plant is lost as a language dies, so are the site-specific plants lost. There is a high correlation between loss of language and loss of plant varieties, and sometimes, whole species. Food is not simply something purchased from a vending machine, but it represents heritage and spirituality, defining family and community.
This central importance of culture is one lesson the food justice movement brings to the environmental justice movement, in that local ways and manners are not easily made universal nor codified. Another lesson is the importance of local communities for the success of campaigns; collective actions involving hard day-to-day organizing work bring change, not individualistic achievements or pronouncements. The metaphor of planting again helps us to understand: Collective work in cultivating diverse crops in a field is much more efficient and successful than individual endeavor, as all the organized (overwhelming female) smallholder farmers across the globe keep showing us by growing 70–80 percent of the world's food. Outsiders can talk or chart “food justice”; only local, collective hard work grows it.
The authors are thorough in covering the scope and complexity of food justice, analyzing each aspect of the “unjust food system” in the first half of the book, with chapters on producing, accessing, and consuming food, including discussion of school lunches and the food deserts in the inner cities. As they state, “Where, how and what food is sold, the rise and locations of fast food chains, the supermarket chains' abandonment of inner-city…communities, the correlation of food deserts with poor food choices, and the conditions of workers in the food market and restaurant industries have all become key food justice concerns” (p. 58). They are careful to give brief historical contexts to each component in the food system to show that current exploitation of labor, animals, and consumers (zero nutrition for high cost) have been developed over decades, following the logic of consolidating markets for higher profits.
The second section of the book is equally comprehensive in analyzing the various roots and branches of food justice alternatives. Key to all the alternatives is “food sovereignty,” a concept that now replaces “food security” across the global food movement. Food sovereignty rose from the struggles of smallholder, peasant farmers—many of whom lost their lives to armies and death squads working for the interests of large landholders—to establish agroecological alternatives to industrial cash crops (e.g., coffee in Guatemala, sugar in Brazil). These peasants, highly creative and brave as well as dirt poor, show us how to take back production of nutritious food for our families, our communities. They define food sovereignty as “the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods, respecting cultural and productive capacity,” as well as the “right of peoples to define their agricultural and food policy” (p. 116). La Via campesina, originating in the Managua Declaration of 1992 among farm organizations from Central America, the Caribbean, Europe, Canada, and the United States, remains a global leader in redefining how to produce diverse nutritious food as a human right. Successful alternatives, varying with the terrain and political landscapes, contribute to the production component of the food justice movement.
Equally important for the United States are questions of “new food routes” (chapter 7), diminishing by thousands of miles how far our food travels. The authors also discuss how changing our consumption back to savoring food, prepared with enticing local flavors, will also transform our health and our conviviality. We do not need to gulp down manufactured fat/sugar/salt, for we can multi-task while savoring, by teaching each other, debating ideas, and organizing. Several of the case stories demonstrate how sharing food connects people to create new ways to promote food justice. Eating becomes an organizing act.
The authors help us to understand that the food justice movement is not an event but a process, with many false starts and quick demises, as in any movement. Organized around production, processing, distribution, and consumption of basic food, however, it offers a place for any person on the planet. Anyone can sit at the table and offer his/her ideas and skills to overcome the exploitation, “globesity,” and environmental destruction of industrial agriculture. Everyone “votes” several times a day, not just once every two years, with his/her food dollar about what is acceptable, not only in terms of nutrition but of labor relations and most important, in advancing for each and every one of us the human right to food.
While analyzing well the difficulties in local organizing, the book is disappointing in its optimism about the Obama Administration. The First Lady's organic garden changes nothing of executive policy in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which endlessly repeats the mantra that U.S. industrial agriculture will save the world from starvation during climate change. Obama policies closely follow a century of U.S. agricultural policy of subsidizing big chemical corporations (e.g., Monsanto) and the grain cartels. While discussing at length the problems of the Farm Bill, the book's argument is still favorable about national policy changes. The authors' discussion of many local initiatives for change is much better documented than any wishful thinking about U.S. Food and Drug Administration or U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations for safe food or for green and humane feed lots for animals.
It is disappointing to note that farmers' rights are not central to the discussion of food sovereignty, especially when referring to international alternatives. For food sovereignty to be realized, farmers' rights to exchange, save, propagate, and store any seed must be sustained. The International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA-2004) recognizes the role of farmers across millennia in cultivating food biodiversity by enshrining this right in international law. Farmers are constant seed breeders, experimenting with new cross-breeds, sharing with neighbors to test a new variety in a different micro-climate. The patenting of seeds in the United States tries to abrogate this farmers' right, removing the very creativity which gives human sustenance. The United States refuses to ratify the ITPGRFA. However, across the globe, it is heralded as equal to food sovereignty in importance to transforming the industrial food system. Farmers' rights are central to food justice.
It is not an exaggeration to suggest that this book should be read by anyone interested in food, for it documents well how rich we are in creating alternatives to the unjust food system. It is also highly recommended to high school and university students, no matter what the subject, because the food justice movement relates to all subjects, from physics and biology to social sciences to humanities. It would be excellent to provoke discussions among community organizers about taking back control over local foods. The book demonstrates how the food movement could readily meet the challenge of feeding thousands for weeks in the Occupy movement in various cities around the USA during 2011. The food justice movement already exists, organized by the 99%. The documented successes are hopeful and perhaps we can all share in that hope, for the food justice movement is exposing and challenging the industrial food cartels in their frenzy to feed Wall Street profits, not any humans.
Food justice teaches that food is not a commodity for financial speculation, but rather, a basic human right. This book will give fresh ideas to all food movement organizers—who are winning the processes (not event) of cultivating multiple, diverse, alternative food systems.