Introduction: Operationalizing Food Justice and Sustainability

Social scientists often use the term "operationalize" to mean defining a variable in a precise way so that it can be properly measured. This form of the word means that we take a variable and make it empirically useful. I hope to do something slightly different, but perhaps related, with the terminology of food justice and sustainability for this special issue of Theory in Action. What I want to do is make the terms theoretically useful-at least in the context of this special issue and, perhaps, in larger discussions about food justice ("sustainability" has likely, at this point, become enough of a populist mush that I don't really have the same hopes for having any impact with it).Let me begin with food justice. I don't want to go into a detailed history of concepts of justice or the oft-used and incredibly stretched and broad notion of "social justice" that attracts so many scholars, nonprofits, liberals, corporations, radicals, politicians, and progressives contemporarily (one might consider, however, if all of these various actors are for a thing called "social justice," just how much meaning the term can have if it isn't operationalized-made theoretically useful-in a given context). On one hand, "justice" is the language we inherited to talk about concepts of individual and social goods often rooted in classical liberal ideas bound up with conceptions of an unspoken social contract that balances freedom and equality under formal legal instruments guaranteed by the state-ostensibly guarding us against a war of each against each (Rousseau 1947; Hobbes 1991; Rawls 1971). On the other hand, and certainly pertinent to the contents of this special issue, one might consider the many criticisms of those approaches to justice-and the classical liberal, capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and statist frameworks from which they arise-from feminists (see e.g. Pateman 1988) to anti-racists (see e.g. Mills 1997) to left libertarians (see especially Perlman 1983) and, of course, to Marx's (1977) blistering critique of political economy. It could be argued that making understandings of food justice useful requires some baselines with a deep and abiding respect for a certain range of disagreement (for an excellent discussion, and one attempt at doing just this, see DePuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011).I do think we can trace some baseline agreements from recent scholarship and organizing around food justice. For example, in Alkon and Agyeman's (2011) excellent collection one finds a number of authors and activists arguing for conceptions of food justice by looking critically at racism, class exploitation, and sexism in institutionalized contexts surrounding contemporary food systems. In this collection, consumers of food and agricultural producers of food are both looked at through a critical lens. Similarly, Gottlieb and Joshi (2012: 5) look at contemporary food systems by, likewise, locating them in the historical context of various relations of inequality, looking for ways to "open up.. .pathways for social and political action."This gives us a good start for defining food justice as both a negative project-one that rejects structured inequalities-as well as a positive project-one that seeks "to transform where, what, and how food is grown, produced, transported, accessed, and eaten" (Gottlieb and Joshi 2012: 5). A good beginning, then, might be utilizing the feminist concept of intersectionality, recognizing the intersections of multiple and overlapping relations of domination as they relate to the food system. But that can only be a beginning. While intersectionality gives us a good start for analyzing the ways that multiple identities shape our social lives and affect our life chances, if one is not careful, it can be easy to overlook relations of inequality that do not necessarily arise from identities (see Rogue and Volcano 2012). Minkoff-Zem, Peluso, Sowerwine, and Getz (2011), for example, point to the case of Hmong refugees in California, who were victims of the latent effects of legislation intended to protect agricultural workers, but which dismpted their cultural practices of farming-both because of processes of racial formation in state policy and because of their social locations as governed social subjects under the state. …