Abstract
In Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, editors Hanna Garth and Ashanté Reese assemble an impressive group of scholars representing a wide variety of disciplines that write about food justice and food culture. Taking a different perspective than traditional food access work, this book describes the landscape of food justice within a capitalist economic system founded in racism. As the mainstream food justice movement gains more exposure, this volume shows how the food system is a byproduct of our capitalist system functioning as designed, complete with inequities and appropriations supported by legal and socio-economic systems—systems that provide few opportunities for farmers and cooks of color to transform food work into economic mobility. Rather than view this reality through a lens of lack and disparity, the authors draw on rich ethnographic vignettes and primary sources that center on black visions, correct historical narratives, and describe everyday resistance strategies.
As Garth reminds us in her chapter “Blackness and Justice in the Los Angeles Food Justice Movement,” a meal is more significant than it appears because growing food, preparing it, serving it, and engaging with it are culturally important to Black communities across the diaspora historically. For example, in “‘Preserve and Add Flavor:’ Barbeque as Resistance in Memphis,” Kimberly Kasper describes southern barbecue culture historically as food representing who you are rather than just a way of making food. Barbecue was a regular part of celebratory events for enslaved Africans in Tennessee as a reminder that food is life. Black families continue to rely on self-sufficiency and determination to grow life-sustaining foods to ensure access in their own way.
In “Nurturing the Revolution: The Black Panther Party and the Early Seeds of the Food Justice Movement,” Analena Hope Hassberg describes how Black communities organized around survival and being neglected by the state, leading the Black Panthers to create free breakfast programs nationally. These programs eventually pushed the state to provide free breakfast programs of their own across the country. Similarly, Gillian Richards-Greaves describes how Black residents in South Carolina understood that given the national social climate, they could not rely on the government to produce and ensure access to healthy foods, so they were determined to build a food system of their own. This kind of food culture promoted webs of trust and connection that acted as a communal form of resistance to a capitalist economic logic. In “Good Food in a Racist System,” Andrew Newman and Yuson Jung provide the example of Karen’s perspective. Karen is a Detroit organizer in her sixties who talks about having the ability to run a tab at the local grocery store. The authors note this as evidence of a shared logic within the community of taking care of each other’s needs, rather than individual capitalist gain.
This volume reveals how the American food landscape was never meant to be sustainable or profitable for people of color due to constraints in access to land and mobility opportunities. In “Race, Land, and the Law: Black Farmers and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition,” by Willie Wright, Tyler McCreary, Brian Williams, and Adam Bledsoe, readers learn about the Pigford I and Pigford II cases, which awarded Black farmers a meager settlement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for their rejection of federal farm loan applications. The inability of Black farmers to access federal funds not only locked families into the “burden of accumulating debt [and] financial bondage, pressing them into bankruptcy” but also led to a waning desire in future generations of Black farming families to continue the legacy (p. 241). Most importantly, it contributed to anti-Black land possession over time, illustrating how disproportionate access to land shapes our future connections to it.
Black Food Matters shines a light on the lack of access to capital and how, unlike white and more well-off counterparts, it has been more difficult for farming to lead to upward mobility for Black families. In the chapter “In the Food Justice World but Not of It: Everyday Black Food Entrepreneurship,” Reese provides excellent examples of resistance strategies to these barriers to entrepreneurship, including different kinds of food businesses (such as mobile food businesses and food businesses in homes and shared spaces). Judith Williams and Kasper’s chapters on Miami and Memphis, respectively, describe the difficulties of transitioning Black food opportunities into financial stability or restaurant ownership.
As our urban landscape changes rapidly due to gentrification and tourism, Black Food Matters illustrates the effects of these forces on the racially segregated restaurant industry in several cities. The traditional food justice movement tends to focus on access to fresh fruit and vegetables but less on how food culture can support, sustain, and provide wealth-building opportunities for communities of color. As cities become more economically competitive, it becomes easier for white or upwardly mobile entrepreneurs to dominate the restaurant industry or grocery store landscape.
This glaring reality has opened the door in the restaurant industry to what Williams refers to as “culinary appropriation,” or the “unauthorized use of Latin American and Afro-Caribbean foods, recipes, and cuisines, as well as the intellectual and physical exploitation of Latin American and Afro-Caribbean cooks” (p. 252). Williams talks about the “Mango gang,” a group of white chefs in downtown Miami who claim to have discovered “New World Cuisine” inspired by traditional dishes with added modern touches—yet they have little concern for the social and economic realities of the indigenous workers that make that food. Similarly to the introduction of Whole Foods to the city of Detroit, Newman and Jung note that business owners and chefs cater to a specific kind of “social experience” for financial stakeholders and gentrifiers while they eat or shop (p. 148). According to “Soul Food Gentrification: Food, Racial Heritage Tourism, and the Redevelopment of Black Space in Miami,” the Black Overtown neighborhood outside of downtown Miami is a subject in the city’s plan to economically stimulate distressed places through soul food and tourism. As in my own research in San Francisco’s “Harlem of the West” neighborhood, Billy Hall’s chapter describes how small food business owners are often marginalized in the development of “heritage tourism.”
In conclusion, Black Food Matters aptly shines a light on the everyday resistances people of color engage in to protect their food processes, keep them sacred, and demand inclusion into the American food system, while exposing a foundation of racial capitalism. The volume attempts to show how Black food culture is deeply intertwined within a global system, but I think this idea needed to be more thoroughly explored and developed. By asking new kinds of questions that reveal the power dynamics and colonialism that sit at the foundation of our food landscape in America, Black Food Matters leaves its reader to ponder a recentered vision of Black food justice work and self-determination.