Food Justice

9. A New Food Politics

9 A New Food Politics Sowing the Seeds of CFP The weather was dreary, yet the room buzzed with excitement. Only five months earlier, on April 4, 1996, the Farm Bill had been signed into law, with a mandate for supporting community food projects (CFPs). The relevant part of the bill—a small item in the overall legislation—provided annual funding for projects that could “meet the needs of low-income people, increase the self-reliance of communities in providing for their own food needs; and promote comprehensive responses to local food, farm, and nutrition issues.” For the groups selected for funding, contracts had to be signed and the money sent out before the end of the federal government’s fiscal year on September 30, just a couple of weeks away.1 After several days of rains from tropical storm Fran, which caused flooding along the Potomac River, the group of seventeen food advocates , farmers, academics, and researchers had slogged through the city on September 9, 1996, to gather in the eighth-floor conference room of the Aerospace Center Building in Washington, D.C. The group, the first panel selected to review CFP proposals, along with the two U.S. Department of Agriculture staff members, had convened on short notice to assess about 120 proposals submitted by various community food groups. While the grant awards to be decided represented a small pot by Washington standards, they would provide an important opportunity for the groups that had applied, many only a few years old. Among the panelists were several food justice advocates who had played a key role in successfully shepherding CFP interests through a conservative Congress and contentious legislative process to obtain $16 198 Food Justice million in funding available over a seven-year period, or until the next Farm Bill weighed in on the program’s future. Some weeks after the legislation was signed into law, two USDA staff members, Elizabeth Tuckermanty and Mark Bailey, were chosen to oversee the process for selecting the grant awardees. Given the assignment on July 1, they got out the request for proposals (RFP) on July 8, and pulled together the seventeen-member panel a few weeks after that—an unprecedented turnaround for the USDA.2 As the review process got under way, the panel began to appreciate how many of the 120 proposals submitted on such short notice had sought to link food-related objectives to a broader social justice framework associated with community and economic development and environmental change. Thirteen projects were awarded grant funding, and in each case the award was able to recognize a new type of food politics. While the panel regretted that not all the top projects could be funded, it was clear to the members that despite the small amounts involved, a crucial if modest step had been taken in the search for a different approach to food and social justice. Several of the groups that were funded in the first round of CFP funding did subsequently emerge as key players in their communities and in the overall food justice movement in the United States. One of them, the Holyoke, Massachusetts–based Nuestras Raíces, described in chapter 6, was seen by the panel reviewers as precisely the type of program that connected to the multiple goals of the funding initiative. The panel’s interest in the proposal was generated by the location, the group involved in putting together the project, the constituencies to be served through the proposed programs, and the nature of the project itself. At the time, Nuestras Raíces was a fledgling organization with three community gardens. But the panel still recommended support, recognizing that Nuestras Raíces, with its strong food justice orientation and overall community economic development approach, was about much more than community gardening. For the Nuestras Raíces organizers, securing the CFP grant was a watershed moment. With the modest funding now available and the resulting increased attention to the group’s work, they were able to take an abandoned building on a vacant lot, gut it, and build what would become the hub of the organization’s development, the Centro Agricola.3 A New Food Politics 199 Nuestras Raíces was by no means unique in its broad-based, food justice approach among the projects supported in the first round of funding. Coastal Enterprises Inc. of Maine, a nearly two-decade-old community development corporation...