Food Justice

The term Food Justice emerges within grassroots communities working for social change through food systems.  Participants within the Food Justice movement recognize and work to address structural inequalities inherent within the production, distribution, and consumption of industrial foods, specifically recognizing issues of race, class, privilege, and oppression that often go unmentioned even in conversations surrounding organic foods and the Slow Food movement.

Communities who are affected by food injustices include inner city residents who do not have access to affordable, nutritious food; farm laborers who are exposed to dangerous pesticides and fertilizers; small farmers who are systematically disenfranchised from government subsidies; residents of communities throughout the United States whose water and food is contaminated by industrial chemicals and hormones as a result of factory farming, and farmers throughout the Global South whose markets are flooded by overwhelming quantities of subsidized industrial crops, thereby driving down the price they can get for food grown for local consumption.

Planting Justice specifically addresses food injustices by growing food with and for people who structurally don't have access to affordable, nutritious food; by holding free educational workshops at Oakland schools that involve students throughout all the stages of building a permaculture garden; by providing job training to local youth, medium-security prisoners at San Quentin, and other disenfranchised people; and working to create living wage jobs that improve the health and food security of urban communities.