Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability

Popularized by such best-selling authors as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser, a growing movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fresh produced on local family farms. But many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have been systematically deprived of access to healthy and sustainable food. These communities have been actively prevented from producing their own and often live in food deserts where fast is more common than fresh food. Cultivating Food Justice describes their efforts to envision and create environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives to the system. Bringing together insights from studies of environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, critical race theory, and studies, Cultivating Food Justice highlights the ways race and class inequalities permeate the system, from production to distribution to consumption. The studies offered in the book explore a range of important issues, including agricultural and land use policies that systematically disadvantage Native American, African American, Latino/a, and Asian American farmers and farmworkers; access problems in both urban and rural areas; efforts to create sustainable local systems in low-income communities of color; and future directions for the justice movement. These diverse accounts of the relationships among food, environmentalism, justice, race, and identity will help guide efforts to achieve a just and sustainable agriculture.