Food Justice in the City

Food Sovereignty in Chicago

Pancho McFarland, Ph.D.

“Food sovereignty, urban food access, and food activism: contemplating the connections through examples from Chicago” (Agriculture and Human Values, Fall 2011), the recently published article written by scholar-activists Danny Block, Noel Chavez, Erica Allen, and Dinah Ramirez applies food sovereignty principles to urban food justice politics.  Their examination of the community-based organizations, Growing Power and Healthy South Chicago, and interviews with residents of food desert communities shows the need for food justice activists to adopt a sovereignty perspective. 

An important discussion in their timely study revolves around their critique of food access inequity as the central problem with the capitalist food system.  The authors argue:

Food access inequities highlight how the experience of living in poorer communities is hugely different from the experience of living in wealthier ones and that these difference can even lead to increased death.  However, their ability to highlight these inequities often leads to a public response that focuses on only food stores themselves, rather than a broader focus upon the broader inequities in economic investment, political and economic power, and health that the food desert issue highlights.

This analysis and critique of the “food access” discourse amongst food justice advocates and others is timely given the current media attention, nationally and in Chicago, of First Lady Michelle Obama’s food campaign.  On October w5, 2011, Obama, former friend and current Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, numerous politicians and businessman met to discuss food access.  In addition, the new Mari Gallagher study reported that the Chicago population living in food deserts has been reduced by 40% in recent years.  The Gallagher report and the food summit define the problem as one of food access that strategically-placed corporate chain stores could solve.  The decrease found by Gallagher resulted from a few store openings and the emphasis placed on corporate interests at the food summit suggests that ‘food access’ is being turned into a market opportunity and catch-phrase.

On the other hand, Block, et.al., see lack of food sovereignty to be the primary concern within a food justice framework.  Their definitions of food sovereignty provide us with insight into their critique of the ‘food access’ discourse promoted by big business and Obama.  Their first definition comes from La Via Campesina: the rights ‘of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods, respecting cultural and productive diversity…the right to produce our own food in our own territory…”  Additionally, they explain that food sovereignty is ‘the right of people to define their agricultural and food policy.’  They also quote “Canadian policy activist Wayne Roberts” who simply defined food sovereignty as “when food is of, by and for the people.”

In essence, the problem is not one of access but self-determination.  The problem is the entire system of social relations that we commonly call capitalism and the U.S. political system mistakenly labeled ‘democracy.’  The U.S. population, in general, has almost no power over their livelihoods.  The ‘food economy’ is monopolized by a small number of corporations that determine what gets grown and raised, how it gets produced, and how food gets distributed and at what price.  The profit motive trumps health and hunger or the cultural appropriateness of available food.  Food sovereignty intervenes at the root cause of food inequity.  Attention to questions of food sovereignty and economic self-determination focuses our food justice praxis away from simple engagement with the food monopoly and towards small-scale production and institution-building.

Somewhere Between Alinsky and Gandhi

Block, Chavez, Allen and Ramirez’s examination of Growing Power, and Healthy South Chicago and interviews with residents from the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago show us that food activists and residents see the problem as power and respect.  They recognize that the cause of food access inequities lies in the power relations between them as working class people of color and the corporate food monopoly.  They have identified the problem as one of lack of food sovereignty and racism stemming from the capitalist organization of society.  The response must involve true democracy and community self-determination.  Their study suggests that alternative food movements that don’t attend to these principles cannot effectively solve the problems associated with inner city hunger.  As a result, they see the organizing principles of Saul Alinsky that have been developed by countless organizers and activists since the 1970s to be useful.  The authors write:

[Alinsky’s] advice is to ‘never go outside the experience of the community’ (Alinsky 1969, p. 229).  Activists have often done so, to their peril, as the power relations that result between the activists and the community may not be very different from those that would result from a plan put into place by the city government without community input.

Here is where the work of food justice activists and scholars like Drs. Devon Peña and Vandana Shiva in slightly different contexts intersects with food justice in Chicago.  The traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) recognized and promoted by these scholar-activists in Meso-American diasporic enclaves in Colorado, Seattle and Los Angeles (Peña) and rural India (Shiva) speaks to not going ‘outside the experience of the community’ in achieving food sovereignty and community empowerment.  Radical food projects must attend to Black and Mexican TEK and other cultural traditions.  They must also be initiated with community leadership.

The critique of capitalism suggests a strategy incorporating the insights of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Indian Independence Movement.  A key strategy in the movement as articulated by Gandhi is the development of parallel institutions.  The food justice movement should keep an eye toward marginalizing the capitalist food system through community institution building.  If the problem as identified by food justice activists and food desert residents is lack of sovereignty, more chain stores in Black and Mexican neighborhoods does not provide a solution.  We can’t be seduced by the glamour associated with Obama’s focus on food access.  Instead we should build a strong local food economy that makes us independent of the corporate food monopoly.