"Choosing" Wisely: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice

Outlining the parallel

I recently came across a reusable cloth shopping bag in the window of a local storefront in Kansas. The bag sported an image of a tree followed by the phrase "I'm saving plastic and the planet. What are you doing?" I chuckled to myself, recalling activist Derrick Jensen's "Forget Shorter Showers," in which he argues, "Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance."¹ My thoughts were torn by a classic environmental conundrum. On the one hand, greater education and awareness are central to efforts toward justice and change. On the other hand, given my research in waste politics and industrialized commodity flows, I couldn't help but view the message as another extension of ethical consumerist trends in environmental activism, wherein individual consumption remains at the center of popular environmentalisms, while systemic, highly profitable industrial models go unquestioned, even protected, by the state.² In like manner, questions of food politics, sustainability and healthier diet currently at the forefront of popular food politics endeavors are often portrayed as matters of good, or more ethical, lifestyle "choices" that people consciously make daily. This embeds what scholar Abby Ferber refers to as a form of color-blind, post-feminist, abstract liberalist discourse rooted in an absence of intersectionality and premised upon right choice making; or, as the title of this article suggests, presumptions of "choosing wisely."³

Similarly, tempestuous political debates over reproductive health in the United States are often couched in rhetoric pertaining to good or bad, right or wrong "choices" rather than as extensions of environmental and socioeconomic constraint or healthcare limitations, including accessible, reliable, or even simply available resources.⁴ Such matters are constructed through the prism of the "right" kinds of lifestyle shifts, or a bootstrap lens of individual purchasing power, rather than as systemic and systematic environmental inequities. No comparative icon embodies my point more than the welfare queen stereotype born from President Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign, an icon persistently shamed as a system cheat and public burden and utilized as a straw-person for rationalizing funding cuts to robust public services. As a legacy of the Reagan campaign trail, reproductive historian Ricki Solinger references the term welfare queen to discuss how the icon absorbs and reflects social, cultural, and political ambivalence "toward women in trouble [and] poor mothers receiving public assistance money from the mid-1960s onward." The racialized icon of the assistance-needy WQ centers upon hostility over the inability to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps to become "legitimate consumers" and "blocks our ability to imagine the social and economic forces that have created hardship, especially intractable poverty for millions of women and children in the United States."⁵

Reproductive justice (RJ) activists have long worked to highlight tensions between rights-based versus justice-centric understandings, drawing attention to the underlying racial, ethnic, class, and nation-based inequities that mainstream reproductive rights movements at times failed to incorporate, on topics ranging from birth control access to eugenics, sexuality education, adoption, childcare, medical informed consent, and more. Sociologist Zakiya Luna underscores such tensions in public shaming via her analysis of rights versus justice frameworks in social organizing: "While abortion was a concern, another part of [Sistersong] members' experiences not felt by middle-class white women was that the media has continually represented their choices to become mothers as irresponsible and pathological, as seen in debates around welfare reform and other controversial issues."⁶ Similarly, scholar Andrea Smith critically examines gaps in pro-choice/pro-life rhetoric to engage other intersecting needs in indigenous communities, like "Fighting for life and self-determination of their communities. The criminalization of abortion may or may not be a strategy for pursuing that goal."⁷ Thus reproductive justice exposes the ways in which choice rhetoric fails to encompass the intersecting issues affecting communities with less class, racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, or national privilege.

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's 2012 Draft Principles for Food Justice similarly underscores the right "to produce...