A review of Weighing In (Julie Guthman, UC Press, 2011)

As anyone in the food movement can tell you, obesity has become the singular issue of the movement. In her new book Weighing In, geographer Julie Guthman of the University of California, Santa Cruz, sets her sights squarely on the singularity of this issue, arguing that "Those who want to redress the problem [of obesity] put a great deal of effort into educating people to make better choices rather than into reforming the policies that allow bad food to be produced or mitigating the consequences for those harmed."

She does not stop there.  She goes on to lambast BMI (body mass index) as a blunt instrument and to skewer obesity alleviation programs that focus too much on individual choice.  Guthman argues that something called "healthism" - the attachment of a moral or ethical component to decisions made regarding health, and especially food - has turned the food movement into a sort of evangelical effort to influence the lifestyle of individuals.  That lifestyle, Guthman argues, will have very little effect on obesity, because the most likely culprit for the increase in obesity is not overeating and lack of exercise, but obesogens - environmental toxins and other substances thought to cause obesity by disrupting the endocrine system and stimulating estrogen production.

Her arguments hold together thus far; it is convincing that individual choice is much too central in the food movement today, particularly with the dearth of policy oriented work, and her arguments for environmental obesogens are backed by convincing evidence.  However, her assertion that the creation of alternative food institutions should be abandoned in favor of policy and anti-capitalist work rings of the ivory tower, a quality unfortunate in much Marxist critique.

While Guthman is correct to attempt to move the food movement away from individual choice and towards more traditional social movement interventions, she fails to see the wisdom in creating the alternative institutions necessary to replace capitalist agriculture.  Both anti-capitalist and policy work need to be a central focus of the food movement, because the institutional context in which food is produced creates obesogens and other types of toxic food.  Guthman gets this right.  However, it is also necessary to create an alternative institutional context that can eventually replace the existing ones.  Together, these are the creation and destruction of social change.

Guthman's book is a necessary read for anyone in the food movement.  It tackles the cutting edge questions of the day, undermines much of the institutionalization (and probably co-optation) of the local food movement, and provides a strong anti-capitalist vision for the future of the movement.  Hers is a timely and profound voice calling the movement back to its justice-oriented roots. Listen to her.

Bittman Misses the Mark

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman unfortunately misses the point when he argues that healthy food is in fact less expensive the unhealthy food. His solution, that all that needs to change is the consumer culture surrounding food, privileges consumer activism over more substantial interventions such as changing production systems or the farm bill.  Bittman is arguing, like most bourgeoisie, that all we need for food outcomes to change is for the poor to adopt the culture of the middle class and wealthy.  This disavows bearers of this "legitimate culture" from any responsibility for food systems change, placing the onus squarely on the shoulders of the poor.

Bourdieu has shown that the poor and working people develop a taste for necessity. The most basic foods that are high in salt, sugars, and fats are the easiest to prepare and the most readily accessible; therefore, working class food culture emerges around the consumption and preparation of this sort of food.  This culture is a function of the social position of the bearer of working class culture.

The best and most lasting way to change the food practices associated with working class culture is to change the social position of the bearer of that culture.  In other words, wealth and prestige are far more important in transforming unhealthy food practices than somehow getting the poor to change their culture.  Culture does not change in the manner that Bittman proposes - it changes in concert with changes in the social structure; also, it is quite patronizing to tell poor and working people how to eat.

What should be the focus instead is the creation of an urban food system in so-called food deserts that will increase incomes and remove the stigma of poor and working people.  People's culture will then change as a result, becoming congruent with a food system that produces both good jobs and healthy food.

Obesity as Violence

This post is inspired by Live Real's Food and Freedom Rides that I was fortunate enough to participate in this weekend.  Live Real's mission is to change the food system and they characterize the food system as perpetuating violence through obesity and other diet related illnesses.  I find this to be a profoundly important approach to obesity, and I want to use this post to meditate on the ideas of violence and obesity that Live Real's fellows addressed during their event at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham.

Part of Live Real's idea is, obviously, to connect the struggle for food justice to the struggle against segregation in the 1960s.  The Civil Rights Movement was met with overt violence in the form of beatings, murders, dogs, and fire hoses, but Live Real asserts that obesity and diabetes are also forms of violence.  At first this seems like an odd comparison.  The perpetrators of the violence during the Civil Rights Movement were obvious - Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan, and the police, while the perpetrators of obesity are less obvious and less easy to identify.  However, upon further examination, the two forms of violence are not so different; in fact, they are quite similar.

I tend to shy away from individualistic solutions to complex problems.  It can certainly be said that Bull Connor, the Klan, and the police were products of their environment.  For these perpetrators, white supremacy was as normal as the sun rising in the east, and those violating white supremacy were the actual perpetrators.  This does not excuse Connor's, the Klan's or other's behavior, but it merely points out that the true perpetrator of the violence, or at least the beliefs underpinning that violence, was white supremacy which still exists today.

Likewise, the food system that makes us obese and unhealthy is underpinned by a belief that greed will allocate food resources equitably.  The food system is founded on the assumption that corporations acting with the sole interest of making profit will somehow produce high quality food for the most disadvantaged people.  In other words, like white supremacy, the logic of the for-profit food system harms or causes violence to the poor and people of color through its normal operation, and, indeed, those who claim the right to food can be seen as violating the norms of food markets.  What is clear is that the murder of Civil Rights workers and the obesity "epidemic," while different, are the violent consequences of unjust systems - white supremacy and the food system, respectively.

Finally, I do not want to minimize the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.  Murder is not really something that modern activists in the US face on a daily basis, though, apparently police repression is still very real and very racialized.  Still, we don't face the same risks as our elders faced.  Even the nature of the violence is less overt and more covert and insidious.  Obesity, as an embodied form of injustice, kills over the long term while murder kills immediately.  Nowadays, injustice is less visible and in some ways more difficult to address, but it doesn't carry with it the dangers that battling injustices of the past carried.

Downtown Stadium is a Strikeout

It has been interesting to watch news people, politicians, and the business community salivate over the proposed $50 million dollar baseball park adjacent to Railroad Park.  Without fail, proponents cite the positive economic impact and the redevelopment of properties between UAB and 1st Ave North, and without fail there are no dissenters among the voices.

Well, count me among the dissenters.  The academic research on sports stadiums shows that these stadiums benefit investors, owners, and players and no one else.  Some highlights of the research follow:

• According to Calvin Jones in the Journal of Environmenal Planning A, sports stadiums contribute to uneven development between and within cities (think spatial injustice from previous post).
• According to Robert Baade and Richard Dye in Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy, "the presence of a new or renovated stadium has an uncertain impact on the levels of personal income and possibly a negative impact on local development relative to the region. These results should serve as a caution to those who assume or assert a large positive stadium impact."
• Baade again argues in the Journal of Urban Affairs that "(t)o attract or retain a team, cities are offering staggering financial support and rationalize their largesse on economic grounds. Do professional sports increase income and create jobs in amounts that justify the behavior of cities? The evidence detailed in this paper fails to support such a rationale. The primary beneficiaries of subsidies are the owners and players, not the taxpaying public."
• Adam Zaretsky argues in the April 2001 issue of the Regional Economist, a publication of the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, that "the use of public funds to lure or keep teams begs several questions, the foremost of which is, 'Are these good investments for cities?' The short answer to this question is 'No.' When studying this issue, almost all economists and development specialists (at least those who work independently and not for a chamber of commerce or similar organization) conclude that the rate of return a city or metropolitan area receives for its investment is generally below that of alternative projects. In addition, evidence suggests that cities and metro areas that have invested heavily in sports stadiums and arenas have, on average, experienced slower income growth than those that have not."

Clearly, stadiums do not benefit the majority of the taxpayers and under some circumstances may actually harm them.  Those that benefit from the subsidy are those that seek to gain the most from the development: real estate magnates benefiting from rising land values, investors in businesses in the surrounding entertainment district, and politicians with more money for their projects.  No cities build baseball stadiums with public money anymore, specifically because there are few public benefits and legions of private sector benefits.

If Birmingham Barons owner Don Logan wants to move the Barons back to Birmingham, he should assemble his own investors. God forbid that he put his own cash up for the stadium [/sarcasm].  It is understandable that Birmingham wants to follow the lead of many cities in turning downtown into a playground for the rich, but careful attention to the research reveals that the benefits from such redevelopment never actually trickle down.

Birmingham needs a municipal economics built on service to the least fortunate, not the most fortunate.  Parkside stadium strikes out in this regard.

Race in Birmingham

Reinventing Our Community: Can Metro Birmingham Move Beyond Race?

This is a pretty good analysis by the Birmingham News.  My only complaint is that the attention to black flight is misleading.  While suburbs in metro Birmingham may be more diverse than in recent years, Birmingham is still the most segregated metro area in the South and 15th most segregated in the nation.  Stay tuned, we have research on race and the local food movement in Birmingham coming out in the next year.

Food access is not the answer

Today's LA Times article on food access and obesity confirms what I have been suggesting throughout this entire blog.

Eating healthy is a question of having money, not of having access to food outlets. Poor folks are going to buy the cheapest food even if a conventional grocery store with healthier options exists. The quickest way to improve people's diet is to increase their income. 

The food movement up to this point has centered on technical fixes to obesity - namely, increasing access to healthy food - but what is needed are interventions that combine community economic development with increased food access. Main Street Birmingham and Project Hopewell are developing public markets in Southwest Birmingham for precisely this reason, but this project is only one piece of the solution.

Birmingham needs comprehensive community economic development beginning with food production through urban farms and possibly aquaponics cooperatives, proceeding to value-added products such as cakes, breads, and jams, and ending with the public markets that are being created.  Comprehensive projects like these will increase access to healthy food, raise incomes, provide employment, and integrate food within every aspect of community life.

These projects are inherently political in the sense that they challenge dominant economic development paradigms that center on financial power, instead devolving control to individual entrepreneurs and in ideal cases, worker-owners of a cooperative.  This stands in stark contrast to the ill-conceived and ineffective focus on access.

The pieces are in place to do real community economic development around food, and the time is now to shift the movement from technical fixes to revolutionary projects.

Why Health is Really a Stand-in for Class

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reveals in his seminal text Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste that lifestyle is a function of an individual's position in society.  In "America's Fittest Cities," Atlantic blogger Richard Florida shows how those lifestyles are a function of uneven economic development in the US. In the rankings of the fittest Americans, "fitness" tracts roughly onto the division of labor between American cities.

Working class, poorer cities are "unfit," while wealthy cities with heavy knowledge industries are "fit."  The lifestyle dubbed healthy by the CDC and others is the lifestyle most appropriate to the labor market best characterized as post-industrial, information-oriented, and "creative," while the least "fit" lifestyles are associated with heavy industry and manufacturing, remnants of an older economic paradigm.

Think of it this way: the assembly line nature of fast food is more congruent with vertically integrated heavy industry or Fordism, while farmer's markets are more in line with creative, flexible, knowledge-based industries.  Foodies are more or less producing the food system of neoliberalism and flexible accumulation.  In other words, the people who have the "healthiest" lifestyle are the most affluent and they use the notion of health to legitimate and generalize the culture and lifestyle associated with affluence.

Simply put, the idea of an objectively healthy lifestyle serves more to legitimate the wealthy than it does to actually address the health needs of the exploited.

As I have said in previous posts, good food is a human right, and what counts as good food or a healthy lifestyle should be determined by those living that lifestyle - not by technocrats at the Health and Human Services and the Center for Disease Control.  These organizations base the assumptions of fitness for their research on the lifestyles of the elite.

For instance, the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (creepy name), on which the AFI is based, opens the exercise section with the question "During the past month, other than your regular job, did you participate in any physical activities or exercises such as running, calisthenics, golf, gardening, or walking for exercise?"  So the activity of an auto mechanic or construction worker during their regular job doesn't count as exercise?  Obviously, the question is remarkably biased in favor of those who do sedentary work and exercise for leisure - biased in favor of the lifestyle of the wealthy.  By the very structure of the survey, a working class person cannot be as fit as an elite.

Of course, there are negative health effects to not being wealthy, such as lack of adequate food and stress, but food activists should connect these to the unevenness associated with economic development and not try to generalize one, elitist culture of health and fitness for everyone.  At its root, food injustice is economic injustice.  This should be the starting point.

Hometown Boy?

I've done alright for myself.  I was on the college track as a high school student, but during my senior year I abandoned that path and became an auto mechanic.  My parents were horrified.

Mostly, what I can say about being an auto mechanic was that it gave me a unique insight into race and class, my current intellectual preoccupations, but this insight only developed after I got to college and began reading critical literature on race and economics.  My personal experience as a working class person appeared as exploitation with the right framework, and the clear exclusion of blacks from higher-paying, white collar jobs was only recognizable through the lens of race theory.

Now, I see the world through these lenses and I observe how both race and class shape the local food movement, economic development, and alternatives in the Birmingham region, my home.  What I bring to the table is clarity about the political-economic framework under which most of this activity happens. 

Not everything that is billed as universally good is, and not everything billed as parochial is bad.  Different groups with vastly different experiences need different sorts of responses from business and government, and the notion that "we can all just get along" may be true, but it has to be a getting along that recognizes difference and doesn't universalize one way of being (which, in the end, tends to universalize the being of the rich and powerful, as evidenced by my discussion of obesity in the last post).

Finally, I consider myself to be in the tradition of the great Southern eccentrics -  William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, and Hunter S. Thompson.  And, like them, I wrestle with the beauty and brutality of the South, with its persistent racism and sexism, and the Southern belief that being poor is somehow noble (and therefore not challenged).

I'm also increasingly concerned with the ubiquity of the Christian religion in the South and its use as the connective tissue of community, following Martin King's formula.  This seems like a highly exclusionary way to construct community and reveals the problem of creating community through difference.

Ultimately, I would like Birmingham, and by extension Alabama and the South, to transform into a progressive, open society that celebrates, instead of mourns, its past.

Let's stop talking about obesity.

I'm glad Eric Schlosser has publicly adopted the food justice paradigm in his recent Washington Post op-ed, Why being a foodie isn't 'elitist.'

I'm saddened that it took criticism from industrial food advocates to finally gain acknowledgment that food justice is the only acceptable paradigm for the food movement, and that years of criticism from food justice advocates went ignored.  Unfortunately, because of this, Schlosser appears to wield the poor as a political tool instead of having a true dedication to the plight of the oppressed. Anyone with any significant involvement with the food movement (I have been involved in both Alabama and North Carolina) should recognize that the movement has absolutely no answers for the poor and that most movement interventions are targeted at the privileged-lifestyle left.

Leaders like Schlosser may finally be understanding the necessity of addressing injustice for a movement to be successful, but the practices of the rank-and-file in the movement only reinforce its elitist status. Farmer's markets in trendy neighborhoods, $800-a-year CSAs and cooking demonstrations are no substitute for a robust policy agenda that genuinely remakes the food system.

While I'm glad Schlosser is on the right side, I'm cynical about his motivations. I wonder how much work he has actually done in poor neighborhoods and his argument seems like one of political convenience. Furthermore, to suggest that the food movement has any workable answers (i.e. empowerment not charity) to issues of hunger and food insecurity is to either be completely naive or outright lying.

The fact of the matter is that the industrial food system produces affordable food, and the food movement does not. Industrial food advocates are right - the food movement is elitist, but Schlosser's arguments are a step in the right direction. I have another step to suggest.

Let's stop talking about obesity.  Medical professionals have long branded the poor and oppressed as deviant, alternately disciplining that deviance with punishment and working to change that deviance through medical intervention. All the talk about obesity serves the purpose of branding the poor as deviant because they are poor - it further "others" them. Moreover, the BMI was developed using white bodies as the norm, meaning as usual, whiteness becomes the standard by which all others are judged.

The poor deserve good food because they are human beings, not because it is our ("the privileged's") job to ensure that they meet some standard of bodily normality. They also deserve the option to be allowed to choose bad food.  In fact, this line of reasoning calls into question whether largely white leaders like Michael Pollan and Schlosser (and myself for that matter) should have any say at all about how food is produced, distributed and consumed among the poor. Food sovereignty should be the goal, not technocratic fixes to bodies constructed as deviant by medical science.

Schlosser's op-ed is a step in the right direction. Now the question is, are the poor going to serve as a political volleyball, or is the movement going to bend towards a real justice paradigm?

Constitution Reform Coopted?

In an admirable display of political dexterity, Alabama Republicans may have demobilized an entire movement and successfully co-opted their agenda, all while delivering for their powerful friends.

What am I talking about? Alabama State Senator Del Marsh's (R-Anniston) plan to remake the Alabama constitution in favor of his buddies. Naturally, the tax code is way off limits, meaning that our current tax code which punishes the poor will remain firmly in place.

Home rule makes the cut, but with a commission made entirely of Republicans, it is fair to say county commissions won't be given too much more power, especially in the realm of taxation.

I can just see Marsh now, running for governor, claiming the mantel of bipartisan reformer and raking in donations from the new plantation owners (timber) - who seem to be cut from the same mold as the old plantation owners (cotton).

Sadly, the response from the Alabama left has ranged from adulation to giddiness.

Nevertheless, this represents an opportunity and possibly even a significant misstep by Republicans, if played right by reformers. No longer is constitution reform a fringe issue of the left, but a mainstream reform on which everyone agrees. All that remains is to determine the rules engagement.

Republicans have fired the first salvo. Liberals and leftists should waste no time firing back. They should make it known that constitution reform is only legitimate if it includes:

1. Tax code reform
2. Limited but significant home rule
3. The commission should be composed of leaders from civil society, business, and government, not just government.
4. The commission should consist of a group representative of Alabama's diversity of opinions and backgrounds, not just Republicans

There is plenty more, but what I'm trying to say is that the left needs to quickly produce a counter plan that questions the very framework set up by the Republicans and attempt to push constitution reform onto more friendly turf.

Reformers have worked for years to get to this point and, as Yoda said on the eve of the Clone Wars, "now the time is."

[Ed. note: Zac is a nerd.]

Reclaiming our Right to the City

Influential French philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued that justice in late capitalism is about the "right to the city."  In this he meant that not only outcomes are important, but more so control over the processes that produce those outcomes.

As this blog makes abundantly clear, I am concerned about control over the processes of food production, particularly by those made hungry by the food system. There are many ways to do this: experiments with food policy councils produced mixed results, some effective but undemocratic, some democratic and ineffective, and so on. Still, the notion that city dwellers - the racially, economically and socially oppressed especially - should control the process of food production can be expanded to an understanding of related and parallel processes and should provide opportunities for alliance building.

Take, for example, housing. Substandard housing exists in areas that have been abandoned by whites and capital. Because poverty almost always corresponds with these areas, real estate investors are dis-incentivized to put money into housing in those neighborhoods. Why invest in an inner city when the suburbs are much more profitable?

Now, consider the phenomena of food deserts - geographic areas that lack traditional grocery stores or outlets for healthy food in general. These areas are served primarily by convenience stores and fast food restaurants. The process behind the production of food deserts and the production of substandard housing are exactly the same. Like real estate investors, grocers see no need to invest in inner city neighborhoods when suburbs offer a larger market.

What is clear is that substandard housing, food deserts, and poverty are located spatially in the same geographic area and that the processes producing these conditions are far outside the control of the residents of inner city neighborhoods.

A closer examination of injustice in transit, health, jobs, environmental degradation and other spheres reveals that injustice is almost always located in the same geographic area, and this spatial injustice underpins the potential for the building of transformational alliances. Housing advocates, food justice activists and others are natural allies in the struggle against the non- or anti-democratic processes of the global economy.

These allies must struggle to regain control of the city, to reclaim the processes making their neighborhood, and yes, to assert what Lefebvre called their right to the city.

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.

The Allen Plan and Ways Forward

Will Allen's Plan: Providing food, jobs  

Until very recently, the typical strategy for a local faction of the alternative agriculture movement included farmers markets, subscription plans, institutional purchasing and distributorships.  This approach appealed to high end buyers, supported small family farms, and focused almost myopically on market-based solutions to the small farm crisis.  However, this path can go only so far as the high capital turnover times in agriculture, stemming from high production times, make agriculture a poor investment.  

Consider an investor looking at an investment in steel production or in agriculture.  Since turnover times are much shorter in steel production than in agriculture, it makes good sense for the investor to invest in steel. Investors are more likely to invest in steel than agriculture because it takes longer to make a tomato than to make steel. This is why American agriculture is subsidized to the tune of 16 billion dollars a year, subsidies which allow large farmers to market at below the cost of production and make farming a lucrative investment. With the current structure of subsidies, the small family farm and urban agriculture will never be a good investment because of the natural limitations to agricultural production and the lack of government support for these enterprises.


While national level subsidies are unlikely to change in the near future, subsidies for local agriculture can be developed by state and local governments. In fact, fiscal sustainability and growth for urban and local agriculture hinges on the ability to leverage support from governments. 

I want to next outline a simple, but effective policies and arguments to push local governments towards subsidies for local and urban agriculture.

• Argument: The region has a legacy of agricultural production, and that legacy should be protected by the government.  

Policy tools: land trusts, tax abatement, agricultural zoning

• Argument: Local agriculture produces jobs and economic development (see Allen Plan).  

Policy tools: direct payment, land trusts, tax abatement, agricultural job training programs, increased availability of public land for agricultural production, "sin" taxes on high fructose corn syrup and other bad foods earmarked for ag. 

•  Argument: Local agriculture relieves food insecurity through economic development and providing access to healthy food.  (The single most important item for addressing food insecurity is economic development.  People have little to eat because they are poor and eat bad food because it is cheap).  

Policy tools: direct payment, land trusts, tax abatements, agricultural job training programs, subsidized farmers markets (municipality pays farmers to provide fruits and vegetables at a discounted price), institutional purchasing, increased availability of public land for agricultural production, "sin" taxes on high fructose corn syrup and other bad foods with proceeds earmarked for ag.

While this is not an exhaustive list, the strategy is markedly different from previous strategies in that it focuses heavily on government-subsidized economic development and relief of food insecurity. 

It also operates on the assumption that food is urbanizing quickly, a reflection of urbanization processes across the globe, and attempts to develop a strategy appropriate for that urbanization.  Even many farmers who may consider themselves rural are in fact in metropolitan areas, and, clearly, they are utilizing urban markets.  

Ultimately, the goal is to eliminate the food system that produces, primarily, hunger, food insecurity, and bad food, and replace it with an urban-based food system that distributes good food fairly and sustainably.