Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability

7. Growing Food and Justice: Dismantling Racism through Sustainable Food Systems

7 Growing Food and Justice Dismantling Racism through Sustainable Food Systems Alfonso Morales Awareness of food and nutrition problems facing Americans has grown rapidly over the past five years, fueled by the writings of many including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, the wide release of films like Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation, and the contributions of celebrity chefs such as Alice Waters and Odessa Piper who focus our attention on food-related inequalities and local foods. Paradoxically, many Americans , particularly low-income people and people of color, are overweight yet malnourished. They face an overwhelming variety of processed foods, but are unable to procure a well-balanced diet from the liquor stores and mini-marts that dominate their neighborhoods. These groups are food insecure, but furthermore, they are victims of food injustice. The early-twentieth-century wave of work represented by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) helped foster the Food and Drug act of 1906, but not since then has food been the subject of so much popular attention . However, for the last twenty years there has been a kind of “call and response” that has produced a web of relationships among government , scholars, nonprofit organizations, and foundations all interested in understanding food insecurity and food injustice. Definitions of important concepts like food security have been developed, organizations like the Community Food Security Coalition have grown up, foundations, universities, and government have developed programs to fund food research and practice, and nascent food justice organizations have emerged and are now populating communities around the country. In this chapter I describe one of the newest threads in this web of activity, that of the Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative (GFJI), a loose coalition of organizations developed under the auspices of Growing Power, Inc., a food justice organization based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with offices in Chicago, Illinois, and a loose coalition of 150 Chapter 7 regional affiliates. Food justice organizations borrow from most every strand in the web of interrelated organizations and ideas, but they focus on issues of racial inequality in the food system by incorporating explicit antiracist messages and strategies into their work. This chapter chronicles in part how GFJI developed in response to the relative absence of people of color in the food system (Slocum 2006). Further, using three case studies I show how food justice organizations have responded to GFJI in different ways and how they are weaving together various threads from the larger web into their own activities and toward their own goals as they develop their own approaches to food justice. Food Justice in Historical and Contemporary Economic Context Over the last century or so food security (and its consequences) has ebbed and flowed in local and national consciousness. Nineteenth-century proponents of “social medicine” exposed the relationships among health, housing, sanitation, nutrition, and work conditions endured by new immigrants and the poor. Social justice was at the root of social medicine (Krieger and Birn 1998), and public health was created as an organized government response to the health-related consequences of urbanization and industrialization.1 Part of this web was the budding urban planning movement and its work designing cities for self-sustainability, including food security. The intersection of economic, health, and food concerns prompted cities to establish local public markets, like Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market, promoting food regulation and security, incorporating new immigrants, and providing employment opportunities (Morales 2000).2 Likewise, the community gardening movement played an important role in food security until mid-century (Lawson 2005). The Great Depression produced local programs, like Detroit’s Capuchin Soup Kitchen (founded in 1929) and federal policies (notably the Food Stamp program created in 1939), addressing food-related problems. In the absence of a consistent food policy, these various programs and policies developed in many directions throughout the mid-twentieth century, eventually producing some contradictory results (Amenta 2000). Through midcentury self-provisioning decreased, population increased and the “industrialization” of food took center stage. During the 1960s and 1970s two important groups rediscovered the political economy of food. The one we know about includes the middle class and other white populations seeking to regain control over elements of the food system (Allen 2004; Slocum 2006). Indeed the work of growing, processing, and Growing Food and Justice 151 selling food began to change when they recognized...