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Food Justice Now!: Notes

Food Justice Now!

Notes

Notes

Introduction

1. Although not always explicitly, many people who identify as food justice organizers are engaged in a Freirean form of praxis, which means “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” (Freire 2000, 126).

2. The research entailed seven months of ethnographic fieldwork, eighty interviews, countless informal follow-up conversations, and hundreds of documentary sources. See “Appendix: Approach and Data” for further details.

3. I use oppression to reference those relations of ruling wherein groups experience subordination based on their economic class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, ability, or other identity. In most instances, I am using this in the broad sense of both the experience of exploitation as a worker and domination based on a socially constructed identity.

4. I use Latinx because it is a more inclusive term. Also, when referring to men and women it avoids the masculine default, Latino.

5. Although many industrial unions were dominated by white men, there are prominent examples of multiracial labor organizing in the fields of California, the United Farm Workers chief among them.

6. Hislop (2015) paints a nuanced picture of the food justice movement but still shows that the major concern of those he surveyed across the United States and Canada is the issue of food security. Social justice was often expressed as a concern, but this did not necessarily translate into food politics that addressed social inequalities. That said, there is a recent shift, perhaps pushed by the election of Donald Trump. The most promising example of thinking beyond the food movement and across an array of interrelated problems is the national HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, and Labor) Food Alliance.

7. Although similar arguments have been made to “get beyond food,” that is, investigate the underlying inequalities that create problems in the food system (e.g., Guthman 2008a; Sbicca 2012; Passidomo 2014; Reynolds 2015; Broad 2016), there has been far less attention to how to make this happen and the possible mechanisms that inhibit or facilitate food justice activism from taking place. This gap, and the question of what it means to engage in movement building in both prefigurative and confrontational ways, is the political analysis that drives much of this book.

8. Hurley 1995; Bullard 2000; Sze 2007.

9. Gottlieb and Joshi 2010, 6.

10. Alkon and Agyeman 2011, 5.

11. Alkon and Agyeman 2011, 5.

12. Guthman 2008b; McMichael 2009.

13. Cadieux and Slocum 2015, 13.

14. Hislop 2015; Reynolds and Cohen 2016.

15. Meyer and Whittier 1994.

16. Garzo Montalvo and Zandi 2011.

17. Here I am building on Laclau and Mouffe’s (2014) discussion of the difference between relations of subordination and relations of oppression. The former are relations “in which an agent is subjected to the decisions of another,” while the latter consist of “those relations of subordination which have transformed themselves into sites of antagonisms” (137–38).

18. Gramsci 1971, 178.

19. Gramsci 1971, 178.

20. Gramsci 1971, 178.

21. Hill 1972.

22. Bohstedt 2010.

23. LaDuke 2005.

24. Poppendieck 1999.

25. Kotz 1969.

26. Wright Edelman 2017.

27. Heynen 2009.

28. Wagner-Pacifici 1994.

29. The relationship between food security and food justice is often muddled. Yet many scholars and activists argue that food justice is the justice-oriented version of food security. This linear representation obfuscates the more important historical point that the antecedents to contemporary food justice are those movements, organizing, and activism that connect social justice considerations to food, regardless of terminology.

30. To access the digital archive of this magazine, visit the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project at University of California at San Diego, https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/archives/#foodjustice.

31. Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, n.d.

32. foodjustice.wikispaces.com 2008.

33. Bové and Dufour 2002; McMichael 2009.

34. Probyn 2000.

35. Meyer and Tarrow 1998. When used throughout this book, social forces refers to the constellation of particular combinations of discourses, symbols, norms, practices, organizational forms, and institutions that influence and are also the target of group behavior. They reflect a hegemony forged in some time and place that is nevertheless temporary and open to contestation and change.

36. Sitrin and Azzellini 2014; Castells 2015; della Porta 2015.

37. Engels 1940; Lenin 2002; Lukács 1971.

38. See, for instance, the work of Bhaskar (2008) on critical realism and Emirbayer (1997) and Donati (2010) on relational sociology to get a sense of the reverberations of dialectical thinking.

39. Boggs and Boggs 2008; Fraser 2013.

40. Marable 1983; Mies 1986.

41. For an explication of the importance of racial formation theory to understanding food justice as a racial project that confronts neoconservatism and neoliberalism, see Sbicca and Myers (2017).

42. Lefebvre 2009, 99; Laclau and Mouffe 2014.

43. Norrie 2010.

44. Boggs and Boggs 2008, 128.

45. Bevington and Dixon 2005; Khasnabish and Haiven 2014.

46. Burawoy 2005, 2008; Wright 2010.

47. Marx 1976b.

48. Žižek 1999; Rancière 2006.

49. Brenner and Theodore 2002; Harvey 2005.

50. Goldberg 2009; Lentin and Titley 2011; Bonilla-Silva 2013.

51. Bourdieu 1999.

52. Fukuyama 2006.

53. Mills 2000.

54. Laclau and Mouffe 2014.

55. Žižek 1999, 204.

56. Boggs and Boggs 2008.

57. Collins 2002.

58. Boggs 2011, 76.

59. See, for instance, books on solving problems in the food system by Pollan (2008), Winne (2010), and Hesterman (2012).

60. Schlosberg 2007; Agyeman 2013.

1. Inequality and Resistance

1. Allen 2008, 158.

2. Bourdieu 1999; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Harvey 2005; Wacquant 2009.

3. Omi and Winant 2015.

4. Bonilla-Silva 2013.

5. Bonilla-Silva 2013.

6. Saez and Zucman 2016.

7. Detention Watch Network 2015.

8. Hagler 2015.

9. Piven and Cloward 1979.

10. Calhoun 1993.

11. Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 137.

12. Piven and Cloward 1979.

13. Carson 1962; Gottlieb 2005; Taylor 2009.

14. McAdam and Snow 2010, 1.

15. Allen 2004.

16. Dimitri and Oberholtzer 2009; Cockrall-King 2012; Center for a Livable Future 2015; Low et al. 2015.

17. Martinez et al. 2010; Guthman 2011; Johnston and Baumann 2015; Low et al. 2015.

18. Myers and Sbicca 2015, 18.

19. Myers and Sbicca 2015, 19.

20. Allen 2004; Guthman 2004.

21. Wright 2010, 20.

22. In California, where there are many powerful social justice movements, there is high social movement spillover. This insight by social movement scholars focuses on the diffusion of activists, frames, organizations, strategies, and tactics. Large metropolitan areas with dense social movement networks offer particularly interesting cases to investigate how the food movement conceives of and practices food politics.

23. Sinclair 1906, 126.

24. Jayaraman 2013.

25. Food Chain Workers Alliance 2012.

26. Liu and Apollon 2011.

27. National Safety Council 2017.

28. Eisenhauer 2001; Short, Guthman, and Raskin 2007; Alkon and Norgaard 2009.

29. Sobal 2008.

30. Guthman 2011.

31. Nestle 2013.

32. McClintock 2011.

33. Carolan 2011.

34. Bookchin 1990, 24, 45–46.

35. Szasz 2007; Park and Pellow 2011.

36. Gottlieb and Joshi 2010.

37. Carolan 2011; Sage 2011.

38. Beyond Pesticides (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/) and other advocacy organizations have compiled, analyzed, and determined trends across the scientific research where federal and state governments and industry have avoided chronicling the harms associated with agricultural dependency on pesticides.

39. Harrison 2011.

40. Marx 1976a; Foster, Clark, and York 2010.

41. Foster 1999.

42. Worster 2004.

43. Gregory 1991.

44. The Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group 2015.

45. Meyer and Whittier 1994.

46. Belasco 2014.

47. Goodwyn 1978.

48. Ali 2010.

49. Postel 2007.

50. Goodwyn 1978.

51. Ali 2010.

52. Hunt 2003.

53. Gerteis 2007.

54. Postel 2007.

55. Hild 2007.

56. Goodwyn 1978.

57. Smil 2001.

58. Commoner 1971.

59. Carson 1962, 64.

60. Brulle 2000; Gottlieb 2005.

61. Obach 2015.

62. Belasco 2014.

63. Guthman 2004.

64. Getz, Brown, and Shreck 2008.

65. Allen and Kovach 2000; Jaffee and Howard 2010.

66. Allen et al. 2003.

67. Oran and Kim 2013.

68. LeVaux 2013. The French dairy giant then purchased WhiteWave for $12.5 billion in 2017 to form DanoneWave.

69. Howard 2016.

70. Howard 2016.

71. Allen and Kovach 2000.

72. Guthman 2004.

73. Gray 2014; Sbicca 2015a.

74. McWilliams 1939; McWilliams 1999; Murray 1982.

75. Food Chain Workers Alliance 2012.

76. Ganz 2009.

77. London and Anderson 1970.

78. Ganz 2009.

79. Mitchell 1996.

80. Hall 2001.

81. Mitchell 1996.

82. Ganz 2009.

83. Ganz 2009.

84. Mitchell 2012.

85. Pulido 1996.

86. Walker 2004.

87. The AFL-CIO formed in 1955 and is the largest federation of unions in the United States.

88. Martin 2003; Rodman et al. 2016.

89. Joseph 2006.

90. Ture and Hamilton 1992.

91. Self 2005.

92. Abu-Lughod 2007.

93. Bloom and Martin 2013.

94. For a full list of Black Panther Party Community programs, see https://web.stanford.edu/group/blackpanthers/programs.shtml.

95. Heynen 2009.

96. Alkon 2012; Sbicca 2012; Broad 2016.

97. The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, July 8, 1972.

98. Mares and Peña 2010; McCutcheon 2011.

99. Kropotkin 1943.

100. Van Deburg 1992.

101. Churchill and Vander Wall 2002.

102. Major 1971, 300.

103. Taylor 2013.

104. Gramsci 1971, 185.

105. Wright 2010.

106. Guthman 2004.

107. Mitchell 1996; Ganz 2009.

108. Wright 2010, 25.

109. Churchill and Vander Wall 2002; Austin 2008.

110. Guthman 2008a; Bradley and Herrera 2016.

111. Walker 2004, 302.

112. Mitchell 1996; Ganz 2009.

113. Kelley 2002, ix.

114. Guthman 2008b.

115. Taylor 1989.

2. Opposing the Carceral State

1. The number of formerly incarcerated people working with Planting Justice is accurate as of April 2016.

2. This is accurate as of April 2016.

3. Söderback, Söderström, and Schälander 2004; Pudup 2008; Jiler 2006; McKay 2011.

4. Oshinsky 1996; Solomon et al. 2004.

5. McKay 2011; Gilbert 2012; Sbicca 2016.

6. Mandela 1994, 476.

7. Gilmore 2007, 247.

8. Civil Eats 2016.

9. Wacquant 2009; Carson 2014; Cadieux and Slocum 2015.

10. Pager 2007; Alexander 2012; Feagin 2014.

11. See, for instance, Herbert 1997; van Hoven Sibley 2008; Hipp et al. 2010.

12. Starr, Fernandez, and Scholl 2011.

13. Gilmore 2007; Pager 2007; Wacquant 2009.

14. Duxbury 2012; BondGraham and Winston 2015.

15. See California Department of Justice (2014) for further details. The ratio of violent versus property crimes in 2014 was roughly 3:17. Official statistics kept by the California Department of Justice do not include drug crimes, only drug arrests.

16. Open Budget Oakland n.d.

17. BondGraham and Winston 2013.

18. Armaline, Sanchez, and Correia 2014.

19. Woods 2006.

20. Matier 2014.

21. BondGraham and Winston 2012.

22. BondGraham and Winston 2014.

23. Hyatt 2014a.

24. Hyatt 2014b. For a summary of the so-called Riders scandal, which cost Oakland $11 million, see Monmaney (2000).

25. KTVU 2011.

26. Artz 2015a.

27. Bloom and Martin 2013.

28. Artz 2015b.

29. Jones 2012.

30. Gammon 2012.

31. Wakefield and Uggen 2010.

32. Glaze and Kaeble 2014.

33. Petersilia 2003; Travis 2005; Goff et al. 2007; Pager 2007.

34. Mollison 1988, ix.

35. Permaculture design and certification, which are growing in popularity among urban agriculturalists, usually requires taking an expensive course. The apprentice model is generally a for-profit model running a person anywhere from about $500 to upward of $2,000 depending on the length of the course and requirements for on-site learning. For a decolonizing approach to permaculture, see Watson (2016).

36. Alkon 2012.

37. To offer everyone on staff a position on the board requires that at least 50 percent of the board be financially disinterested.

38. The board has varied in size, from the low to upper twenties. As of winter 2018, it sat at twenty-one people. The board consists of people traditionally ignored: immigrants, people of color, and young people. Given the corporate culture of many nonprofits, there is an assumption that to join a board requires that you are a bigwig in your respective professional area.

39. As of spring 2016, there was an expectation that board members contribute four volunteer hours a month, regularly attend board of directors meetings, join at least one committee, and become a monthly sustainer at a minimum of five dollars a month. Board members remind each other of these commitments, which most meet or exceed, but when people are busy or face extenuating circumstances, there is respect for life’s demands.

40. Light in Prison 2015.

41. Shabazz 2015.

42. Shabazz 2015.

43. Cacho 2012.

44. New York Times Editorial Board 2013.

45. Light in Prison n.d.

46. Zakaria 2012.

47. Irwin 2004.

48. Petersilia 2008; Pew Center on the States 2011. According to a report by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (2014), the recidivism rate for former prisoners tracked over a three-year period has fluctuated between 67 and 61 percent for people released between 2002 and 2009. However, the recidivism rate for those released since 2010 has declined, perhaps due to the Assembly Bill 109.

49. Bell 2016a.

50. Glaze and Kaeble 2014.

51. Shabazz 2015.

52. Petersilia 2003.

53. Bell 2016b.

54. Pager 2007; Russell-Brown 2009.

55. Petersilia 2003.

56. Cacho 2012.

57. Bradley and Herrera 2016; Cadieux and Slocum 2015.

58. These budget statistics are true as of April 2016. The budget is now likely different because Planting Justice acquired the entire Rolling River Nursery catalog and now runs a large nursery on its farm in El Sobrante.

59. Planting Justice n.d.

60. Alexander 2012, 186.

61. Zehr 1990; Wright 1996; Marshall 1999.

62. Johnstone 2013.

63. Walgrave 2013.

64. Opsal 2012; LeBel et al. 2015.

65. White and Graham 2015, 3.

66. Graham and White 2015; Hynes 1996; Pudup 2008.

67. Kaplan 1995; Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny 2004; Söderback, Söderström, Elisabeth Schälander 2004.

68. Hayes-Conroy and Martin 2010.

69. Deane 2016a.

70. See, for instance, Bradley and Galt (2014) on the work of Dig Deep Farms & Produce.

71. Gibson-Graham 1996; Wright 2010; Omi and Winant 2015.

72. Opsal 2012.

73. Lebel, Richie, and Maruna 2015.

74. Pathways to Resilience includes The Green Life, Earthseed Consulting, Planting Justice, Wildheart Gardens, Impact Hub Oakland, United Roots, and Sustainability Economies Law Center.

75. Pathways to Resilience n.d.

76. Thomas and Starhawk n.d. As of April 2017, there were 1,060 signatories.

77. Pellow 2014.

78. One of the leaders of the Pathways to Resilience program helped start the Black Permaculture Network. Its solidarity statement links racial, economic, food, and environmental justice struggles: http://blackpermaculturenetwork.org/solidarity-statement/.

79. Maruna 2011.

80. Planting Justice 2014.

81. Uggen 1999; Maruna 2001.

82. Deane 2016.

83. See, for instance, Baker (2004), who talks about “food citizenship.”

84. Levkoe 2006.

85. Uggen, Manza, and Behrens 2004.

86. Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee 2016; Vongkiatkajorn 2016.

87. Bell 2016a.

88. Levin 2015.

89. Levin 2015.

90. Gottlieb and Joshi 2010; Sbicca 2012, 2014; Cadieux and Slocum 2015; Hislop 2015.

91. See the collection of comments from leaders of color about Black Lives Matter movement (Civil Eats 2016).

92. Guthman 2011.

3. Taking Back the Economy

1. Walker 2004.

2. Harrison 2011.

3. Mitchell 1996; Arcury and Quandt 2007.

4. Pachirat 2011.

5. Cummins and Murphy 2013; Food Chain Workers Alliance 2015.

6. Galt 2013; McClintock 2014; Sbicca 2015b; Sbicca 2015a; Ekers et al. 2016.

7. Jayaraman 2013.

8. Walker 2004.

9. Walmart captures about 25 percent of the food retail market share. Statista n.d.

10. Knupfer 2013; Obach 2015.

11. Complete California food cooperative statistics are hard to come by. At a national level, there is a growth in worker-run cooperatives (Palmer 2015). I exclude agricultural cooperatives from my discussion because they tend to operate within the confines of the conventional food system (Deller et al. 2009).

12. Guthman 2004; Harrison 2011; Holmes 2013; Jayaraman 2013; Gray 2014.

13. Holt-Giménez 2017.

14. Sbicca 2015a.

15. Guthman 2008b; Harrison 2011.

16. Myers and Sbicca 2015.

17. Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994.

18. San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project n.d.

19. Hoppe 2014.

20. Hoppe 2014. Seventy to 80 percent of small family farm labor is carried out by the operator and spouse, while almost 70 percent of family farms have a negative operating profit margin.

21. Guthman 2004; Walker 2004.

22. Galt 2013; Ekers et al. 2016; Weiler, Otero, and Wittman 2016.

23. Despite a thriving $30 million sector — there are more registered organic farms in San Diego County than in any county in the United States, producing over 125 different crops, although most acreage is dedicated to citrus — San Diego’s food movement tends to overlook the concerns of farmworkers. Two major reports and assessments of San Diego’s conventional and alternative food systems overlook how the political economy of migrant farmworkers impacts their future sustainability (Ellsworth and Feenstra 2010; San Diego Food System Working Group 2011). Such reports smooth over the racialized agricultural political economy and immigration regime: most farmworkers speak Spanish and come from Mexico, many of whom are likely undocumented (Aguirre International 2005; Nabhan et al. 2012). There is also heavy reliance on this labor: as of 2007, the number of paid farmworkers (21,114) doubled that of growers (Ellsworth and Feenstra 2010).

24. Hale et al. 2011. Taylor and Lovell 2014.

25. According to 2013 990-EZ tax returns, San Diego Roots received $99,365 in contributions, gifts, grants, and similar donations and made $70,619 from farm school tuition, produce sales, and other fee-for-service work. The organization’s long-term goal is to increase its programs’ revenue generation. For information on 2014, see http://www.sandiegoroots.org/report-2014/2014-ye-report.html#financial.

26. The farm ran a surplus in 2013–15.

27. The Luiseño called Palomar Mountain “Paauw.”

28. Ekers et al. 2016.

29. San Diego Roots estimates that it reached twenty-five hundred people at Wild Willow Farm in 2013.

30. Gibson-Graham 2006a, xii.

31. Dailey 2010.

32. EricVideo 2010.

33. Sbicca 2015b; Ekers et al. 2016.

34. Goodman and Redclift 2002; Fitzgerald 2003.

35. Cadieux and Slocum 2015.

36. At the time of my fieldwork, the internship was being transformed into a farm school requiring tuition. As of April of 2017, these courses cost anywhere from $400 to $1,400, depending on the course length and time commitment. According to San Diego Roots tax documents between 2012 and 2016, the tuition made the organization less reliant on grants.

37. McClintock (2014) has made similar observations about urban agriculture.

38. Marsden and Franklin 2013; Levkoe and Wakefield 2014.

39. Sbicca 2014.

40. Mares and Alkon 2011.

41. In A Postcapitalist Politics, Gibson-Graham argue that their deconstructive project of dethroning the centrality of capitalism requires “reading for difference rather than dominance” (2006b, xxxi–xxxii).

42. Slocum and Cadieux 2015.

43. See, for example, Mitchell 1996; Guthman 2004; Walker 2004.

44. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

45. This history is reconstructed from an internally circulated history drafted in 1989 by the former president of UFCW 770, Ricardo F. Icaza.

46. Union Facts n.d.

47. Milkman 2006.

48. Tomassetti, Tilly, and Zipperer 2012.

49. Mordechay 2011; Flaming and Burns 2012; Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation 2012; Los Angeles 2020 Commission 2013; Bergman 2014; Mordechay 2014; Economic Roundtable 2015.

50. Robinson 1983.

51. Marable 1983.

52. Young 2000, 123.

53. Young 2000, 146.

54. The makeup of the executive office reflects the leadership as of March 2018.

55. The makeup of the field representatives reflects the leadership as of March 2018.

56. Gray 2014.

57. Gray 2014.

58. Guthman 2004; Alkon and McCullen 2011; Sbicca 2015a.

59. Aronowitz 2014.

60. Guthman 2011.

61. Schneider 2015.

62. Carolan 2011; Nestle 2013.

63. Food Chain Workers Alliance 2012.

64. The Walmart 1%. The endnote accompanying these numbers reads, “Sam Walton’s dependents include his children Alice, Rob, and Jim, as well as Christy, who is the widow of his late son John. This calculation is based on share ownership data from Walmart’s 2014 filings and Walmart’s declared FY 2015 dividend of $1.92 per share.”

65. National Employment Law Project (2012). High-wage and mid-wage jobs account for 79 percent of all lost jobs during the Great Recession, while 58 percent of the recovery growth is in lower-wage jobs. Two of the ten lower-wage jobs with the biggest recovery growth are food-chain workers, who also happen to be the lowest-paid workers. Corporate profit margins are at an all-time high, while wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.

66. Schnaiberg 1980; Obach 2004; Mayer 2008.

67. See Howard (2016) for a robust discussion of corporate concentration throughout the food system.

68. Bassford et al. 2010.

69. This narrative is largely confirmed by the work of historian Nelson Lichtenstein (2009).

70. Coleman-Jensen et al. 2012.

71. California Food Policy Advocates 2014.

72. Food Chain Workers Alliance and Solidarity Research Cooperative 2016.

73. Food Chain Workers Alliance and Solidarity Research Cooperative 2016.

74. Los Angeles Food Policy Council 2013.

75. Los Angeles Food Policy Council 2013.

76. Guzick 1984, 422.

77. Sbicca 2017.

78. The Service Employees International Union has built on United Food and Commercial Workers’ efforts with their support for the fast food worker–led Fight for $15 movement. However, United Food and Commercial Workers seems to be changing its tactical approach to Walmart because the energy generated by its strikes and OUR Walmart organizing has not produced the level of desired changes. For some insightful commentary, see Moberg (2015) and Olney (2015).

79. Moberg 2015.

80. Olney 2015.

81. Wattenhofer 2016. Walmart leaving Los Angeles’s Chinatown was part of a nationwide closure of Neighborhood Markets, which have faced stiff opposition and also proven incapable of competing in urban, and more liberal, markets.

82. Eisenhauer (2001) explains the process of supermarket redlining and its effects on public health.

83. Xu 2014.

84. Hassanein 2003; Lyson 2004; Levkoe 2006.

85. Los Angeles Food Policy Council n.d.

86. Since March of 2018 there are coalitions or governments in Austin, Chicago, Cincinnati, Colorado (along the Front Range), Madison, New York, Oakland, Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul), and San Francisco that have established or are looking to establish a Good Food Purchasing Program.

87. Delwiche et al. 2014.

88. Heynen 2010; Barnard 2016.

4. Immigration Food Fights

1. Food Chain Workers Alliance 2012; Nicholls 2013; Terriquez 2015.

2. “Social boundaries are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities” (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168).

3. Public Policy Institute of California n.d.

4. Wilson and Lee 2013.

5. Food Chain Workers Alliance 2012; Food Chain Workers Alliance and Solidarity Research Cooperative 2016.

6. Food Chain Workers Alliance 2012; Food Chain Workers Alliance and Solidarity Research Cooperative 2016.

7. Knobloch 1996.

8. Gates 2014.

9. For a full discussion of the idea of imported colonialism, see Ngai (2014).

10. Guthman 2004; Slocum 2007; Alkon and McCullen 2011.

11. Holmes 2013.

12. Berlin 2000; Churchill 2002; Du Bois 1935 [1992]; Grinde and Johansen 1995; Jaimes 1992; Marable 1983

13. Harrison and Lloyd 2012; Ribas 2016.

14. As the eminent sociologist and social movement scholar Charles Tilly (2005) has shown, interpersonal transactions are the “stuff” that produces social inequality and maintains social boundaries. That is, there is an ongoing relational process that we can dissect in order to understand the (re)formation of collective identities. The corollary for noncitizens is that social boundaries can also be political boundaries that undermine democratic inclusion and participation. Some of the most innovative spaces, then, for political mobilization are those that bridge citizenship boundaries, which expand the scope of social movement mobilization and tactics. Developing new narratives of “us” and “them” is imperative to breaching social boundaries.

15. One need look no further than the internship and apprenticeship list housed by A National Sustainable Agriculture Assistance Program to get a sense of how typical nonwage exchange is to the spread of organic farming: https://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/internships/.

16. Chavez 2013.

17. Harrison and Lloyd 2013; Sbicca 2015a; Holmes 2013.

18. Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002; Fitting 2011; Massey and Pren 2012.

19. McMillan 2016.

20. Guthman 2004.

21. Carolan 2011.

22. Fisher and Gottlieb 2014; Reynolds 2015; Sbicca 2015b.

23. Trioni 2012; Meissner et al. 2013.

24. There are about ninety-three thousand uniformed military personnel in the San Diego metropolitan area, which is one of the highest concentrations of military personnel in the United States. There are also seven military bases in San Diego County. San Diego also has a very large defense industry, which includes Northrop Grumman, Parsons, Cubic, Raytheon, General Dynamics NASSCO, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. For more details, see Kyle (2012) and San Diego Military Advisory Council (2014).

25. Mayhew 2003, 306.

26. Nienstedt 2003.

27. Davis, Miller, and Mayhew 2003.

28. Chavez 2013; Nevins 2002.

29. San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, Justice Overcoming Boundaries of San Diego County, and American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego & Imperial Counties (2007).

30. Such conditions are well documented (e.g., a documentary exposé called The Invisible Mexicans of Deer Canyon by John Carlos Frey).

31. Martinez and Núñez-Alvarez 2009.

32. San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, Justice Overcoming Boundaries of San Diego County, and American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego & Imperial Counties 2007.

33. Health and Human Services Agency 2011. In line with most San Diegans’ geographical imagination, I cut statistics for Coronado from the South Bay and added them to Central San Diego.

34. Meissner et al. 2013.

35. Pastor et al. 2012.

36. Jayaraman 2014.

37. Pachirat 2011; Ribas 2016.

38. Artz 2012; Kandel 2006.

39. Barboza 2001; Gee and Bunge 2017.

40. One of the ongoing tensions is that there is a belief among some in the business community that the labor movement is only interested in increasing its membership and dues. Adding fuel to this line of reasoning was the recent, albeit ultimately futile, attempt by the Los Angeles Federation of Labor to put in an exemption to the $15 minimum wage increase for unionized employers. Business opponents thought this would encourage more businesses to allow for collective bargaining to avoid the minimum wage law (Jamison, Zahniser, and Alpert Reyes 2015).

41. Pastor et al. 2012.

42. Castles and Davidson 2000; Chavez 2013.

43. Milkman 2006.

44. Milkman 2000.

45. Ganz 2009.

46. Watts 2002.

47. Milkman 2000; Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2009; Ness 2010.

48. Sipchen 1997.

49. Watts 2002.

50. Icaza 1994.

51. Pastor 2015.

52. Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson 1980; Van Dyke 2003.

53. Aronowitz 2014. Even after the AFL-CIO Executive Council passed a resolution in 2000 calling for the repeal of employment eligibility verification required under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, a position it once supported, a number of UFCW locals opposed the changes. However, along with many in the labor movement who recognized the importance of immigrants to the movement’s future, UFCW 770 had independently adopted this position.

54. Cleeland 1999; Usheroff 2014.

55. United Food and Commercial Workers 2015.

56. City News Service 2016.

57. United Food and Commercial Workers 2016.

58. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770 2015; Vasquez 2015.

59. See, for example, the work of Milkman (2006) on immigrant labor organizing in Los Angeles and Bacon (2008) on the conditions that produce the need to organize immigrant labor pools.

60. Bacon 2009.

61. City of Vernon n.d.

62. Compa 2004. Meatpacking is a dangerous job. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than one in ten workers experience illness or injury, which is double the rate for all manufacturing.

63. Scholars and organizers that produce citizen science have documented the discrimination that immigrants and workers of color experience when it comes to promotions. See, for instance, Pachirat (2011); Food Chain Workers Alliance (2012); Ribas (2015).

64. These worker centers never came to fruition.

65. McDonnell 2009.

66. Bacon 2009.

67. A new union rep came in after the mass firing in hopes that he would build a new relationship with the workforce. According to this rep, he does not know much about the mass firing and maintains that the union supported the fired workers as much as possible. Yet there are unions such as UNITE HERE that successfully win clauses in collective bargaining agreements that prevent the use of E-verify and I-9 that might prevent immigrants from getting jobs (Lee 2015).

68. General Brotherhood of Workers n.d.

69. Catron 2013; Kazin 2013; Sarlin 2013.

70. These eight million workers make up 5 percent of the labor force (Krogstad and Passel 2015).

71. United Food and Commercial Workers 2013.

72. Lind 2016.

73. Lazare 2016; Mascaro 2016.

74. Lazare 2016.

75. Washington Post Staff 2015.

76. I reconstruct Salvador’s story from my interview with him in 2012 and his testimony in a video posted to Facebook and YouTube (Planting Justice 2016b).

77. Spener 2009.

5. Radicalizing Food Politics

1. Pollan 2010; Allen 2012.

2. Myers and Sbicca 2015.

3. Flammang 2009.

4. I have critiqued the food focus of food justice practice in greater detail elsewhere (Sbicca 2016a).

5. Mouffe 2000.

6. Broad 2016; Alkon and Guthman 2017.

7. Rancière 2010, 54.

8. May 2008.

9. Boggs 2011, 76.

10. Rancière 2001.

11. Rancière 2001.

12. Guthman 2008b; Mares and Alkon 2011; McClintock 2014. Harrison (2011) offers an incisive analysis of the food movement in relation to using the regulatory power of the state to monitor and reduce the toxic outcomes associated with pesticide drift.

13. Omi and Winant 2014.

14. Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 118.

15. Sbicca and Myers 2017.

16. Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 128.

17. Tattersall 2010.

18. Fine 2006.

19. Gabriel 2006, 2008.

20. Fine 2006.

21. UFCW was part of CTW when I was conducting initial fieldwork. However, after eight years, they left in 2013 to rejoin the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). This period with CTW was a time of increased labor organizing and confrontational labor politics.

22. Baker 1985.

23. Greenwalt 1985.

24. Sbicca 2017.

25. Cho et al. 2012.

26. Warehouse Workers United and Cornelio 2011.

27. The coalition Good Jobs L.A. consists of workers in Service Employees International Union, the Brotherhood Crusade, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, Community Coalition, Consejo de Federaciones Mexicanas en Norteamérica, and the Korean Resource Center.

28. Lo and Jacobson 2011. Interestingly, UFCW 770, WWU, and OUR Walmart are all part of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. They represent some of the major organizations working together to fight for economic justice in the food system.

29. Lopez 2014.

30. Tarrow 2011, 9.

31. Gottlieb and Joshi 2010, 233.

32. Domhoff 2005.

33. Tarrow 2011, 9.

34. Burke 2015.

35. Insight Garden Program n.d.(a).

36. Insight Garden Program n.d.(b).

37. Planting Justice 2016a.

38. Douglass 2016, 288.

39. Alexander 2012.

40. Douglass 2016, 288–89.

41. See chapter 2, note 48.

42. Deane 2015.

43. Deane 2015.

44. This is the counterfactual point also made by Schurman and Munro (2010) regarding the global anti-biotechnology movement. Even though the movement has not won every battle, were they not to have engaged in confrontational politics and fought to eliminate, label, and otherwise slow down biotechnology, there would be a much greater market presence of genetically modified organisms. I have also made a similar point in an article about the significance of the confrontational politics used by UFCW 770 and its food justice allies in Los Angeles (Sbicca 2017).

45. Garzo Montalvo 2015, 126.

46. Garzo Montalvo 2015, 127–128.

47. Slocum 2007; Guthman 2008a; Alkon and McCullen 2011.

48. Iverson 2007.

49. Reynolds 2015.

50. Bonilla-Silva 2013.

51. An edited volume on food justice by Alkon and Agyeman (2011) offers many ways in which people of color use their communities’ assets to strive for racial and economic justice.

52. In the educational context, see Yosso (2005).

53. Morier (2015). In case I will be misinterpreted, I think that social welfare programs are necessary to maintain an adequate standard of living for all. However, without major restructuring of the economy that eliminates the need for social welfare programs, there cannot be true economic justice and racial justice.

54. Castells 1983.

55. Gelderloos 2013, 31.

56. Gelderloos 2013, 31.

57. Reger, Myers, and Einwohner 2008.

58. White 2017.

59. Araiza 2014.

60. Dorceta Taylor (2000) has convincingly demonstrated that a commitment to social justice helps bring differently situated interests and movements, say, regarding class, gender, and race, to fight for environmental justice. There are similar processes taking place across left urban social movements (Harvey 1996), particularly with regard to the framing of problems and solutions (Snow et al. 1986).

61. Sbicca 2012.

62. Liwanag 2013.

63. For an example of the political and social importance of Mexican and Central American cultural foodways, see Mares and Peña (2010).

64. Boggs 2010.

65. For more details on the history and consequences of NAFTA on Mexican farmers and subsequent migration patterns to the United States, see Martin (2005) and Fernández-Kelly and Massey (2007).

66. Boggs 2010.

67. Freire 2000, 49–50.

68. Freire 2000, 49–50.

69. Nevins 2002; Chavez 2013.

70. Nienstedt 2003.

71. Jacobs 1980; Hames-Garcia 2004; Davis 2005; CR10 Publications Collective 2008; Berger 2014a; Berger 2014b; Pellow 2014.

72. Sbicca 2016; Sbicca and Myers 2017.

73. Deane 2016b.

74. Sbicca 2012.

75. Slocum and Cadieux 2015.

76. Minkoff-Zern 2012; Aptekar 2015.

77. Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 168.

78. Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 168.

79. Cairns and Johnston (2015) offer a compelling intersectional analysis focused on food and femininity that speaks to the social embeddedness of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the realm of cooking, shopping for food, and working in alternative food initiatives.

Conclusion

1. As Hislop (2015) has shown in his study of the food justice movement in the United States, there are many different articulations and actions that people take under the banner of food justice.

2. Gramsci 1971, 276.

3. Boggs and Boggs 2008, 208.

4. The Movement for Black Lives n.d.

5. Climate Justice Alliance n.d.

6. Dream Defenders n.d.

7. Day of Dinners 2017.

8. Johnston, Biro, and MacKendrick 2009.

9. Guthman 2004; Born and Purcell 2006.

10. Hinrichs and Allen 2008.

11. Anguelovski 2015a, 2015b.

12. Boggs and Boggs 2008: xxxiv–xxxv.

13. Gottlieb 2001, 231.

14. Allen 2004. There was little money made available for “community food projects” during this five-year period (up to $1,000,000 the first year and up to $2,500,000 the remaining four years). Also, this money went to “private non-profits,” which carry out valuable work but avoid solving the problems perpetrated by the rest of the Farm Bill that they are reacting to. Discursively, however, “community food security” changed how some people understand food system problems and solutions and practically made money available to expand the grassroots reach of the food movement.

15. Winders 2009.

16. Allen 2004.

17. Regardless of whether one views this system in terms of a supply chain, a network of some sort, or a system of intersecting systems (hydrological, economic, social, etc.), there is a sophisticated degree of interdependency between many moving parts that brings food to our tables.

18. Klein 2017.

19. Bittman et al. 2014.

20. For a brief overview of this Twitter chat, see https://storify.com/ucsusa/national-food-policy-tweetchat. You can also go to Twitter and put in the hashtag #NFPTalk and read through the conversation, which took place on December 3, 2014.

21. WKKF (WK_Kellogg_Fdn) 2014.

22. Ghaziani 2008.

23. Mouffe 2000; Laclau and Mouffe 2014.

24. Concerned Scientists (UCSUSA) 2014.

25. Bittman 2014; Pollan 2014.

26. Rodriguez (5RO5) 2014c; Rodriguez (5RO5) 2014c. The Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative, which grew out of the work of Will Allen and Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, started hosting The Gathering in 2008 to highlight the assets and needs of low-income communities and communities of color and to build solidarity across social difference.

27. Rodriguez (5RO5) 2014b.

28. Nowhere is this patchwork approach more obvious than in the guise of food policy councils. Recent reviews of food policy councils (e.g., Harper et al. 2009; Scherb, Frattarolli, and Pollack 2012; Chen, Clayton, and Palmer 2015) suggest that there is important work taking place at a city and sometimes statewide level, but that it varies dramatically from place to place. This partially reflects different needs in different places, but also it shows a lack of attention to some major areas of concern such as labor practices.

29. Mooney, Tanaka, and Ciciurkaite 2014.

30. Klein 2017.

31. For text of the speech, see the online encyclopedia kept by Stanford University: kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu.

32. Beyond the Moment 2017.

33. Lake Research Partners and Bellwether Research and Consulting 2015.

34. There was also a letter opposing Puzder that a coalition consisting of Corporate Accountability International, Food Chain Workers Alliance, Friends of the Earth, and Real Food Media drafted and sent out to the food movement. Over one hundred food and farm organizations signed this letter before it was sent to every senator.

35. O’Keefe and Marte 2017.

36. McAdam 1999.

37. Allen 2004, 187.

38. Johnson and Monke 2014; Lilliston 2014.

39. Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future 2017.

40. Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic 2017.

41. Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic 2017.

42. Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic 2017.

43. For example, see Harrison 2017 on the failure of federal agencies to implement environmental justice.

44. Allen 2004.

45. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2012b.

46. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2012a.

47. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2012b.

48. I derive these policy categories from the Principles of Food Justice as well as from other food justice and food movement convergences, including The Gathering conferences and the national food policy Twitter chat. They also reflect policy arenas that intersect with other social justice movements.

49. Kerssen and Brent 2017.

50. Penniman 2017.

51. Havens and Roman Alcalá 2016.

52. McClintock 2018.

53. Planting Justice was able to raise $104,000 to build a nursery and aquaponics farm on a marginal piece of land next to the 880 freeway in deep east Oakland. Although Planting Justice will still work the site, as of March 2018, this land is in the process of being turned over to the Sogorea Tè Land Trust to decolonize land by officially recognizing Ohlone ancestral claims.

54. Gilbert, Wood, and Sharp 2002.

55. Rodman et al. 2016.

56. Howard 2016.

57. Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999; Lyson 2004; Carolan 2011; Green and Haines 2015.

58. Collins 2010.

59. This is a nonexhaustive list of what might constitute a community.

60. Low et al. 2015.

61. Kurtz 2015.

62. Guthman 2011; Hatch 2016.

63. Poppendieck 1999; Fisher 2017.

64. Robl 2014.

65. Holt-Giménez and Patel 2009.

66. To understand the spirit of this treaty, the food-related article reads in part, “The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed. . . . (b) Taking into account the problems of both food-importing and food-exporting countries, to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need.”

67. McClintock 2011; Sbicca 2017.

68. Guthman 2011.

69. Sbicca 2012; Bradley and Herrera 2016; Broad 2016.

70. Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2012.

71. White 2011.

72. Incite! Women of Color against Violence 2007.

73. Reynolds 2015.

74. Incite! Women of Color against Violence 2007.

75. Sbicca 2015b.

76. Pulido, Kohl, and Cotton 2016.

77. Piven and Cloward 1979.

78. Per the work of Gibson-Graham (2006), this might include solidarity economies in the guise of cooperative enterprises, noncapitalist forms of land control and use, noncommodified forms of labor, and free schools, all of which could help prefigure more just social relations around food.

Appendix

1. Engels 1998, 48.

2. Freire 2000, 49.

3. For insight from other food scholars who have grappled with this question as well, see Reynolds and Cohen (2016) and Levkoe et al. (2016).

4. I offer more details of my research approach in Sbicca 2015c.

5. Bookchin 1990, 170–71.

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Bibliography
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Portions of chapter 2 were previously published in “These Bars Can’t Hold Us Back: Plowing Incarcerated Geographies with Restorative Food Justice,” Antipode 48 (2016): 1359–79; reprinted with permission from John Wiley and Sons. Portions of chapter 4 were previously published in “Farming While Confronting the Other: The Production and Maintenance of Boundaries in the Borderlands,” Journal of Rural Studies 39 (2015): 1–10; reprinted with permission from Elsevier.

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