White Heroes, Racial Purity, and the Media

A previous version of this blog post stated that no blacks were interviewed.  This was incorrect, as Mark Bowen is African American.  The error was regrettable.

Apologies to my few readers for not posting sooner, but I'm 5 of 6 chapters down on my dissertation and we have a paper ready for publication.  I have been working.

But, something caught my eye today: an article in Grist on local food in Alabama.  I found this to be amazing piece that really captures how whiteness is reproduced in the media.

First of all, one of those interviewed and none of the organizations covered are black.  This gives one the impression that local food is a solely white affair in Alabama.  But, this is clearly not true.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which saves black land and organizes mostly black cooperatives of small family farmers, has been in operation since 1967, and grew out of the Civil Rights Movement.  Alabama has not one, but two HBCU agricultural universities, Tuskegee and Alabama A&M.  So, clearly the fight for the small farm has been in existence far longer than Jones Valley Urban Farm, the Front Porch Revival, or Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network.  In a fine example of how whiteness distorts reality, a fight that has been led for over forty years by black-run organizations is transformed into a fight led by trendy white heroes.

Furthermore, the claim that somehow the white side of the local food movement doesn't appeal to the white bourgeois is suspect at best.

Food has always been a way to affirm and reproduce identity. During Jim Crow, food practices acted as a way to reproduce white racial purity.  In her dissertation To Live and Dine in Dixie: Foodways and Culture in the Twentieth Century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that because food was ingested and literally became to body of the consumer, it was strictly policed by racial mores.  Eating the right food was paramount to reproducing a healthy, pure, white body, and therefore part and parcel to the culture of Jim Crow.

Today's healthy lifestyle justification for local food is a similar purity narrative.  Propagated by elites and cultural producers, healthy lifestyle similarly reproduces white purity by relegating alternative food practices to marginal status.  As one member of the Health Action Partnership stated to me, "even when (black) people have access to good food, they don't know how to cook it.  They cook it with too much oil, and it cooks all the nutrients out of it."

The healthy lifestyle argument for local food is more about reproducing the status of those consuming it than about the actual health of the consumers. (One thinks of the numerous fundraising dinners with Frank Stitt or Chris Dupount and how their highly unhealthy food all of the sudden becomes healthy because it is fine dining).  Under both Jim Crow and modern food ways, the "pure food" is backed by the perceived legitimacy and objectivity of science, with whites using science to validate their foodways as objectively superior.  The white side of the local food movement, with its overarching focus on health and purity, is absolutely an elitist endeavor.  (I love how they talk about it not being elitist and then talk about Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings as the "original local food revolutionaries" three paragraphs later.)  Anyone who argues otherwise is selling something.

So what does all this mean?  Well, it means that there are deep racial divisions within the local food movement, divisions that are reproduced by media outlets, and which are reflected in the broader culture.  There are divisions in the local food movement because there are divisions in the local culture.

What can be done about it?  One thing is to hold media outlets like Grist accountable for their product.  What Grist did was simply lazy, but it had the unfortunate quality of marginalizing the groups that have led the fight for the small farm for decades.

Another thing that can be done is to host anti-racist workshops like the one Magic City Agriculture Project is hosting beginning next week and continuing for six months.  This Allies training will focus on cultivating resistance to white supremacy and building community around this resistance.

Race, Integration, and a Unified Food Movement

The local food movement has a race problem.

In recent years, many academics have pointed this out, the foremost being Julie Guthman at UC Santa Cruz.  The crux of the issue is that the abstract aims and goals of the movement, such as ending GMOs and dealing with obesity, fail to resonate with communities of color; and, when white groups try to address issues like food security that are more resonant with these communities, they often lack the multicontextual skills to garner any support.

Furthermore, those pulling the triggers on food policy at the local level are very often white and college educated. The dominant narrative (think Michael Pollan) within the local food movement represents only the interests of the lifestyle left and has a very elitist bent. The movement addresses structural issues in regards to small rural farmers, but fails to address structural issues on the consumption side as well and the connection between food and wider justice concerns.

This blog aims to articulate a different vision of the local food movement, a vision that I call food justice. While lifestyle and cultural issues are very important and should not be ignored, the food justice approach pays close attention not only to structural issues in regards to farmers but also structural issues in regards to food consumption and production in general. In other words, the agribusiness food system destroys the small family farm and produces hunger, food insecurity, and obesity. Moreover, the larger economic system produces conditions of poverty which lead to hunger, food insecurity and obesity. A food movement that is a real movement addressing issues of justice must understand the structural causes of and connections between small farm decline, food hardship, obesity and poverty.

This is not to say that lifestyle choices and culture are unimportant. However, food related behavior is connected to structural injustices produced by the system. Consider that many low income people eat at fast food restaurants regularly because of the inexpensiveness of the menu items. These people develop lifestyles and cultural norms surrounding food through repeated engagement with cheap food, creating what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called a “culture of necessity.” Of course, there are ways to eat well on the cheap, but certainly these aren’t culturally “normal” with low-income people or even well-off people for that matter. Ultimately, the lifestyle change to better food for low-income people is complicated by the high cost of good food.

The local food movement must therefore work on both structural issues of poverty and access and cultural/lifestyle issues surrounding food consumption because changes in culture/lifestyle have an effect on structures and changes in structures have an effect on culture/lifestyle – they are mutually constitutive.

What does race have to do with this? Two things.

First, though not all black and Latino community gardens are addressing the broad structural issues, the only organizations addressing these issues at all are black and Latino community gardens. There are a number of reasons for this.

• White community gardens do not have the first-hand experience with food hardship, and to address it would be a significant step outside their self-interest. 
• Addressing structural injustices compromises hard-won alliances that white community gardens have developed with moderate and conservative white folks and organizations. Simply put, issues of justice are threatening to white community garden’s constituencies.  

In this criticism, I do not mean to argue that white community gardens should be making justice related arguments. In general, they should serve their people's needs and interests. However, if white community gardens move to create institutions that claim to be for everyone, they cannot shut out the critical discourse of black and brown community gardens.

Second, it has been my experience that the solutions provided by the food justice faction of the local food movement differ from those of the movement broadly. The white side of the movement has basically consumption-oriented solutions – food labeling, "eat local" campaigns, farmer’s markets and CSAs, while black and Latino gardens are focused on production-side solutions such as job creation, novel urban ag systems that include aquaponics, solar power, and soon vertical gardening and cooperatives. Ultimately, these two approaches are complimentary, and it would behoove whites and people of color to work together in this regard.

To sum up, the local food movement can be enriched by the holistic approach of food justice.  Food justice understands the dialectical relationship between food culture and the structure of the food system and attacks on all fronts.  Race has been a primary divider between the food justice movement and the larger local food movement, in some respects because of self-interest and in others because of exclusion. Activists and participants in the food movement would be served well to integrate the interests of everyone into a broader, more comprehensive justice-oriented narrative.