School of Social and Political Science

Description

The food justice movement in the United States has grown to include a wide range of issues: diet and health, labor, land politics, ecology, and more. What constitutes food justice in each case is the degree to which there is an analysis of power and a commitment to challenging relevant intersecting systems of oppression. This is no small task. For every problem in the food system, there are multiple sectors around which to organize. Most prominently, organizers focus on economic and social inequities and therefore target the institutional and organizational drivers of or seek to build socially just alternatives to settler colonialism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy and more. This talk dives into a range of specific cases to explore the intersectional dynamics that animate the food justice movement. Food justice movements in California, Colorado, and Florida show how organizers connect food to the politics of food chain work, immigration, and incarceration. While these cases reveal how the food justice movement expands its reach when it remains rooted in a broad commitment to social justice, there are many practical factors that can facilitate or hinder the movement’s further growth. Challenges include resource constraints, messages that resonate with political and economic elites, and programmatic continuity with powerful local movement organizations. The food justice movement regularly finds common ground with other movements, but in doing so it navigates a whole host of conditions that complicate the road to transforming the food system.