Featured Title
- Upsetting Food : Three Eras of Food Protests in the United States Battle lines have long been drawn over how food is produced, what food is made available to whom, and how best to protect consumers from risky or unhealthy food. Jeffrey Haydu resurrects the history of food reform and protest in Upsetting Food, showing how activists defined food problems, articulated solutions, and mobilized for change in the United States. Haydu's sociological history starts in the 1830s with diet reformer Sylvester Graham, who blamed alcohol and store-bought bread--signs of a commercializing urban society--for poor health and moral decline. His successors at the turn of the twentieth century rallied against impure food and pushed for women to be schooled in scientific food preparation and nutrition. Decades later, in the 1960s and '70s, a grassroots movement for organic food battled commercial food production in favor of food grown ecologically, by small farmers, and without artificial chemicals. Each campaign raised doubts about food safety, health, and transparency, reflecting how a capitalist system can undermine trust in food. But Haydu also considers how each movement reflects the politics, inequalities, and gender relations of its time. And he traces how outcomes of each campaign laid the groundwork for the next. The three eras thus come together as parts of a single, recurring food movement. Upsetting Food offers readers a historical background to better understand contemporary and contentious food politics.
Related Guides
About Food Justice
This is a guide to scholarly sources as well as local resources on the topic of Food Justice.
Featured Project
- Urban Food Stories The Urban Food Stories project was started by Professor Julian Agyeman and a group of students in his first Food Justice: Critical Approaches on Policy and Planning class in the Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning program at Tufts University who believe that storytelling has an important role in urban planning and food justice.
Featured Article
- "The Practice of Food Justice: How Food Hubs Negotiate Race and Place in the Eastern United States." Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (Wiley) Despite aspirations toward more equitable and sustainable food systems, alternative food movements have been critiqued for reproducing the inequalities of the agrifood system they contest. This article examines the challenges a group of justice-oriented food hubs face in integrating racial justice into their work. We ask whether the financial pressures of enacting alternative approaches to food hub work within market logics can squeeze out racial justice goals. We find that dominant framings of alternative food movements diminish Black activism. We argue that justice-oriented food hubs can get caught in a “justice trap” similar to the “local trap”—the tendency to assume that the local scale is inherently desirable and leads to a socially just food system. The notion of a justice trap signals the assumption that what constitutes justice in the food system is self-evident and that different forms of justice are automatically subsumed within the general concept of “food justice.” Our analysis indicates that the justice trap arises from an inability to articulate the racial justice implications of the everyday realities of running organizations within the market logics that dominate even alternative food movements.
Librarian
This guide was originally authored by Chris Smith, April, 2023.