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
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Cuisine and Just Food
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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)
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Framing Alternative Food
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Cuisine and Just Food
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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.
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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).
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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