FOOD JUSTICE
Before attempting to define food justice, let's review the definition of community food security.
"Community food security is a condition in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice."
--Mike Hamm and Anne Bellows
From Community Food Security Coalition's website
Food justice work goes deeper than this definition implies. Food justice work requires us to question why food insecurity currently exists. We must examine the historical social and economic inequalities that cause wide spread food insecurity, locally and globally.
"Food security is more about analyzing problems, ameliorating issues and providing answers...Food Justice...involves local people from seed to sale. It educates, organizes and mobilizes new social relations around food. It touches hands, hearts and pockets."
--Ian Marvy co-director of Added Value in Brooklyn, NY
Check out Brahm's Blog from the People's Grocery in California on why they call their work "food justice."
What you can do to be a food justice advocate
- Question why there is enough food in the world to feed all people yet many experience hunger. What systems are in place that create this dynamic?
- Question how racism has played a role in determining who has access to healthy food and who does not.
- Question how it is possible to have "racism" in our society without having "racists".
- Ask where your food comes from and how the people, the land, and all the creatures were treated in its production. Buy food that respects and values all people, creatures, and features of the world. Farm work is some of the most dangerous work due to exposure to pesticides and demanding schedules. Buying local and sustainable whenever possible can help to ensure that your food and food workers were treated carefully.
- Get involved with your community. Investigate if there is a community garden in your area. If not, organize one.
- If you identify yourself as "white" examine the extent of your "white privilege." Host a discussion about the classic piece, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh.
- Host a discussion about structural racism and our food system. See the Center for Social Inclusion's presentation for more information.
- Talk with people you normally wouldn't talk with. You might be surprised what you have in common and how you can support one another.
- Buy local food and products from locally owned businesses or ask your favorite businesses or restaurants (even your school's cafeteria!) to source more produce and products locally.
- Shop at your local farmer's market and ask your farmers questions about their food and growing practices.
- Come to Earthworks' monthly Food Justice Community Gatherings or host your own.
- Talk with your friends, family and coworkers about issues of agriculture, race, and equality. We can not move forward without having these conversations.
- Learn about the food system through newsletters, books, and blogs. Inform yourself using by reading about the work and thoughts of others!
Earthworks’ journey towards food justice…
Over the past year, Earthworks has begun to transform our work and programming in critical ways. We still operate the farm as always, but we have begun to rethink our motives and methods to reflect our deepening concern regarding how our work relates to our community. Our primary guiding principle is to create a just, beautiful food system for all. Daily, we are reminded that this principle will require hard work and careful determination as we meet and interact with the people from our community who are in need of meals at our soup kitchen. We recognize that we can not be successful in transforming our world into a just and beautiful place without analyzing historical social and economic inequalities.
We realized that although we always had plenty of volunteers from the surrounding community and suburbs, and although we were passionate about growing healthy food for the people, our farm was not as welcoming a space for most of the folks who come to the soup kitchen for meals as it should be. So, starting with very simple steps, we have begun to shift our approach:
- First, the bulk of our produce was redirected away from markets and instead to the soup kitchen meals.
- We installed a chalkboard in the soup kitchen dining room and posted daily about what in the meal was grown in the garden, noting the health benefits and hoping that knowing the food was grown in the soup kitchen’s gardens would entice more people to try it.
- We made garden plots available for soup kitchen guests, staff and community members who wanted to be involved but didn’t have the ability to garden at their homes. (Contact us if you’re interested in having a plot or garden space!)
- We made space and time for a weekly meeting (called the F.O.O.D. - Field Of Our Dreams - group) to develop ideas issued by the guests related to food access in our neighborhood and healthy communities overall. Ideas about creating adaptive gardens for nearby senior centers or setting up a mobile market for our neighborhood came from those meetings and will be a focus of the upcoming season.
- We established a series of potlucks and discussions related to food justice (Food Justice Community Gatherings) and invite soup kitchen guests, neighbors, our volunteers, partners, and Detroit residents to enter into conversations about important topics.
- We are making a concerted effort to reach out to our neighborhood, talking with people we’re meeting for the first time and asking for more commitment and involvement from those we have been talking to for years.
As we think about and plan our work, we are always evaluating the effectiveness of it for our community by considering the following:
- Are we thinking about how we can let control of projects be truly in the hands of the community?
- Are we working with, rather than for, our community?
- Are our staff representative of the community we serve?
- What questions do we ask when we are making decisions?
- What questions don’t we ask?
- Who do we involve in the decision making process and who is excluded?
We have a long way to go. We appreciate your ideas, comments, critiques, suggestions.
Important resources related to food justice
Food Justice Manifesto
More information available at http://foodjustice.wikispaces.com.
Growing Food and Justice
An initiative aimed at dismantling racism and empowering low-income and communities of color through sustainable and local agriculture. It views dismantling racism as a core principal which brings together social change agents from diverse sectors working to bring about new, healthy and sustainable food systems and supporting and building multicultural leadership in impoverished communities throughout the world. Check out this website’s resources page. This year’s gathering will be in Milwaukee from October 30 through November 1, 2009.
Food Justice Community Gathering series.
Monthly opportunities for folks from various walks of life to sit and share at the same table, talking of food justice issues.
F.O.O.D. meetings
Weekly meetings with Capuchin Soup Kitchen guests who have been motivated to take action in their community to provide access to high quality fresh foods, among other initiatives they are currently working on.
People’s Grocery
People's Grocery is a community-based organization in West Oakland, CA that develops creative solutions to the health problems in their community that stem from a lack of access to and knowledge about healthy, fresh foods.
Village Gardens
Village Gardens is a 60,000 square foot urban agriculture program that uses sustainable organic gardening and farming to increase access to healthy food, improve economic opportunities and build unity with low-income residents of North Portland, OR.
Growing Power
Growing Power is a national nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people in all communities. Growing Power implements this mission by providing hands-on training, on-the-ground demonstration, outreach and technical assistance through the development of Community Food Systems that help people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner.
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