The issue of food justice is extremely relevant for me at the moment as I’m sure it is for all of us. Considering my internship is at a farmers’ market, Agyeman had me questioning the very system I’m promoting. The Gray Street Farmers’ Market (where I’m interning) accepts SNAP benefits and is trying to establish a system that will accept WIC vouchers as well. The goal of the market is to reach out to those that live in surrounding, low-income neighborhoods which are considered “food deserts” and hopes to make fresh produce more accessible. We’re also trying to find an economically sustainable way to apply “double dollars” for those who receive government assistance which would match the amount of money spent on fresh produce. Although it does promote capitalist theory, I thought of the local food movement and the acknowledgement of food deserts as a step in the right direction as Agyeman acknowledges when he says: “these entities’ work, especially those advocating for food as a public good and right, is necessary in order to bring about this change in food provisioning” (218). While Agyeman acknowledges this, he also says: “No matter how local or healthy, an FJ campaign, if it in any significant way relies upon the charity of “big food” or re-creates conventional exchange-value markets that fetishize profit and commodification of food, then the movement will encounter a parallel symptom-focused existence” (217). This forced me to think about all the social justice programs I have encountered in the past that I thought of as crafty rather than compliant, such as the “Food For All” volunteer-run dinner on Bar Harbor that gleans unsellable food from the local Hanaford and provides a meal for everyone in the community in an attempt to minimize waste, feed the hungry and build community bonds.
Moving the Field of Food Justice Forward brought up a lot of questions for me. It provided an interesting perspective. The food “movement [is] not only guided by reactions to unequal access to food but also interested in addressing the causes of unequal access to food, which are tied up in broader structures and political–economic forces” (216). I consider food systems to be such an interesting issue because it is tied up in all of these complicated social/environmental/political issues. It is both the root and the fruit on a tree of dysfunction. Agyeman’s perspective offers a complex knot of issues which calls for a rewiring of food philosophy.
After reading this article, I was reminded of a book I read last term called Wandering God by Morris Berman. The book traces the roots of spirituality and philosophy throughout the years, highlighting both the pros and cons of a nomadic lifestyle and the birth of agrarian thought and investment in land. Though all types of child-rearing practices and religious beliefs have their benefits, they are all essentially the same in the sense that they are external systems/habits that become irrelevant without thoughtful intent. The conclusion was the most fascinating for me because Berman wrapped around to present day by noting that we, as humans, are addicted to the paradigm-shift. We are constantly looking for “better” systems that fix our tired, dysfunctional patterns of thought, while our gleaming solutions are simply reincarnations of our old ones. This can be applied to mainstreaming of the local food movement, which a new generation of consumers is attempting to effect change while perpetuating old systems. Can positive changes be made to the current system to make it just? Can the market economy be salvaged? How do we create a new system without falling victim to another fruitless paradigm shift? I’m all for a more ecological and all-inclusive solution, but I’m curious how it will all play out.
Despite the focus on spirituality, which gives the impression that Wandering God is all about religion, the important part of Berman’s message is that our philosophies bleed into every aspect of our lives and shape our experience. His most prominent comparison is between
“vertical” and “horizontal” systems that we prescribe to. For instance: a fundamentalist Christian would believe in a “vertical” reality in which there is an outside force, a higher level of being, a hierarchy of existence. A “horizontal” religious believer would be a Buddhist who finds enlightenment in the present and in the self. This creates a delicate paradox due to the different levels of consciousness and discovery of the “self”, which leads to hierarchies. What I gather from this is that we must work as a unit and discover “systems” over discovering the “self”. By attaching our well-being to others and living interactively and “horizontally” with our environment (racial, socioeconomic, ethnic, gender, sexuality, etc…) it brings both identity and consciousness of a systems as a whole. What I’m really trying to get at is that so many aspects of our food system are invisible (production, waste) because many people are only conscious of the role that they play. Urban Ecology is such as fascinating concept because it applies not only to food systems but to identity and the part it plays in the construction of systems.