Food Justice in the City

MODERATOR'S NOTE: Today's entry is a guest blog by Dr. Pancho McFarland, a Chicano sociologist from New Mexico now teaching at Chicago State University, and his partner Kourtney Craigmiles McFarland. It is our privilege to welcome the McFarlands to ejfood blog as regular guest contributors. Professor McFarland's most recent book is Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio (University of Texas Press, 2008).

Food Justice in the City: Key Concepts
Pancho McFarland and Kourtney Craigmiles McFarland

Capitalist Food Systems

Food production, distribution and consumption in a capitalist economy result from the bourgeois need to accumulate profits through the exploitation of labor, consumer, and the environmental conditions of life itself.  The global capitalist food system makes huge profits from the creation of monopolies and the intensive use of fossil fuels and petrochemicals.  Capitalists have used legal apparatuses such as the WTO, free trade agreements, intellectual property rights on genetic material and government-backing to control the production, distribution and consumption of food. 

Ideological apparatuses such as the media and public education have assisted capital in its domination over food.  They have taught us to not question the dominance of the market and the capitalist system and have limited access to information that would help us take control over food production, distribution and consumption.  In addition, the total reliance on petroleum to run highly mechanized agribusiness and for the development of chemical fertilizers and other key inputs has negative consequences for our Earth and other beings.  Under the authoritarian capitalist system we have little say in our food system.

Food Deserts

The capitalist food system has degraded our food supply at the point of production through the application of chemical toxins in order to support monocultural land use.  The hormones, pesticides and herbicides used to produce food cheaply ruin our food and water and create superpests and superweeds that further challenge food production and contribute to disease.  Additionally, the capitalist food system creates inequality with the wealthy and middle-class having disproportionate access to healthy food and the poor and working-classes living in virtual “food deserts.” 

Food deserts are geographic areas in which access to healthy food is limited or non-existent.  Measures of access to healthy food include the number of grocery stores in a given locale, whether stores in a given locale have fresh produce and meats or stock only highly processed foods, and ratio of fast food establishments to grocery stores.  Many in food desert communities lack access to personal vehicles. 

For example, in the food desert community of South Chicago nearly 30% of residents do not have personal vehicles.  They must take the bus or walk to distant full-service grocery stores.  In Chicago, a bus trip to a grocery store easily costs five dollars.  Additionally, residents in food deserts find that if healthy food can be found at neighborhood corner stores, it is much more costly than at supermarkets in other neighborhoods.  Healthy foods at these stores are also more costly than highly processed and nutritionally lacking foods.  Thus, working people are often forced to purchase unhealthy food. 

Some 600,000 Chicagoans live in food deserts.  Residents in Chicago’s majority Black communities travel twice as far to reach a grocery store as they do to reach a fast-food restaurant.  Given the lack of knowledge about healthy eating options, lack and cost of transportation, and cost of healthy food, Black and Latino residents of food deserts in Chicago’s Southside communities eat foods with low nutritional value (see the article, “Food Desert” in Chicago Magazine, by clicking on this link Food Deserts.

These obstacles to accessing healthy food means that hungry children are often given a couple of dollars to run to the corner store or liquor store to grab some chips, candy and a soft drink for dinner.  Of course, this poor eating leads to illnesses including chronic and life-threatening diseases such as diabetes.  In fact, studies have shown a correlation between food access and diabetes and obesity.

Food Justice: The Biocentric Roots

Food justice means combating the inequalities of the global capitalist system.  Since the capitalist system relies on racism and patriarchy to supply its profits, food justice requires ending racism, sexism, and colonialism.  It requires truly democratic and local politics; a radical democracy (see the writings and work of the Zapatistas and the book, Radical Democracy by Lummis).  Starvation, hunger, malnutrition, and disease caused by the current dominant food system can only be eradicated if people control politics and economics.

However, since the capitalist system has manipulated how we think about food and power and how we act as regards food and power, many are content to act to maintain the status quo or never give a second thought to food production, distribution and consumption.  We have lost touch with our ability to produce food, we do not value food production, nor know how to organize ourselves.  Capitalism’s cultural imperialism has also created an individualist ethic which keeps us from acting in the name of community or ecological good.

A central component of food justice is a biocentric (life-centered) ethic such as the Lakota, “mitakuye oyasin” (all my relations), Mayan, “in lak ech” (you are my other me) and Bantu, “ubuntu” (I am because you are).  We need to regain a community and love ethic; a philia which recognizes that all living beings are my relations. This means that we must become good stewards of the land and our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

Food Justice in an Urban Setting

That’s all nice and Edenic, a utopic dream, but how do we achieve food justice in an urban setting?
Numerous groups and individuals in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and New York have developed a food justice movement that creates on a small-scale, local, democratic, ecologically-sound food systems.  Through a combination of community-supported agriculture (CSAs), farmers’ markets, community markets, backyard gardeners’ networks and innovative community gardens, thousands are participating in alternatives to the capitalist food system. 

The challenge is to include more people and more communities in these alternatives and marginalize capitalism out of existence.  Examinations of previous and ongoing projects to establish and strengthen urban communities and local food systems can help us realize a political, economic, and cultural system based on food justice.

Food Justice as Radical Localism

A central problem of the organization of our world is that the systems we have created are beyond the human scale (see Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism).  Our political, economic and food systems, our legal regimes and communication systems are global in scope and thus incoherent to the vast majority and out of our control.  Since they are out of our control they are by definition anti-democratic.  Radical localism brings our systems down to a human scale in which each of us can participate, debate, organize, and engage in mutually beneficial agency.

Radical localism includes radical democracy.  Such a democracy is a true form of democracy in that the people (demos) rule (kratia).  Every adult in a community participates in governance.  The autonomous communities of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico are organized on such a model.  This form of governance takes time (more time than authoritarian decision-making regimes) but, perhaps, this is a virtue as capitalism requires speed and efficiency.  Slowing down will help undermine it.  Only at the local level can a true democracy work.

Food justice in an urban setting requires a radical localism that includes radical democracy and an ethic of eating locally (locavorism).  To have a system based on food justice people, all people, must have a say in food production, distribution and consumption and how land is used.  Locavorism is an orientation toward food that privileges local food systems that are kind to the Earth and all our relations, respectful of traditional food practices, and supports non-capitalist methods of food production and distribution.

Locavorism encourages us to eat food produced with minimal use of non-renewable resources. Eating locally also helps solve the ecological problems created by the capitalist agribusiness food distribution system that imports foods from thousands of miles away.  This practice of shipping food contributes to climate change and other ecological problems since it relies on the burning of fossil fuels and food production practices that require additional chemical inputs to account for the long-distance travel. The long-distances involved also do not allow consumers to participate in the production process or to observe and resist the exploitation of farm workers who otherwise might remain faceless and unknown to us.

A food ethic based on mitakuye oyasin means we act locally and participate directly in the production of our food.  We act as producers and not simply consumers.  We support local farmers, CSAs and community markets at the same time that we produce in backyard and community gardens.  We tread lightly on the Earth and encourage biodiversity.  We are good stewards of the land and value all our relations.

Resurgent Local Food Systems and Polyculturalism

This call for food justice through developing local food systems is not a call for homogeneity, monocultures, cultural imperialism or some other form of authoritarian organization of society nor does it eschew our responsibilities to and recognition of our relations throughout the globe.  Local food systems recognize and encourage diversity and polyculturalism, an understanding and respect for the multiple and complex connections that we share with multiple peoples; see V. Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting).

Diversity in the production, distribution and consumption of food means allowing traditional horticultural and organizational practices to flourish.  Polyculturalism suggests that we learn from and exchange food production, distribution and consumption practices with multiple peoples with whom we interact (directly and indirectly).

Local food systems are not authoritarian regimes requiring adherence to a dogmatic orthodoxy.  They work from a rhizomatic pattern of interconnected, self-organized and self-governed units (seethe work of Delueze and Guattari).  Self-directed units may include communes, co-ops, or autonomous communities.  Local food systems increase diversity and interconnectedness as their local nature makes our interdependence visible.  This visibility of our dependence on one another reinforces our ethic of mitakuye oyasin, in lak ech, and ubuntu.

In the end, only local food systems can provide the solutions to the problems of capitalist production, distribution and consumption of food.  Future entries will focus on various aspects of food justice in urban settings including innovative projects, important individuals and groups, and other social problems and issues that impact how food is produced, distributed and consumed in the city.