When we talk about the food system

food justice, food apartheids, food sovereignty, and more

Mar 01, 2023

I’m in my final month of college. The last group project, the last midterm that should not be called a midterm because week 8 of 10 is not the middle of the term, and probably my last time in a large lecture hall with neatly composed slide decks and linked readings curated for my comprehension. People start to ask, “omg how does it feel to be graduating soon” and I shyly smile, shrug, and say it hasn’t hit me yet.

If you spend enough time reading, writing papers, and everyone’s favorite – commenting on two classmates’ posts to the discussion forum (“I appreciated when you said [x]. It resonated with me because [y]. I also talked about [x] in my response, but this is what I thought about it.”), well, you will have spent a lot of hours feigning interest in discussion posts, but hopefully learned something from other activities.

I’m grateful to have learned some things I care about, aside from the first two years where I did silly things like put my phone in the bathroom sink to measure turbulence for Zoom physics labs. I don’t know about the water, but my brain felt turbulent. Even though I’m near the end, sometimes I feel more confused than before because there are “potential solutions” and “future directions,” but what will it take to feasibly get them off the ground? I say this specifically about food system reform, but I’m assuming the same goes for other causes. You would think that people who want to find comfort in solutions would study something like math, but no. Even math is always changing, as this person on TikTok was very surprised about. (Mostly a joke, but also somewhat relevant?)

I’m currently looking for work in food justice and/or community health during my gap year, which means I track my options on a spreadsheet, question my qualifications, and hesitate to reach out. I browse websites and come across the usual buzzwords – food security, food justice, and food sovereignty. I see “food desert” in some places and “food apartheid” in others. It may seem like a minor aspect of food studies to fixate on, but words matter. Words shape the values of movements, which guide action.

This is a primer about terminology, for me just as much as anyone else. We constantly hear words thrown around, so I wanted to learn more about their origins and intended use in order to use them responsibly. Conveniently, I’m taking a midterm (a four-fifths-term, actually) on this topic this week and I highly recommend the readings linked below, including some from my class and others that I stumbled upon this week.

Food Security

Let’s start with food security because the food justice and food sovereignty movements build on food security. Even though some popular media tends to group them together, food security, food justice, and food sovereignty cannot be used interchangeably. To make the distinction, the authors of “Whose Justice is it Anyway? Mitigating the Tensions Between Food Security and Food Sovereignty” say:

“Food security generally focuses on ensuring that people have economic and physical access to safe and nutritious food, while food sovereignty (or food justice) movements prioritize the right of people and communities to determine their agricultural policies and food cultures.”

The authors equate food sovereignty and food justice, but we’ll get to that later. They proceed to trace the origin of food security, which was coined after World War II to describe the state or nation as a whole, but more recently, food security has applied to individuals and households. Food security centers access and health, which are worthy values, especially when there is a clear delineation between access to food and access to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food. However, several scholars critique the food security framework for perpetuating neoliberalism. Food security has been considered part of the “corporate food regime,” while food justice and food sovereignty are categorized as “food movements.” This is because food security efforts create access within the current system, which is built on industrial agriculture, social exclusion, and socioeconomic inequality. Food pantries are an example of a solution that attends to food security but not food justice, as pantries often provide access to food without acknowledging the root causes of food insecurity or altering the broader system.

A few definitions of food (in)security:

FAO: “A person is food insecure when they lack regular access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life.”
USDA on food security: “Food security means access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.”
USDA on food insecurity: “A household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

Food Justice

Any time someone asks me what I plan to do between undergrad and (maybe) medical school, I respond, “probably something in food justice or community health.” Now that I’m reflecting on what that actually means, I wonder how I would have defined food justice a couple years ago, when I first started using the term because it sounded more #woke than food security. Yeah, probably not the right reason to use it…

The definition of food justice, according to a FoodPrint article:

“Food justice is a holistic and structural view of the food system that sees healthy food as a human right and addresses structural barriers to that right…A food justice lens examines questions of access to healthy, nutritious, culturally appropriate food, as well as: ownership and control of land, credit, knowledge, technology and other resources; the constituent labor of food production; what kind of food traditions are valued; how colonialism has affected the food system’s development and more.”

origin story of the food justice movement

The food justice movement was inspired by the environmental justice movement (EJM) of the early 1980s. According to the Intersectional Environmentalist “Reimagining Food Justice + Food Sovereignty Toolkit,” the EJM brought attention to the whiteness of mainstream environmentalism, especially in its tendency to highlight wildlife and conservation without adequately covering environmental disparities among humans. These disparities include health disparities (i.e. proximity to toxic waste), but they also include disproportional land allotment, ownership of farms, and abuse of BIPOC farm workers. The US has a long history of forced farm labor and racially-motivated policies (i.e. the Bracero program) that kept immigrants overworked and underpaid.

Food justice transcends food security by acknowledging race, class, culture, and more, not only with respect to access but also with respect to production, power, and ownership within the food system. Still, the food justice movement is about complementing food security rather than replacing it.

However, simply recognizing racism and imbalanced power dynamics in the food system is not enough for effective food justice-oriented initiatives. In Black Food Matters by Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese, the authors critique food justice interventions that frame “healthy eating” in a way that “brings communities of color into a mold of the middle-class American citizen.” An organization may target BIPOC communities and use all the “correct” words, yet in practice, they perpetuate the idea that BIPOC communities are in need of assistance and education. Furthermore, they call attention to the tension between food justice, health, and race, an ongoing conversation complicated by our society’s tendency to associate “healthy eating” with Western patterns of eating. Unsurprisingly, there are several problems with how food justice is co-opted and portrayed by the media and organizations, but that deserves its own essay.

Food Desert vs. Food Apartheid

These are two terms that are often used interchangeably in the food justice movement, yet they convey vastly different values. I still occasionally hear the term food desert used when educating pre-health students about food insecurity.

Food desert was coined in 2008 “to describe low-income communities with low access to grocery stores.” While the term communicates the lack of grocery stores providing fresh food in communities, it implies that a community is naturally desolate rather than a place with potential for change. Furthermore, it implies that the solution is to introduce grocery stores to these areas. In Guernica Magazine, activist Karen Washington says that people who live in a so-called “food desert” would never refer to their community as a food desert, so why should outsiders have the right to label the community? Washington suggests replacing “food desert” with “food apartheid” to highlight the root causes of food system issues. Food apartheid does a better job of representing the racial, economic, and spatial disparities that are tied to food injustice and often rooted in policy (i.e. redlining).

Karen Washington on why she coined “food apartheid”:

“I coined the term “food apartheid” to ask us to look at the root causes of inequity in our food system on the basis of race, class, and geography. Let’s face it: healthy, fresh food is accessible in wealthy neighborhoods while unhealthy food abounds in poor neighborhoods. “Food apartheid” underscores that this is the result of decades of discriminatory planning and policy decisions. It begs the question: What are the social inequities that you see, and what are you doing to address them?”

Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty is a more radical approach to food system reform, seeking to bring self-determination, liberation, and culture into discussions about food justice. Rather than operating within the corporate food regime, as a food security framework may do, food sovereignty prioritizes a community’s right to create policy, grow food according to their needs and knowledge, and feed themselves. Food sovereignty is especially important to indigenous peoples and inextricable from their sovereignty as a tribe.

origin story of the food sovereignty movement

Like food justice, food sovereignty has unfortunately been co-opted by a number of organizations. Both terms have come to be associated with the farm-to-table movement through the writings of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Waters, and others. This is problematic because the mainstream farm-to-table movement paints an idyllic, exclusive way of living. The food sovereignty movement similarly promotes the growth and consumption of local food, yet it was founded by the international peasant group La Via Campesina. It is defined as the following in the 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni:

“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers.”

Putting it all together

Food security: access to nutritious food within the current system

Food justice: progressive model for access that is heavily intertwined with racial justice

Food sovereignty: radical reform to food system with an emphasis on self-determination and liberation of communities

For a comprehensive overview: this guide by the Health Food Policy Project. I highly recommend it if you want a deeper dive than what I touched on here.

For more on food justice: FoodPrint’s issue on food justice

For more on food sovereignty: Robin Kimmerer’s work, including the book Braiding Sweetgrass and Kyle Whyte’s “Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples.”

For actions to take, check out the end of the Intersectional Environmentalist “Reimagining Food Justice + Food Sovereignty Toolkit.”

mini spice rack

writing

Last week’s email was a guest post for Antiracist Dietitian: Social Media Made Veganism About White Wellness. How Are We Changing That? You can check it out on Anjali’s Substack, which I highly recommend subscribing to for more on nutrition, racism, and the food system!

cooking

Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s cavolo nero pasta (made it vegan by replacing the ricotta with cashews, lemon juice, and nutritional yeast – so good), eggplant tofu adobo, and so much bok choy and noodles. Video here.