“Cause unfortunately we are in honky heaven…”

“...and the only people who seem to be able to afford to live here are people of this race” - CSA Manager (Alkon & Agyeman 268).

[Week 4: Reading response]

This week’s readings examined food justice from multiple perspectives, from case examples of the CIW and activist movements, to a discourse of the food justice theories and trends over the years.  Julie Guthman’s article on “If They Only Knew: The Unbearable Whiteness of Alternative Food“ was an interesting analysis of white privilege in the food movement (Alkon and Agyeman).  

Though I agree with many of the observations in Julie Guthman’s article, I also think it may be too simplistic to blame racially charged food disparities on the “whiteness” of alternative food spaces and messaging alone.  While this is an extremely significant factor in the inclusivity of the food justice movement, I think the issue goes even deeper.  The article makes a little (but not much) mention of black food culture/history and the importance of black farmers in United States history.  Many foods, especially “southern” dishes like okra, peanuts, yams, etc. were originally brought from Africa to the New World.  Additionally, black farmers played a pivotal role during the Civil Rights Movement, “coordinating campaigns for desegregation and voting rights as well as providing food, housing, and safe haven for other organizers” (“Radical Farmers Use Fresh Food to Fight Racial Injustice and the New Jim Crow”).  So while I don’t think that food education is inherently wrong in and of itself, it’s worth paying attention to who is doing the teaching, what they are teaching, and how they are teaching it.  Maybe an alternative practice to confront the “proselytizing” approach about “good food” (Alkon & Agyeman 278) is to promote education that celebrates the heritage and history of the food movement among nonwhite populations.   

I don’t think this goes against what Guthman argues in her article.  The article’s main objective, to examine the “If they only knew” mentality, does not criticize the idea of education, but the idea that (white) “alternative” food advocates assume that other factions of society don’t adopt similar views/practices because of “lack of education”.  Again, I think much of this circles back to cultural competence.  Guthman’s comment about “putting your hands in the soil” being “more likely to invoke images of slave labor than nostalgia” (276) reminded me of a young man’s statement in a news article about a restorative justice farm in Albany, New York.  The teenager, who was paid to work on the farm in lieu of a prison sentence, explained:

“I basically expected it to be like slavery, but it would be better than jail.  It was different though...The farmers there are black like us, which I did not expect.   I could see myself having my own farm one day.”

This statement, and the rest of the magazine article, examines the view of farming as a "white" practice. In addition to cultural competence, Guthman also discusses the exclusivity of “white-dominated” spaces like farmers’ markets and CSAs.  Although I wonder how many of the student empirical examples she shares have to do with the particular university where she teaches, the general point of being more cognizant of the racial implications of “white centric” attitudes and try to actively create more inclusive spaces within the food arena, is a critical argument.

What did others think about this article?  Any support or criticism of the author’s points?

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Update (2/2/16):

After today's TED Talk, which identified "food as a weapon," I thought I'd share this short video, about food branding, violence, and addiction:

A tomato is literally used as a weapon at the end...