Review of Black, White, and Green by Alison Hope Alkon

It is an exciting day for me when I finally get to read a new book from one of my favorite thinkers on the alternative food and agriculture movement, Alison Hope Alkon. The book, Black, White, and Green: Farmer's Markets, Race, and the Green Economy, is a tour de force on the most important institution in the movement: farmer's markets.

Alkon covers a vast territory in her ethnography, looking at race, class, gender, and economics in the context of two markets in East Bay.  Those two markets, North Berkeley Farmer's Market and West Oakland Farmer's Market, represent two starkly different ways of approaching the green economy, though they share a common belief in producing social change through markets.  Both markets are about the performance of black and white identities in an effort to build community around buying and selling fresh produce.

In West Oakland, the market is commonly referred to as a "black farmer's market."  Many of the events revolve around the celebration of black holidays like Juneteenth or Black History Month.  The purpose of the market is to give an outlet to marginalized black farmers and to provide healthy produce in an area that lacks grocery stores, called supermarket redlining, a process specifically linked to institutional racism.  Alkon quotes Food First! in defining supermarket redlining:

"Redlining usually evokes images of insurance companies, realtors, and banks refusing to grant fair insurance policies, mortgages, or loans to residents of certain neighborhoods.  Now these images include the decaying shells of inner city supermarkets.  The supermarket industry has drawn boundaries defining where fresh, nutritious, and competitively-priced food is and is not provided for communities throughout the country."

The West Oakland market is, therefore, perceived by vendors, managers, and customers alike as a response to institutional racism within the food system.  Alkon states that the roots of this market lie in the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast for School Children program, further placing the market squarely within the realm of resistance to white supremacy.

In contrast, the North Berkeley Farmer's Market is rooted in countercultural notions of what Alkon and McCullen have called elsewhere the white farm imaginary.  Drawing from authors such as Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, the performance of white identity is central to the community that is formed through the market.  The market itself grew out of anarchist and socialist attempts to create a different kind of economy in Berkeley, including Chez Panisse and gardening in People's Park in Berkeley.  Today's iteration of the market focuses heavily on environmental and economic concerns, though there are secondary concerns about equity.  The market has also become more focused on elite Northern California gourmet food and the resistance to the industrial food system through the creation of alternative, high-end markets for farmers.

One of the most important points that Alkon makes is that though both markets are rooted in radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s, all of which was specifically anti-capitalist, today's version of both markets focuses heavily on the use of capitalism to promote social and environmental change.  While Alkon stops short of criticizing this development directly, she does note that policy change and the role of the state (local or national) have effectively disappeared from the agenda of the alternative food and agriculture movement.  In fact, many are completely opposed to participation in the government.  In my opinion, whiteness and the lack of critique of the state are the two most important issues within the movement today and must be addressed going forward.

I have two critiques for Alkon, designed to be constructive.  First, the reader is left to wonder how Alkon's positionality as a white, female academic colored the analysis she produces.  She does include an epilogue that documents some of her struggles in the field, but fails to integrate this into her work.  I'm particularly concerned about a few statements that she makes in particular.  First, she argues

"At first glance, North Berkeley Farmer's Market participants seem to have a more inclusive, cosmopolitan notion of community that the multiple and contradictory definitions evidenced in West Oakland."

She then states in the epilogue that

"In North Berkeley, on the other hand, I could both literally and figuratively let my hair down."

It seems that Alkon's first impressions of the North Berkeley Farmer's Market had more to do with her own position and a white woman, and less to do with the market itself.  To borrow from my field work, a black food activist in Birmingham stated that Pepper Place is "for certain people."  It is reasonable to assume that had Alkon been black, she would have perceived the exclusionary nature of North Berkeley Farmer's Market immediately.  Now, there is nothing wrong with feeling more comfortable with people more like you, but those feelings should have been part of the analysis.

My second critique is that the West Oakland Farmer's Market failed, ultimately, while the North Berkeley Farmer's Market succeeded.  The reader needs to know more about the institutional and community reasons as to why one organization succeeded and the other failed.  Alkon makes an initial argument that conflicts about the direction of the organization led to the failure, but it also seems that there could be community reasons.  For instance, although West Oakland Farmer's Market is in a low income black neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying, very few black community members participated, and most of the customers were relatively affluent.  About 50 percent of the customers were white.  It could be that there may have been little real community buy-in, a problem that markets face on low income communities throughout the nation.  Why is this?  What would work better?

Secondly, we know almost nothing about the institutional landscapes in which the farmer's market operate.  Who funds the Ecology Center, the organization that backs the North Berkeley Farmer's Market?  Why can they maintain funding for the market when the organizations backing West Oakland cannot?  Can an argument be made that institutional racism also played a role in the demise of West Oakland Farmer's Market?  What kinds of food movement programs would work in low income neighborhoods of color?  Why?  I feel like these are pertinent, unanswered questions that I as both a practitioner, activist, and academic would like to know.

Overall, though, this book is really incredible.  Comparative studies are really hard to do, and Alkon pulls this one off nicely.  She communicates with a critical voice that doesn't get in anyone's face.  She communicates in a language that people involved in the research can understand.  Spend some time with this book.

Eating Alabama and the White Farm Imaginary

 

Last night, I finally had the privilege of viewing Eating Alabama, a documentary by University of Alabama professor Andy Grace (shown above right: image via al.com). Since seeing the trailer, I have been anticipating screening it for months. It struck me as a sort of anthem for one section of the Alabama's alternative agriculture movement, and I was curious to see if Grace departed from well-traveled terrain and promoted any new views of alternative food.

Eating Alabama Trailer from Moon Winx Films on Vimeo.

In the film, Grace (a filmmaking professor) and his wife Rashmi (now an urban farm educator) eat the way their grandparents did for a whole year, consuming only locally grown, non-GMO and seasonal foods. While trying to support small farmers with their project, they find that many are struggling to survive.

Though I thought the film was artistically sound, quite stylish and funny, and included a very important critique of industrial agriculture, Grace fails to depart significantly from what Alison Alkon and Christie McCullen call the "white farm imaginary" in a 2011 Antipode article. To make the meaning of this term clear, I quote from their article at length:

"For many customers in farmer's markets we study, the markets are more than just a place to procure food.  Customers are motivated to shop at farmer's markets by ethical imperatives to 'support your local farmer' or 'buy directly from the people who grow food.'  Such phrases are common not only in the everyday conversations of market shoppers, but in the work of food writers and celebrity chefs that has made alternative agriculture so increasingly popular.  In this section, we argue that these common slogans produce what we call a white farm imaginary.  This imagery romanticizes and universalizes an agrarian narrative specific to whites while masking the contributions and struggles of people of color in food production (see also Sackman 2005).

"The white farm imaginary holds that small-scale, yeoman farmer as an American agricultural icon.  Only whites, however, were historically able to farm this way.  This imaginary ignores the justification of Native American displacement by white homesteaders, the enslavement of African Americans, the masses of underpaid Asian immigrants who worked California's first factory farms, and the mostly Mexican farm laborers who harvest the majority of food grown in the USA today (Allen 2004: Guthman 2008b).  Therefore, it is quite possible that the romantic notions of yeoman farmers and rural culture do not resonate with many people of color whose collective history recalls the racism and classism of America's agricultural past and present."

Eating Alabama reproduces this white farm imaginary quite clearly.  To begin with, there are very few blacks in the film, and the ones that do appear, appear incidentally. This alone should strike us in a state that is over one quarter black and also has a significant population of black farmers (compared to non-Southeastern states). There are also no Hispanic or Latino people shown in the film - again, striking in a state where local food depends on migrant workers and the agricultural landscape was rocked by the sudden shortage of Hispanic and Latino laborers after HB56 passed last year.

To further bolster this white imaginary, Grace romanticizes our rural agrarian past by repeatedly calling our grandparents' way of living a "simpler way of life." Certainly, in highly segregated rural areas, often policed by the Ku Klux Klan and controlled by politicians determined to institutionalize white supremacy, Alabama's agrarian past was not a "simpler way of life" for blacks, but was rather oppressive and exploitative. Sharecropping, in which both black and white farm laborers received a share of the crop for working the land for planters, can only be seen as a marginal improvement from slavery, and almost as oppressive. The film makes no mention of segregation or Jim Crow, even though many of those battles were fought in rural areas.

Grace does acknowledge that our agrarian past is associated with slavery, but then disassociates his idealized family history from it because, he says, his ancestors were too poor to own slaves. This is a trick of rhetoric used by many whites to distance themselves from the institution of slavery. Grace's ancestors may not have owned slaves, but we can be fairly sure that they supported the institution of slavery. At the time almost all poor whites did, and it directly benefitted them by placing them higher in the racial and class hierarchy.

Eating Alabama therefore has the unfortunate quality of erasing history in order to promote a romantic, whitened notion of how the food movement should organize based on a mythical past.

"An unsustainable model for sustainability"

Grace knows all this, or at least, has reservations about the romanticization of rural culture and yeoman farming. Throughout the film, he constantly asks himself "am I being naive?" and "why am I romanticizing?"

While Grace's film depicts his year of pursuing this white farming ideal, he remains ambivalent about its viability as an alternative to the current industrial food system, leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether he is, indeed, romanticizing. At one point he asks whether his lifestyle experiment is "an unsustainable model for sustainability."

Unfortunately, Grace fails to pursue his doubts to what could have been a different conclusion - that while his year of "living sustainably" may not be viable for most people, it is also not the only alternative to industrial food out there. Grace and many other local food advocates fail to see that many of the people who have always been systematically excluded from industrial agriculture have already evolved alternative institutions to aid and promote the well-being and economic security of small farms.

Viable alternatives

Blacks have never been included in industrial agriculture.  The recently concluded Pigford v. Glickman settlement says as much.  As I mentioned in a previous post, black farmers have therefore developed alternative institutions to bolster small farms. Tuskegee University, founded in 1881, has been aiding small farmers for over a century.  Alabama A&M, a historically-black land grant university and one of the so-called 1890 schools, has also been at the service of the small farm for many years and is the host of the Small Farms Research Center.  And finally, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) has been fighting for small farmers since 1967.

A cooperative is a method of organizing farmers which allows them to build economies of scale to ensure economic security and sustainability.  Basically, in a cooperative, groups of farmers come together to market collectively, all sharing equal ownership in the business.  Instead of just serving local markets, they can access regional, national, and even international markets, all while preserving the viability of the small farm.  This is a more practical, real-world alternative to industrialized agriculture than the white farm imaginary, and should serve, at the least, as an organizing principle for the alternative food and agriculture movement.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the FSC's 45th anniversary celebration. What was clear to me throughout the evening was that the members of the Federation have a deep and abiding sense of social and economic justice. They serve limited resource and minority farmers to keep them as viable business entities.

The white faction of the alternative food and agriculture movement can learn a lot from this practical, pragmatic, and serious dedication to the oppressed and exploited. The FSC grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, and they see themselves as carrying on that tradition. Isn't that a better story to tell about food and agriculture?