Guest Blog: Food Freedom or Food Justice?

Moderator’s Note: With this blog, we re-initiate a series of contributions by students in my University of Washington courses. This contribution is from a student in my Chicano Studies 498a Special Topics seminar, “Food Sovereignty Movements in Mexico and the United States.” The posting was prepared by Steve M. Sullivan-Zárate, Esq. and is a fascinating reflection on the possible opposition/contradiction between “food freedom” (a.k.a. consumer freedom of choice) and “food justice” (the abolition of hunger and the provision of adequate, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food).

“In Poor Taste”

A Glorious and Belligerent Treatise from the Age of Deep-Fried Consciousness

By Steve M. Sullivan-Zárate, Esq.

            In favor of discourse surrounding buzzwords such as shade-grown, sustainable, slow-food, deep-food, fair-trade, seasonal, local, equitable, organic, and whatever else, a commonly overlooked topic in the dialogue surrounding food justice are the matters of convenience and taste. We can talk all we want about eating locally, sustainably, organically, equitably, and so forth, but when all’s said and done, when people have a choice about what they eat, there is always the risk that people will choose based on taste, convenience and comfort instead of the environmental or socio-cultural impacts. With this writing I would like to explore the paradox of Food Freedom and Food Justice.

            It would probably behoove me greatly to begin by defining the key terms. After all, one hears the word Justice thrown around with the same impunity as the word Freedom. They’re often even used in collaboration, as though they are but two complementary flavors inhabiting the same delicious candy bar, arm-in-arm in the revolutionary struggle of peanut butter and chocolate. “Freedom and Justice for all”. To complicate the common, simplistic and unexamined definitions of Freedom and Justice, Albert Camus once famously said: “Absolute Justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction; therefore it destroys Freedom”.

            This phrase seems to suggest a contrary interpretation; that instead of and far from being collaborative ideals, they are in fact, in their purest forms, actually in direct opposition to each other. Absolute Justice would mean that there really is “one correct way” whereas Absolute Freedom would mean the complete absence of taboo - every path open, just as valid as the next. “Every/any way” vs. “One way / the right way”. Freedom vs. Justice.

            Humans naturally crave certain, specific tastes- sweet, salt, spice, and fat. This inclination wouldn’t normally be a problem except that we’ve ceased to eat food opportunistically like every other member of the community of life. Naturally, we would only very rarely come across enough sugar, salt, spice, or fat to pose a particularly grave threat to our health. The urge was always there throughout our evolution exactly because those foods were so scarce but we do need a certain amount of them in our diet. After the advent of intensive food production (which operates on the premise that all food is ultimately human food and is often referred to as “Totalitarian Agriculture”), we suddenly had access to huge quantities of foods that were cultivated to satisfy our hereditary urges for certain tastes. When you get right down to it, there are really good reasons for both why people eat at fast food restaurants or munch candy bars, and why the sale of fast/junk food is so obviously successful. Reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with economics...It’s convenient and tastes good. Nevermind that comfortable foods are harmful on any number of levels, they are not only cheap and convenient, but they also happily satisfy the tastes that we crave- sweet, salt, spice, and fat. Herein lies the problem of Freedom vs. Justice.

            Consumer-citizens of dominant culture the world over (but especially Americans) have to choose between eating something because it’s seasonal, organic, healthy, etc..., or to eat something that they know comforts them, tastes very good, is quick and ready, and satisfies their evolutionary cravings. Activist groups have found themselves in the unsavory (pun intended) position of trying to argue against what tastes best to the human tongue and is most easily at hand. It’s like when parents admonish their children to eat their meticulously prepared Lima beans and Spinach “because it’s good for you” even though it tastes like... Lima beans and Spinach and you could have just thrown in a frozen pizza. In this way it could be considered Freedom to have a myriad of food options and the right to choose whichever, but it could be considered Justice to have “one right way” to eat: local, slow, deep, organic, seasonal, and all that.

            And don’t mistake me and get all angry dear reader. I’m not saying that because foods are produced respectfully, they can’t taste good or be incredibly flavorful, but I AM saying that they usually don’t taste like a goddam Snicker’s bar so let’s do away with that critique right now. Junk food has a gravity all it’s own. If ice cream didn’t make you fat, have any adverse health effects, was readily accessible worldwide and could be produced respectfully/organically/sustainably/whatever, then who would eat fair-trade, shade grown, local organic broccoli instead? Come on now. And I’m a man that loves me some good steamed broccoli. The fact is that people gravitate towards quick food that meets their cravings. Heirloom squash is all well and good but people seem to like the McRib despite overwhelming reasons not to.

            It’s news to me, but apparently every economist worth their salt (notably Paul Hawken, Richard Robbins, and Milton Friedman) knows that to maintain a healthy Capitalist economy it must increase annually by 3 percent. This implies three very important things to me: 1) There is an underlying assumption that infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is even possible, 2) people always need to sell more (and profit, which means selling something for more than you know it’s worth or buying for less than you know it’s worth), and 3) people always need to buy more. What happens when people are satisfied with what they have or want to live within their means? The economy falters and the entire apparatus of the dominant culture shows its fragility. In order to keep things running smoothly, businesses have created a competitive advertisement industry based entirely around carefully suggesting that people buy, suggesting that people... indulge. Like Burger King says: “Have it your way”.

Dominant culture fetishizes both consumption and Freedom, (hell, we invade other countries ostensibly just to spread the gospel), and what better way to demonstrate consumer freedom than an abundance of food choices? Even small town grocery stores have literally dozens of varieties of salad-dressing, pasta sauce, potato chips, chocolate and other products, not even counting the foods you mix and match yourself.

For a culture in which everything bends to the needs of the economic system, is it any great surprise that consumers have been fully indoctrinated into the notion that “the customer is always right”? We’re conditioned to the point that even the way we make friends and interact with other humans follows this mandate of comfort and indulgence. We can block phone numbers and online chat partners if anyone says word one with which we disagree. We can get delivery food or go through the self-checkout to avoid any possibly uncomfortable social interaction. Almost everything is considered disposable. At every point the “Westernized” consumer is encouraged to act based solely on comfort, convenience and taste.

The other day I overheard someone telling a friend that: “The only thing Americans fear is inconvenience”. I thought that was an apt appraisal. The battle here is unbelievably difficult because not only is it internal and subtle, but it counters the fairy-tale logic with which we’re all familiar. The struggle isn’t between the forces of what’s good and what’s evil, but the forces of what’s good and what’s easy.

This all begs a question though; If we are trained and strongly encouraged from birth to insulate, indulge, comfort, and make exceptions for ourselves in order to spur the economic system, then what does that mean for our strategy if we care at all about Food Justice?

Clearly the utopian ideal would be to convince every man, woman and child the world over to personally and moreover, voluntarily become comfortable with discomfort/inconvenience, and resolve to eat a certain way because it’s more Just, but it would be more than a little naïve to bank on that kind of worldwide, individualistic transformation.

At some point we have to bring up the effects of a Capitalist economy. At some point we have to acknowledge the unsustainability of the current system of food production. Certainly at some point we must address the fact that any FORCED change towards eating with deliberation and respect, will leave many people feeling mightily displeased by the limitations on their eating habits and resentful of those who forced the change. It might even result in backlash. Asking people to adopt what’s essentially an entirely new lifestyle is a tricky proposition. Is the plan just “wait for collapse” or is it still “wait for the universally voluntary transformation to a better lifestyle”? Could change take the form of a cultural shift in the way we view and interact with the world? If so, could that culture-shift withstand the mechanism of economy that already ruthlessly put down so many other, more firmly established cultures? 

All of these are big questions, I know... but I keep coming back to that quote by Camus. If Freedom and Justice are indeed at opposite ends of the spectrum, then perhaps, like so many things in the world right now, they’re out of balance. Perhaps we need more Justice for our Food. It’s one thing to diagnose a problem, it’s entirely another to treat it. 

South Central Farm Update: Leslie Radford on SCF and Occupy LA

 

Moderator's Note: We are presenting a very insightful and significant update from Professor Leslie Radford, a long-time supporter of the South Central Farmers. In this update, Dr. Radford notes that instead of paving the way to restore the South Central Farm for the low-income and predominantly African-American, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Chicano residents of the Central Alameda neighborhood, instead of leaving them even two and a half acres for a soccer field, Mayor AntonioVillaraigosa and Councilmember Jan Perry are offering farmland to the predominantly white, and until recently mostly middle-class, occupiers of City Hall, people widely perceived as the symbolic children of Westside liberals. The offer itself will undoubtedly get more attention and add more to the environmental credibility of the two elected officials than the nail in the coffin of the South Central Farm ever will.

 

Why the Whole Movement Should Be Watching

What It Means to Occupy Los Angeles 


 

by LESLIE RADFORD

Los Angeles

All across Los Angeles you’ll find small, quiet occupations, clusters of tents sheltered by overpasses or erected in communities that emerge in the twilight and disappear at dawn. Most have been there for years, in places like Watts and Skid Row, a fact of life for much of Los Angeles south and east of City Hall.

Last night, the newest one, the biggest and noisiest, was offered a building, housing, and a farm. Occupy Los Angeles, just a little over 50 days old, has rattled the bars of City Hall, the building it surrounds, so emphatically that the monolith that is the City has rocked. Yesterday, the City signaled a buy-out deal to OccupyLA in exchange for removing the part of the encampment from City Hall’s south lawn.

Many of Los Angeles’s long-term advocates for social and economic change are trying to figure out what just happened. City Hall politicians played “divide and conquer” on a much bigger scale than deciding who gets to stay and who gets to leave the encampment. Community activists have whispered that the Occupy Wall Street movement across the United States is driven by people formerly of privilege, mostly white and with dashed expectations of a middle-class life. The City has forced Occupy Los Angeles to address that challenge, and where the movement goes next depends in great part on their next move.

Occupy Los Angeles, ensconced on the north and south lawns of Los Angeles’s City Hall, is the nation’s largest encampment associated with the ubiquitous Occupy Wall Street movement since Occupy Wall Street NYC in Zuccotti Park was dismantled in a police raid a week ago.

Although without a defining set of demands, Occupy Wall Street participants cite social justice, political accountability, and economic realignment as reasons to claim possession of land and visibility. The police raid on Zuccotti Park triggered a week of coordinated police incursions into Occupy encampments across the country, dismantling the sites and displacing the protesters. Except in Los Angeles.

Since before its inception OccupyLA has been unique in that it negotiated its encampment with City officials before the protesters took up residence on the City Hall lawn. Most in OccupyLA have asserted that the police belong with the occupiers as members of the 99% and have avoided encounters with police that might signal hostility. With the exception of an unexpected clash with police on Thursday morning and a nonviolent civil disobedience action that resulted in planned arrests Thursday night, OccupyLA as a whole has had no significant conflicts with LAPD.

Occupiers have come to know and chat with the uniformed police who stroll across the grounds in pairs. OccupyLA’s City Liaison committee has continued conversations with police and City officials, and after weeks of rumors, they announced an exchange offered by the City to the occupiers that would cede the most visible part of the lawn for some security for the occupiers. But it’s not that neat, and it’s not that easy. Dealings with City Hall never are.

First, there is the farmland. A couple of weeks ago, LAPD demanded the removal of garden boxes that some occupiers had carried to the lawn to grow food, apparently signaling to the City some interest among the occupiers in farming. And mind you, this is not a garden. A garden would be ambiguous; a Farm has special resonance in Los Angeles.But elected city officials have a more self-serving motive in offering a farm to the occupiers.

Just last week, at the behest of mayoral candidate Jan Perry, the City Council sold off land promised for a soccer field at the site of the former South Central Farm. In doing so, they most likely paved the way to turn the former urban gem into another pollution-pumping, gray and cold, low-wage manufacturing site. The grassroots blowback has been harsh on Mayor Villaraigosa who is busy defining himself as the green mayor of the Million Trees program, and, after he hit a taxicab while riding his bicycle, the champion of bike lanes. And it’s been harsher on LA City Councilwoman and mayoral candidate Jan Perry, who’s tying her election campaign to developers for the money, even as she paints herself to voters as the advocate for healthy eating and green space.

So, instead of paving the way to restore the South Central Farm for the low-income and predominantly African-American, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Chicano residents of the Central Alameda neighborhood, instead of leaving them even two and a half acres for a soccer field, Villaraigosa and Perry offer farmland to the predominantly white, until recently mostly middle-class occupiers of City Hall, people widely perceived as the symbolic children of Westside liberals. The offer itself will undoubtedly get more attention and add more to the environmental credibility of the two elected officials than the nail in the coffin of the South Central Farm ever will.

Then there is the building. The City’s offer includes 10,000 sq. ft. across from City Hall for a dollar a year. The offer  on the table is, almost assuredly, tied up with the City’s frantic divestiture of its Community Redevelopment Agency money before the state Supreme Court rules in January on the legality of the governor’s plan to redirect CRA funds from developers to schools and public safety.
The exact location is still undisclosed, as are most of the details of the City’s offer to the occupiers, but a likely site is the mostly-vacant Parker Center, the former headquarters of LAPD, now used mostly for its jail and communications facilities. Parker Center is also where protesters who attempted to set up tents at the Bank of America plaza on Thursday were booked. In spite of that, OccupyLA is renowned for its cordial working relationship with LAPD, and a neighborly arrangement between the police and at least some of the Occupying protesters, perhaps, not a contradiction.

And there is the offer of housing for the homeless now encamped on the south lawn of City Hall. In the geography of the encampment, the south lawn is perceived as the residence of the homeless, the drug users, and the stoners, all sources of friction for the activists on the north lawn. The City is asking for its front lawn back, and it’s willing to let the north lawn campers remain, at least for now. In exchange, the City is offering to open up new shelter for the homeless who will be displaced. The effort to fracture the 99% along existing seams of class and political tension is transparent.

What’s not so evident is that if the City can establish that  it has provided 1,250 new beds in low-income housing since 2007, they get out from under a 9th Circuit order that allows sleeping on the sidewalk. That would leave the City free to resume citing and arresting those who do sleep outside or even sit on the sidewalk, the infamous practice Perry was fond of for cleaning up Skid Row in her district. As recently as 2010, Perry was railing against feeding people on the street. The entwinement of the protesters and the homeless, and the City’s insistence on not feeding people in public spaces, already has led to the closing of kitchen facilities at City Hall encampment.

Ironically, the court order allowing the homeless to sleep on the sidewalks is the basis for the occupiers’ encampment now going on at City Hall. Allowing the City to relocate the people on the south lawn to new low-income housing could precipitate the eventual end of the OccupyLA encampment at City Hall.

Back at the encampment, the occupiers are in the throes of debate about persistent key organizational questions, issues that the City’s offer are forcing to resolution. The determinedly direct and horizontal democracy of the Occupation, in which everyone is heard and everyone has equal weight, is being tested by the City’s insistence in dealing with a designated group. The line between those perceived as activists and those perceived as needing assistance turns out not to be as clear cut as the line between the north and south lawns. The impetus to cooperate with the police to avoid violence, long a mantra in this Occupation, has morphed into a corollary that, among the more confrontational of the occupiers, now looks like a blanket acquiescence to authority. On one hand, the deal is being hailed as a victory for the 99% and the power of OccupyLA and its tactics. On the other, it’s being denounced as a set up. And if there’s such a thing as a third hand, a large contingent of occupiers want to ask the City for more, up to and including the wholesale resignation of the mayor and city council.

And in the community, calls are already going out among grassroots groups for their own deals for 10,000 square feet in a city building and farmland, and people who’ve worked for low-income housing for years are shaking their heads. Wittingly or not, even before the deal has been consummated, the offer itself is throwing into bright relief the economic and racial divisions that simmer in Los Angeles. It remains to be seen whether those calling themselves the 99%, there on the City Hall lawn, can figure out how they can transcend the history of fissures that is Los Angeles.

Thus far, the inertia of OccupyLA has left it out of the Occupy Wall Street limelight. That may change in the next few days, as the largest standing encampment determines what course it and the Occupy Wall Street movement will take. Can the Los Angeles occupiers navigate their way and the movement though the seas churned by more experienced politicos, or will they inadvertently crash up against the complexities of realpolitik and real tensions in Los Angeles? The Los Angeles Times is already marshaling public support for the City’s offer.

At Tuesday night’s  General Assembly, the people roundly rejected the City’s offer.  A number of reasons were cited, but it seemed to me that chief among them was rejecting the whole idea of City Hall  setting the terms of settlement.

It was reported that in meetings held since city officials made their original proposal, they have thought better of some or all of it.  Negotiators reported that the terms were a lot less sure than they were yesterday.  It was also reported that the City gave the occupiers until Monday to vacate. I’m not clear if the expectation to vacate was for just the south lawn or for the entire occupation.  In either case, people clearly anticipated a confrontation on Monday.  I missed the very end of the GA, but unless there was a hard block, the City’s offer was rejected.

LESLIE RADFORD is an adjunct professor of communications and a freelance journalist living in Los Angeles.  She can be reached at LRadford@RadioJustice.net.

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.