Food justice is a concept of moral rightness where every community has access to healthy, affordable, organic food. Food justice supports food that is grown in a method that does not exploit the earth or its workers and promotes local distribution. The food justice movement envisions communities achieving food security while ensuring that our system shifts toward a more equitable production, distribution, and consumption of local and organic options. Today, leaders creating that shift are found on urban farms, permaculture projects, rural organic farms, markets and Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs). These community hubs serve to educate the public as to what healthy organic local food looks, feels, smells, and tastes like. They also promote the localization and fair share of surplus food, as well as employing and feeding local families.
The food justice movement includes policy perspectives that communities can enact to support urban farms, farmer’s markets, CSAs, and organic grocery stores through activism, advocacy, and research. Together with permaculture as a lens for understanding nature’s pattern of closed loop systems and urban farms as a space for replicating them, we create a triangle of theory, practice, and activism. Our movement’s goal is to effect the changes our communities call for in order to create a food system that sustains everyone. As we begin to awaken to the harm created by decades of eating processed foods, chemical fertilizer farming, and challenges to global food transportation in an age of diminishing oil production, this call will grow louder.
So what are some strategies of the food justice movement? How do we promote food justice in our communities? We begin by surveying accessibility to healthy, affordable, organic foods. We define areas of little to no access to such foods as food deserts. These food deserts are often filled with liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and a lack of healthy food options. One of the most difficult challenges faced by the food justice movement can be educating people as to what healthy food is, why organic food is important for their bodies and the earth, and why they should take the time to cook for themselves rather than buying the easy option. This is where our Green Man Triangle of theory, practice, and activism comes in handy.
We connect with community leaders, create neighborhood coalitions and establish urban farms in backyards, city lots, church lots, abandoned space, and schools. We raise funds and collect surplus resources to create garden programs that teach our community through entertaining events. We host dinners, cook-offs, planting, harvesting, canning and preserving parties, movie screenings, music and art festivals that connect our community and provide a space to teach them the basics of urban farming and permaculture. From these projects, we create a network of food justice activists that work with communities to enact policy changes allowing fuller, more diverse systems that can further address the problems of our current food system.
As policy creates a space for more community investment in land projects, we push to create models that can be replicated across the world and adapted to the needs of communities and cultures. These models are published online and through organizations serving as think tanks for policy research, and as they are enacted throughout the world the conversation continues as to what are the best practices, most innovative methods, and most productive models toward achieving food justice and feeding our community locally.
The framework for this grassroots movement currently going viral is in place, after connecting and building for the past 25 years. Food justice activists are busy fighting laws prohibiting the sale of homegrown foods, reforming laws against keeping backyard micro-livestock, and challenging laws that prevent the rezoning of land for use as community garden projects. These laws currently limit the scale of a legal local food system, and can be replaced to create a space for the growth of such a system. We create systems to distribute food surpluses locally to those who are in need and cannot afford organic food. We host events and launch websites to promote food justice, urban farming, and permaculture.
We envision a world where a walk around your block will bring you into contact with a network of food surpluses, reinvested into the community with cooking and preserving programs. Fruit trees with pears, plums, apples, apricots, and peaches that get canned, jammed, and baked into pies weekly. Berry bushes with raspberries, blueberries, and marionberries to put over your cereal every morning. Garden herbs and spices like mint, thyme, basil, oregano, parsley, and cilantro dried on clotheslines, waiting for you to come by and jar up. Garden vegetables like zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, peas, beans, onions, garlic, cucumbers, carrots, beets, spinach, and tomatoes overflowing in neighborhood free cold boxes, primed for the pickling or cooking in a neighborhood kitchen space (perhaps your home?).
These surpluses, all possible on urban lots, will create a gift economy. This economy of shared goods will connect a community through conversation, shared meals and recipes. It will also hopefully foster a willingness to collaborate in facing transitions of energy, transportation, and food security. These surpluses will not feed an entire city, or even a neighborhood, but will empower communities to educate themselves about their food. Sharing this surplus and creating bonds of community with it will ultimately empower us to make choices that continue the shift towards food justice and resilient, local, equitable food systems.
YES!!!
Oh Mr. Nick. Soooo many things.
To start with: Killer fuckin essay! I just sent it to a bunch of the ‘right people’, but, more importantly, I sent it to a bunch of the ‘wrong people’ as well. It’s really difficult to bring folks into the tribe, but the vision you paint towards the end of your piece is hard to argue against. Why the fuck WOULDN”T you want that in your community?
Topics to address:
Generational inertia: The Boomers and Millenials seem to be rubbing against each other like two tectonic plates. They simply can’t understand that once the lucky few among us who graduate from college (instead of being incarcerated) pursue things like this instead of swirling like piranhas towards the last bit of meat (read: jobs) on the carcass of the previous industrial-growth economy. Is this analysis consistent with your concept of food justice in general, and more specifically is there a way to make this line of thinking palatable to our forbears. What has to happen to the boomers who weren’t at the forefront of the food justice revolution for them to finally accept that (some of) the hippies may have been right?
Previous Industrial Order: Is the industrial food system actually collapsing? For years I personally held that belief but it has been amazing, to me at, at least, how many shocks the system has taken and still managed to muddle through. Oil as has peaked, and then all of a sudden a shale gas play kicks in. The financial system crashes but is now steadily rebounding. I could go on. In my humble opinion climate change is going to severely fuck things up because our cheapest energy (coal) is more abundant than our own damn atmosphere. But will it be enough to bring about system collapse and re-localization of food? I am unsure. I think that may have to be a political choice. More on this later when I have more time.
Anyways, fuck man, I’m late for my night job. I have a lot more to say. Let me keep thinking on it and I’ll update again in my incredibly spare free-time. Very well done essay, Nick. Thanks for taking time out of your life to create. We appreciate it.
P.S. Sorry this comment probably needs an edit.
Yessssss an opportunity for discussion!
So, as a student of Permaculture, you’re probably familiar with the tenet that states “the problem is the solution”. Our problems are a lack of living wage jobs, unhealthy tasteless industrial food, wildly unpredictable weather patterns and generations unwilling to embrace localized DIY solutions because they can afford what they consider to be a more exotic, refined, imported option. These are also our solutions.
From this I can surmise that we will have future generations of unemployed high school and college grads who are too indebted/underemployed to afford health care. Within this tribe will be those who choose to take on food justice projects that can return the abundance of healthy organic food and herbal medicines to themselves and communities (preventative health care), create jobs selling produce (to the employed millenials/boomers at a premium they are willing to pay because it tastes better than industrial food), as well as yielding better than industrial agriculture will because they are resilient in a changing climate. Small, localized solutions that diffuse horizontally like nodal networks can support each other in crisis, while top-down bureaucracies crumble.
At this stage it seems that the most successful of these types of projects are combinations of venture capital and non-profit models. Government funding isn’t by any means a sustainable foundation, but it is beginning to trickle into urban farm and food justice projects. One great example would be the GrowHaus in Denver, CO. Their triple bottom line model is food production, food education, and food distribution. They have made roots with a collaboration between developers willing to buy old greenhouses, city governments looking to horizontally revitalize distressed urban industrial districts, and state and federal programs supporting farmers and organic food. They sell food at a premium to the rich and return the abundance to their neighbors, who just so happen to be poor. Check them out at http://www.thegrowhaus.com/
The GrowHaus is a model that can go viral, internationally, if it is scaled to locales and utilizes available resources. The methods of growing they have chosen, hyroponics and aquaponics, may not be affordable in other parts of the world, but approaches like bio-swales and greenhouse-compost-rain catchment systems can easily take their place. As these systems reach their stride, the abundance they create will create a gift economy that will challenge the current market.
Let the boomers and millenials that don’t have time to work trade pay a premium. But for the under and unemployed who have time to work, their work is rewarded with premium food, medicine, and potentially even surplus seeds, plant starts, and building supplies for self employment. Their yields support an investment in those that need help and food the most. It’s not a hand out, its a hand up. At a certain point the necessity to convince anyone dissolves – it’s a question of skills and resilience in the face of uncertainty.
This will, of course, only happen if these models go viral, if funding and land is accessible, and if the networks can distribute their abundance and educate people openly. I don’t think system collapse is necessary for re-localisation, and defining what collapse looks like is a different conversation completely. Maybe it’s blind faith, but I’m confident enough sane people will see the logic of these approaches and choose to launch, fund, and support businesses and non-profits that will continue this work. Hell, you and I got this far, right? The privileges we share create the space to develop and test the solutions we desperately need.
Sorry this got so wordy…trying to learn how to self edit but the concepts are just too broad to package down…theres plenty more like confronting systems of oppression but gimme some feedback and lets continue…