Abstract
Given the 2008 and 2011 global food crises, which have affected not only economies and political systems but also cultures and ecosystems, efforts to provide distinct alternatives to the corporate food regime are more pressing than ever. With its U.S.-centric focus, the food justice movement is going through similar growing pains as the environmental justice movement, albeit not over exposure to environmental bads such as waste incinerators, but over access to the environmental good of just and sustainably produced food. Alkon and Agyeman have pulled together a compelling set of chapters that make up Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. Although there have been a smattering of articles employing the “food justice” concept over the past 10 years, beginning with Fisher and Gottlieb’s (1996) call to integrate the concerns of the food security movement with the environmental justice movement, it was not until last year that Gottlieb and Joshi (2010) published the book Food Justice, also on MIT Press. Cultivating Food Justice builds off of this book by providing a critical exposition that attends to positionality within the agrifood system and helps expand our understanding of food justice by linking race, class, and gender at multiple scales, often blurring boundaries between spaces and experiences of production and consumption. As Alkon and Agyeman note in the Introduction, this book “help(s) to nurture fertile soil in which a polyculture of approaches to just and sustainable agriculture can thrive” (p.16). Specifically, the book integrates environmental justice literature, critical race theory, and studies on food and agriculture to explore how food injustice is produced and how groups are resisting exploitation and domination both within the agrifood system and the broader food and farming movement.
The book is organized in four parts. The first part, “The Production of Unequal Access” investigates the way that racialized systems of exclusion interact with capitalism to create not only food insecurity and hunger but also inequality in who owns, controls, and grows food on land throughout the United States. For example, in the chapter by Norgaard, Reed, and Van Horten, the authors explore the racialized environmental history that produced hunger in the Karuk community: “outright genocide, lack of recognition of land occupation and title, and forced assimilation” (p. 28). Minkoff-Zern, Peluso, Sowerwine, and Getz also contribute to food justice scholarship with their concept of agricultural racial formations. They investigate how the dispossession of Chinese, Japanese, and Hmong farmers’ lands is racialized either explicitly or implicitly through a set of laws, policies, or practices that affect specific Asian American groups. Both of these racial processes are at play in the chapter by Green, Green, and Kleiner who pay particular attention to “the stresses placed on black farmers’ livelihood systems through structural inequality, limited access to land, and indifference and hostility from the institutions that are supposed to assist producers . . .” (p. 48).
The second part, “Consumption Denied” focuses on the inability of people of color to purchase healthy and/or culturally appropriate food. McClintock contributes to the literature through his concept of demarcated devaluation whereby industrial, residential, and food retail capital flows out of communities contributing to a loss of control and autonomy over local spaces of production and consumption. The next chapter takes us out of the flatlands of urban Oakland and into California’s rural farm spaces where Brown and Getz investigate the paradox of farmworker food insecurity. These authors clearly make the case that the structural causes of immigration policy, the “ideological construction of a racialized agricultural working class” and “the global economic system in which the domestic dynamics of food production are embedded” produce food insecurity (pp. 125, 139).
The third part, “Will Work for Food Justice” presents the reader with a set of chapters dedicated to how poor people and people of color are working to create more just and sustainable alternatives to the dominant agrifood system. This is the heart of the book. I think that these five chapters are the most important chapters because they get the reader to begin thinking through how the food and farming movement is going to have to address a deeper set of structural concerns if food justice is to be achieved. The first chapter evaluates efforts to dismantle racism through sustainable food systems (Morales), while the second looks at the role that two Black Nationalist religious organizations play in developing autonomous community food security strategies that focus on improving the livelihoods of Black people (McCutcheon). In what I consider to be one of the best chapters in the book, Mares and Peña argue for the importance of integrating sovereignty and autonomy into food justice strategies and scholarship through “exploring how diasporic and immigrant gardeners mobilize deep senses of personal and collective identity while employing place-based agroecological knowledge in urban spaces” (p. 199). Harper’s chapter pushes food justice scholarship to consider the politics of eating meat, specifically, the color-blind claims by vegans that often ignore race and class privilege. In this chapter, Harper provides qualitative data that supports the claim that “food justice cannot be a reality, vegan or not, if the overwhelming white food movements, fail to engage in antiracism and critical whiteness-awareness activism” (p. 235). Dethroning the urban bias of much food justice scholarship, McEntee shows how poor whites construct a rural notion of food justice, traditional localism. This chapter shows how people’s intent matters in how they view the agrifood system and in turn how they want to change it. For traditional localists, they see access barriers tied to the availability of soil, water, and land resources, which therefore informs their priorities to obtain fresh, affordable food through gardening, hunting, and/or reciprocal exchange with friends.
The last part of the book, “Future Directions” pushes theoretical and activist boundaries to address the deeply structural realities of race and class by reevaluating how we understand anti-oppression efforts, justice, and food sovereignty. Although two of these chapters have been published in different forms elsewhere (Guthman’s article and Holt-Gimenez’s article), they offer important insights in the context of this edited collection. First, White cultural discourses need to be recognized in food justice efforts if racial and ethnic inequality is to be solved. Second, a worldwide movement integrating the strategies and perspectives of food sovereignty struggles is needed to not just address symptoms of the corporate food regime, but to confront it head on, transforming human/food relations into a more just and sustainable food regime of the future. The most subtle chapter comes from DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman with their concept of reflexive food justice that “works within an awareness of the tensions between different definitions of justice, environmental and bodily health, and good food . . . (and) responds to changing circumstances, imperfectly, but with awareness of the contradictions of the moment” (p. 297).
Overall, this book provides a much needed addition to the food justice literature. Not only does Cultivating Food Justice highlight the importance of moving beyond colorblindness, the heterogeneity of individual and group constructions of being in the world as consumers and producers of food, and the necessity of bodily and community autonomy, but it also reveals the contested and myriad intersections between race, class, and geography. Specifically, the editors call to pay more attention to food and farmworkers, the need to move beyond market-driven strategies to change the agrifood system, and the significance of efforts by the food justice movement to directly confront the dominant food and farming movement. Both scholars and activists concerned with the prospects of creating a more just and sustainable food system, the basis on which humans both socially and biologically (re)produce, will find this an imperative read.