Food Equity Research Articles

Working Toward a Just, Equitable, and Local Food System: The Social Impact of Community‐Based Agriculture*

Objective. This article serves as a pilot study of three central aspects of sociological research concerning the impact of local agriculture on local communities: food equity, social integration, and natural human capital.Methods. Four CSA farmers, four partners in a direct‐market organic farm, and four community garden site coordinators working in the Intervale, a local agriculture project in Burlington, Vermont, were interviewed in person for this research. Additionally, the author collected observational data in the Intervale, at two local farmers' markets, and as a member of a local community garden.Result. Different modes of local agricultural production have distinctive effects on the local population with regard to equitable access to healthy food, social inclusion, and experiential knowledge of the natural world.Conclusions. Given class‐based disparities in local agricultural participation, local food projects should consider promoting programs designed for broader social inclusion, including subsidized farmer‐to‐family coupons.

Biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food equity

Biodiversity and genetic resources have become the focal point of major national and international biological and political debates regarding control, ownership, access, and erosion of critical resources. While these issues are key to environmental sustainability and food security, biodiversity and genetic resources must be seen in the broader context of their inextricable relationship to cultural diversity and to humans' view of nature. Nature is assumed to be constituted socially through a wide variety of human processes described collectively as culture. Three significant cultural factors, technology, science, and capitalism, are largely responsible for the secularization and homogenization of food and agriculture and the remaking of nature. These processes and forces may simultaneously and unwittingly create the problems of declines in biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food equity. Indeed, it may well be that the only way to conserve cultural biodiversity in the field is to conserve cultural diversity among peoples. This reunification of biodiversity and cultural diversity and food and agriculture will require new paradigms and institutional mechanisms that allow us to show our care for each other through our reverence for nature.

Recognizing rationalizations among responses to hunger

In this article I undertake to discover the extent to which five distinct philosophical arguments for “hardhearted” responses to hunger are rationalizations. In each case, I consider the prima facie appeal and then consider the extent to which these appeals can be answered or overcome by principles promoting policies of food equity. I pay special attention to the appeal that pits political self-determination against food equity, because I believe it is especially important to determine the extent to which respect for sovereignty and political self-determination is to be seen as compatible with promoting policies of food equity.