Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy

Preface

xi Preface This book has been almost a decade in the making. In 2005, I moved to Oakland to try to better understand how and to what end low-­ income communities of color were making use of local food systems. There, I met a group of people working to connect African American farmers and small businesspeople to residents of neighborhoods that lacked healthy food choices. The experiences of this group—which includes Jason Harvey, David Roach, Dana Harvey, Leroy Musgrave, Will Scott and the Scott family, Charlotte Coleman, Ted Dixon, Xan West, and Jada White—are at the core of this book. Their efforts , and their willingness to share them with me, had a profound effect on my thinking about race, food systems, and local economic (under)development, and I am incredibly grateful to them. But in another way this project started long before I came to Oakland. I had begun to become involved in local food system work as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Atlanta. When it came time to choose a graduate program, Davis’s vibrant alternative food scene had as much to do with my decision as the academics . I quickly connected with like-­ minded people through the Domes, a cooperative campus housing community that included gardens, chickens, fruit trees, and friends who would soon teach me how to live in such a place. These new friends, often well connected to the wider organic farming scene, helped me see our home as part of a larger movement for sustainable agriculture. And yet we couldn’t help but notice that this movement was overwhelmingly white. This book started out as an attempt to answer the question “Why are we all so white?” though I recognize now that this was the wrong question. There are growing numbers of people of color developing local food systems and challenging dominant ideas about food, agriculture, and the environment in exciting ways. I shifted my questions to explore how race intersected with thinking about local and organic food systems. This shift in my questions guided me toward a comparative project. By also studying an affluent, predominantly white, progressive farmers market, I could follow the sociological dictate to “make the familiar strange” and treat this kind of local food system as something to analyze rather than take for granted. Here, I was fortunate to get to know the managers at the North Berkeley Farmers Market, particularly Rosalie Fanshel, Linda Bohara, Herman Yee, and Max xii • preface Cadji. I learned much from these individuals’ impressive dedication to both sustainability and social justice, as well as from the Ecology Center’s support for a just sustainability approach. I am also grateful to all the vendors and customers , too many to name, who shared their insights and their warmth. Ethnographic work starts with data, and lots of it. The task then shifts to analyzing the data absent pre-­ established questions, figuring out what is most significant about a particular social world and what it has to say to both academics and laypeople. In this endeavor, I have been incredibly fortunate to be a part of multiple and intersecting communities of scholars. Tom Beamish shaped this work in a number of important ways, most fundamentally by suggesting that I think about farmers markets as places of economic exchange as well as social change. Many aspects of this book were initially articulated and developed through related collaborative projects. Articles coauthored with Christie McCullen, Kari Norgaard, and Teresa Mares helped me gain a better understanding of why farmers markets and food movements are so culturally important. And the process of coediting Cultivating Food Justice (mit Press 2011) with Julian Agyeman pushed me to sharpen my understanding of food justice as both a social movement and a body of academic work. I am also grateful to all our contributing authors, whose research has deepened this exciting and dynamic field. During and beyond my graduate training, I have also benefited from the support of the uc Davis Environmental Justice Project (Julie Sze, Jonathan London, Marisol Cortez, Raoul Lievanos, and Tracy Perkins), the uc Multi-­ campus Research Group on Food and the Body (especially Julie Guthman, Melanie DuPuis, Kimberly Nettles-­ Barcelon, Carolyn de la Peña, and Laura-­ Anne Minkoff-­ Zern), colleagues and mentors in the uc Davis Sociology Department (Jim Cramer, Joan S. M. Meyers, Dina Biscotti, Julie Collins-­ Dogrul, Jen Gregson, Macky Yamaguchi, and Lori Freeman), and colleagues at the University of the Pacific (Marcia Hernandez, Ethel Nicdao, George Lewis, and Ken...