Bridging good food and good jobs: From secession to confrontation within alternative food movement politics

Abstract

Much of the alternative food movement is predicated on a prefigurative politics of building alternatives to the conventional agrifood system, with only a smaller segment invested in a politics of confrontation with that very same system. In the context of actually existing agrifood relations, this raises a number of concerns. First, the movement often ignores challenging race and class inequality within the agrifood system in favor of realizing environmental sustainability and supporting small farmers. Second, corporate agribusinesses often co-opt the movement’s consumer-centric and health-centric framings to legitimate low-wage big-box retail development in low-income urban communities. Third, the movement does not always recognize how low-income urban communities are developing language and tactics to shape local economic development. In this article, we investigate new alliances between alternative food organizations and labor organizations that use confrontational politics to demand greater food justice and economic justice in the conventional agrifood system. Specifically, we focus on struggles against Wal-Mart in New York City and Los Angeles and the discourse of “Good Food, Good Jobs,” which is used to build alliances between alternative food activists and labor activists working to address the root causes of food insecurity and food deserts. We find that at the core of the Good Food, Good Jobs discourse is a politics committed to increasing the power and health of food chain workers, and more broadly, the communities within which they live, by rejecting the tradeoff between food and jobs, which empowers working class people to shape the development of their communities.