Many structures, including settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy, drive problems in the food system. In response, food justice movements center the importance of racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, feminist praxis, decolonial praxis, and other progressive and radical orientations.
How do food justice activists go from identifying the problems stemming from entrenched systems to actualizing their political commitments?
Kirsten Valentine Cadieux and Rachel Slocum offer a set of food justice organizing nodes that encompass a wide range of work:
1) Trauma and Inequity
2) Exchange
3) Land and
4) Labor
The Colorado Food Justice Toolkit centers conditions and actions at each of these nodes. As Cadieux and Slocum explain in more detail food justice organizing can entail:
-
Acknowledging and confronting historical, collective social trauma and persistent race, gender, and class inequalities
-
Designing exchange mechanisms that build communal reliance and control
-
Creating innovative ways to control, use, share, own, manage and conceive of land, and ecologies in general, that place them outside the speculative market and the rationale of extraction
-
Pursuing labor relations that guarantee a minimum income and are neither alienating nor dependent on (unpaid) social reproduction by women