Resetting the “Good Food” Table

The formation of food-labor alliances in Los Angeles pushes food justice politics beyond a focus on food access, culturally appropriate food, and self-determination by strategically emphasizing economic inequalities and working conditions and engaging in confrontational politics. These alliances reveal that it is important to have highly visible labor campaigns, the integration of activists with direct knowledge or experience of food work and food insecurity into the food movement, and labor activists who will combat food deserts and therefore work alongside food justice activists through the lens of poverty. In short, it is essential to build a food movement that can fight to take care of the hands that grow, process, deliver, and sell the food meant to nourish the good food revolution.

Introduction

This chapter argues that food activists need to look beyond the politics of their plates to engage with broader questions of racial and economic inequalities, strategy and political transformation. It grounds the examples that follow in two ongoing scholarly debates. The first regards the role of inequalities, particularly of race and class, in shaping past and present industrial and alternative food systems. The second looks to strategies and tactics. While some have argued that the provision of relatively apolitical alternatives to industrial food systems lays the groundwork for transformative change, the editors of this volume urge activists to follow those profiled in this book towards more cooperative, oppositional and collective strategic choices. The introduction ends with an overview of the chapters to come.

Farmworker-Led Food Movements Then and Now

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with farmworkers and farmworker advocates in California and Florida, this chapter explores the progress made by farmworker-led, consumer-supported movements for farmworker justice. It argues for the need to break down divides between producer and consumer, rural and urban, and individual and community based approaches to changing the food system. It contends that farmworker-led consumer-based campaigns and solidarity movements, such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) current Campaign for Fair Food, and The United Farmworkers’ historical grape boycotts, successfully work to challenge agrarian imaginaries, drawing consumers into movement-based actions. This research illustrates the possibilities for alternative food movement advocates and coalitions to build upon farmworker-led campaigns and embrace workers as leaders.

How Canadian Farmers Fought and Won the Battle against GM Wheat

On 10 May, 2004 Monsanto conceded to a coalition of organizations opposing the introduction of genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat in Canada and abandoned its application to introduce the crop in North America. This chapter examines how this producer-led coalition defeated RR wheat by challenging the prevailing neoliberal logic that the fate of RR wheat should be decided in the marketplace according to individual choice. Instead, the farmers at the center of the anti-RR wheat coalition insisted that their distinct and collective interests as producers of food should be reflected in Canadian biotech policy and argued that wheat should remain a crop that farmers could reproduce outside of markets through the practice of seed saving.

Food Workers and Consumers Organizing Together for Food Justice

Despite being among the country's lowest paid workers, employees in the food system have remained largely invisible to the average consumer. But now, food system workers are garnering the support of consumers through campaigns for good jobs, wages, and food. This chapter highlights three organizing campaigns that are emblematic of this struggle: 1) the Brandworkers campaign at Amy’s Bread, an artisanal bakery in New York City; 2) the Teamsters campaign at Taylor Farms in Tracy, California, the largest salad processor in the U.S.; and 3) the OUR Walmart campaign at Walmart stores around the country. These cases illustrate how consumers can actively support workers who are organizing against everyday exploitation and oppression.

Taking a Different Tack

This chapter showcases the work of California’s pesticide drift activists, who address their environmental concerns by advocating for regulatory restrictions on the use of the most-toxic and unruly pesticides. It shows that pesticide drift activism is a critical reaction to the longstanding inadequacies and more recent neoliberalization of the pesticide regulatory apparatus, as well as to the sustainable agriculture movement’s reliance on market-based practices. Pesticide drift activists mobilize their anger about pesticide exposure not by giving up on the state but by holding it responsible for reducing environmental hazards that threaten human health. Their work illustrates why stronger health-protective pesticide regulations are necessary and demonstrates that they are possible.

Grounding the U.S. Food Movement

The international peasant confederation La Vía Campesina has long understood land as a key battleground in the struggle against neoliberal globalization and in the construction of food sovereignty. Food movements in the United States, however, have been slow to embrace land as a key platform of struggle—this despite dramatic and rising levels of land concentration, magnified by recent trends such as financialization and climate change. This chapter argues that the injustices of the capitalist food system are directly related to dispossession and lack of control over land. As such, it suggests that a sharper focus on land among the seemingly disparate groups that comprise the US food movement could form the basis for political convergence and deeper, more long lasting transformation.

Cooperative Social Practices, Self-Determination, and the Struggle for Food Justice in Oakland and Chicago

This chapter examines two food hubs in Oakland, CA and Chicago, IL in light of the food justice and neoliberalism critiques explained in the introduction to this volume. With regard to food justice, the chapter argues that although alternative food systems have often been created in ways that reify white norms and cultural frames, these organizations are steeped in African American cultural frameworks that position them as part of broader anti-racist struggles. Secondly, these food hubs simultaneously reproduce and contest neoliberalism through their collective approaches to the buying and selling of alternative foods. Taken together, these examples demonstrate some of the ways that alternative food projects are affected by and position themselves within the complexities of racial inequalities and neoliberal capitalism.

Conclusion

IN 2006, WHEN COLLECTING DATA for her book Black, White, and Green, Alison spoke with Kirk, a manager at the first entirely organic farmers’ market in the United States. Like most of the market’s vendors and customers, he was white, college-educated, and politically progressive. Kirk described the farmers’ market as a way to advocate for a healthy environment while working around, rather than challenging, an unresponsive state:...

Boston’s Emerging Food Solidarity Economy

An emerging food justice movement in Boston aspires to build a food economy rooted in values of justice, sustainability, and democracy. Though not centrally coordinated, this movement encompasses cooperatives, a community land trust, social enterprises, and nonprofits spanning the food system, from land and farms to food processing and organic waste recycling. This chapter uses an urban political ecology lens and a solidarity economy framework to understand and analyze the challenges and opportunities facing this emerging Boston Food Solidarity Economy. The chapter examines how these play out through the case of the legalization of commercial farming in Boston. Finally, we discuss how some of these constraints might be overcome, with an emphasis on organizing and shifting power relations.