Tomato Salvation

LaDonna Redmond wanted to get the healthiest food that she could for her young son, who had an array of food allergies—food that was free from genetically modified organisms, free from pesticides, and free from harmful fertilizers. Food grown organically was unavailable in her community on the West Side of Chicago. As Redmond explained in a 2013 TED talk, "I live in a community where I can get a semi-automatic weapon quicker than I can get a tomato.” With her husband, she began turning nearby vacant lots into farm sites as part of an effort to rebuild the food system from the ground up.

As founder and lead organizer for the Campaign for Food Justice Now, Redmond advocates that food is a human right. Her organization is a part of a growing cadre of individuals, community groups, and organizations around the country and around the world pushing for reform of the agricultural system to serve a broad array of needs well beyond nutrition.

The movement demands fairness at every point in the food chain, from producer to consumer, says Danielle Nierenberg, president and cofounder of FoodTank, a think tank advocating sustainable solutions to hunger, obesity, and poverty worldwide. It seeks to end the deep inequity by which 40 percent of Americans are believed to have limited access to safe, nutritious food, while almost as many are overfed and obese. According to the New York City–based nonprofit Just Food, all communities have the right to grow, sell, and eat healthy food that is not only nutritious, affordable, and culturally appropriate, but grown locally with care for the well-being of the land, workers, and animals.

That may sound like a lot to ask of dinner. But food and the food production system have become the means to remedying an array of societal ills. In fact, food has always possessed power well beyond the plate. As nourishment and medicine, as sources of celebration, ritual, and pleasure, what and how we eat forges relationships, creates connections, establishes cultural norms, perpetuates social orders, and much more. In recent years, medical science has greatly expanded our understanding of the influence of food and its components on health, even as an epidemic of obesity and diet-related chronic diseases has erupted across the United States and in countries replicating the standard American diet.

Food justice has roots in other social movements, notably Slow Food, begun in the late 1980s in Italy to protest the spread of fast food and promote local edibles and gastronomic traditions. Swift on its heels, in 1993, came Via Campesina, a transnational peasant and family-farmer movement demanding “food sovereignty,” or the right of people who produce and consume food to establish their own sustainable agricultural practices and policies.

There are hot spots of food justice in the United States. Chicago, Detroit and Oakland, California, are prominent among them because their areas of urban decay highlight societal inequities that mirror food system failures and also provide opportunities for transforming both the city and the food supply.

In Chicago, Lynn Todman, an urban planner by training, was galvanized when she saw a city map that overlaid communities with the highest rates of gun violence and homicide with those lacking access to fresh, healthy food, labeled “food deserts” (they’re also called “food swamps,” since unhealthy food is cheap and plentiful). The two maps were almost identical. “That match does not suggest causation,” Todman says, “but it made it hard to ignore that there might be a relationship.”

Now a visiting scholar at MIT, Todman is examining the relationship between nutrition and antisocial behavior, including aggression and violence, through research conducted by nutritional neuroscientists. “Food plays a role in entrenching and reinforcing social inequalities because of the impact that it has on the human body, the human brain,” she says. “Lack of access to nutritious food is a major driver of a wide variety of inequities,” she adds, pointing to studies showing how poor nutritional status can interrupt children’s educational processes and predispose them to contact with the juvenile justice system.

The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network formed in 2006 to urge residents to take active leadership in ensuring a supply of healthy food. Organizers created D-town Farm, seven acres of sustainable urban agriculture with year-round production. They also launched a cooperative buying club offering healthy food and household items at discounted prices, and they educate the public about the importance of healthy food choices. The group helped write a comprehensive food policy for the city, which Detroit’s city council passed unanimously in 2009, establishing a Detroit Food Policy Council.

Sociologist Monica White, a Detroit native, member of the DBCFSN, and assistant professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin, explains it this way: “There are some groups who say, ‘We grow food because this tomato tastes really wonderful.’ There are other folks who say, ‘Food is a pathway to freedom.’”

For her and many others, food is the entrée to water rights, living wages and economic equity, access to transportation and quality education. “How you got to the meeting is not nearly as important as what we do once there,” says White.

Fifteen years ago, after getting a master’s degree in history at New York University, Bryant Terry enrolled in a chef training program. He came to food through other forms of social activism. “The same communities that were dealing with police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, crumbling infrastructure, horrible public schools, that had the most people who were sick and dying, were the communities with very few sources of healthy, affordable foods,” Terry says. He took up cheffing to help empower young people of color to transform their lives and their urban communities. Now based in San Francisco, he is the celebrated author of Afro-Vegan, The Inspired Vegan, and Vegan Soul Kitchen.

As a unified movement, food justice began gaining traction in the United States in the wake of the global food crisis of 2007­—when food prices suddenly spiked, leading to riots in 40 countries and the overthrow of two governments—as well as the financial crisis of 2008. These events coincided with the birth of the local food movement—locavore entered the dictionary in 2007—and together helped reverse a trend, in place since the 1940s, that had obscured the processes by which food reaches the plate.

“The movement toward farmers markets and community gardens and local agriculture and cooking—all those fantastically important and engaging projects—have helped us just pull the curtains back and say, ‘Wow, this is a sick system,’” says Nancy Romer, a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College and cofounder of the Brooklyn Food Coalition.

The push for food justice is not limited to food-blighted communities. Consumers everywhere are becoming more aware of how their dinner is grown—and what implications the methods have not just for their personal health but for the health of communities and the climate as well.

A Menu of Food Activism

• The Agricultural Justice Project, a national organization based in Gainesville, Florida, has been pushing beyond organic certification for labeling standards that reflect the well-being of farm laborers, slaughterhouse employees, and retail food staff, and fair pay for their labors. The group piloted the first “Food Justice Certified” labeling program for farms in the upper Midwest in 2010 and certified the first stores in New York State last summer.
• College students around the country have initiated many efforts to supply local communities with healthy food, and courses on food justice now abound. The real power of students to change the food system is not academic. For example, the half-million students in the California State University system are urging their alma mater, which spends $100 million on food each year, to shift much of its sourcing from huge industrialized farms, where workers are poorly paid and exposed to pesticides, to smaller, local, organic farms that pay workers fairly and produce “real food.”
• At Soul Fire Farm outside Albany, New York, co-owners Leah Penniman and her husband, Jonah Vitale-Wolff, teach farming as a way of transforming youth who have been caught in the juvenile justice system. “We’ll start with tomatoes,” Penniman says, “then work our way up” to discussing restorative justice.
• Boston’s Fresh Food Generation is equipping a food truck to bring affordable and healthy prepared foods, sourced from local farms, to low-income neighborhoods with high rates of diabetes and obesity.
• Faith-based groups have long worked to repair the world, and food is increasingly the means. A pilot Jewish Food Justice Fellowship trains leaders to increase food access and self-sufficiency in impoverished areas near San Diego. Wake Forest School of Divinity, in North Carolina, adds food to its religious leadership initiative because “food justice and agricultural sustainability are issues that will define this generation.”