A Farming and Food Justice Reading List
By: Alicia Kennedy
Tags: Food, Capitalism, Books, Farming, Equality

While the COVID-19 crisis continues to ravage the global population, food workers in the United States have been especially hard hit. From the meat-processing plants deemed “essential” business to the farms where produce is grown, keeping the industrial food supply moving has meant many low-wage, mostly immigrant workers are putting their lives at risk so that supermarkets continue to be well-stocked.

That makes it more imperative than ever to read up on food justice movements and how industrialized, corporate food took over the world. Among Black farmers, especially, there has always been a radical element to working on the land. As Ashley Gripper recently wrote at Environmental Health News:

While some dominant modern narratives talk about urban agriculture as an innovative way to build community and fight food insecurity, Black folks in this country have been growing food in cities for as long as they have lived in cities. Before that, our ancestors lived in deep relationship with the land.

Here, six books to read to deepen an understanding of the connections between farming and food justice.

Dr. White is assistant professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in this book, she reframes agriculture — commonly and historically understood as a site of Black oppression — as a place of liberation. “This book recovers the efforts of black land- owners as well as the civil rights activism of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers,” she writes in the first chapter. “It focuses its attention on those who refused to migrate and who fought to stay in the South and maintain communities around agriculture. This book is an effort to recover, tell, and honor the stories of collective agency and community resilience of the black rural poor, a group the civil rights movement left behind.”

Penniman runs Soul Fire Farm and has been a go-to source on how Black communities can reclaim their relationship to the land and plant-based foods. More than a book, this is a comprehensive how-to manual. “Some of our most cherished sustainable farming practices have roots in African wisdom,” she writes. “Yet, discrimination and violence against African-American farmers has led to their decline from 14 percent of all growers in 1920 to less than 2 percent today, with a corresponding loss of over 14 million acres of land.”

Broad’s book looks at community-based solutions in urban agriculture, nutrition education, and food-related social enterprises that have been able to fight back against industrial food and capitalism’s strategic enactment of food apartheid, which keeps the wealthy in constant supply of food and low-income communities of color struggling to find fresh options.

Patel is an expert on the failures of the global food system within the “conventional” supply chain, which looks at U.S. policy and more to explain why distribution remains a massive issue in worldwide hunger.

5. ‘Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice’ by Eric Holt Giménez and Raj Patel

Giménez has written another of my favorite books, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, which explains how a global food economy based on profit fails on multiple levels. Here, along with Patel, they document the ways in which people have come together to fight the the industrial food system.

How does fatphobia play into the hands of capitalism and the industrialized food system? Here Guthman takes to task the touted ways in which “obesity” has been discussed, noting there are classist and racist elements at play that ignore environmental and economic realities.