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.
