Marginalizing Access to the Sustainable Food System: An Examination of Oakland's Minority Districts PDF
Preview Marginalizing Access to the Sustainable Food System: An Examination of Oakland's Minority Districts
MARGINALIZING ACCESS TO THE SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEM _________________________ An Examination of Oakland’s Minority Districts _________________________ Camille Tuason Mata University Press of America,® Inc. Lanham · Boulder · New York · Toronto · Plymouth, UK Copyright © 2013 by University Press of America,® Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 UPA Acquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 10 Thornbury Road Plymouth PL6 7PP United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2012955823 ISBN: 978-0-7618-6053-2 (clothbound : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-0-7618-6054-9 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 iii Dedication This book is dedicated first and foremost to my family. I also dedicate this book to food system activists and policymakers, who inspired this topic. I hope they, whoever they are, will read these pages and feel equally inspired to promote inclusive and sustainable food systems everywhere. And finally, to Goddard College, which supported my effort to complete the Individualized Master of Arts program and allowed me to finish this study. v Table of Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements xi 1. Introduction: Framing the Indicators for Measuring Minority Food Access 1 2. Community Food Security: An Evolving Concept 18 3. Localizing Food Security: Oakland’s Experience 43 4. The History of Farming Access for Minority Farmers 72 5. Historicizing Access to the Sustainable Food System through CSAs, Farmer’s Markets, and Urban Gardens 105 6. Summarizing Marginalization and Concluding Remarks 134 7. Bibliography 138 About the Author 153 Preface I cannot say exactly when I first became interested in the sustainable food system as a matter of life and death. Perhaps it began when case studies of activists and scholars, who either grew their own food or studied people who did, began to materialize as I perused through literature, like the Urban Agriculture Magazine, which showcased different urban food efforts around the world and the Cultural Survival Quarterly, which brought to light the social and environmental challenges facing indigenous people, for whom the forest is livelihood. Perhaps the interest was always there, dormant, waiting to be revived by the fortitude of people struggling to improve food availability in their communities. What I do know is that whenever I came across a case study, there was something about the rawness of the people in need, catalyzing urban farming to produce food in their community, resonated with that part of my childhood when I learned how to crouch in the dusk, waiting for turtles to come in from the sea and lay their eggs in the sands of the seashore signifying the distinguishing features of my birthplace, Laoag, a coastline city in the province of Ilocos Norte located at the northern-most part of Luzon Island. I wanted to be a part of those people, foraging, growing, or gathering their food, for it was where I felt most at home. As I learned more about sustainable food systems and began to slowly piece together its sometimes divergent dimensions, I arrived at new and related questions, which enquired about larger, systematic mechanisms regarding the integration of land and ecology with the production, manufacturing, and marketing operations of food, especially among regional entrepreneurs. How might these operations come together to truly build a solid infrastructure that promised security in food access and, presently, how do they not? I was especially curious about the inclusiveness of the food system that I kept reverting back to nagging questions: who are chronically left out and how do we include those who want to be more deeply included? Most of the studies I came upon have failed to represent the food system as a comprehensive mechanism of demographics, ecology, economy, and urban dynamics, writing about these dimensions instead as separate topics. These dimensions, I soon discovered, were really caveats to a well-functioning sustainable food system that needed to be reconciled with inequalities in health and hunger conditions resulting from viii Preface marginalization. These knowledge discoveries led me to the central question I sought to answer with this book: how foods-deficient are minority residents in Oakland and how has the condition of food insecurity changed over time? Subsequently, I asked what the connection was between food deficiency and access, but more specifically how has inequality been inadvertently or intentionally woven into the sustainable food system. I further enquired about the connection between environmental health to eating and to the sustainable production of food. I posed these questions to myself as theoretical as well as grounded queries. Throughout the framing and doing phases of my study, I found myself continuously asking where minorities fit into the sustainability of the food system. Although I learned a lot about what the implications are of studying minority marginalization to civic action and to making policy (where bridges to the food system might need to be built) and understood the value of being more stringent about organic farming, in the course of doing my study I nevertheless found gaps in research pertaining to minority inclusion in sustainable food systems. These gaps might serve as research questions for future studies on food systems in Oakland or elsewhere. Some of these questions were: what policy measures would help to revive the entrepreneurial spirit among African Americans connected to food access? Would inquiring about the reasons why Oakland residents, who qualify for food stamps, are not claiming them aid in better understanding the causes of food insecurity from a different angle? What are the food security potentials of a food incubator project that ties food access with Green Economy projects occurring around the country? What novel partnerships between CSA farms, food markets, and food manufacturers and minority neighborhoods can be discovered, and how might food security be better achieved from this nexus? How might cities expand their urban open spaces to attain the urban food productivity that has been postulated by some researchers? What are the national and state participation rates of minority farmers in organic farming? Research on minority participation in organic farming is an area that needs to grow before we can get a better sense about the potential for minority integration into the sustainable food system. At the core of these intersectional questions is the role of minorities. How can minorities, who continue to be at the margins of American society, be more central figures in planning for and maintaining a reliable and sustainable food system? Clearly, there is much more to learn about how to make the sustainable food system truly inclusive. It is my hope that this manuscript inspires more integrated and systematic studies on the food system and eventually leads to community and regional food systems becoming more sustainable, more extensive in its reach along the food chain and across geographical boundaries, and above all, more inclusive. And now, a word about the complexity of converting this research into a book-the sustainable food system in Oakland is in constant change. I discovered this when updating data and information in order to make the knowledge contained in these chapters more contemporary. In the three years since July Preface ix 2009, when I completed the master’s thesis version of this book, both old and new players had emerged in the urban food arena in Oakland. The Mandela Food Cooperative had finally become a physical reality, Phat Beets Market and food stalls had become a weekly mainstay in the North Oakland community, and the Handy Harvest Club CSA, which forays into Oakland upon request, had come into being. Many of these changes were initiated by residents, which is the way it has been for a long time and, I suspect, will be for many more years to come. I have accommodated these recent transformations in the book as much as I could and to the best of my ability. Any mistakes and/or misunderstandings are purely my own. My apologies in advance to those, who might see themselves misrepresented in these pages.
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