While other scholars have traced these tendencies, like that of localism, to libertarian and neoliberal ideologies, this chapter emphasizes the autonomous Marxist and social anarchists framings of strategies towards justice, many originating out of broader global social movements. Alternative economic analyses are complicated and thickened with the increase in the importance of cultural and racial politics in food movements. Activists have seen alternative food initiatives , and particularly urban gardens as a means to value marginalized cultural and racial identities, bring different communities together, and support cultural place-based resistance to racism and marginalization. For other organizers AFIs have been a space for challenging racial discrimination and marginalization through community struggles for self determination or recognition like the work of food justice organizing in Oakland and Detroit . Many argue AFIs can and do represent spaces that go beyond cultural preservation or the bringing together of different communities; they can be built as places where communities can self-organize and provide mutual-aid when the state and civil society are oppressive.
And yet,square pot food activism in many ways is still dominated by white discourses and faces. Debates within food justice and food sovereignty organizing have highlighted the questions of the future of dominant cultures, spaces of difference and spaces of self determination in food movements. Finally, in response to social-justice blind, bio-centric approaches to the environment common in some parts of the food movement, activists have fought for the importance of socio-ecological justice. sustainability has been a central pillar of alternative food movements since the 1960s, and for many this commitment is bound to one for justice. For food sovereignty activists and many urban agriculture advocates, food politics represent a way to seek a form of justice that values socioecological change for holistic well-being. Socio-ecological justice calls into question the divide often created between humans and nature. Agroecologists offer cultivated landscapes that produce food as an example. Agroeoology is increasingly presented as a field that is concerned with a form of sustainability that values agricultural systems based on just socio-natural practices . What follows is a description of the genesis of three iterations of the US alternative food movement in its search for better relationship to struggles for justice: the community food security movement, the food justice movement, and the food sovereignty movement. Anti-hunger activists in the US have advocated for a variety of approaches to fighting hunger including state entitlement programs, charity emergency food sources, community-based strategies to provide access to healthy foods, and direct action, such as civil-disobedience that demands the right to food.
These different approaches embody the political commitments and engagements with justice of food security activism. In response to the global food crisis in the early 1970s the United Nations organized the first World Food Conference to discuss international action. At the conference the term “food security” was introduced . Many nations adopted food security as a policy goal at the same time that they advocated for a right of freedom from hunger. Food security was conceived as a complementary political strategy to advocate for a nation’s ability to produce sufficient food so that no person experience hunger . The U.S. government first used the term food security in the early 1980s. Policy makers recognized the need to not only address hunger but also the social conditions that gave rise to it . Food security was defined as “a condition in which all people have access at all times to nutritionally adequate food through normal channels” . Unlike many of the nations that adopted the food security framework, the United States did not make a statement of people’s right to food . In response to growing problems with food insecurity and the lack of sufficient government efforts to address these problems, community activists, students and anti-hunger advocates united under the banner of community food security. The catalyst for this coalition was provided by the work of Robert Gottlieb and his students out of University of California Los Angeles .
While conducting interviews on community concerns following the 1992 Rodney King beating, the group uncovered a great deal of concern over food access, affordability, and quality. After developing a report highlighting concerns and strategies for change, several researchers met with other individuals and anti-hunger groups to discuss new directions for food security organizing . In 1995, a coalition of advocates met to develop and promote the Community Food Security Empowerment Act “as the conceptual basis for solving food-system problems” . Together they drafted a food security policy statement included in the1995 Farm Bill, which defined community food security as a condition in which “all persons obtain at all times a culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency sources” . Then in 1996 various community-based initiatives united under the banner of the Community Food Security Coalition. As an alternative to dependence on diminishing classical food entitlements and emergency food, coalition members introduced a variety of community-based solutions, such as urban gardening and local policy-based solutions . The Coalition and other food security organizations aimed “to create community-based ways of providing food in an affordable, sustainable, and ecologically sensitive manner” . This integrative framework is concerned with both production and consumption . It takes a long-term, preventative approach to creating community-based systems that will promote conditions of food security even during times of hardship. Many projects focus on food self-reliance as opposed to an emphasis on entitlements . Part of this shift can be identified with a critique of charity that led community food security activists to seek community-based solutions. Both individuals seeking food and charitable organizations distributing food must comply with a myriad of standards and procedures that make it difficult if not “materially impossible” to be political advocates for structural change . As a result of growing problems with hunger and poverty,drainage collection pot academic and community groups undertook efforts to document and map the lack of access to food. Community food assessments have been used to demonstrate food insecurity and highlight strategies for change. In a 2010 review article, Walker, Keane, and Burke identified thirty-one articles published using CFAs to assess the presence of food deserts. The term “food desert” first appeared in the early 1990s. Short, Guthman, and Raskin stated that food desert has been used to refer to defined geographical areas lacking a large supermarket. Other studies have used the term to describe the type and quality of food available in a given area, as opposed to the characteristics of or simply the lack of food stores . 6 For most community food security activists the essential question focuses on why food distribution is determined by these issues of profitability and not issues of need. The term “food deserts” became an important political tool for activists in highlighting the problems many US residents face in accessing adequate food resources.
While activists focused on inequality of access, some scholars and advocates critiqued the heavy focus on developing solutions like mobile grocery stores or bringing back large retailers to the inner city. Short, Guthman, and Raskin provide an example of this critique. The authors argued excessive emphasis has been placed on the supply side rather than the ability of residence to pay. In their study of small full-service food retailers in the Bay Area, authors found that these stores can provide nutritionally adequate, culturally appropriate and affordable foods. The authors claimed these stores are frequently ignored in CFAs. Many storeowners noted that fresh foods were not large profit items but instead they felt ethically required to carry these items. Small, full-service food stores can contribute to community food security but attention must be paid to both the supply and the economic and social ability of community members to pay for or access fresh foods. Critiques of supply side arguments have helped food movement actors refocus on underlying structural inequalities that create not only food insecurity but also housing insecurity, health inequalities, and other injustices faced by low-income communities. Responding to movement demands, congressional Representative Eligio “Kika” de la Garza worked with 17 bipartisan co-sponsors to introduce and support the Community Food Security Empowerment Act of 1995 . In the 1996 Farm Bill, Congress allocated $16 million for a seven-year period and empowered the USDA to create the Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program . The program works to develop community leadership among non-profits working towards food system change by granting organizations a one-time infusion of federal funds . In the first ten years of the program over 240 projects were supported to “meet the food needs of low-income people, increase the self-reliance of communities in providing for their own food needs, and promote comprehensive responses to food, farm, and nutrition issues” . Non-profits were funded to create community-based solutions to food insecurity such as rural or urban agriculture training centers. According to the USDA, the CFPCGP differs from many other agency projects in its emphasis on evaluation and technical assistance. In order to ensure that non-profits are using tax payer money wisely, the USDA has sought to ensure projects accurately and sufficiently work to document the progress of their efforts and train other communities in their methods . Much of this work has happened in partnership with the Community Food Security Coalition that developed detailed evaluation tools and trainings for grantees. In 2006, ten years after the start of the CFPCGP, the USDA announced it would eliminate the use of the word ‘hunger’ from its food security assessments . The agency claimed that the move was based on the technical difficulties and inability of the current data collection tools to accurately capture information of hunger. Hunger had been defined in medical terms so that clinicians would presumably be able to measure and provide data that demonstrated physical evidence of the experience of hunger. This medicalized approach was criticized in the 1980s by anti-hunger advocates for waiting until hunger created irreversible damages in individuals to identify a problem, focusing on physical symptoms as opposed to social signs of trouble, and failing to recognize the household and community as important scales of impact . As such, the adoption of data collection on community food security, as a social condition of lack of access to food, provided an important addition to research on the effects of hunger, a physiological state in individuals . The move to eliminate the term hunger from USDA assessments was highly contested by food activists. The issue of concern can be read as what critical political ecologists have called one of framing and problem closure . This political ecology approach challenges the objective explanations of biological and environmental research by exploring social and political contests of such scientific investigation . Scientific research engages with an object of study using “social derived instruments and metrics” and “knowledge of health and environmental problems necessarily reflects the manifold social relations that affect science” . Contexts, interests, and values influence how scientists frame the problem and object of study. This framing impacts the potentials for future research and political work derived from such research . When such framing is limited in specific ways it directs future research of a particular problem’s causes and effects into those limited directions, causing problem closure . Guthman describes the impact of problem closure on obesity research as directly connected to food access and the built environment. Obesity as a problem is automatically connected to a predefined solution of increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables and greater opportunities for physical activity, which are expected to decrease caloric intake and increase expenditure .For anti-hunger and community food security activists, the move to remove hunger from USDA assessments raised questions as to the political consequences of narrowing the scope of scientific research . The manner in which the USDA, as a leading scientific and political body, frames the issues “determines the importance attached to them and how they are addressed; data defines and delimits the problem” . Allen asked: “If hunger is no longer an analytical category, how does one talk about it or advocate for its elimination? How does one make policy claims about something for which there is no data and which, therefore, does not exist in policy science terms?” . The reframing of hunger to very low food security reduced the ability of advocates to use the term as a rhetorical tool, one that once had significant social power.