Alternative Foods, Activism and Strawberries in California - Books & ideas
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For instance, because the local food movement has come to cater to relatively wealthy consumers, the food justice movement has been trying to create alternative sources of food in lower-income areas, many of which are populated by non-white people. The idea is to provide healthier, local food to people who live in food deserts: places with little access to fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products, places where there were only convenient stores and liquor stores. There has been enormous effort in the last decade to set up community gardens, produce delivery services, farmers’ markets in those neighborhoods. But as my students came to see, much of these efforts are coming from white, affluent people, and are almost a missionary practice. Like most missionary practices, they often don’t resonate in neighborhoods that they are trying to serve. Many people living in those neighborhoods just want a supermarket to be located there, and they don’t want the white hippies telling them what to eat. I wrote an article on this that’s been widely circulated [4]. I have seen how this type of friendly critique helps move the conversation forward. Many of these organizations are now very conscious of the problem and work hard to address the needs of community residents. This is just one example where scholarly critiques have generated a positive response in alternative food movements, which has changed its discourse.
So much of food studies has becoming focused on assessing the alternatives, with a kind of more activist orientation. I started that trend and I have to confess I am a little tired of it now, even when it is not entirely laudatory and uncritical. Organics, community gardens, farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, food justice are good topics, but these represent a minute percentage of how food is produced and distributed. It’s obviously a lot easier to study people in a community garden or a farmer’s markets than understand how a complex supply chain works, especially given that so much information is proprietary.
Still, there are new trends that deserve studying. I just put in a proposal for a multicampus collaboration on “science, technology and the future of food” which I hope will be a platform to encourage new directions in food studies. The hope is to look at new food inventions such as in vitro meat or plant proteins as substitutes for eggs, and understand how the boundaries of what constitutes food are being reshaped by such inventions.