Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice PDF
Preview Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice
BLACK FOOD MATTERS This page intentionally left blank BLACK FOOD MATTERS . . . RACIAL JUSTICE IN THE WAKE OF FOOD JUSTICE . . . HANNA GARTH AND ASHANTÉ M. REESE, EDITORS University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Copyright 2020 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2 520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer. 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Garth, Hanna, editor. | Reese, Ashanté M., editor. Title: Black food matters : racial justice in the wake of food justice / [edited by] Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An in-depth look at Black food and the challenges it faces today”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020020391 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0813-3 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0814-0 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Food. | African Americans—Social conditions. | Food security—United States. | Equality—United States. | Racism—United States. Classification: LCC E185.86 .B52555 2020 (print) | DDC 305.896/073–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020391 CONTENTS Black Food Matters: An Introduction 1 Ashanté M. Reese and Hanna Garth 1 In the Food Justice World but Not of It: Everyday Black Food Entrepreneurship 29 Ashanté M. Reese 2 The Intersection of Politics and Food Security in a South Carolina Town 53 Gillian Richards- Greaves 3 Nurturing the Revolution: The Black Panther Party and the Early Seeds of the Food Justice Movement 82 Analena Hope Hassberg 4 Blackness and “Justice” in the Los Angeles Food Justice Movement 107 Hanna Garth 5 Good Food in a Racist System: Competing Moral Economies in Detroit 131 Andrew Newman and Yuson Jung 6 Soul Food Gentrification: Food, Racial Heritage Tourism, and the Redevelopment of Black Space in Miami 158 Billy Hall 7 “Preserve and Add Flavor”: Barbecue as Resistance in Memphis 181 Kimberly Kasper 8 Sisters of the Soil: Urban Agriculture in Detroit 208 Monica M. White 9 Race, Land, and the Law: Black Farmers and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition 228 Willie J. Wright, Tyler McCreary, Brian Williams, and Adam Bledsoe 10 The Mango Gang and New World Cuisine: White Privilege in the Commodification of Latin American and Afro-C aribbean Foods 251 Judith Williams Afterword: Problematizing the Problem 279 Psyche Williams-F orson Acknowledgments 285 Contributors 287 Index 291 BLACK FOOD MATTERS An Introduction Ashanté M. Reese and Hanna Garth . . . The global food system is plagued with inequities. On the one hand, the U.S. food supply is so abundant it could feed everyone in the country nearly twice over— even after exports are consid- ered (Nestle 2002, 1). Yet the United States Department of Agri- culture (USDA) reported that in 2018, 14.3 million Americans were food insecure.1 The burden of food insecurity is especially felt by communities of color. In an effort to understand how race and eth- nicity influence food insecurity, Ana McCormick Myers and Mat- thew Painter (2017) find that Black and Latinx people—r egardless of immigrant status—a re significantly more food insecure than foreign- or U.S.-b orn whites, suggesting that the food system is part of a larger structure of inequity. In an effort to address both food insecurity and unequal food access, activists and scholars have turned their attention to creating an equitable food system, fram- ing their work under the umbrella of food justice. Growing out of the environmental justice movement that is largely led by women of color, food justice has become a theoretical, methodological, and aspirational framework for reenvisioning a world in which access to healthy, affordable food is not a dream but a reality for all. In recent years, nuanced examinations of this movement reveal that what was once characterized as a singular movement is more a collection of similar (though sometimes diverging), fragmented approaches to food inequity, resulting in varied definitions and applications of the term food justice. At minimum, food justice • 1 2 • Ashanté M. Reese and Hanna Garth highlights the problems of a contemporary food system that relies heavily on undervalued labor and the quick and efficient circu- lation of food products and is concerned with the unequal distri- bution of and access to healthy, affordable food. Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi (2010, 6) assert that “food justice” ensures that “the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown and produced, transported and distributed, and accessed and eaten are shared fairly” and as part of the process, knowing how food injustices are distributed and experienced form the basis for which a movement can grow. Many Black activists and scholars theorize and frame food inequities as a by-p roduct of the contestation to Black life, spe- cifically grounding their food justice work from the starting point that just as racism produces increasing surveillance, disproportion- ate rates of mass incarceration, and income inequities, it also pro- duces food inequities. Leah Penniman argues, Racism is built into the DNA of the US food system. Begin- ning with the genocidal land theft from Indigenous people, con- tinuing with the kidnapping of our ancestors from the shores of West Africa for forced agricultural labor, morphing into convict leasing, expanding to the migrant guest worker program, and maturing into its current state where farm management is among the whitest professions, farm labor is predominantly Brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in food apartheid neighborhoods and suffer from diet-r elated illness, this system is built on stolen land and stolen labor, and needs a rede- sign. (2018, 5) Our food system and the inequities it produces, in other words, are the afterlife of slavery— the ways the “past” extends beyond a fixed position or time period to extend into the present day (Hartman 2007, 6). In this afterlife, one in which the racial cal- culus devalues Black life, inequities and injustices are not acci- dental but the result of deeply entrenched systemic processes: the fruit that is produced from a capitalist economic system for which the expendability of Black life is not tertiary but central. Black Food Matters • 3 The implications for those of us who study food is that it is not enough to simply examine race in the food system. We must also consider how the food system is part of larger structures that, by design, were never created for Black survival (Lorde 1997; Costa Vargas 2010). In this way, food inequities are one manifestation of the after- life of slavery. Rasheed Salaam Hislop connects food justice ex- plicitly to racial justice, defining it as “the struggle against racism, exploitation, and oppression taking place within the food system that addresses inequality’s root causes both within and beyond the food chain” (2014, 19). Working from the premise that anti- Blackness is “pervasive as climate” and operates as a precondi- tion for the expendability of Black lives (Sharpe 2016, 106), in her book Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-R eliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., Ashanté Reese argues that exam- ining both the specificity and the mundaneness of anti- Blackness “opens up possibilities for us to reconsider and imagine constraint and possibility, harm and care, and destruction and commu- nity building” (2019, 4). We frame this edited volume in similar ways to Hislop, adding the specificity of anti- Blackness that Reese (2019) offers with the hope that within the chapters, we may wit- ness seedlings of resistance and refusal. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, we are talking about not only racial dispari- ties that Black people experience in the food system but the condi- tions that produce those disparities. The “contested landscape” (Twitty 2017, 6) in which Black people shop for, grow, distribute, and consume food is multidimensional. Redlining in housing and supermarkets, nefarious practices of discrimination and exclusion- ary lending, and ongoing forms of institutionalized discrimination and circuits of capital exacerbate deeply entrenched inequalities and poverty. This is the context from which many food justice movements have taken up the call to provide or fight for healthy, accessible food for all. Intermingled with these contexts, Black communities maintain vibrant Black food cultures that draw from Black history and shift into contemporary variations. Weaving together the contexts of vibrant Black food cultures and the need to incorporate racial justice into the food justice
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