Notes on the practice of food justice in the U.S.: understanding and confronting trauma and inequity

Kirsten Cadieux,Rachel Slocum

doi:10.2458/v22i1.21077

Kirsten Cadieux, Rachel Slocum

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.2458/v22i1.21077

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Abstract

The lexicon of the U.S. food movement has expanded to include the term 'food justice.' Emerging after approximately two decades of food advocacy, this term frames structural critiques of agri-food systems and calls for radical change. Over those twenty years, practitioners and scholars have argued that the food movement was in danger of creating an 'alternative' food system for the white middle class. Alternative food networks drew on white imaginaries of an idyllic communal past, promoted consumer-oriented, market-driven change, and left yawning silences in the areas of gendered work, migrant labor, and racial inequality. Justice was often beside the point. Now, among practitioners and scholars we see an enthusiastic surge in the use of the term food justice but a vagueness on the particulars. In scholarship and practice, that vagueness manifests in overly general statements about ending oppression, or morphs into outright conflation of the dominant food movement's work with food justice (see What does it mean to do food justice? Cadieux and Slocum (2015), in this Issue). In this article, we focus on one of the four nodes (trauma/inequity, exchange, land and labor) around which food justice organizing appears to occur: acknowledging and confronting historical, collective trauma and persistent race, gender, and class inequality. We apply what we have learned from our research in U.S. and Canadian agri-food systems to suggest working methods that might guide practitioners as they work toward food justice, and scholars as they seek to study it. In the interests of ensuring accountability to socially just research and action, we suggest that scholars and practitioners need to be more clear on what it means to practice food justice. Towards such clarity and accountability, we urge scholars and practitioners to collaboratively document how groups move toward food justice, what thwarts and what enables them.Key words: food justice, trauma, food movement, alternative food networks, antiracism

Highlights

In the first decade of the 21st century, the term 'food justice' blossomed throughout the North American food movement's lexicon, joining the radical concept for food system analysis, 'food sovereignty'
As we argued in the previous article in this volume (Cadieux and Slocum 2015), practicing food justice means intervening in the areas of trauma/inequity, exchange, land, and labor arrangements using processes that enable people to deal with power relations across relevant scales with the aim of effecting systemic change
Though the pursuit of social justice in food system change has been acknowledged to be extremely difficult, we find the concepts of food justice and food sovereignty coming into much wider use in our research sites

Summary

Introduction

In the first decade of the 21st century, the term 'food justice' blossomed throughout the North American food movement's lexicon, joining the radical concept for food system analysis, 'food sovereignty' (see Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010; Wekerle 2004). In reviewing scholarship on food justice, we find descriptions of inspiring examples like workers' coops (Alkon 2013), and organizing taking place in all corners of the world in pursuit of socially just food systems (Allen 2008), as well as mobilizing by people of color (Anguelovski 2014; White 2010, 2011).3 In this nascent literature, we find few studies of what AFNs are doing differently, and we do not see many accountable appraisals of the approaches, methods, and strategies that enable dominant food movement groups to shift toward socially just food systems. In the academic community, we have witnessed intense interest from students at all levels as well as from established scholars who have taken up the subject of food change with zeal, resulting in a multitude of new graduate degree programs and research projects Many of these have developed in institutional contexts unsupportive of the need to address the difficult nature of food justice work as a result of disciplinary distance from social analysis and a lack of institutional commitment.

Historical and conceptual background for a focus on trauma and inequity

Addressing inequity and trauma: barriers

Findings

Getting unstuck: conditions for practicing food justice