COMM 114 The Meaning of Food Justice Discussion

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COMM 114

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There is 12 keywords and the first one called "Food Justice" is the example

Make each keywords definition shorter and looks like the sample I give to you

Please use the example to make the left of 11 words much more clear and concise

  1. DEFINITIONS  should include:

(a) a brief definition

(b) a concise observation about the term's meaning (significance) with respect to food justice, food democracy, and/or food systems., and 

(c) at least one reference to literature on the subject (one of your required readings in COMM 114J). Your references should include the author’s last name, year of publication, and title of the article or book.

Example:

FOOD JUSTICE:  (1) Gottlieb and Joshi (2010) define food justice as follows: “Food Justice seeks to ensure that the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown, produced, transported, distributed, accessed and eaten are shared fairly.” Food justice is about fairness, diversity, equity and inclusion with respect to food systems. (2) One of the most significant aspects of Food justice is its power as an organizing framework. Organizers use the food justice story to rally people in ways that integrate diverse struggles and forms of  justice  --social, cultural, political, economic, racial, health. (3) Gottlieb and Joshi. 2010.Food justice,

Please put each of your key terms into the format above.

TERM: (1) definition; (2) significance; (3) reference


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1. Food Justice Gottlieb and Joshi (2010) define food justice as follows: “Food Justice seeks to ensure that the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown, produced, transported, distributed, accessed and eaten are shared fairly.” Food justice is about fairness, diversity, equity and inclusion with respect to food systems. One of the most significant aspects of Food justice is its power as an organizing framework. Organizers use the food justice story to rally people in ways that integrate diverse struggles and forms of justice --social, cultural, political, economic, racial, health. (Gottlieb and Joshi. 2010.Food justice) 2. Food Democracy is a participatory process that inclusively and equitably involves the demos (the will of the people) in making sure that the diversity of food systems upon which humans depend for survival are secure, resilient, sustainability regenerative and just. (Pezzoli, COMM 114J). Food Democracy is significant for its potential to make food systems more just by establishing inclusive, diverse, and participatory governance arrangements that can change the institutional power relationships, socio-cultural belief systems, and market dynamics that create food system inequities and injustices (Vide and Klemencic 2017: 24). 3. Food Sovereignty “Food sovereignty is the right of people to define their own food, agriculture, livestock, and fisheries systems” (Cited in Ventura and Bailkey 2017: 11). The concept grows out of worker and farmer movements in rural working lands of developing countries. Stressed by the forces of globalized agriculture as a kind of factory farming, a progressive ruralism has risen up calling for “food sovereignty” -- an approach to food systems justice that seeks local and indigenous people power over food culture and ownership. Food sovereignty is significant as an actionable theory and ethical stance that people are using to improve community food security, aid hunger and foster transformative social activism; it addresses and makes visible the injustices, racism, and environmental degradation rooted in food systems around the world (Ventura and Bailkey, 2017 Good Food Strong Communities). Gottlieb and Joshi (2010: 115) define it as “a new kind of campesino- or peasant-based movement seeking to identify alternatives to the globalization of food and the destruction of rural farming practices and farming communities throughout the developing world.” 4. Food Security 1996 World Food Summit definition (FAO, 1996): Food security is met when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (Porter et al., 2014: 490). The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life (source). An estimated 1 in 6 students are food insecure at one point or another during their time at UC San Diego (source). In 2017, an estimated 1 in 8 Americans were food insecure, equating to 40 million Americans including more than 12 million children. [i]. 5. Food Desert A food desert is a social and geographical term that refers to an area of a city where people do not have adequate access to markets, including supermarkets, where they can purchase healthy food, including fresh fruits and vegetables. Food deserts tend to be in communities of color and underserved neighborhoods where the problem of food access is compounded by high rates of obesity, poor nutrition, poverty and food insecurity. The term food desert is significant as communication framework to raise awareness of, make visible, the “place-based,” territorial, spatial injustice associated with food systems. This place-based concept is being used to strengthen the urban agriculture movement, including community gardens, and changes in city policy and planning aimed at improving food systems through place-based approaches that engage people locally (Pezzoli, 2019 Local and Bioregional Solutions to Climate Change). 6. Food Forest A Food Forest is a system that replicates a woodland or forest ecosystem using edible plants, trees, shrubs, annuals and perennials. Food Forest improves air, water, and soil as it creates habitat, harvestable food, and greenspace. These food ecosystems can provide comparable food yields to more traditional community gardens with lower maintenance, water and other resource inputs, and expenses. A food forest is significant in light of its potential to provide an accessible local food source that help offset food insecurities while also benefiting the climate and quality of urban spaces. (Pezzoli, 2019 Local and Bioregional Solutions) to Climate Change) 7. Urban Agriculture Is the process of growing, harvesting and distributing food within an urban setting; the practices include horticulture, livestock, aquaculture and forestry seen in community gardens, food forests, small urban farms, backyards, school gardens, green houses, rooftops, and other types of arrangements. Urban agriculture minimizes our carbon footprint as it relies less on global and external food systems--thus promoting food sustainability. (Conner, 2015 Urban and Peri Urban agriculture) Urban agriculture has proven to be a good organizing platform to get people working with one another convivially while also improving coupled natural-and-human systems (CHANS) involving soil, biota and water (e.g., green infrastructure) (Ventura and Bailkey, 2017 Good food strong communities’ chapter 2,) (Pezzoli, 2019 Local and Bioregional Solutions to Climate Change) 8. New Urban Agenda Is an important milestone document recently published by the United Nations (UN); it is “a roadmap for enabling cities to become engines of prosperity and of integrated rural-urban development” (source: Sustainable food systems in the New Urban Agenda). The NUA was written in response to the lackluster performance of nation states to meet climate change goals as spelled out, for instance, in the 2015 Paris Accord. The NUA sees cities as engines of innovation best suited to advance climate mitigation and adaptation. The FAO’s 2019 Urban Food Agenda builds on the NUA, calling for new approaches to urban food systems designed to be resilient to the impacts of climate change. (2019, FAO framework for the Urban Food Agenda). Global leaders committed “to promote the integration of food security and nutritional needs in urban and territorial planning in order to end hunger and malnutrition” and “to promote coordination of sustainable food security and agriculture policies across urban, peri-urban and rural areas to facilitate the production, storage, transport and marketing of food to consumers in adequate and affordable ways in order to reduce food losses and prevent and reuse food waste” (source: Sustainable food systems in the New Urban Agenda). 9. Localization De Young (2015) defines localization as follows: “Localization is a process of social and behavioral change focused on localities. Its primary concern is how to adapt our goals, expectations and daily patterns to a life lived within the immutable limits of nearby natural systems. In a localizing process, our attention is focused on everyday behavior within a placebased community, a transition that involves adapting-in-place. The ultimate goals of localization are increasing the long-term psychological well-being of people and societies while sustaining, even improving, the integrity and coherence of natural systems, especially those that directly provision our communities.” Source: LOCALIZATION: A BRIEF DEFINITION https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/localization/definition. Significance Localization is a territorial process that includes place-based policies, plans and local activities that are creating circular, resource-conserving, waste minimizing and regenerative systems of production, consumption, distribution and exchange. Doing this right can help planners and citizens navigate a healthy bioregional transition that, among other things, can improve food justice and the sustainability/resilience and regenerative capacity of food systems. Localization is happening where place-based investments are made, for instance, in local renewable energy microgrids, stormwater management and water harvesting systems, establishment of local industry that is carbon-neutral and zero-waste, urban agriculture and farmers markets. (Pezzoli, 2019 Local and Bioregional Solutions to Climate Change). 10. FOOD SYSTEM A food system is all processes and infrastructure involved in satisfying a population’s food security, that is, the gathering/catching, growing, harvesting (production aspects), storing, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, and consuming of food, and disposing of food waste (non-production aspects) (Porter et al., 2014: 490). 11. Bioregional Transition The “Bioregional Transition” is a territorial theoretical framework that provides an actionable way of understanding and managing global changes taking place in urban, rural and city-region contexts worldwide. The Bioregional Transition calls attention to how forces of “globalization” and “localization” intersect. The Bioregional Transition involves a shift from: (1) globalized (outward looking, exogenous) approaches to planning and development that favors export led industrialization and international trade, to (2) more of an emerging localized (inward looking, endogenous) approach that favors a closed loop, place-based coupling of human and natural systems as the preferred path to making city-region development sustainable, resilient and regenerative. Bioregional Transition is about finding ways to value and wisely use local bioregional sources of natural capital (e.g. soil, water, ecosystems) and natural sinks for wastes (e.g. toxicants). The Bioregional Transition is an emergent process. It is visible where societies have begun grappling with complex socio-ecological problems by establishing place-based, territorial approaches to securing health and wellbeing for their residents (p. 2). Pezzoli, K. 2015. “Bioregionalism.” pp 25-29, In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William Gleason, David Pellow. NY: New York University Press. 12. Bioregionalism Bioregionalism is a social movement and action-oriented field of study focused on enabling human communities to live, work, eat, and recreate sustainably within Earth’s dynamic web of life. At the heart of the matter is this core guiding principle: human beings are social animals; if we are to flourish as a species, we need healthy relationships and secure attachments in our living arrangements with one another and with the land, waters, habitat, plants, and animals upon which we depend. Bioregionalists argue, we need to establish new, just, ethical, and ecologically resilient ways to reconnect with one another and with the land. Bioregionalism’s core commitments include (1) rebuilding urban and rural communities—at a human scale—to nurture a healthy sense of place and to secure attachments and rootedness among community inhabitants; (2) reintegrating nature and human settlements in ways that holistically instill eco-efficiency, equity, and green cultural values into systems of production, consumption, and daily life; (3) making known (and valuing) the way wildlands, working landscapes, ecosystems, and rural dwellers and resources enable cities to exist; (4) developing authentic community-based participatory processes that empower just and equitable civic engagement in local and regional planning, visualization, and decision making; and (5) building global transbioregional alliances and knowledge networks to support sustainable place making around the world. The bioregion as a unit of analysis is significant as it provides a useful territorial framework to address challenges raised in the New Urban Agenda, and the FAOs Urban Food Agenda. A is broadly defined by its physical, human built, socio-cultural and economic attributes. Bioregions are significant as in terms of food systems since it highlights urban-rural linkages with an eye on improving food distribution, consumption, processing, cultivation and waste minimization and management. (Pezzoli, 2019 Local and Bioregional Solutions to Climate Change). Part 2. Short answers 1. Lewis, Ford and Pratsch (2017, ch. 9 in V&B) argue that food justice requires attention to racism –that, in the case of Detroit, racism has to be uprooted in order to realize food justice. Explain. Discuss the evidence they cite. Here is the Book link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q2404 The Detroit food system is highly affected by racism which has to be dismantled in order for people from different communities can come together and develop relationships. Food is an important aspect that can be used to bring these people together. This allows people from different backgrounds, socialeconomical classes and personalities hence creating accountability and building capacity among the people, hence achieving food justice. The evidence used is data from researchers. (2017, ch. 9 in V&B) 2. Ventura (2017, ch. 8 in V&B) and many others highlight the importance of soil when it comes to urban agriculture, food justice and building healthy communities. Explain. What’s all the fuss about soil, why now? Here is the Book link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q2404 The soil is crucial in the growth of healthy plants. Soil is essential for any agricultural activity, especially in the urban areas. Unlike the traditional notion of urban areas not being suitable for agriculture, Ventura specifies that with soil, it is possible for people in the urban centers to also farm. With soil, however little it is, it is possible for healthy plants to grow, hence achievement of food justice and hence healthy communities. (2017, ch. 8 in V&B) 3. What are the 5 As of Food Security as spelled out by Ventura and Bailkey (2017, pp. 2123 in V&B). How do these authors connect community food security and food system change? Here is the Book link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q2404 Availability which means sufficient food for all people at all times. Accessibility, which means the ability to physically and economically access food at all they times. Adequacy, which means ability to access food that is safe, nutritious and that is produced in ways that are environmentally sustainable. Acceptability, which means access to food that is culturally acceptable, and does not comprise the dignity of the people. Agency means presence of policies and practices that promote food security. The authors connect community food security to food system by explaining how people in the community ensure food security by embracing the food system, which the people eating the food know where the food came from, know the people making the food hence being fully aware of the food system and participating in it. (2017, pp. 21-23 in V&B) Essay questions Question 1. Food systems are composed of, give shape to, and impact: (a) social, economic, political and cultural systems, together with (b) ecosystems, soil, water and earth’s climate. Explain how the prospect of increasing food justice in the world depends on addressing both sides of this coin: the social and ecological. Be sure to pinpoint some way the social and ecological interact. Give an example that seems hopeful (i.e., evidence suggests it may be a connection/relationship that can be amplified in ways that improve food justice and the environment). Here is the Book link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q2404 Another reading I will attached below called “Fairfax etal 2012 (ch8. Food Democracy and Innovation)” Increasing food justice in the world depends on addressing both sides of this coin: the social and ecological. Food justice involves diversity, inclusion, equity and fairness with respect to food systems. It ensures that benefits and the risks or food systems are share equally. For food justice to be effective, there is a relationship between social, economic, political and cultural systems, and ecosystems, soil, water and earth’s climate. This means that it is critical to address the social and the ecological factors if one needs to enhance food justice. Fr example, it is crucial to acknowledge the population of a place in regard to the amount of food being produced or transported into the area. Food justice involves production of food that is culturally acceptable, therefore there is need to ensure that the food systems do not violate the culture and beliefs of the land. to achieve food justice, it is therefore important to address all the sides of the coin. (VENTURA, S., BAILKEY, M., & SHARMA, N. (2017). Connections between Community Food Security and Food System Change) Question 2. Fairfax et al. (2012, ch. 2) underscore the importance of “Framing Alternative Food.” Along similar lines, Allen, Cooley and Sims (2017, ch. 13 in V&B) argue that we need to reframe institutional power in order to bring about social and food justice. Drawing upon both of these publications, explain what is meant by “framing” alternative food and why this matters from a food justice advocacy standpoint. Weave into your essay the idea of “narrative ownership as a power shifting strategy.” Here is the Book link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q2404 Another reading I will attached below called “Fairfax etal 2012 (ch2. Framing Alternative Food)” According to Fairfax et al. (2012, ch. 2), “framing” alternative food means establishing strategies that provide information to the people on the issues of food systems, how they can ensure food security and the alternatives available to either supplement or increase food production. “framing” alternative food is important food justice because it shifts people’s mindsets from their current perception about agriculture and food production to a more concise attitude towards food. People begin to see food from a new dimension, therefore appreciating it, preserving it and doing the best they can to respect the food system. Through the new narratives about food, through the increased number of researches works, articles and books now addressing food justice form a new perspective, people’s knowledge about food and food systems is changed hence shifting their mindsets. (Fairfax, S. K., Guthey, G. T., Dyble, L. N., Gwin, L., & Moore, M. (2012). California cuisine and just food.) MIT Press Chapter Title: Framing Alternative Food Book Title: California Cuisine and Just Food Book Author(s): Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Nelson Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey, Lauren Gwin, Monica Moore, Jennifer Sokolove, Matthew Gerhart and Jennifer Kao Published by: MIT Press. (2012) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhm2k.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to California Cuisine and Just Food This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 2 Framing Alternative Food Both the evolution of the alternative food district and our analysis of it occur in close relationship to a broader discussion that has been taking place, more or less simultaneously, across the nation. Because both the exchange of ideas and the process of continuing dialogue are important to our district, this chapter puts California Cuisine and Just Food into the context of what is frequently called “the food literature.” That literature did not exist until the 1970s. Prior to that point, most of what we now think of as food and food systems was typically thought about and labeled as “agriculture.” Both mainstream and reform discussions of food were dominated by attention to production economics and agricultural technique. It was difficult to discuss food the way we do today for the simple reason that food was hard to envision very much beyond cookbooks.1 As the more complex idea of food systems became recognizable, discussions expanded to include a fuller picture of the activities involved in feeding a population: cultivation, harvest, processing, packaging, transport, marketing, sale, and consumption, plus disposal of food and food-related items, and, in addition, the labor, financing, and inputs needed and outputs generated in each of those processes. Until recently equity remained ancillary to the conversation, addressed episodically but only occasionally with sustained intensity. For most of the twentieth century, equity was discussed in the farm-centric context of agricultural labor.2 Topics now loosely addressed as food security, which turn on access for all to safe, nutritious food, were subsumed into analysis of the problems created by overproduction and agricultural surpluses. The international concept of food sovereignty, which includes an individual right to food and a community right to control its own food system, adds an element of self-determination to questions of food This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 14 Chapter 2 access; but it has only recently begun to shape the U.S. conversation about food. Perhaps because the early academic discussion of food was so narrowly focused, popular books, newspapers and magazines, and, more recently, blogs, videos gone viral, and feature films, have played an important role in leading the contemporary food conversation. Indeed, the line between academic and trade books has largely eroded in the food literature. Many trade books about food are analytically sophisticated and data rich, and several academics have written best-sellers. That is not unique, but neither is it common, and it may have contributed to the broad array of perspectives on food that is gaining traction as essential to the conversation about the future of the U.S. food system. Food Systems: An Intersection of Scholarly and Popular Debate Food systems were not discussed until recently because they were not generally visible. Allen (1993) points out that a focus on farm-related issues largely marginalized the analysis of the social impacts and dynamics of food production, distribution, and consumption. Even when social analysts were involved, a narrow cohort of politically powerful agricultural economists dominated, limiting the range of permissible topics.3 Academics learned “the dangers of challenging the hegemony of production agriculture and its intellectual articulators, the agricultural economists.”4 For a long time, it was difficult to put together a viable academic career outside a restricted range of technical and economic issues. It is not surprising, then, that several of the most influential early discussions about food and food systems started outside the academy. Many of the innovators discussed in part II mention two best-selling authors—Rachel Carson and Francis Moore Lappé—as critical to their own values. Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) compiled data regarding the environmental and health consequences of conventional agriculture’s growing reliance on pesticides. Many consider it to have been the opening salvo of the environmental movement. Although the initial response to her work focused on the impact of pesticides on wildlife and ecosystems, Carson’s analysis also exposed the disturbing public health consequences of intensifying agricultural production methods. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 15 Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) appeared in the context of a deepening conversation about agricultural intensification, efficiency, and protein. First, the 1967 Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, The World Food Problem, reviewed global crop failures and concluded that “the scale, severity and duration of the world food problem are so great that a massive, long-range effort unprecedented in human history will be required to master it.”5 Promoting the intensive agricultural techniques associated with the “green revolution,” the report encouraged more efficient use of protein resources, including a shift toward fish and vegetable sources and away from feed-intensive livestock.6 The 1973 Arab oil embargo soon added a second concern: conventional agriculture’s dependence on oil. Lappé was among the first to suggest a direct and personal response to potential global disasters. She emphasized that although grazing animals can turn low-quality forage into high-quality protein, the reality of conventional beef production was that “enormous quantities of highest-quality foodstuff were being fed to animals.”7 And she provided a practical guide for strategically combining vegetables and grains to achieve the “complete proteins” that meats provide. Unlike the presidential commission’s report, Lappé’s analysis caused change, anchoring two diverse and important elements of the early days of alternative food. First, in tandem with a popular cookbook, Laurel’s Kitchen (1976), Lappé had a major role in the rapid spread of vegetarianism. Second, Lappé invested her book earnings in a small nonprofit think tank, the Institute for Food and Development Policy (or Food First). Over the years, Food First researchers have critiqued and offered alternatives to U.S. and conventional approaches to food in the globalizing economy. Lappé and Collins’s Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (1977) and Lappé, Collins, and Kinley’s Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions about Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry (1981) both focused on impacts in the global South of U.S. agricultural technologies, aid, and consumption, just as the idea of globalization began to shape a general understanding of the world. A rush of popular books followed Lappé. In Hard Tomatoes, Hard Time, Hightower (1973) exposed the close connections between agribusiness and academic researchers at land grant universities.8 Wier and This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 16 Chapter 2 Shapiro’s Circle of Poison (1981) argued that pesticides banned for use in the United States but manufactured for export returned as problems on imported foods. Those early authors helped to shape the more comprehensive food systems story that emerged thereafter.9 Academics radicalized by social upheavals in the 1960s gradually changed the focus of scholarly investigation. The global economic crises of the 1970s facilitated this shift, inviting reassessment of economic policies in the United States and Europe and incubating cross-disciplinary discussion of the political economy of agriculture.10 Two scholarly works published in 1981 proved particularly influential. Friedland and colleagues applied commodity chain analysis (which traces the lifespan of a specific product from production through consumption) to iceberg lettuce in California, examining both who benefited and who was harmed by farm mechanization and consolidation. Sen debunked the dominant agri-centric idea that famine and starvation result from inadequate food production and supply.11 Commodity chain analysis encouraged scholars to probe particular products, frequently at a global level. Mintz’s masterful Sweetness and Power (1985) explored sugar, a product of global trade for centuries before Columbus’s voyage, and its role in simultaneously underwriting slavery in the Caribbean and transforming the diet of working-class British. Similar narratives have become both a popular and scholarly genre, enabling attentive readers to see the implications of quotidian food choices. Salt, tomatoes, potatoes, coffee, oranges, sugar, bananas, oysters, milk, and diverse meats are among the products that have been subjected to close inspection.12 The commodity chain also anchors a long muckraking tradition in the literature. Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) is the archetype: his exposé of the horrors of the Chicago meatpacking industry led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act that same year. The equivalent horrors of chicken production have been similarly documented in the early twenty-first century, but to less effect. Striffler’s Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (2005), a 2008 Charlotte [North Carolina] Observer series entitled “The Cruelest Cuts,” and the 2009 film Food, Inc. illustrate the problematic social and environmental consequences of current industrial practices.13 Although the chicken industry is changing gradually, this intersection of scholarly This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 17 and popular work underscores the shift away from the farm-centric, and generally uncritical, themes that dominated twentieth-century agricultural social science.14 Sen’s pivotal Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation focused on hunger and equity, disproving the standard, durable wisdom that famine and starvation arise from inadequate supplies of food. Sen’s review of famine events in Bengal, Ethiopia, and the Sahel demonstrated that access, rather than supply, is most central to famine. Assessing differences in entitlements, he insisted that whether hungry people have food to eat is a function of the power dynamics of resource distribution, not a simple relationship between numbers of people and tons of grain.15 Subsequent works reinterpreting the Irish potato famine, the late nineteenth-century famines in India, and the “late Victorian holocausts,” confirm Sen’s essential insights.16 If Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, and the Gates Foundation are determined to promote supply-side and technological fixes to hunger in the style of the green revolution, it is not for lack of analysis demonstrating the shortcomings of such input-dependent agricultural intensification.17 Sen’s emphasis on food distribution has inspired our own approach to both Berkeley’s foodie hub—known as the Gourmet Ghetto—and food justice issues in Oakland: distribution problems that made it difficult to get superior produce to the Gourmet Ghetto are similar to the barriers that make it difficult to provide nutritious foods to hospitals, the elderly, and school children and to what some call “food deserts,” that is, neighborhoods without ready access to a healthy diet.18 The 1980s launched a broader scholarly inquiry into questions of who is eating what, and why and how foods are produced. Poppendieck’s Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat (1985) demonstrated that U.S. hunger policies begun during the Great Depression have prioritized support for agriculture and dealing with food surplus rather than feeding hungry people. In a slightly different vein, other social scientists have focused on America’s changing food habits. Levenstein positioned food more broadly as an appropriate lens for inquiry into social and cultural history: Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in America (1988) explored the shift in the United States from a traditional British menu to a more American diet during the period 1880 to 1930. Belasco explored a similar topic in Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 18 Chapter 2 Industry (1989), documenting Americans’ post–World War II embrace of highly processed, standardized food and early efforts to loosen the corporate commodities’ grip. By the time Allen’s book appeared in 1993, her emphasis on social analysis of the new entity—food systems—was as much evidence of the broadening discussion as a startling call for redirection. Public events also forced growing attention to the intersection of environmental and food issues and drew both public and scholarly attention to toxins in food and food production. An explosive public debate in 1989 about the growth regulator Alar on apples intensified questions about whether “you are what you eat,” and if so, whether we should be concerned about children’s tolerance for the chemicals that they consume.19 The resulting National Academy of Science’s Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children (1993) documented the inadequate oversight in the U.S. food regulatory system. Two 1996 works explored both serious historic abuses in the food system and pending problems. Wargo’s Our Children’s Toxic Legacy demonstrated that “science and the law fail to protect us from pesticides.” In Our Stolen Future, Colborn raised questions about the hidden, long-term impact of chemicals in food and food production, focusing on human reproduction and bringing the concept of endocrine disrupters—chemicals that interfere with hormone activities in animals, including humans—at least to the outer border of mainstream conversations about food. Scholars have addressed toxics, access, and health from a variety of directions. Dupuis (2000) identified a “not in my body” politics: advocacy that unites long-standing environmental, public health, and consumer activists with justice advocates’ priority on nontoxic, nutritious meals. Scholars in Great Britain first explored the issue of healthy food in what they called “food deserts,” neighborhoods that are often served primarily by fast food restaurants and corner stores without a produce section.20 That idea has defined a major segment of the food justice agenda; for example, Chicago food leader LaDonna Redmond has been quoted time and again observing that in her Chicago neighborhood, it is easier to buy an AK-47 than an organic tomato.21 These food systems topics were already on the agenda when three writers—a journalist, a professor, and an academic journalist—produced a wave of work bringing food systems issues into daily conversation. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 19 Atlantic Monthly writer Eric Schlosser’s popular volume, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001), documented the fast food industry’s enormous marketing power and probed the consequences for producers of beef, chicken, and kindred products, from redesigning the potato to redefining school lunch.22 Schlosser also explored fast food impacts on consumers and on meatpackers and the youth who work in fast food outlets. His analysis inspired Spurlock’s 2004 polemical film, Super Size Me, in which the producer-directorauthor-star consumes only McDonald’s products for a month, with alarming, albeit not peer-reviewed, health consequences. Nutrition professor Marion Nestle followed in 2002 with Food Politics and a year later with Safe Food. Her first book’s subtitle, How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, suggests her concerns. Nestle tracked the industry’s well-funded marketing and lobbying efforts and concluded that the industry encourages overeating, promotes poor nutritional practices, and confuses basic nutritional guidance. Safe Food explored who bears the risks of food safety shortfalls and who benefits from ignoring them. And in 2008, she focused on pet food safety, investigating the problems of monitoring and maintaining basic health standards in extended, globalized food chains.23 Completing this trio, journalism professor Michael Pollan has become the ubiquitous face of critical food writing.24 His New York Times articles, best-selling books, including Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and scores of speeches, articles, interviews, and personal appearances have made him a household name. Pollan has even appeared in popular films: King Korn (2007), The Vanishing of the Bees (2009), and with Schlosser in Food Inc. (2008). These compelling analysts significantly expanded the audience for food discussion at a time when the health consequences of a diet of cheap, processed food were becoming increasingly apparent in the scientific literature and on the street. Halweil’s (2004) Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket expresses a vote-withyour-fork response—suggesting that consumers can change the system with careful food choices.25 But the harder task is addressing access to food and community economic development in historically disenfranchised populations, where folks do not deploy the consumer power in evidence at San Francisco’s upscale Ferry Plaza nor do they have a range This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 20 Chapter 2 of food choices easily available. New activist chefs are among those addressing access, development, and deskilling in those communities. For example, Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine (2009) weaves together efforts to build community and culture as well as reskill urban workers and urban consumers by growing, cooking, and sharing healthy food and preparing urban populations to find jobs in the growing food sector. Newly audible voices are adding their own perspectives to the rapidly expanding food systems conversation. The global peasant organization La Via Campesina introduced the notion of food sovereignty at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome.26 The concept emphasizes the anticolonial and self-determination elements of food access. In the United States, analysts and community organizers have more commonly pursued what is referred to as food justice. Winne (2008, 2010a) and Gottlieb and Joshi (2010) have probed the rapidly expanding array of organizations, most of them recently formed, that work in the food justice field. On the production side, a new wave of workers’ organizations has worked to bring the concerns of low-wage, frequently immigrant food service workers into the food debate. Sen and Mamdouh’s The Accidental American (2008), the Restaurant Opportunities Centers’ Serving While Sick (2010) and Behind the Kitchen Door (2011) and Liu and Apollon’s “The Color of Food” (2011) provide fresh insight into the ever more complex justice arena. Gottlieb and Joshi’s chronicle of new actors and concerns in what will likely become a thick and feisty discourse characterizes food justice as “ensuring that the benefits and risks of where, what and how food is grown and produced, transported and distributed and accessed and eaten are shared fairly.”27 Others who have used and popularized the term food justice appear to us, as we discuss in chapter 8, purposefully less comprehensive. They emphasize, as do many of the groups that Gottlieb and Joshi profile, community-level concerns with access to healthy food that weave together self-determination, youth empowerment, economic development, and skill building, frequently with a clear focus on racism and race. Although these concerns are part of the narrative in Gottlieb and Joshi’s work, their definition both adds to and subtracts from food justice as we have encountered it. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 21 We therefore take a more inductive approach, using the term food justice to reflect as best we can what the advocates in our narrative have told us. When we need a term to convey Gottlieb and Joshi’s more comprehensive definition, we use food democracy: a participatory decisionmaking process that addresses the human right to safe, nutritious, justly produced food. That definition emphasizes a comprehensive discussion underlying collective action.28 It also asserts rights, which, again as we shall discuss in chapter 8, seems particularly important. The same new perspectives have also confounded the already complex meanings of local. At first glance, local seems simple and transparently positive. Foods produced more locally will be fresher and the supply chain shorter. That permits a kind of sustainability and accountability that is impossible in a global system that erases the producer and often alters the product. In addition, local suggests that consumer dollars will remain in and support the local community. However, just how close to home local must be is a tricky question. For example, under what definition can coffee beans that are grown in Tanzania but roasted in the Bay Area be considered local to the Bay Area? Or under what conditions can milk produced in the Bay Area but packaged in bottles from Canada be considered local? The confusion arises in part because some understandings of local come into the food discussion through global climate change issues, which are every bit as contested in the food systems context as they are more generally. Locavores, who try to eat only food produced within a circumscribed local radius, appear to have borne the brunt of inappropriately dismissive critiques.29 Similarly, conventional agriculture’s reliance on cheap oil for fertilizers and pesticides has become mired in conflicting data about oil used in transport and remains an underaddressed, but significant, issue. The very much related issue of food miles—how far a product travels to get to the point of consumption—is similarly contested, with significant debate about measurement and the environmental impacts of production and processing in one place or another. Sadly, the process of excoriating the locavores has diverted public attention from a more complex and important issue of accountability. Locality provides some mechanisms—perhaps a proxy— for setting and enforcing expectations about food quality that are not This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 22 Chapter 2 available in the long, convoluted supply chains that make conventional processed foods possible. Early rosy assertions that global warming would benefit agriculture— warmer weather and more carbon dioxide arguably could increase growing seasons and yields in some areas—has given way to less hopeful views.30 Recent international agricultural assessments anticipate a serious decline in clean and accessible water in developing countries, which would likely be exacerbated by climate change.31 The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for reporting, with little visible policy impact, that the worst effects on agriculture may be in the least-food-secure areas: Africa, for example, is expected to experience a 30 percent drop in food productivity over the next several decades.32 On the positive side, a 2009 global assessment of agriculture found that sustainable production methods that build on site-specific agricultural knowledge could feed the global population and support local economic development around the world. Unfortunately, the report of the International Assessment of Agriculture Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, Agriculture at a Crossroads (2009), has had little impact, although its findings have been amplified in the more recent Food and Agriculture Organization’s assessment, Save and Grow (2011).33 Industrial Districts and Food Systems We use a simple version of the industrial district concept to focus our narrative. The idea has been a useful tool for explaining innovation and learning in small manufacturing regions for over a century. Districts arise where focused interactions among those involved in a particular trade or activity create a sense of common enterprise. Familiar districts include the actors, writers, financiers, publicists, and related service providers and hangers-on that make Hollywood recognizable as a center of entertainment and the cluster of high-tech folks—the wonks, programmers, engineers, university researchers, funders in the military and venture capital firms, and others—who understand themselves as “working for Silicon Valley” (Saxenian 1994). Scholars have studied industrial districts in many different places and called them many different things. The idea enjoyed a renaissance in the This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 23 1980s as an element of scholarly response to economic globalization. In the conservative political climate that grew out of the economic crises of the 1970s, neoliberals advocated “free market” capitalism without protectionist national trade barriers or subsidies to nationally prioritized industries. Scholars concerned about this round of globalization responded with a wave of analyses exploring the durability and importance of local and regional activity, including industrial districts. Both groups have agreed that industrial districts are important to the businesses involved. Most descriptions of districts have in common an emphasis on the importance of routine face-to-face contact in economic activity, and many of them explore the way regions respond to the globalization process. The observation that propulsive economic gains stem from close interactions among similar producers has seemed applicable to diverse industrial systems. Brusco (1982) explored the successful industrialization of the Emilia-Romagna region during the 1970s that created the so-called “third Italy.” 34 The region became known for its food and machinery industries, comprised of dense networks of small and medium-sized businesses. The Emilian district is very similar to Marshall’s original formulation in the1890s. Rebranded again as “flexible specialization,” Piore and Sabel used the industrial district frame in 1984 to defend the efficiency of local specificity and creativity against enthusiasm for globalization. Their The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity described an alternative to global mass production: small-scale producers employing craftsmen rather than unskilled, interchangeable labor. In yet another iteration, Saxenian (1994) and Storper (1997) analyzed the formal and informal social practices that produce highperforming industrial regions. Industrial districts came into discussions on food systems early in the twenty-first century as part of assessing the common assertion that smaller-scale, artisanal production is preferable on its face. Confronted with vibrant regional economies, Goodman and Watts (1994) criticized the presumption that social agency at small scales necessarily withered when confronted with global actors. But scholars did not presume that these more “flexible” or regional forms were superior. Dupuis and Block (2008) underscored, for example, that relocalizing in the milk industry has led to very different outcomes in different places. Winter (2003) This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 24 Chapter 2 argued that efforts to promote embeddedness, local sourcing, and proximate industry can easily obscure or reinforce politics and goals that are neither progressive nor sustainable.35 Accordingly, most have reasoned that industrial districts suggest possibilities for more creative work and more satisfying workplace practice and politics, but that they do not automatically result in better social conditions or preordain a wide dispersal of economic benefits.36 Although most industrial district literature emphasizes producers and manufacturers, Goodman’s (2003) description of a “quality turn” away from mass-produced products focused attention on consumers and how their responses to genetically modified organisms, food scares, and increasingly toxic production methods and food products can provide a market for small-scale and artisanal production. In the same vein, numerous scholars have studied the notions of values and trust that appear central to Goodman’s idea of quality. Storper (1997) discussed conventions, formal and informal agreements about acceptable social practices, in a district. Reskilling and reshaping practices can underwrite the sale of products based on specific qualities—fresh, organic, artisanal, fair trade—rather than price. Murdoch, Marsden, and Banks (2000) have similarly emphasized that trust, embeddedness, and consumer insistence on food safety reflect local conventions that are critical to understanding shifts in the global agrifood system. Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch’s Worlds of Food (2006) expanded on this theme to chart how global, regional, and local cultural, political, and ecological priorities shape the food system in different places. Others have argued that global commodity chains can be part of the quality turn, arguing that they can serve as mechanisms for communicating quality standards across vast distances.37 Finally, DuPuis and Gillon, summarizing a significant body of recent scholarship, suggest that the values, conventions, and expectations embodied in alternative markets are created and maintained through civic engagement.38 Analysts have also pointed to obvious constraints on the possibilities for regional food. For example, the much-discussed idea of more personal relationships between food producers and consumers (as in the slogan, “Know your farmer, know your food”) is largely incompatible with the notion of year-round markets with fresh produce, which requires This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 25 importing many products.39 Conversely, diverse adaptations of terroir— roughly, controlled appellations such as Rocquefort, Champagne, and similar efforts to market regionally distinct products—require integrating industrial districts into global commerce. Indulgence and Innovation in an Alternative Food District Our book enters the conversation at this point. We start by admitting that it is more difficult than we anticipated to identify particular acts or items as innovations—leading to alternative food—or as indulgences, and “bads” that we should perhaps oppose, shame, or stamp out. Perspective matters enormously. The local organic peach that may strike farmers’ market critics as an indulgence may in fact be one for the shopper, especially when nearby homeless people are looking for food in trash cans. However, the United Farm Workers have regarded eliminating pesticides as a fundamental justice issue for good reason, and farmworkers are unlikely to regard a field without pesticides as an indulgence. As much as perspective matters, scale is probably more important. It frequently requires time and space to turn an indulgence for the few into a food system innovation. For example, before pasteurized or certified milk was available, the purity of fluid milk was never guaranteed, and many children, rich and poor—but assuredly more of them were poor— died from drinking it. The privileged were the first to enjoy access to consistently safe milk, but it soon became the standard. Moving privileges to scale is a key element of justice. It is quite common to characterize raising the standards on basic food requirements as elitist, but is it? It is clear whose interests are served when federal regulations permit chicken to be chilled in water baths known as “fecal soup” 40 and a hamburger made with “pink slime”41 to be the standard. When preventing such outrages signifies a “nanny state,” and an air-cooled chicken and a grass-fed beef are characterized as elitist, improving food quality for all is a challenge.42 We have adapted the industrial district idea to explain how alternative food is being defined and created in a place where food has been an important focus of social, family, and political activity for generations. Marshall noted long ago that activity in a district is defined by This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 26 Chapter 2 what is in “the air.”43 In our understanding, he meant that in successful districts, routine interactions among people who pursue a common activity generate an air, that is, a shared culture. That culture identifies the district’s activity as a common enterprise and invites cooperation that leads to learning. Over time shared learning raises expectations and improves practice. The common enterprise also attracts more and different kinds of related participants, leading to growth and diversification in the district. Finally, the learning and diversification produce innovation, which raises the bar for participants and encourages more learning and innovation.44 The stories that follow in chapters 5 to 8 track three core elements in the culture of our alternative food district: a common enterprise,45 institutional thickening,46 and innovation over time. A Common Enterprise An industrial district is not simply an aggregation of similar or related activities in a particular area. Routine, open communications among participants create a recognition that the activity is common and that “everybody does better when everybody does better”—hence our term common enterprise. Although competition in a district is real, and an important incentive to innovate, the competition is shaped by the idea that people are in the same field and share and learn together. In our district, much of the earliest important learning involved relearning how to produce food without the suite of chemical inputs that underwrite conventional agribusiness. Elaboration of the culture is encouraged by the fact that boundaries between and among entities and sectors tend to be porous. Individuals and ideas move between firms and sectors, improving practices and creating expectations of mutual support. Thus, while individual firms are recognizable, they are open; for example, someone who works here is married to someone who works over there, and they may work together at a third place soon. Conversely, those in the area who do not regard themselves or act as part of a shared enterprise are recognizable as such, occasionally with repercussions for their activities within the district. The consequences can rise to the level of more or less formal rules and some kind of enforcement, but in our district things have generally been less explicit. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 27 Institutional Thickening The shared learning and improvement in practice and product encourage an increasing range and number of institutions. This institutional thickening results in part because the common enterprise facilitates economies of regional scale by reducing many kinds of transaction costs within the district. For example, a district can support services that might not be available to isolated operators, and some services may actually become cheaper if most or many people need them. Creameries, slaughterhouses, and accessible commercial kitchens are all important facilities in our district. Similarly, established practitioners get wind of changes and apply them to their own operations, while skilled and talented workers are attracted to districts that provide diverse opportunities. The newcomers contribute their skills and perspectives, pushing the boundaries of the shared enterprise and raising expectations and levels of knowledge. Districts can encourage thickening by lowering barriers to entry and exit. For example, county planners may delay or even harass the first innovative food incubator or taco truck. But when they begin to regard the activity as beneficial and important, they may develop more sophisticated regulatory programs that can make it easier for others to follow. Similarly, districts can increase the level of public and private investment. Local markets, for example, can help producers accumulate capital within the district. In our case, although innovators developed ways to distribute small lots of product fairly early, it took longer to create ways to accumulate capital and move it within the district, particularly from urban to rural areas. But a new generation of processors has taken advantage of well-established markets in quality products to start small, in mobile and sometimes only occasional food carts (frequently knows as pop-ups) that impose lower expectations and fewer capital requirements. In our telling, institutional thickening need not be confined to commerce and entrepreneurs. Diverse civic activism that led to both government and private efforts to protect land was central to the beginning of our alternative food district. Entrepreneurs were a critical part of the institutional thickening, but not the initial drivers of it. However, as urban entrepreneurs moved into the countryside, they became important vectors of progressive social values, particularly regarding the treatment This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 28 Chapter 2 of land and labor. This makes our district an excellent place to view and assess the interaction of markets and collective political (not always, but frequently, government) action. Innovation over Time The most important dimension of industrial districts is that as they develop, they generate innovations more rapidly and deeply than dispersed actors are able to accomplish. The same local markets, particularly farmers’ markets, plus post offices, school yards, coffee shops, and similar gathering places, facilitate organizing, education, and exchange of ideas. Innovation is not an automatic result, but over time, in Marshall’s words, “Good work is rightly appreciated; inventions and improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of business have their merits promptly discussed. If one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it becomes the source of further new ideas.”47 Risks and Challenges in an Industrial District An industrial district is not a perpetual innovation machine. Some observers have emphasized the importance of getting from one generation to the next in an industrial district: if the innovations do not gain enough acceptance to get beyond their original creators, or if a district cannot resolve internal conflicts, the district will not endure. Our district was probably inclined from the outset to value longevity. The early planners and park advocates wanted to create a sense of permanence in their community, and the ranchers who joined them in land conservation were experiencing threats to the survival of their family enterprise and way of life. Subsequent generations in those families are almost uniformly determined not to be the ones who lost the farm. Nonetheless, the sense of shared enterprise can fall victim to either an erosion of consensus or too much of it. Some friction is necessary, of course: without competition within the district and from outside it, it is difficult to create and sustain the risk taking that underlies innovation. But shifting orthodoxies, technical innovation, or changes in parts of the district can erode the common enterprise. Conversely, if participants become guarded against new ideas or stop learning and sharing, the district culture can also disintegrate. In our alternative food district, the This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 29 embrace of new understandings of justice as defined by the affected communities is not yet accomplished.48 Farmers’ markets are a particular focus of impatient analysis in this vein. Because successful multiracial and multiclass farmers’ markets are not common, the genre is frequently dismissed as elitist, racist, or irrelevant to real problems. That may be true in many circumstances, but the outcome is generally not for want of trying: enormous efforts to adapt the farmers’ market format to poor, particularly African American, communities, have produced limited success. These outcomes are clear signals of gaps in or threats to the common culture of the district. But they also reflect the enormity of the barriers to altering entrenched food system operations, as well as a host of class and race barriers. Modifying the Standard Format We have adapted Marshall’s original industrial district format to a more complex setting than is common. Key elements of the district agenda are beyond the reach of even the most diligent innovators. Centuries of racial abuse and economic exploitation and the problems arising from the nation’s failure to enact, or even agree on the necessity for, comprehensive health care and social support systems, chemical policies, and cautionary principles that are standard throughout the industrialized world cannot be addressed in the context of a regional analytical frame or, for that matter, even by “fixing” the global or national food system. The standard industrial district literature also pays little attention to actual people. Although a theoretical cast of characters innovates abstractly, we rarely meet the individuals in the Marshallian work. In our district, we saw a multitude of amazing people every bit as compelling as the innovations they created, so we decided to focus somewhat on a diverse cast of actors: entrepreneurs, academics, governments, activists, farmers and ranchers, distributors, community organizers, and consumers. Perhaps because we have such robust characters, we are unsatisfied with the standard array of roles in networked conceptions of social change: “warriors, builders, and weavers.”49 When distribution is a central element of innovation, for example, it is hard to say what is outreaching and organizing (weavers), what is entrepreneurial (builders), and what is political (warriors). Changing distribution requires people in many different institutions to be all three, frequently simultaneously. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 Chapter 2 In addition, when institutions are porous and rapidly changing, learning and reskilling are at the heart of a culture that is both cooperative and competitive. Most of the characters have worked those different duty stations at different times. Instead, our narrative focuses on a group that we call mavens.50 The culture of the district, we have found, did not emerge automatically from frequent interactions or even from a shared interest in accessible food, good pasture management, or fair wages. It was in significant part created by individuals who founded and led institutions—in civil society, business, and government—with the specific intent of building a shared enterprise as an alternative to conventional business as usual. Others have created connections needed for their business plan or shared their knowledge as part of promoting their cause or their product, but mavens have worked actively and self-consciously to nurture the district, make it recognizable to both participants and outsiders, and instill in the district the values and priorities that inspired them to become involved in the first place. The mavens have been strengthened, we believe, by the fact that profit is less central in our district than in some others. There may be passion for art and glamour in Hollywood and for cutting-edge technology in Silicon Valley, but both are focused, without cavil, on making money, preferably huge amounts of it. Perhaps it is because there is so little money on the table and so little opportunity for a quick buck or a big strike in alternative food, but our district prioritizes different values. Enough profit to stay in business is, of course, mandatory for the entrepreneurs in our narrative, and we do not mean to imply that profit is of no interest. But the mavens in our district specifically nurtured a vision of the district that does not aim at making a large profit. The vision has been about building a different kind of system—one in which healthy food is available to all, one that will protect the land and provide farmers and workers a decent living, and one that builds a community in which they themselves would live and want to remain. The culture of the district is also supported by the fact that its products tend to compete with each other and with outsiders by raising quality, not lowering price. This could be seen as evidence of a significant profit motive but, in fact, so doing appears to leave room, and may even This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 31 require, a high respect for both land and skill: quality competition in the district has tended toward nurturing skilled laborers who can create distinctive products and stewarding the land that gives the district its terroir, that is, its unique characteristics. Similarly, although proximity is essential to industrial districts, place and land are not normally necessary. Yet we focus on both. We are interested in the place where the relationships occur—how the people, history, institutions, and physical environment shape the possibilities for innovation and have in turn been shaped by them. We believe that the physical environment and land use practice in a region affect human interactions. Exploring that requires taking a long view, which we have taken. Our district is coming up on five decades depending on where you start, and our background materials add another century. This is unusual, but it permits us to explore changes and constants in the culture of the district.51 The land and environment are particularly important components in an industrial district focused on the production, distribution, and consumption of food. To illustrate, for farming purposes, our district is both poorly watered and insufficiently productive to warrant irrigating. Hence our district has not experienced the erosion of community resources that Goldschmidt (1947) and MacCannell (1986) documented. They concluded, four decades apart, that the poverty and class disparity that water projects brought to large-scale corporate farming was not replicated in places without project water where more functional communities featuring smaller, family-owned operations flourished.52 Much of our district is coastal as well, simultaneously spectacularly beautiful and subject to fogs that enhance its utility for extensive pastures. Those factors give the district a certain stability in the same way that you cannot grow avocados in Vermont or rapidly switch from milk to semiconductors. Significantly, however, the combination of beauty and pasture-enriching fog has led to heated controversy about why and how to protect the land from development. The focus on land and place has not, however, made us particularly concerned with geographical boundaries, and we do not draw lines to indicate locales that are in or not in the district. When we say “the Bay Area,” we mean the nine counties (4.4 million acres) surrounding the San This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 32 Chapter 2 Francisco Bay, but we are aware that the notion is relatively recently derived and we approach it with some flexibility. We also do not imply that the Bay Area is sealed or isolated. Far from it. The district has long been involved in and dependent on global traffic in ideas, products, money, and people across multiple scales and boundaries. Innovations in the district occur because of and inspired by ideas and events beyond the region. We will, for example, observe the French wine industry’s appellation at work in the district and how differently it has played out thus far in neighboring Marin and Sonoma counties. We will also note the inspiration that Oakland’s food justice community has taken from Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Finally, while many districts are in relatively small, isolated, homogeneous areas that focus on a single product, the Bay Area is highly diverse, including both farming communities and major urban areas. This means that justice in our telling must include justice for farmers as well as justice for underserved populations. Although that scope complicates the analysis, it reflects reality. Moreover, bridging the two has been a central task of innovators in the district: adapting urban preservation priorities to agricultural land protection, moving small batches of first funky and then extremely high-quality produce into urban markets, developing markets for new food products, and, more recently, addressing distribution barriers in poor urban neighborhoods. Having thus modified the concept of the standard industrial district, we then use it to organize a story about the evolution of alternative food in a particular place. District participants have, over more than half a century, worked together in planning processes, teaching, and suasion; leading changes in investment and business strategies; promoting regulatory reform; encouraging individuals to change consumption patterns; and attracting foundation grants and tax dollars. This is one reason why Cowgirl Creamery’s Peggy Smith could stand in the Ferry Building in 2007, that temple of “yuppie chow,” and welcome organic activists, regulators, academics, health researchers, farmworkers and farmers, and elite chefs as part of the same community. That community has since expanded to include interests and groups previously unconsidered or disarticulated from the alternative food community who have become functional elements of the district, shaping practices and products, environmental quality and markets, and increasingly seeking justice. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Framing Alternative Food 33 We readily grant that seeking justice is not the same as achieving it. It is also very different from ignoring justice and pursuing profit. But while our alternative food district remains a work in progress, it can tell us about what it takes to change the possibilities for healthy, just food in a particular place, about the relationships of markets, nonprofit organizations, and governments—and the people and mavens who inhabit those institutions. It also speaks of the enormous barriers that remain in the path to food democracy. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:35:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MIT Press Chapter Title: Food Democracy and Innovation Book Title: California Cuisine and Just Food Book Author(s): Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Nelson Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey, Lauren Gwin, Monica Moore, Jennifer Sokolove, Matthew Gerhart and Jennifer Kao Published by: MIT Press. (2012) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhm2k.15 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to California Cuisine and Just Food This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 Food Democracy and Innovation Given the district’s history of radical food politics and food-based political organizing, justice issues were surprisingly unformed and inconsistently pursued during the 1990s. That began to change early in the new century. Expressed geographically, one could say that the center of district innovation has moved from the Gourmet Ghetto to Oakland as diverse new voices and activists have asserted their own prerequisites for the U.S. food system. They are defining a new and more comprehensive justice agenda for the district that is reshaping regional practice, investment, and food discourse. The new voices are generally young, and they come largely from communities hardest hit by a major public health crisis: theirs will be the first generation of Americans living shorter lives than their parents. They are also pursuing their agenda during an unprecedented national and international conversation focused on America’s “productionist” food policies, which emphasize increasing the total production of cheap food with little or no regard for social and environmental consequences. Health issues have forced growing numbers of Americans to acknowledge that the Western diet has narrowed around low-quality, highly processed foods and beverages with dire public health consequences. Increasingly malnutrition in the United States is associated less with those who are underweight and hungry and more with overweight and obese people. The human suffering associated with this malnutrition is enormous, and the public policy problems, current and pending, are potentially overwhelming. Diabetes is probably the most discussed consequence: medical experts predict that by about 2050, 20 to 34 percent of Americans will be suffering from type II diabetes, and at a far earlier age than suggested by the name it once went by: adult-onset diabetes.1 But This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 176 Chapter 8 diabetes is just one part of the health problem. Hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and some cancers are among the diet-related diseases that are also on the rise and increasingly concentrated in poor and minority communities where fast food take-outs and liquor stores are often the most readily accessible, and sometimes the only, food retailers. This dismal situation has become a topic of intense national debate. The recent explosion of information available about food systems includes popular works by Schlosser, Nestle, Pollan, Spurlock, and others discussed in chapter 2. While some camps still point to improved personal choices as the route to ending the obesity epidemic, any serious response to these food-related health issues requires recognizing that critical parts of the problem are structural. Scientists and scholars have documented the role of food processors in creating and promoting food, snacking, and consumption habits designed to exploit humans’ biologically hardwired food preferences for fat, sugars, and salt.2 While stoking those addictions is profitable for the industry, it has created a cascade of health and social problems. The severity of these interrelated epidemics has spurred activism among community leaders who are now determined to engage food debates that had largely bypassed them for decades.3 The most basic way to address frontline communities’ most pressing problems, convenient access to affordable healthy foods, was often simply not available to those at the greatest risk from diet-related illness. In many cases, efforts to address this have started with promoting urban agriculture and alternative retail, some of the same strategies discussed in previous chapters. Nevertheless, food justice groups in the district and elsewhere have focused far greater attention on empowerment, self-determination, and social entrepreneurship. More recent still, young and low-wage workers throughout the food chain have joined the discussion. Relying in part on the ethical consumer–ethical producer notion that took root during the United Farm Workers boycotts, a separate but increasingly coordinated array of new institutions and leaders, “invisible no more,” is defining food quality in terms of fair wages, safe working conditions, and health care for food system workers.4 Solutions to access issues are complicated by the fact that many health threats stem in large part from foods that most people consider com- This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Food Democracy and Innovation 177 pletely standard in supermarkets, schools, restaurants, and homes. Food system labor issues, which have been contested over several centuries, are further complicated by the particular toxicity of immigration issues. But innovative advocates have expanded the conversation—and raised expectations—for change in the district, where food democracy remains a work in progress.5 Our primary focus in this chapter is on Oakland, historically and currently. Our version of the city’s complex food situation highlights both the critical intersection between urban planning and food systems over time and evolving perspectives on the concepts of “local” and “community.” The fertile alternative food scene there reflects a new-style Gold Rush–like period: new ideas and actors from throughout the nation and globe are arriving, rooting themselves while retaining previous links and contacts, and starting to drive the district’s evolving understanding of justice. Exploring Oakland requires additional background. The complexities of food and place in San Francisco and Marin County are well treated elsewhere; our abbreviated version here emphasizes that planning and environmentalism had very different impacts on the east side of the Bay, where large portions of Oakland were devastated by white flight and infrastructure construction. Many of Oakland’s food access issues are related to the resulting destruction of place and community. Three elements of Oakland’s history are particularly relevant. First, anticolonialism, black nationalism, and the Black Panther era were an important part of black Oakland’s response to the devastation of place; second, the results of the subsequent, highly unusual blip in U.S. history, generally known as the War on Poverty, when eradicating poverty seemed both possible and an appropriate national priority, were disappointing in Oakland; and finally, the environmental justice response to mainstream environmentalism grounded Oakland’s discussions of food justice. With a bit of additional East Bay history in hand, we address three topics roughly in chronological order. Although most Oakland food justice groups began (and some remain) with urban agriculture, the various legacies of Black Power and community activism are not entirely subsumed in the garden. We begin by looking at contemporary food and agriculture advocates in the city who often define their activities in terms This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 178 Chapter 8 of self-determination, leadership development, and social entrepreneurship. Similarly, efforts to address food access and grocery retail problems proceed in a crowded arena of nonprofits and for profits that is not entirely harmonious. However, most Oakland food justice advocacy groups are less than a decade old and charting new territory. They are hopeful that the city’s new Food Policy Council may provide better coherence and coordination, as well as an effective means of engaging with local politics and policy. Second, we look at a new community of food processors, microenterprises, and food business collaborations in the district. Food professionals coming into Oakland looking for cheap space, capital, markets, inspiration and even raw materials often bring years of district business experience with them. Others in Oakland’s new generation of activist entrepreneurs are starting from scratch in food carts and trucks, incubators and pop-ups with ethnic specialties or dreams of a small business. This eclectic community appreciates delicious food, but prioritizes social responsibility even as it creates issues of gentrification. Their appearance alongside Oakland’s food justice advocates highlights important issues about the relationship between nonprofits and for-profit businesses. That relationship and both sectors’ interactions with local governments remain to be sorted out. Nevertheless, the Oakland community is pushing the district to include a fuller spectrum of food democracy possibilities. Finally, we discuss new approaches to food system labor, exploring district involvement in the development of workers’ organizations that build on the UFW boycott legacy of ethical producers and consumers. We begin with a union farm and a labeling scheme, but we focus on the district’s involvement in unionlike organizations. The North Carolina– based Agricultural Justice Project is extending the familiar labeling approach into workers’ issues and is an important adjunct to the district’s “beyond organic” debate. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Restaurant Opportunity Center have developed a nonunion institutional form, the worker center, to focus on low-wage food system workers. We look to two district institutions—Bon Appétit Management, a Palo Alto– based food service firm, and Young Workers United, a food service workers organization in San Francisco—for two different windows into how worker centers work throughout food supply chains.6 This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Food Democracy and Innovation 179 Food, Place, and Community in West Oakland Urban Planning While Marin County leaders focused on the land protection that enabled early alternative farms and other food enterprises, Oakland activists were having an entirely different experience. That different history of the West Oakland neighborhood and the far larger region known as East Oakland is important in the food justice story. Growth accelerated in Oakland after the 1906 earthquake: many displaced San Francisco residents settled permanently in the East Bay. With its easy access to downtown, as well as to the city’s bustling transcontinental railroad and port facilities, worker housing sprang up in West Oakland in the late nineteenth century.7 World War II marked its heyday, with industry surging and shipbuilding at the forefront. War workers from throughout the country arrived in West Oakland, and diverse Spanish-speaking immigrants joined a growing majority of African American residents in East Oakland.8 West Oakland had its own commercial and cultural center along Seventh Street, while East Oakland, always more diffuse, featured commercial districts along several major thoroughfares, including Fruitvale Avenue, Foothill Boulevard, and East Fourteenth street (subsequently renamed International Boulevard). Both areas were home to diverse and thriving working-class communities. However, events of the next few decades undermined both their diversity and their prosperity. An exodus of industry in the 1950s and 1960s compounded white flight as major manufacturers sought cheap land, easy regulation, and tax incentives in new suburbs like Hayward and Fremont. When state engineers and rapid transit planners looked for a route through Oakland in the 1970s, they aimed at the struggling centers of black culture and community. West Oakland leaders had little traction with the state and regional bureaucrats, who wielded eminent domain with impunity. The I-80 and I-580 freeways shown in figure 8.1 were built, starting in the 1950s, to facilitate new suburbanites’ commutes through Oakland into San Francisco. The neighborhood’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station, with the largest commuter parking lot in the city, also obliterated housing and businesses in 1971, while providing little benefit for the working-class residents whose own commute led them toward buses. This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 180 Chapter 8 Figure 8.1 Map of Oakland showing the large portions of West Oakland that were cut off from the rest of the city by twentieth-century highway construction. They have become centers of food activism where urban gardens and farmers’ markets provide food to underserved neighborhoods, along with community and school gardens (not shown). Source: Adapted from McClintock and Cooper (2010). This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Food Democracy and Innovation 181 The two-tier Cypress Freeway that opened in 1957 cut West Oakland in half, isolating large parts of it from the rest of the city. Destruction of Oakland’s black neighborhoods continued through the 1970s as whole districts were removed to facilitate construction of the Acorn Plaza housing project, Oakland’s Main Post Office, and the West Oakland BART Station. By the 1980s, West Oakland was almost entirely black and had lost much of its commercial base. One of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, it lacked basic amenities, including access to fresh food.9 The Cypress Freeway became a focus for frustration among Oaklanders who believed, with ample justification, that they had had no meaningful opportunity to participate in the decision making that led to its construction.10 An older generation of black leaders who had tied their aspirations to racial integration was displaced by younger organizers’ more militant calls for self-reliance. Oakland’s black nationalist and Black Power activists drew explicitly on Third World models of colonial subjugation to explain the plight of their city and embraced both community empowerment and self-determination to craft locally defined solutions.11 The Black Panther Party was born of the neighborhood’s growing anger.12 West Oakland is also home to the West Coast’s first containerized shipping facilities. Since 1962, the port has grown to include a thousand acres of marine terminals, rail facilities, and maritime support areas. It is not, however, an unmitigated blessing for West Oaklanders. The city’s air pollution problems reflect “growing port activity, the densely populated regions where most ports are located, and the prevailing onshore wind patterns that accumulate, rather than disperse” the pollutants, creating a “perfect storm of threats to public health.” Port development has provoked intense but largely ineffective opposition over time. To settle a lawsuit brought by West Oakland Neighbors, the port agreed in 1997 to a plan that included a $9 million program (out of a $1.4 billion budget) designed to reduce air emissions from marine terminal equipment, tugboats, local buses, and trucks.13 A Blip in the 1960s West Oakland’s destruction played out, ironically, during an unusual period of national attention to hunger and poverty.14 Between John This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 182 Chapter 8 Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, global and domestic upheavals allowed a new direction on policy to help the needy. The turn from Bentham’s “wholesome horrors” was brief, and gains in addressing poverty were perhaps less than both the period’s mystique and the reaction against it suggest. Kennedy’s campaign initially focused largely on white, rural communities, especially in Appalachia. But the civil rights movement soon forced a more inclusive view. Several years after the 1963 March on Washington and passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Martin Luther King called for a new “economic bill of rights” to address structural economic disparities at least as crippling as Jim Crow laws. King was assassinated in 1968 even as the Poor People’s Campaign planned a “Poor People’s March” styled on the earlier one. Although the march took place, it was probably the racial violence that erupted in many U.S. cities soon afterward that jolted leaders and citizens alike into considering the relationships between racism, poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.15 The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) that was part of the War on Poverty that emerged as the centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was far from King’s economic bill of rights.16 The OEO did not directly address the consequences of “an economy still permeated with the legacy of Jim Crow,” and its programs generally allowed existing local power structures to control the implementation and distribution of resources.17 After intense efforts to achieve even limited goals through the OEO programs, Oakland’s black leadership concluded that it could not serve as “an effective arm of the larger Black liberation struggle.”18 Politics around hunger did, however, shift during this unusual period. In 1967 Congress deviated from normal practice and directed not the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) to study hunger and malnutrition.19 In the following year, CBS’s news weekly show 60 Minutes aired a disturbing analysis, titled “Hunger, USA,” prepared by former War on Poverty staff at the Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty.20 Richard Nixon’s incoming administration took up the cause with vigor, convening the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health in December 1969. The president’s opening address at that conference explicitly rejected the “unworthy poor” notion and identified hunger alleviation as a moral imperative for government action: “Until This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Food Democracy and Innovation 183 this moment in our history as a nation, the central question has been whether we as a nation would accept the problem of malnourishment as a national responsibility. That moment is past. . . . I not only accept the responsibility—I claim the responsibility. . . . Our national conscience requires it.”21 Nixon proposed the Family Assistance Program (FAP), which would set a minimum annual income—or “negative income tax”— guaranteeing all families sufficient funds to buy food. But the proposal ran into hostility from both parties, and as the urban riots subsided, it quietly disappeared.22 The proposed FAP was threatening to the USDA’s constituency because it would curtail government purchase of surplus food and allow participants to buy food in the supermarket like everybody else. Agribusiness preferred that USDA continue purchasing surplus food for distribution to the poor. The existing pattern allowed bureaucrats to direct benefits to specific producers. USDA allies also argued, somewhat incredibly in retrospect, that Americans were simply not eating enough. Senator George Aiken of Vermont identified “under consumption” as one of two major problems facing American agriculture, and President Kennedy also urged addressing the twin dilemma of hunger and surplus food by encouraging people to eat more.23 Although the FAP never saw the light of day, it was serious enough to persuade substantial segments of agribusiness that their world had changed. Convinced that declining rural populations and congressional redistricting boded ill for their programs, the USDA and its clients moved to create programs within USDA that would benefit nonrural constituencies.24 The 1960s and 1970s also saw the start of a durable coalition of progressive groups that is still known as the “hunger lobby.” Their efforts led to a reinstatement of the Depression-era food stamp program; after years of pilot and demonstration programs, food stamps got a new life (renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2008). Although frequently described as a cornerstone of government aid to needy Americans, the program did not, even at the peak of national attention to hunger and poverty, move very far from supporting agriculture. As in the Depression, participants were required to purchase stamps “equivalent to their normal expenditures for food.” Thereafter, they could use subsidized stamps “to obtain a low-cost nutritionally adequate This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 184 Chapter 8 diet.”25 Although the hunger lobby led the fight for food stamps, it resisted efforts to take hunger programs out of USDA. It still does; despite all the nutrition- and education-related contraindications of USDA management, the hunger lobby views human services as politically weaker than USDA and fears the program would disappear if it were moved.26 Attention shifted away from hunger and poverty issues as the Vietnam War and then Watergate heated up,27 and political support for systematically addressing poor people’s issues declined substantially.28 Repeated funding cuts refocused public attention back on charity.29 Poor people may not starve, but the same system that encourages unsustainable overproduction also ensures that channeling the least desirable leftovers from that system to poor and hungry people remains the nation’s primary response to hunger in America.30 Environmental Justice and Environmentalism The environmental justice movement has strongly influenced Oakland food justice advocates’ responses to these issues. While Rachel Carson’s concern with environmental poisons and health did much to precipitate the modern environmental movement, wild land and wildlife preservation and conservation groups initially defined its agenda. Up to and following the first national celebration of Earth Day in April 1970, their focus remained largely on pre–World War II wilderness, parks, and recreation issues.31 Embracing nature and getting back to the land were regarded by some at the time as a less divisive alternative to the unrest that accompanied the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and the women’s movement that emerged at about the same time. Even as they turned to address air and water pollution, Big Ten32 environmental groups, whose board members and paid staff were (and remain with a few exceptions) largely white and male, did not regard minority communities’ issues as environmental.33 Even after elaboration of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 institutionalized requirements for public comment on “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” people of color were not conspicuously involved in shaping the environmental agenda.34 Unacknowledged by mainstream environmentalism, people of color nonetheless waged many of the epic environmental battles of the second half of the twentieth century, including those in Louisiana’s Cancer This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Food Democracy and Innovation 185 Alley35 and on PCB dumping issues in Warren County, North Carolina.36 Environmental groups failed to understand routine, disproportionate exposure to toxic pollutants as an urgent environmental issue, and that failure fueled growing tension between environmental organizations and fence-line communities.37 This lack of support for an environmentalism based on civil and human rights to pollution-free lives led minority communities to develop a separate environmental justice (EJ) paradigm that included racial factors as central elements of analysis. In that setting, minority leaders defined and pursued their own priorities.38 Much of the EJ movement took inspiration from 1979 litigation that suggested that disparate experience of environmental hazards might be a civil rights violation.39 It gained traction in 1987 with the release of research conducted by the United Church of Christ demonstrating that health hazards associated with industrial waste treatment, storage, and disposal had a disproportionate impact on people of color. Even when economic status was considered, the racial makeup of the surrounding community was the single most significant variable in the distribution of waste site locations. Four years later, in 1991, the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit attracted a diverse group of new leaders to Washington, D.C., to “begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities” and to draft a set of principles of environmental justice.40 The EJ movement was heir to the moral force of the civil rights movement, and the principles, approaches, and remedies to environmental hazards it has pioneered have been influential in defining food justice. Nevertheless, EJ came of age in the wake of the Reagan revolution, a time of growing hostility to activist courts and the government. The litigation strategy that had shaped the successful assault on Jim Crow laws and then developed environmental law was running out of steam by 1990, and despite a very few successful cases,41 by and large EJ advocates could not persuade courts that disproportionate experience of environmental harm constituted racial discrimination.42 Environmental Justice and Food Justice Food issues were not central in early environmental justice debates. The 1991 Principles mentioned food just once, in the preamble.43 And This content downloaded from 132.239.241.68 on Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:41:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 186 Chapter 8 although the Second EJ Summit in 2001 included farmworkers’ organizations and discussed their issues, summit documents still framed food issues primarily in connection with foodborne diseases.44 A 1994 Journal of the American Medical Association article is generally acknowledged as the turning point when medical professionals became aware of an important obesity epidemic.45 Lead author Katherine Flegal noted that that while obesity rates “had been pretty stable for about 20 years,” analysis of new data showed a “noticeable and surprising increase.”46 The paper set off alarms, and further investigation demonstrated that obesity and related health problems of diabetes, str...
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Running head: FOOD JUSTICE

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Food Justice
Name
Institution

FOOD JUSTICE

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Food Justice
Food Justice ensures that benefits and risks of food growth, production, transportation,
distribution, accessing and food eaten are equitably shared because it is about fairness, diversity,
equity, and inclusion. Food justice primary significance is its power in organizing framework.
(Gottlieb, and Joshi. 2010. Food justice)
Food Democracy
Food democracy is a participatory process which involves the demos in ensuring that
diversity of food systems that humans depend for survival are resilient, secure, sustainable,
regenerative and just. Food democracy is significant in making food systems just by establishing
inclusive, diverse and participatory governance arrangements to change institutional power
relationships, socio-cultural belief systems, and market dynamics. (Vide and Klemencic 2017:
24).
Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty is the peoples' right to define food, agriculture, livestock, and fisheries
systems. Food sovereignty is significant as an actionable theory and ethical stance that people
use to improve community food security, aid hunger and foster transformative social activism.
Food sovereignty addresses racism, injustice and environmental degradation rooted in food
systems globally. (Ventura, and Bailkey. 2017. Good Food Strong Communities)
Food Security
Food security is the consistent access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for an active,
healthy life. Food security significance is to meet people’s dietary needs and food preference for
an active and healthy life. 1996 World Food Summit definition (FAO, 1996)

FOOD JUSTICE

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Food Desert
Food desert socially and geographically is an area of a city where people do not have
adequate access to markets to purchase healthy food. A food desert is significant as a
communication framework to raise awareness, make visible, the “place-based,” territorial, spatial
injustice associated with food systems. (Pezzoli, 2019 Lo...


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