Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building A Better Movement

Anthropologist Garth (Food in Cuba) offers a piercing ethnographic study of the power dynamics and misunderstandings that plague “food justice” nonprofits operating in Los Angeles’s predominantly Latino South Central neighborhood. Exploring the question of what happens when primarily white, well-off activists decide to solve food-related problems in places they don’t live, she shows that it typically leads to insulting interventions (such as teaching women how to cook unseasoned chicken) and assimilationist assumptions—i.e., that eating healthy means eating like white people. (“[We’re] here to... get them to stop eating things like tortillas... and eat things like Brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, you know healthy food,” one nonprofit executive director states.) Having spent 12 years embedded in the L.A. activism world, Garth is able to follow individual activists’ journey toward disillusionment—a number of them, like one who begins to perceive her organization as a “revolving door of ‘fancy’ master’s graduates who never stayed long enough to do anything substantive,” eventually decamp for more “grassroots-oriented” movements that they feel are genuinely addressing the root causes of food inequity, like the anti-gentrification and “land justice” movements. This casts a harsh light on the professional nonprofit world and provides a nuanced window into mechanisms of power within lefty activism circles. (Feb.)