How We Are Hungry: Reconciling the growing appetite for local food with food insecurity in urban America

Ariel Diliberto Vassar College Independent Program, Urban Ecology May 3, 2011

Senior Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree in the Independent Program

_________________________________________________________ Adviser, Lisa Brawley _________________________________________________________ Adviser, Tim Koechlin

Abstract Local agriculture is simultaneously a social movement, consumer trend, business model, policy focus, and planning fixation. A substantial proportion of the activity surrounding urban and regional agriculture incorporates at least a tenet of social justice. Yet local food activism must navigate the fine line between using food as a lens to understand the underlying causes of social injusticenamely poverty and inequalityand allowing food to become a myopic focusan ends rather than a means to solve structural problems. This thesis examines how urban and regional agriculture projects have managed this tension, and how the use of food as a tool for greater change in cities can be advanced. The ultimate goal is to inspire a more radical mandate among urban and regional agriculture advocates, one in which food is seen as one of several potential pathways to create structural social, economic and political justice within the neoliberal political program in which our society is currently embedded.

Table of Contents

Abstract.. 2 Acknowledgements.4 Introduction.5 Chapter 1 : Food Justice?: Why local food has arisen as a solution to marginality......11 Neoliberalism, Hunger, and the City.............13 Urban Agriculture: trend or tactic?..28 Internal Divisions in Food Justice-Related Movements............32 Chapter 2 : Case Studies........48 Qualifying Studies..............48 Hearty Roots Community Farm.....53 High School for Public Service Youth Farm.....59 Chapter 3 : From Food Justice to Socioeconomic Justice: Strategies and tactics.....65 Political Engagement.........65 Transregionalism...........76 Organizational Synthesis...........88 Case Study Review.............99 Conclusion.......107 Developing Cognitive Praxis.......108 Uniting Diverse Projects.........112 Bibliography....117

Acknowledgements Infinite thanks to my two thesis advisers, Lisa Brawley and Tim Koechlin. Their unfaltering belief in my work, my ideas, and my goals, as well as their superb teaching abilities, have provided me with the confidence and knowledge to tackle the material in this thesis. To my unofficial thesis advisors, Mary Ann Cunningham and Uma Narayan, thank you for taking the time to debate the many issues contained herein, and encouraging me to question everything Id assumed. Our conversations were invaluable to my thesis-writing process. I would also like to express my gratitude to Heesok Chang and the Independent Program steering committee for allowing me to constantly revise and hone my academic path while questioning my decisions each step of the way. I really do think it has resulted in the best education I could possibly receive at Vassar. To my mom, Kim, and my sister Grace, thank you for all the love and support for every decision Ive made. Your encouragement, stability, and compassion have allowed me to explore how to improve the lives of others, as you have already made mine so ideal. And to my friends, Lily, Logan, Claire, Yasmin, and Anoop, who have provided guidance and feedback throughout this process, deliberating with me on the tough questions I hoped to address, and keeping me from straying from the topics I care about most. Youve also fed, clothed, housed, and otherwise cared for me at various points during this process- you guys rule. Lastly, many thanks to the farmers and food activists who took time to answer my questions with thought and care.

Introduction

Activity surrounding urban agriculture and local food has become prevalent and momentous enough to be labeled a movement. 1 At times this movement has pursued social justice under the moniker of food justice. Yet the food justice movement itself remains nascent, and up to this point has often been tacked on as an addend to local food system and environmental justice advocacy. This thesis aims to examine what has been accomplished thus far by urban and regional agriculture (URA) under the banner of food justice, and the potential for the inroads it has forged to be strengthened and extended into a potent social movement creating structural change. Thus I aim to critique URAlook at what isand to compose2look at what is for what could be. This decision is based on the predication that theorists must not only explore the declines and failures of normative forms of democracy, but the new possibilities produced therein, while contending with the deeply entrenched politics and disempowerment of the municipal, state, and federal government structures.3 The theory explored herein will be grounded with practice by two case studies in order to avoid exclusive reliance on personally
Though there has been debate as to whether local foods, sustainable agriculture, etc. represent a movement, the definition of a social movement itself remains vague and contested among theorists. Dwelling on this distinction would be pedantic, instead this thesis aligns itself with the conclusion that [h]owever imperfectly articulated and integrated, a large group of people working together to achieve sustainability and community food security is considered to be, and should be referred to as, a social movement, Patricia Allen, Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 5. 2 See Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto, New Literary History 41 (2010): 471 3 Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 321.
1

accumulated knowledge and experience, as well as to ensure "distance and critical examination.4 Accordingly, I will proceed to state my personal accumulated knowledge, experience, and stakes in the subject matter. Growing up in a relatively well-off suburb, I was not often exposed to poverty or hunger before attending college. However, I was aware from a young age of the fact that the two tend to concentrate and become visible in urban centers: I recall bringing sandwiches and handcrocheted hats whenever visiting nearby Philadelphia as a preteen, in case I encountered anyone in need asking for assistance. Yet in the suburbs, where I spent most of my time and where hunger was neither prevalent nor visible, my interests gravitated towards the issue I saw as most pressing therein: environmental sustainability. This changed drastically when I started my freshman year at Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, a city ravaged by the flight of industry, where unemployment, poverty, hunger, crime, and domestic violence rates are high. I had selected the Poughkeepsie Community Garden as my Federal Work-Study job, unaware that the gardens mission was to provide food to Poughkeepsies food insecure residents as well as education on food-related issues to a set of local elementary and high-school students through the Green Teen program. Rather, I chose the garden out of my interest in sustainable agriculture. A few days on the job radically altered my worldview, academic goals and career path. In short, my focus shifted from environmentalism to environmental justice, from sustainable agriculture to urban agriculture, and from sheer local foodie-ism to collective community food security. Until my junior year I was resilient in this pursuit of local, nutritious food for all. My semester studying abroad in Paris cast doubt on my confidence in urban and regional
4

Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 18.

agriculture as panacea. I interned with a progressive, experimental architecture studio: Latelier darchitecture autogre (the Studio for Self-Managed Architecture). There, I was exposed to more complex theory on capitalist urbanism and the retrenchment of democracy. I felt unable to reconcile these processes with the local food movement I had so espoused. Whats more, the atelier was based on lofty goals of political, social, cultural, ecological and participatory democracy, but I found that the realization of these objectives was persistently undermined by the inability of the projects to reach diverse actors and connect across organizations and movements. This observation exacerbated my faltering belief in community-based food, as the projects I was involved with were directly related to urban agriculture and I witnessed firsthand how they tended to reach a narrow audience of well-to-do Parisians, were restrained in their realization by the public funding theyd received, and were even seen as exclusive by some of the communities they were situated within. By the time I left Paris, Id discarded the local food movement as bougie, irreconcilable with the economic realities of anyone living below a certain income level. When I began to brainstorm my thesis topic, I knew I wanted to write about urban agriculture. Though I considered writing a highly negative critique of the movement, I quickly realized that I wanted to create something more productive than destructive. With the help of my official and unofficial advisors, I decided that I wanted to use my thesis as a medium to figure out what urban and regional agriculture has accomplished, and how those accomplishments can be expanded and reworked to rectify their shortcomingssuch as those I witnessed in the ateliers projectsand create real change. Therefore I approach this thesis with my origins in environmentalism; a desire for a more equitable distribution of health, well-being, and security;

and sensitivity to efforts for justice being exploited in order to validate other movements and aims. I do not intend to expound upon the conventional food system and the unevenly distributed ecological, economic, social, and health problems that result. These issues have been detailed in an extensive number of recent works.5 I write this thesis with the recognition that the way most food is grown in the United States is environmentally unsound, economically unviable without consistent propping-up by thes government, structurally designed to produce unhealthy food and uneven food availability, dependent on underpaid migrant labor and above all, an indicator of the processes of uneven development embedded in American and global political economy. The underlying question that frames my work is: how do disenfranchised individuals find the time, money, resources, and education to combat systemic inequality, and how do people of privilege engage in that process without enforcing existing power structures?6 Three primary methodologies have been employed to date in researching alternative food movements: identification, classification, and analysis.7 What remains is to study the constellation of food and agricultural alternatives, and how they interact with, are embedded in, and pose a challenge to dominant political, economic, and social institutions and discourses. Thus I hope to develop theory for, not about, urban agriculture. I aim to do this in part because those embroiled in direct action rarely have the time or opportunity to study and critically
See Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influence Nutrition and Health (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2008); Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); Daniel Rothenberg, With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today; and Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 6 Given uneven resource allocations among different groups of peopleinclusiveness in turn requires exploring the possibility of democratizing both movements and institutions. So far there has been little discussion of how historically marginalized people can gain access to resources such as education, property, and capital that can give them equal footing in discursive spaces, Allen, Together at the Table, 18. 7 Allen, Together at the Table, 7.
5

examine their work. Yet it is such examination that can excavate new possibilities, as well as unseen obstacles, that may not be visible in everyday struggles.8 At times I will employ academic language, in part because I aim to address those in academia and industry who I see as perpetuating the normative discourse on food-based issues. However, I hope my vocabulary and style are largely accessible, and remain consistent with my belief that it is not necessary to exercise linguistic privilege in order to discuss these topics. Excessive elite and exclusive language would detract from this thesis message of collaboration and engagement. The results of my research are inconclusive. Rather than prescribe a set of concrete steps, which I am certainly not qualified to do, I ask you to take a journey with me as I explore challenging questions of food, privilege, inequality, and power, with the goal of excavating new possibilities for a more radical mandate within food-based movements. With the first chapter, I will begin by situating both urban hunger and urban agriculture in time, explicating their origins, development, and attempted reconciliation. Subsequently, I will discuss the divisions in theory and practice among food and environmental activists that have inhibited collaboration and effective action. In the second chapter I will introduce the case studies on two farms that serve food insecure urban communities: the urban High School for Public Service Youth Farm (Flatbush, Brooklyn) and the regional Hearty Roots Community Farm (Red Hook, Hudson Valley). With these case studies I hope to provide concrete examples of the conditions food justice projects are situated within, and the limits to fostering structural change that farms with social justice objectives both encounter and perpetuate. I also intend to highlight the variation in those conditions between regional and urban farming projects. In the last chapter I will detail opportunities I see to expand the justice component of food justice through the general
8

Ibid., 8.

approaches of regionalism, political intervention, economic ingenuity, and inter-movement synthesis.

10

Chapter 1 Food Justice?: Why local food has arisen as a solution to marginality

Hunger in America was re-visibilized during the Reagan years due to an increase in the poverty rate, the subsequent increased demand for food stamps, and the administrations failure to respond to either adequately.9 In response, the emergency food assistance complex (private charities such as soup kitchens, food pantries, etc.) rose to fill the gap between the public need for food and public food assistance. Lines that wound around the block formed at city churches and food banks, comprised of hungry citizens who had run out of that months installation of food stamps, or did not qualify for food stamps due to the Reagan administrations tightened eligibility requirements. At the same time, lines were forming elsewhere in cities. In well-to-do urban neighborhoods, the presence of farmers markets was on the rise, tracking the increased demand of middle- and upper-class consumers who lined up for the opportunity to marry their desire to do goodfor the environment, for the local economy, for their own healthwith their consumption patterns, by purchasing fresh food from local farmers. During the Great Depression, American citizens were scandalized by the coexistence hunger and abundance exhibited in images of breadlines stretching for blocks and media reports of surplus grain rotting in silos and dairy farmers pouring thousands of gallons of milk that they

Although federal food stamp expenditures continued to grow during the Reagan administration, they grew at a slower rate due to tightened eligibility requirements and decreased benefits. The 1980s also marked an end to food stamp program liberalization and expansion, at a time when the demand for food stamps was growing due to a climbing poverty rate caused by a confluence of factors, including the administrations own cuts in cash-payment welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Unemployment Insurance, as well as rising unemployment, factory relocation overseas, tax cuts to the wealthy, and industry deregulation. See Janet Poopendieck, Sweet Charity?: Emergency food and the end to entitlement (New York: Penguin, 1999).
9

11

could not sell down the gutter. The phrase breadlines knee deep in wheat was coined during this era, and soon thereafter the first public food assistance program was created as part of the New Deal. However, during the Reagan administration, half a century and a slew of public food assistance policies later, breadlines and knee-deep wheat continued to coexist, in the updated forms of soup kitchen lines and mega-supermarkets brimming with food. The unfortunate irony remained, though the typology of the food abundance had diversified into various permutations local, sustainable, organic, conventional, industrial, etc. During the 1990s, some of those in the farmers market line became aware that only certain residents were waiting with themresidents who looked like them and lived near them. Elsewhere, in lower-income areas of the city, not only were there not farmers markets, there were hardly any food retailers at all. It seemed obvious to supply those areas directly with fresh, local produce to remedy the fact that there were no grocers in proximity. It is this conclusion that Id like to zoom in on. It is a conclusion that was drawn independently in various urban centers around the country, and subsequently began to gain steam in planning policy, non-profit work, academia, and business ventures. This trend of local food provisioning for the urban underserved (in short, food justice) serves as a microcosm of the political economic processes that have perpetuated the existence of the urban poor (and thereby hungry) and the need for alternative food provisioning models to begin with. The mere existence of the food justice movement recognizes how the market economy inculcates conditions and logic that simultaneously allow for hunger, obesity, poor dietary health, the waste of immense amounts of food, the use of harmful food production methods, the intentional relocation of businesses out of poor neighborhoods (a practice known as redlining), a lack of living wages or wealth redistribution, the creation of moralized elite food niches, the exploitation of farmworkers, and the generation 12

of immense prosperity for a very select minority.10 The question is whether the movements focus on food ultimately serves as a lens through which to perceive these contradictions, or a blinder that obscures them.

*** Neoliberalism, Hunger, and the City

Persistent hunger in the United States is a result of a complex constellation of political, economic, and spatial arrangements:11 In dissecting them, Ill begin at the core: what has been labeled the political rationality of neoliberalism is evident in both hungers causality and management. 12, 13 Neoliberalism is commonly used to denote policies of deregulation, economic liberalism, free trade and a radically free market.14 However, neoliberalisms influence extends far beyond the official policy and trade agreements in which it is codified; it creates a rationality a mode of reasoning and decision-makingthat pervades the human experience.15

These issues, though not a complete list, summarize the array of concerns that qualify as food issues. Although the consequences can be visible the causes and the scope of food insecurity problems for urban populations may not be apparent. From production to consumption, the food system comprises complex interrelated and interdependent parts: social and economic elements, agencies, processes and structures, Mustafa Koc et al., Introduction: Food security is a global concern, in For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, ed. Mustafa Koc et al. (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999), 3. 12 The phrase political rationality of neoliberalsim is borrowed from Wendy Brown, Economic liberalism, political liberalism, and what is the neo in neoliberalism, Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 38. 13 The political rationality of neoliberalism has also been theorized as the hegemony of consumption in Zygmunt Baumans Consuming Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007) though Bauman does not employ this term directly, but I have derived it from his text, particularly from chapters 1 and 2. When used in an urban context, Soja, Postmetropolis, 299, has called it the postmetropolitan mode of social and spatial regulation. 14 Brown, Economic liberalism, 38. 15 Brian Holmes, Neoliberal Appetites, AREA Chicago 2 (2006), accessed December 3, 2010, http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-2/neoliberal-appetites/.
10 11

13

On an individual, everyday level, the logic neoliberalism instills can be characterized by self-interest and the direct correlation of political power to economic prowess. Interactions become reducible to financial transactions, and those who dont have the means to vote with their wallet are stripped of their political voice. On the level of governance, economic growth has become the standard for state legitimacy, and has far surpassed the upholding of civil liberties and the creation of social safety nets in its legitimizing capacity. 16, 17 Thus, if the aforementioned conditions of economic prosperity are met, Americans are content with the current administration. If they are unmet, Americans vote for the opposition. Even if Americans desired political pathways beyond the electoral process, the normative channels of political engagement (including, to an extent, the electoral process itself) have been retrenched and disempowered, resulting in a notable absence of participatory politics18 and the hegemony of growth economics and policies. Neoconservative ideals of family values often serve as trappings to the central political goal of economic growth, and are in fact deeply interconnected with neoliberal policies, a relationship that can be studied further in other sources.19 That is to say, though it might be argued that Americans are concerned with a wide range of social values, in addition to economic prosperity, the former cannot often be distinguished from (and tends to be trumped by) the latter. David Harvey argues that the neoliberal logic is not a political theory, but a political
It is worth noting that the assumption that growth enhances living conditions across socioeconomic strata has been debunked. In reality growth does not necessarily reduce inequality or poverty. More importantly, exaltation of growth distracts from the structural modifications necessary to actually and more equitably meet basic needs, Herv Kempf, How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), 72 17 Brown, Economic liberalism, 42. 18 Integrated World Capitalism has successfully neutralized the working classes, offering them a pseudoparticipation in political debate as consumers, Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, translators notes, in Flix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Althone Press, 2000), 73. 19 See Brown Economic Liberalism; Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: the Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Soul of Neoliberalism, Social Text 92 (2007).
16

14

program. Rather than an approach to governance, neoliberalism is an explicit strategy designed to concentrate and enclavize wealth for those who have it, and prevent those who do not from accessing or sharing it in anywaythis includes through public services such as public education, infrastructure, security, and social welfare, which are typically costs shared by the entire tax base (with higher contributions mandated of those with higher incomes). The neoliberal program was typified by Reaganomics: suppress wages, deregulate the private sector, reduce taxes on the upper classes, and finance debt through military engagement (in Reagans case, the Cold War arms race), all of which increase domestic poverty and the national deficit simultaneously. Increasing domestic poverty in turn mandates increased spending on social welfare programs. The enormous national deficit (from military spending) provides justification for budget cuts, and with the neoliberal precondition that the rich cannot have their taxes increased, social services become the scapegoat of the debt crisis and are targeted for cutbacks (an approach disquietingly dubbed starving the beast).20 Economist Robert Pollin highlights inconsistencies in neoliberal political theory that support the contention that neoliberalism is a program rather than an approach:
Neoliberalism, and the Washington Consensus dominant within the US government as well as the IMF and World Bank, are contemporary variants of this longstanding political and economic philosophy. The major difference between classical liberalism as a philosophy and contemporary neoliberalism as a set of policy measures is with implementation. Washington Consensus policy makers are committed to free market policies when they support the interests of big business as, for example, with the lowering of regulations at the workplace. But these same policy makers become far less insistent on free market principles when invoking such principles might damage big business interests. Federal Reserve and IMF interventions to bail out wealthy asset holders during the frequent global financial crises in the 1990s are obvious violations of free market precepts.21

In further support of the notion of a neoliberal program, a disturbing majority of political officials are among those who benefit from neoliberal policies, and therefore enforce them
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, lecture presented at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, March 24, 2011. Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity, (Verso: New York, 2003), 8.
20 21

15

against the will of the electorate, with justifications that have historically proven to be false, such as the claim that tax cuts to the rich creates jobs, and that government spending and welfare abuse are the root of the national unemployment crisis. As Joseph Stiglitz describes, nearly all the members of the Senate and the House are members of the top 1 percent [of Americas income ladder] when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent.22 Cites have become the nexus of neoliberal policy experimentation.23 They provide the fiscal instability, speculative movements of financial capital, global location strategies by transnational corporations, and rapidly intensifying [interurban] competition24 needed to test different approaches of remaking of capitalism after its own image.25,26 Municipal governments are faced with the contradiction of the need to be globally ever more competitive and the need to protect the basic needs and rights of residents.27 As the mobility of productive investments increases, city spending for the poor decreases: cities cannot capture much of the wealth generated within their borders for use in reducing concentrated poverty.28 Corporations

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%, Vanity Fair, May 2011. Accessed April 13, 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105. 23 Jamie Peck, Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, City as Policy Lab, AREA Chicago 6 (2008), accessed December 5, 2010, http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/city-as-lab/city-policy-lab/, 24 Peck et al., City as Policy Lab, n.p. 25 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 477. 26 The primacy of this idea in social and political analysis is treated in more depth and qualified on page 88. 27 As a result of their fiscal predicament, most cities focus on attracting new private investments, hoping that expanding tax revenues will fund programs to improve the quality of urban servicesEven in economically successful cities, however, the willingness to deal with persistent poverty and inequality [is variable], Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the twenty-first century, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 165. 28 Ibid., 33.
22

16

capitalize on this contradiction by exploiting every opportunity for economic growth, which the city is dependent on for political legitimization, as mentioned above. This exploitation takes the form of place-marketing and local boosterism, enterprise zones, tax abatements, urban development corporations, and public-private partnerships to workfare policies, property redevelopment schemesand a host of other institutional modifications within the local state apparatus.29 What results is the transformation of municipalities into place entrepreneurs, competing amongst themselves in an intergovernmental marketplace to appeal to capital investors.30 Such interurban competition tends to sacrifice local quality-of-life and resource provisions in order to attract business at any cost, and leads to the stratification of cities according to their ability to attract capital.31 The city under siege of extreme neoliberal policy has been deemed the revanchist city, exhibiting a reversal of the assumption of liberal urban regimes past in which the government is at least partially responsible for guaranteeing a decent minimum quality of life for all residents.32 Couching the proceeding discourse in terms of neoliberalism is tricky: many academics and organizations aligning themselves in opposition to neoliberalismand capitalism more generallyoperate under the assumption that the only solution to its failings is a slate-cleaning apocalypse or revolution.33 While recognizing the immense shortcomings and perturbations of neoliberal capitalism, it is crucial not to become embroiled in this notion of total, radical change as a necessary prerequisite for any progressive transformation of urban society.34 Moreover,

Peck et al., City as Policy Lab, n.p. John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The political economy of place (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007),13; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 11. 31 Ibid., 13. 32 Neil Smith, Giuliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s, Social Text 57 (Winter 1998), 1. 33 Soja, Postmetropolis, 302. 34 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 435.
29 30

17

capitalism makes for a highly phantasmic antagonist and the notion of combating capitalism is indeed a fantastical one: as capitalism has infiltrated every facet of human existence, advocating for its complete demise is nonsensical, if not self-destructive. Rather, the most effective approach is to target the hyper-contagious viral logic35 of neoliberalism and exploit the conditions it has engendered: to treat [structural] influences as straight-jackets would be to overlook the rich possibilities for action and transformation.36 Returning to hunger: how has the neoliberal political rationality infiltrated the production, distribution, and availability of food? Food has always been political: historically, the daily human need for sustenance necessitated the creation of coordinated, cooperative social relationships.37 Presently, food is politicized as a basic human right, codified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.38 Yet the mere declaration of a right by a government or international organization does not inherently realize it as such. Rather, it is truly a right only when it is defended: rights cannot actually be granted or denied, but respected or disrespected.39 The respecting of the right to food is not merely a matter of technicalitygetting food from producers to consumersbut rather is profoundly political, posing important
Max Haiven, Food, Finance, Crisis, Catalyst: Global capitalism and the revolutionary value of food sovereignty, Politics and Culture 2 (2009), accessed March 18, 2011, http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/11/03/max-haivenfood-finance-crisis-catalyst-global-capitalism-and-the-revolutionary-value-of-food-sovereignty/. 36 David M. Gordon, Left, Right, and Center: An Introduction to Political Economy, in The Imperiled Economy, ed. Robert Cherry (Amherst, Mass.: Union for Radical Political Economics, 1987), 10. See also: [I]t would be absurd to want to return to the past in order to reconstruct former ways of livingthe increased speed of transportation and communications and the interdependence of urban centres are equally irreversible. While on the one hand we must make due with this situation, on the other we must acknowledge that it requires a reconstruction of the objectives and the methods of the whole social movement under todays conditions, Flix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Althone Press, 2000), 42. 37 Allen, Together at the Table, 53. 38 Article 25: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, United Nations, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml. See also: Madeleine Bunting, How can we feed the world and still save the planet?, The Guardian, January 21, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/21/olivier-de-schutter-food-farming. 39 Jrgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in political theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 189.
35

18

questions about distributional justice.40 Disconcertingly, in addition to being a right, food is a privatized commodity41: instead of being a right directly secured by the U.S. government, it is provided by the market, with the government stepping in where the market failsnamely, anywhere where incomes are too low to purchase food or to attract food vendors. The instances of such market failures are consistent and widespread. The argument for the private provision of food is as follows: governments are corrupt and inefficient, while corporations are efficient and upright. Corporations have the funds to provide these resources, as well as the profit motivation to do so as efficiently and satisfactorily as possible. Moreover, competition between corporations both keeps prices low and allows individuals to select the best provider from a pool of choicesas contrasted with state provision, which many point to as an inefficient monopoly. 42 Lastly, the market responds to consumers needs, which appear as signals, and can best meet demand with supply in a sort of organically orchestrated fashion ( la the invisible hand the market) superior to the inefficient bureaucracies of the modern state. The first flaw with this logic is the fact that individuals actually only generate a signal of need on the market when that need is backed by purchasing power.43 In other words, the market is deaf to those who do not have the funds to signify a demand (e.g. the poor), rendering access to food contingent on ones ability to pay.44 In particular, the market has proven unable to
Graham Riches, Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada: The role of community-based food security, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 203. 41 Food is not just like an automobile. Foodlike wateris not an optional product that consumers may choose to purchase: food is the basis of life, Lori Wallach and Patrick Woodall, The WTO on Agriculture: Food as a commodity, not a right, in Whose Trade Organization: A comprehensive guide to the WTO (New York: The New Press, 1991), 189. 42 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 6. 43 Uma Narayan and Robert E. Prasch, Should Water be a Commons or a Commodity?: A defense of partial commodification, Unpublished draft (2006), 14. 44 Allen, Together at the Table, 22.
40

19

respond to the diversity of incomes and cultures found in cities.45 Additionally, the speed of the signals that are generated outpaces the speed of the market response that often entails a reallocation of resources,46 a process that is particularly slowed in the case of agriculture due to the spatially fixed nature of its fundamental resource: land.47 These discrepancies in the logic of market signals result in a disparity between the need for food and the effective demand for food the former being the required nutrient intake to maintain physical and mental growth in children and health in adults, the latter the amount of food people are able and willing to pay for.48 These signals are also much more complex and diversified than free market proponents portray them as. Beyond simple supply-and-demand economics, in our highly speculative and volatile global economy, signals are also generated by price fluctuations, profit margins, labor costs, indications of militancy, and political stability in a given nation-state.49 The second flaw is that the market does not actually control the production and sale of food free from government intervention. Farmers no longer respond directly to the signals that are generated on the market, but rather to those who control the market.50 Urban residents in particular are not directly fed by rural producers.51 The U.S. government exerts immense influence on the market, subsidizing most elements of conventional farming and distribution substantially, providing price protection for farmers, conducting food quality inspection and regulationeffectively skewing any sort of free market competition among different farming

Koc et al., Introduction, 4. Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The hidden battle for the world food system (New York: Melville house, 2008), 49. 47 Thomas Lyson, Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting farm, food, and community (Lebanon, NH: Tufts University Press, 2004), 39. 48 George W. Norton, Jeffrey Alwang, and William A. Masters, Economics of Agricultural Development: World food systems and resource use (New York: Routledge, 2006), 42. 49 Haiven, Food, Finance, Crisis, Catalyst, n.p. 50 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 39. 51 Ibid., 53.
45 46

20

systems or regions. As Patricia Allen observes, [a]griculture is the only sector of the U.S. economy for which it can be said that there is national planning.52 The invisible hand of the market is actually attached to the arm of the government, and this is not exclusive to the domain of food and farming. As Brian Holmes highlights, the idea of governance without government is a myth. The food industry, the education industry, the health industry, the war industry, all these are intensely regulated and heavily subsidized by the US government.53 Economist Robert Kuttner details the highly involved role of the U.S. government in the food and agriculture sectors:
supermarkets are far from perfectly free markets. Their hygiene is regulated by government inspectors, as is most of the food they sell. Government regulations mandate the format and content of nutritional labeling. They require clear, consistent unit pricing, to rule out a variety of temptations of deceptive marketing. Moreover, many occupations in the food industry, such as meat cutter and cashier, are substantially unionized; so the labor market is not a pure free market either. Much of the food produced in the United States is grown by farmers who benefit from a variety of interferences with a laissez-faire market, contrived government to prevent ruinous fluctuations in prices. The government also subsidizes education and technical innovation in agriculture.54

These free market contradictions are particularly cruel with regard to food access: as self-interested citizens, politicians, and businesses continually advocate against funding for public assistance, they are essentially asking that when the market fails to meet the basic need/right of food for certain individuals, the government does not intervene with their tax dollars, despite the fact that the government has already intervened (with their tax dollars) to contribute to the circumstances that have directly and indirectly rendered certain individuals hungry. Decreased government intervention through public food assistance has allowed the
Allen, Together at the Table, 53. Holmes, Neoliberal Appetites, n.p. See also Brown, Economic liberalism, 41: [f]ar from flourishing when left alone, the economy must be directed, buttressed, and protected by law and policy as well as by the dissemination of social norms designed to facilitate competition, free trade, and rational economic action on the part of every member and institution of society. 54 Robert Kuttner, The Limits of Markets, The American Prospect, March 1, 1997, accessed February 2, 2011, http://prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=4845.
52 53

21

commodification and privatization of food to exacerbate human vulnerability in meeting our daily food intake by basing access to food on what happens with food elsewhere in the global market system, decreasing direct access to food for many, and revoking social safety nets that mitigate these consequences.55 Put simply, the market provision of food is increasingly creating hunger. Even government antihunger support is infiltrated by the rationality of neoliberalism. In domestic public food assistance programs as well as international food aid, the food is purchased from private suppliers by the government (or individuals with government payment vouchers) and to provide for those in need, to the benefit of the agriculture and food retail sectors. Historically, this has resulted in a problematic interrelation between the public and private spheres, the tensions of which have lead to quelling rather than combating hunger. For example, in the United States food relief programs were initiated first and foremost to prop up agriculture prices, not to eradicate hunger.56 The New Deals antihunger programs were actually intended to augment the incomes of commercial farmers. These programs chronically underperformed due to pressure from groups like the American Farm Bureau and the National Association of Manufacturers to keep free relief food from reducing the profitability of commercial food. As a result, in 1936 individuals in food assistance programs were receiving about 5 percent of their total food needs.57 Continuing the trend of coupling private and public interests, and often prioritizing the former over the latter, the 1961 Food Stamp Program was initiated to placate farm-state senators.58 The 1948 National School Lunch Program was founded in part because
Nikolas C. Heynen, Justice of Eating in the City: The political ecology of urban hunger, in In the Nature of Cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen et al. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 133. 56 Mark Winne, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the table in the land of plenty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), xix. 57 Ibid., xix. 58 Ibid., xx; Allen, Together at the Table, 43.
55

22

many men did not qualify for military service during WWII due to malnutrition. In essence, the program was instated to ensure a new generation of soldiers.59 Here were presented with yet another example of neoliberal logic: federal antihunger programs exposed as having financial interests underpinning decisions, with economic growth as their motivating factor. Whats paradoxical is that it has been demonstrated that growth often has only a small effect on povertyespecially in unregulated economiesand growth alone is clearly not the most effective way to combat poverty. Yet programs designed to mitigate hunger a consequence of poverty, are motivated by growth, which does not necessarily lift people out of poverty. This glaring contradiction is further evidence of neoliberalism as a program. Similar contradictions are evident in private sector food provision, the pathway by which the majority of Americans obtain their sustenance. As a commercial industry, supermarkets aim to make money, not to feed America. This means they situate grocery stores in areas that will generate the most profit, which are areas that have the highest incomes to spend on food. For a supermarket to locate in a low-income area is simply bad business practice according to economic rationale.60 Situating supermarkets in lowincome urban areas becomes particularly problematic, as the one-size-fits-all megamart model, increasingly necessary for companies rapid expansion, is not amenable to spatially specific urban sites.61 The particular physical footprint, delivery, and distribution requirements of potential urban locations would necessitate adaptable and site-specific design, precisely that which was abandoned in the name of efficiency. Thus in urban centers the self-reinforcing cycle of poverty and hunger is particularly
Winne, Closing the Food Gap, xxi. Ibid., 33. 61 Ibid., 88.
59 60

23

potent. It is a process Mark Winne describes, in which families poverty, the systems that were supposed to help them manage that poverty, and the failure of the marketplace to serve their food needs [are] restricting their ability to live normal and healthy lives.62 The distributional inequalities that have resulted from the privatized provisioning of food can be evidenced with most basic needs in urban life, and together they are some of the most visible consequences of uneven development and spatial discrimination.63 As far as food and nutrition, cities are sites of both neoliberal experimentationsuch as the promotion of local foods as a new form of elite consumptionand progressive counterexperimentationcommunity gardens and other urban food justice labwork attempting to evolve and excavate neoliberal rationality for emancipatory spaces. Food can operate as a symbol of neoliberal rationality and as a tool for its exploitation. While a decent quality, well-stocked food store is a symbol to residents of a stable, safe, and viable place to live and work,64 the absence of such stores represents a shrinking middle-class and the increasing inequality in wealth distributiona reality manifested by Whole Foods and farmers markets for the upper classes, bodegas for the lower, and a notable absence of stores courting the middle.65 Reactions to this disappearance of the middle class and its spatial manifestation of uneven food access are marked by neoliberal rationality: [i]t is actually the logic of the free market economy that allows some members of society to purchase their local/sustainable/organic/free-range individual health in exchange for turning a blind eye to the

Ibid., 33. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 47; Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 89; Dreier, Mollenkopf and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 33. 64 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 92. 65 Ibid., 123; Janny Scott, Cities Shed Middle Class, and Are Richer and Poorer for It, New York Times, July 23, 2006, accessed December 17, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/weekinreview/ 23scott.html? _r=1&scp=1&sq=%2 2cities%20shed%20middle%20class%22&st=cse#.
62 63

24

structural inequalities of the two-tiered food system.66 Yet reactions to the increasingly publicized disparities in food access have the potential to transcend this self-interested rationalization of the two-tiered food system, and use the resources that neoliberal capitalism has providedsuch as momentum behind alternative ways to grow, distribute, and buy foodto foster circumstances that defy the markets conflation of need and ability to pay, and instead provide nutritious, safe food to all regardless of income. The exploitation of neoliberal capitalism cannot be achieved without first recognizing its logic that prevents the recognition of the actual forces that cause and perpetuate hunger. The most dangerous rationalization of the two-tiered food system is the claim that hunger and poor nutrition are the results of poor decision-making on the part of individuals who simply fail at being self-interestedan argument that has been repeatedly disproven.67 Doubtless hunger is a result of persistent poverty rather than the mere (dis)functioning of food assistance programs or personal choice. As put by Patricia Allen: Given that food is treated as a commodity, it is axiomatic that the primary cause of food insecurity is poverty.68, 69 This was echoed by a 1974 bipartisan report on hunger and nutrition issued by the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, which states: In a nationin which 40 million people remain poor or near poor, more than a food stamp or child-feeding program is at issue.70 The late-1980s Community Childhood
Daniel Tucker, Inheriting the Grid #2, AREA Chicago 2 (2006), accessed December 3, 2010, http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-2/ inheriting-the-grid2/. 67 Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 25; Sarah Treuhaft, Michael J. Hamm and Charlotte Litjens, Healthy Food For All: Building equitable and sustainable food systems in Detroit and Oakland, Policy Link, Michigan State University, and the Fair Food Network, 2009, 9, accessed March 18, 2011, http://www.policylink.org/atf/cf/%7B97C6D565-BB43-406D-A6D5-ECA3BBF35AF0%7D/Healthy%20Food %20For%20All-8-19-09-FINAL.pdf,. 68 Allen, Together at the Table, 23; Koc et al., Introduction, 4. 69 A recent study by the British Government Office for Science found that in addition to poverty, food insecurity is linked to economic growth, water and energy shortages, climate change and biodiversity loss. See Foresight, "The Future of Food and Farming, Government Office for Science, London, 2011, 12, accessed January 25, 2011, http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/projects. 70 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 10.
66

25

Hunger Identification Projects (CCHIP) surveys of hunger among family households cities, confirmed this declaration. The findings stated that the lack of income (poverty and nearpoverty), the insufficiency and ineffectiveness of major food assistance programs such as food stamps, and inadequate access to affordable retail stores were to blame for the nations rising hunger issues.71 At the policy level, federal food assistance programs have historically focused on alleviating hunger rather than poverty, which has resulted in their mutual perpetuation. By cutting back funding for income benefit programs in the 1980s while maintaining food assistance programs, Reagan effectively shifted the burden of welfare to public food assistance, and the antipoverty discourse to an antihunger discourse. Such a substitution of public food assistance for public income maintenance created a nutritional safety net in lieu of an economic safety net, and a patchy one at that. Reagans policies implied that [a] society may have no minimum standard for income yet strive for minimum standards of health and nutrition for all its citizens.72 Janet Poppendieck observes how Reagan almost guaranteed that poverty and unemployment and to a lesser extent, homelessness, would be portrayed as hunger.73 Food stamps do not provide employment, housing, or income. The federal governments continued focus on food assistance as one of the primary forms of welfare has kept people in poverty, and in turn has kept them dependent on food stamps, which themselves are insufficient for maintaining proper nutrition and adequate food intaketherefore simultaneously perpetuating hunger and poverty.
Ibid., 33, emphasis added. William G. Hoagland, Perception and Reality in Nutrition Programs, in Maintaining the Safety Net: Income redistribution programs in the Reagan Administration, ed. John C. Weicher (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1985), 43. 73 Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity?: Emergency food and the end to entitlement (New York: Penguin, 1999), 87.
71 72

26

Even these programs with the subsatisfactory aim of simply mitigating hunger were partially dismantled during the Reagan administration.74 The private charity and non-profit sectors rose to attempt to bridge the resulting gap between peoples needs and government assistancebut not without consequence. The Zietgeist of the situation, as stated by one participant in the emergency food efforts, was that: [w]e are playing into Reagans hands by increasing private feeding activity while the federal government is doing all it can to shirk its responsibility. This patchwork system is an inadequate and terribly inefficient way to try to keep people from starving.75 Unfortunately, that Zietgeist crystallized into a permanent, structural reality, unchanged for decades, and continues to tacitly render government neglect tolerable. The situation has been exacerbated by the fact that those who would be advocating for structural change are preoccupied with providing everyday emergency-turned-permanent food assistance.76 With that background in mind, the difference between the terms antihunger, food security, food justice, and food sovereignty will be clarified before proceeding. Antihunger most often refers to emergency hunger relief, feeding the hungry day-to-day.77 Antihunger establishments include food pantries, food banks, and soup kitchens. Food security refers to a more structural effort to eradicate the need for antihunger work. In other words, food security is defined as an individuals or a communitys sustained ability to access and obtain healthy food. Food security establishments are typically organizations working towards policy change, collaborating with affected communities, and creating on-the-ground resources such as
The policy cuts that were initiated during the Reagan administration and continued through the 1990s, were the largest cutbacks since the food programs establishment. [P]olicymakersclearly rejected the notion that federal policy should provide a safety net against hunger, Patricia Allen, Contemporary Food and Farm Policy in the United States, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 177. 75 Ibid., 27. 76 Ibid., 28; Allen, Together at the Table, 8; Koc et al., Introduction, 1. 77 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 169.
74

27

community gardens and farmers markets in low-income areas.78 Food justice is a more general term employed to indicate fair distribution of the costs and benefits of food production across all social, economic, and cultural strata.79 Food sovereignty is often defined as the democratic control of food, farming, and food systems by those who eat the food produced.80 Whereas food security provides guaranteed access to food, food sovereignty provides the peoples self-governing of the food system, encompassing production, processing, distribution, marketing, and consumption.81 However, food sovereignty for a given region should not be conflated with food-self-sufficiency.

*** Urban Agriculture: trend or tactic?

While urban agriculture is not a novel or recent phenomenonquite the contrary, it likely dates back to the first urban settlementadvocacy for urban agriculture as social policy is endemic to our time.82 Given the heightened concentration of hunger in urban centers, coupled with increasing urban decay over the past half-century, it is no surprise that the impulse has arisen to use the resulting abandoned lots to grow food for the urban hungry. Mark Winne describes this impulse: what better way to use something that has fallen outside the standard utilitarian economic model than to feed or employ the poor?83 While seemingly logical, the

Ibid., 169. Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 6. 80 Wallach and Woodall, WTO on Agriculture, 198; Eric Holt-Gimnez and Raj Patel, Food Rebellions!: Crisis and the hunger for food justice (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2009), 84. 81 Holt-Gimnez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 86. 82 Desmond Jolly, Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 196. 83 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 56.
78 79

28

assumptions this impulse is based upon must be examined and considered on a case-by-case basis. Urban decay illustrates a specific set of issues, and a lack of access to food in urban areas signifies overlapping yet distinct issues. Abandoned lots testify to the trend of deurbanization84 and its underpinning political and economic processes,85 and serve as a physical reflection of the void that separates public institutions from the vital energy of todays civil society.86 A lack of supermarkets and availability of fresh foods bears witness to commercial redlining, and the incompatibility of market rationale with basic resource provisioning. One of the greatest assumptions of urban agriculture is that vacant land is of no value to other uses or other potential forms of employment.87 In their report Urban Agriculture and Community Food Security in the United States, the Community Food Security Coalition describes vacant88 lots as relatively inexpensivewithout much economic potential.89 While no general statement can be made as to whether urban agriculture is inherently in conflict with dense cities and their much-discussed benefits,90 it is important to weigh the costs of using vacant land for food production instead of for built uses or public space.91 The blind advocacy of urban
Ibid., 56. For more on these processes, see Robert Fishmans The American Metropolis at Centurys End: Past and Future Influences, Housing Policy Debate 11 (2000), 199-213; David Harvey, Money, Time, Space, and the City, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Thomas J. Sugrue, Introduction and The Deindustrialization of Detroit, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and inequality in postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Richard Child Hill and Joe R. Feagins Detroit and Houston: Two Cities in Global Perspective, in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner and Roger Keil (New York: Routledge, 2006). 86 Stefano Boeri, Five Ecological Challenges for the Contemporary City, in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010), 450. 87 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 56. 88 Or between use, the English translation of the German term zwischennutzung, currently the widely accepted denotation. 89 Martin Bailkey et al., Urban Agriculture and Community Food Security in the United States: Farming from the City Center to the Urban Fringe, North American Urban Agriculture Committee, Community Food Security Coalition, October 2003, 7. 90 Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 32. Also, see generally: Randolph T. Hester, Density and Smallness, in Design for Ecological Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Elizabeth Burton, The Potential of the Compact City for Promoting Social Equity, in Achieving Sustainable Urban Form, ed. Katie Williams et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000). 91 Katrin Bohn and Andr Viljoen, More Space with Less Space: An urban design strategy, in CPULs: Continuous
84 85

29

agriculture without careful, case-by-case consideration of its opportunity costs92 and impact on urban processes runs the risk of abetting deurbanization in the quest for and use of open space for food production. Such hard-line urban agriculture rhetoric smacks of Ebenezer Howards Garden City or Le Corbusiers farm units, which are not solutions to providing food for cities but designs in deconstructing the city to produce food.93, 94 Diana Lind captures the crux of the matter: Many cities havesought to transform undeveloped lots into green space and urban agriculture. Its a natural fitBut land-based strategies that try to reinvent this vacant lot or that blighted ground do little to stem the larger social trends that created the spatial problem in the first place.95 Moreover, at least with cities like New York and London, it is impossible to grow the food required to feed the entire city within city limits.96 In the case of such cities, the intention of growing some food in the city must be critically examined and understood, particularly in order to avoid the abuse of urban cultivation projects as green band-aids for neglected neighborhoods.97 Detroit in particular has been targeted as a city with the confluence of conditions necessary for urban agriculture: vacancy, poverty, and a lack of food retailersall abetting chronic disease and food insecurity. Yet from the initial wave of excitement over Detroit as the

Productive Urban Landscapes, ed. Andr Viljoen (Burlington, MA: Architectural Press, 2005), 15. 92 The cost of the nearest alternative factor or activitythe next best thing that might have been done 93 Joe Howe, Katrin Bohn, and Andr Viljoen, Food In Time: The history of English open urban space as a European example, in CPULs, 100. 94 In Le Corbusier: to live with light (Burlington, MA: Artichtectural Press, 1987), Maurice Besset goes so far in his critique as to say Howards and Le Corbusiers plans would maintain their inhabitants in organized slavery by capitalistic society (as quoted in Howe, Bohn, and Viljoen, Food In Time, 100). 95 Diana Lind, The Bright Side of Blight, New York Times, January 24, 2011, accessed February 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25lind.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=the%20bright%20side%20of %20blight&st=cse. 96 Bohn and Viljoen, More Space with Less Space, 15; Joanna Frank, Director of the FRESH Program, New York City Economic Development Corporation, interview by author, Queens, New York, 14 January 2011. 97 New York City Departments of Design and Construction, Health and Mental Hygiene, Transportation, and City Planning, Active Design Guidelines (New York: City of New York, 2010), 26.

30

pilot farm city of the future has arisen much criticism over the assumption that one cannot purchase healthy, fresh food within the citys limits. In actuality, there are multiple full-service grocery stores in the city, readily accessible to Detroits residents.98 It appears that in their eagerness to apply urban agriculture wherever feasible, advocates have overlooked the actual conditions that Detroit presents. This phenomenon has been dubbed Detroitsploitation: the fetishizing of urban farming (and more generally, urban decay) to a fault, leading to its uncritical application without consideration of local conditions and the processes that brought those conditions about in the first place. 99 All URA projects, and urban ones in particular, must fully understand the precarious composition of the communities in which they hope to impose upon or contribute to. John Logan and Harvey Molotch describe the delicacy of community composition: The development of an effective array of goods and services within reach of residence is a fragile accomplishment; its disruptioncan exact a severe penalty.100 In light of such discrepancies in urban agriculture, periurban agriculture has proven a safer objective for some advocates, as it furnishes local food and food security along with a physical barrier to sprawl, thus simultaneously promoting density.101 From both shortsighted and appropriately situated URA projects, two principle forms have emerged: alternative food distribution and marketing models, and self-provisioning models. Alternative distribution and marketing is largely comprised of farmers markets and communitysupported agriculture (CSA). Self-provisioning consists of peoples growing and preparing their

Griffioen, James, Yes There Are Grocery Stores in Detroit, Urbanophile, January 25, 2011, http://www.urbanophile.com/2011/01/25/yes-there-are-grocery-stores-in-detroit-by-james-griffioen/ 99 John Patrick Leary, Detroitism: What does ruin porn tell us about the motor city, ourselves, other American cities?, Guernica, January 2011, accessed April 2, 2011, http://www.guernicamag.com/spotlight/2281/leary_1_15_11/. 100 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 104. 101 Boeri, Five Ecological Challenges, 445.
98

31

own food, often in the context of community gardens and community kitchens.102 Both models often incorporate explicit social justice clauses into their mission statements, with claims of combating urban hunger and, less frequently, its underlying forces. However, the transfer of such statements into practice is less prevalent than their mere rhetorical existence.103 Even when goals of social justice are operationalized, they risk reproducing the discourses, ideologies, and inequities of the dominant food and agriculture system, including the economic liberalism and individualism[] in which nonsustainability and food insecurity are embedded.104 Moreover, at the phase of implementation of social justice stratagems, certain groups may be excluded entirely, as is often the case with farm workers.105 As an unnerving testimony to the reproduction of dominant power structures in URA programs, consider the fact that the primary and most powerful participants in URA projects resemble conventional agriculture stakeholders in class, gender, and ethnicity.106 Such trends seem to indicate a lack of understanding of the causes of food insecurity and a general isolation from broader agendas of systemic change.107 It is also important to note that the intention of urban agriculture is not always to increase food security and feed the hungry. In New York, urban farming and gardening are often executed by young, economically empowered college graduates, who eschew the emergency food model for a more entrepreneurial approach through CSA and restaurant sales, in order to turn a profit.108

Elaine M. Power, Combining Social Justice and Sustainability for Food Security, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 33. 103 Allen, Together at the Table, 18. 104 Ibid., 17; See also Power, Combining Social Justice, 35. 105 Ibid., 18. 106 Ibid., 18. 107 Power, Combining Social Justice, 33. 108 Joshua David Stein, What an Urban Farmer Looks Like, New York Magazine, September 19, 2010, accessed November 22, 2010, http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/68297/.
102

32

*** Internal divisions in Food Justice-Related Movements

The following are common ideological and discursive divisions within and among movements that have confounded more cohesive action towards fresh, healthy, ecologically resilient food for all. They are important to address and move beyond in order to productively critique and compose urban agriculture.

Environmentalism | Environmental Justice: Historically, the environmental justice and environmental conservation movements originated, developed, and acted separately, establishing a few tenuous collaborations when interests were determined to be compatible.109 Though ecological and social sustainability are inseparable,110 the perception of differing claims and differing goals has inhibited these movements from pursuing their intrinsically interrelated and often overlapping efforts. This false separation has become embedded in the two movements. The discipline of ecology has chronically avoided people,111 while environmental justice views environmentalism as competition more often than potential collaboration. To exclude ecology from the discourse of environmental justice is to narrow the focus of the movement to merely mobilizing from one instance of injustice to the next, ignoring larger
Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 8; Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking nature in New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 217. 110 Lizabeth Cohen, Black and White in Green Cities, in Ecological Urbanism, 135; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 282; Brendan Smith, Fighting Doom: The new politics of climate change, Common Dreams, November 23, 2010, accessed December 28, 2010, http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/23-1. 111 Alexander J. Felson and Linda Pollak, Situating Urban Ecological Experiments in Public Space, in Ecological Urbanism, 356.
109

33

socioecological processes. What results is a lack of ideological coherence that renders the environmental justice movement as a sort of clean-up squad, following in the path of uneven development, attempting to right its wrongs project-by-project.112 Such a concentration on specific targets and highly localized, precise instances of discriminatory environmental consequences inhibits both awareness of the greater forces at play and the ability to address them.113 It also limits the capacity to perceive shared interests across different groups and organizations, which instead become identifiable only over longer periods of time.114 This reductionist approach to social justice, which has been labeled militant localism115 and projectization,116 allows for environmental injuries to simply be relocated from the aggrieved party to another disempowered community: [i]n this sense ecological enlightenment and democratic urbanism are linked, because exclusionary conceptions of environmental justice merely transfer pollution onto less powerful communities.117 Militant localism also has a fragmentary effect on larger class and labor struggles.118 Understandably, municipalities have a tendency to gravitate towards projectization, as it does not require systemic structural adjustments to the processes that led to the project (problem) in the first place. The municipal support tends to exacerbate communities and organizations ability to discern the deleterious effects of projectization. Lastly, the limited community engagement that may result from addressing militantly local issues of environmental (in)justice do not qualify as participatory

Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 225. Ibid., 217. 114 Christopher Mele, Asserting the Political Self: Community activism amongst black women who relocate to the Rural South, The Sociological Quarterly 41 (2000), 77. 115 Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 370; Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 53. 116 Arjun Appadurai, Deep Democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics, Environment & Urbanization 13 (2001), 30. 117 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 227. 118 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 53.
112 113

34

democracy, as the communitys political voice will terminate with the alleviation (or relocation) of a particular grievance.119 The movements rejection of ecology and environmentalism often implies a greater unawareness of the influence of social, political, and economic power relations on uneven socioecological conditions. 120 Yet the paradigmatic reality is that politically and economically underprivileged communities are forced to focus on these isolated issuessuch as housing, employment, the police state, and access to education and healthcareas they have the most direct impact on their daily lives. These issues, by virtue of determining everyday survival, take precedence over considering the greater forces that underlie, exacerbate, and perpetuate their daily struggles. Even when environmental justice literature is aware of such forces, it does not often acknowledge how they are embedded in capitalist political economy.121 Similar charges can be raised against environmentalism, despite its composition primarily of actors with the time and resources to comprehend and address structural political, social and economic conditions. Recently under the more fashionable moniker of sustainability, environmentalism has fostered a pseudo-ethical agenda that avoids issues of how the social and political interact.122 Yet sustainable does not necessarily mean just,123 and by prioritizing the natural system over its social and political correlatives, sustainability runs the risk of precipitously foreclosing the question of how these various regimes interact with one another within the dynamics linking natural and cultural history, and further, of what degree and sort of autonomy these interactions

Diana Mitlin, Reshaping Local Democracy, Environment & Urbanization 16 (2004), 5. Eric Swengedouw and Nikolas C. Heynen Urban Political Ecology, Justice, and the Politics of Scale, Antipode 35 (2003), 910. 121 Ibid, 910. 122 Scott Cohen and Erika Naginski, The Return to Nature, in Ecological Urbanism, 136; Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 216. 123 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 177.
119 120

35

make possible.124 American environmental policy and the environmental movement alike make the egregious assumption of geographic and social neutrality within the natural and human environments they attempt to regulate.125 In lieu of recognizing the interconnectivity of environmental sustainability with social equity, livability, and dense urbanization, the environmental movement has largely remained a bastion of NIMBY-ism, defense of pristine nature for the vacationing elite, and other efforts pioneered by economically privileged individuals to preserve a superficial sense of nature. The tension between environmentalism and environmental justice is most visible in cities.126 The close proximity of workplaces, residencies, industry, parks, schools, and stores makes it much harder to externalize the outputs (waste, pollution, etc.) of everyday operations, particularly when the city is surrounded by suburban areas or preserved farmland, neither of which are amenable to receiving the citys waste products. Moreover, the concentration of people, material, and capital in cities also concentrates these negative outputs, rendering environmental degradation and mismanagement more evident. Due to the challenge of exporting their consequences, they tend affect certain areas of the immediate community. Both the processes that produce waste, pollution, and other inhospitable by-products, and the uneven distribution of their consequences, are the result of a constellation of ecological, social, economic, and political factors. The complexity of causality does not lend itself to reductionism: [t]here is no such thing as an unsustainable city in generalbut rather there are a series of urban and environmental processes that negatively affect some social groups while benefitting

Andrew Payne, Sustainability and Pleasure: An Untimely Meditation, Harvard Design Magazine 30 (2009), 78. 125 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 215; Cohen and Naginski, Return to Nature, 136. 126 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 216.
124

36

others.127 When treating issues of food and nutrition, the distinction between urban environmentalism and environmental justice morphs into the distinction between local foodieism and food justice, both of which are reactions to the [h]unger, supermarket abandonment of urban American, and a growing discontent with food and the environment [that] emerged as separate but equal problems in the 1960s and gradually swelled to a tidal wave by the 1980s.128 Again, the underlying causes of these separate but equal problems are shared: the market economy and the mindset it inculcates allows for individuals to go hungry, to face the perils of poor dietary health, to grow food in harmful ways, and to exploit farmworkers, all while generating immense prosperity for the few. Yet in response, activism has focused on the problems this underlying cause engenders rather than the cause itself, fragmenting efforts into separate camps of antihunger, food access/food justice, local foodie-ism, and sustainable agriculture. Attempts to reintegrate these efforts have been marked by social tensions, which can amplify their differences rather than reveal their mutual goals.129 As Mark Winne highlight, [t]he exponential growth in consumer demand for healthy food that is local and organic is driving a wedge the size of the Grand Canyon between the haves and the have-nots. 130 The fundamental goal of these fragmented movements should be not just to preserve a swath of farmland or to keep a factory from polluting near a low-income neighborhood, but to
Eric Swyngedouw and Nikolas Heynen, Urban Political Ecology, Justice, and the Politics of Scale, in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 80. 128 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 8. 129 Ibid., 18; Isaiah Thompson, Agricultural Phenomenon: What happens when idealist, entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats all latch on to the same trend?, Philadelphia City Paper, April 28, 2010, accessed November 22, 2010, http://citypaper.net/articles/2010/04/29/urban-gardening-agriculture-in-philadelphia. 130 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 135. See also: If theres no place in the food movement for low- and middleincome people of all racesweve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right that this is a consumption club for people whove traveled to Europe and tasted fine food, Elizabeth Roythe, Street Farmer, New York Times, July 1, 2009.
127

37

reorient urban and environmental processes so their costs and benefits are shared evenly across all communities. Eric Swengedouw and Nikolas Heynen describe how [a] just urban socioenvironmental perspectivealways needs to consider the question of who gains and who pays and to ask serious questions about the multiple power relationsand the scalar geometry of these relationsthrough which deeply unjust socioenvironmental conditions and produced and maintains.131 Ultimately, the antihunger, food justice, local foods, and sustainable agriculture movements are responses to those deeply unjust socioenvironmental conditions, but they fail to recognize both their unity against the cause of those conditions, and their interdependence in forming an effective counterforce. Instead, they have often mutually excluded one another. For example, there was no clause for food justice or hunger relief in the Organic Foods Protection Act of 1990 promoted by farmers and environmentalists, and accordingly, antihunger activists did not support the bill and the farmer/environmentalist camp did not advocate for an antihunger clause.132 Another example: in the past, the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) has taken a stance against legislation to protect farm workers rights (considered both an issue of immigrant rights and environmental justice), such as the Fair Labor Practices Bill claiming that it would harm the small farmers that comprise much of their membership.133

Subsistence | Profit-generation: In his proposal for an offensive restructuring of the social state, Loc Wacquant lists the decoupling of subsistence from work as one of the three key

Swengedouw and Heynen, Urban Political Ecology (2003), 901. Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 134. 133 Ed Yowell, Farm Views on Labor Practices, June 2010, Food Systems Network NYC, June 2010, accessed May 1, 2011, http://www.foodsystemsnyc.org/farm_views_labor_june2010.
131 132

38

elements in expanding the sphere of social rights.134 On the other end of the spectrum, Lori Wallach and Patrick Woodall contend that those liberated from subsistence farming through the globalized food trade ultimately end up among the urban workforce, either unemployed or victims of continually suppressed wages due to an oversupply of labor.135 Offering a compromise, Beth McKellips discusses the need to create ways to grow food that blend and compliment peoples living patterns.136 Though the commodification of food has exacerbated human vulnerability by basing access to food on what happens elsewhere in the global market system and has doubtless decreased direct access to food for many, 137 it is not in my interest to propose a implausible nationalization of the food system. Another extreme proposition has been made for a return to individual subsistence farming, but I maintain that this is both untenable and undesirable in our highly modernized, urbanized, and interconnected society. It is particularly perverse when these calls to subsistence are forced upon the poor and hungry: [h]aving witnessed many sincere but ultimately failed attempts to transform dirt, water, and seed into food, I tend to look somewhat askance at those who suggest that more of us, if not all of us, and especially the poor, should grow their own.138 Ive observed a trend in what I call apocalyptic gardening books describing how to grow food in light of a pending catastrophe, including Steve Solomons Gardening When It Counts: Growing food in hard times (2005), Kathy Harrisons Just In Case: How to be selfsufficient when the unexpected happens (2008), and Robin Wheelers Food Security for the
Loc Wacquant, Sustaining the City in the Face of Advanced Marginality, in Ecological Urbanism, 404. Wallach and Woodall, WTO on Agriculture, 190. 136 Beth McKellips, Why food systems planning is a fad (that should not fade), Panorama: Journal of the City and Regional Planning Department of the University of Pennsylvania (Spring 2010), 15. 137 Heynen, Justice of Eating in the City, 133. 138 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 55.
134 135

39

Faint of Heart (2008). While self-sufficiency is a typical impulse in uncertain times, perhaps it is the cause of uncertainty that should be examined.139 These books detail activities only plausible for an individual with a certain level of resource access (to land, equipment, knowledge including the book itselfand the necessary funds to acquire them, etc.), thus inherently excluding a portion of the population.140 Such a mindset is in line with the nostalgia Alice Waters and Michael Pollan express for Jeffersonian agricultural ideals, in which self-sufficiency tends towards self-satisfaction and self-righteousness.141 Despite the fact that the stewardship that Jefferson envisioned is anachronistic, the term stewardship is frequently employed in political rhetoric to denote unhelpful notions of Jeffersonian volunteerism and free will, as opposed to state control and intervention.142 It is unfortunate to see this neostewardship143 infiltrate the parlance of URA, at times resulting in an individualist, self-interested approach that leaves many behind. Rather than consider rationality of neoliberalism as a totalizing force that has ravaged society and will eventually implode in a slate-cleaning doomsdayresulting perhaps in the apocalyptic primitivism of every-man-for-herself subsistenceI find it more productive and realistic to consider the new forms of progress, polity, and engagement that this rationality has engendered in the context of food justice, and explore how they can be expanded for real change.

Sustainable Local Food | Biotechnology: The claim of both the local food and the agrochemicalbiotech camps is that their approach will feed the world.144 Both exhibit ulterior motivations
Dorothe Imbert, Aux Fermes, Citoyens!, in Ecological Urbanism, 256. Power, Combining Social Justice, 34. 141 Ibid., 256; Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 55. 142 Randolph T. Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 367. 143 Ibid., 369. 144 By agrochemical-biotech camp, I mean proponents of genetically modified crops, synthetic agricultural
139 140

40

and underlying ideologies. I believe that once the aforementioned trappings are removed, both present valuable and not necessarily conflicting evidence for their respective claims. The local foods movement finds its origins in the environmentalism mentioned above, drawing on the First Earth Day (1970), Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and Wendell Berry in its claims for homegrown food, a reduction in fossil fuel dependence, restoration of the family farm and rural lifestyles, challenges to corporate power and increased self-reliance (sometimes bordering on the above-mentioned calls for subsistence).145 The movement largely presupposes sustainable agricultural practices, thus encompassing ecological farming within its undertakings. Though the movement has dabbled in collaborations with environmental justice, for the most part it remains firmly rooted in a credo of conscientious consumerism for personal health and environmental sustainability.146 If the local foods movement continues to distinguish itself from efforts for environmental justice or appropriate growing technology, it risks becoming another neoliberal policy experiment in local boosterism, place-making, and elite consumption practices.147 However, many involved in the local foods movement are aware of both their socioeconomic status and the fact that fresh, healthy food is an accompanying privilege of their class.148 Such actors attempt to reconcile the health and environmental benefits of local food with the fact that the underprivileged cannot access such benefits through the market. It is these actors, and their efforts, that Im interested in: the local foods movement does not need to be exposed or debased so much as reoriented, so its advantages can be enjoyed by the broadest
chemicals, and other forms of high-input, high-cost farming. 145 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 18; Power, Combining Social Justice, 31. 146 Holmes, Neoliberal Appetities, n.p. 147 Peck et al., City as Policy Lab, n.p. 148 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 3.

41

constituency possible. Moreover, the movement to date can be credited with turning the public and political eye to issues of food insecurity in America,149 and, when most successful, highlighting these issues as symptomatic of unequal wealth distribution. Farmers markets, the poster-child of local foods, for example, presented the first milestone in the campaign to overhaul the food system, both to increase sustainability and food security.150 This represents acknowledgement of the often-overlooked notion that both agricultural unsustainability and poverty (and thus food insecurity) are produced by the current neoliberal program.151 An asset local sustainable agriculture proponents do not often tout is high-yield production. Whether or not ecological farming practices achieve this is perhaps irrelevant: it has been frequently argued that enough food is already produced to feed the world over.152 Rather than stemming from underproduction, hunger is an issue of entitlement and access.153, Yet the agrochemical-biotech camp argues that the solution to hunger is increasing production, despite proof that increased yield does not result in increased distribution, and developing new agricultural technology does not necessarily increase justice for inner city populations or agricultural workers.154 While I could go into a more discursive treatment of whether genetically modified crops actually increase yield, etc., in the context of this paper such a discussion would be pedantic. 155 Avoiding the pervasive bickering over these facts, I believe the greater issues
Joanna Frank 2011. Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 46. 151 Power, Combining Social Justice, 32. 152 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 54; Allen, Together at the Table, 22; Damian Carrington and John Vidal, Global food system must be transformed on industrial revolution scale, The Guardian, January 24, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/24/global-food-system-report. 153 Wallach and Woodall, WTO on Agriculture, 190; Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 129; Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 54. 154 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 46; Cheri Lucas Jennings and Bruce H. Jennings, Green Fields/Brown Skin: Posting as a sign of recognition, in In the Nature of Things: Language, politics, and the environment, ed. Jane Bennett and William Caloupka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 175. 155 Some research claims no significant yield increase in certain transgenic crops: Wallach and Woodall, WTO on Agriculture, 211; Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 138; Holt-Gimnez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 103, or even if higher
149 150

42

arent the effectiveness of the technology but its appropriateness, inclusiveness, and availability.156 In his preeminent essay The Three Ecologies, Flix Guattari describes how the technosciences are crucial for human and planetary survival.157 Raj Patel, on the other hand, contends that focusing on technology actively prevents serious discussions about tackling systemic poverty. It is absurd, he states, to ask a crop to solve the problems of income and food distribution.158 As with the above dichotomies, a compromise between the two provides much more fruitful discourse and basis for action, and Patel and Guattari ultimately arrive at similarly moderate conclusions. Guattari calls for the reorientation of the technosciences through the recomposition of social movements and power structures,159 and Patel concedes that technology itself is not necessarily the problem, but its power and control.160, Just as the field of ecology has consistently ignored people, agricultural researchers have persistently disregarded social and ecological consequences in their narrow goal of increasing production. They often see themselves as purely scientists, with illusions of acting apolitically through their research.161 This illusion is easy to maintain when research is executed in highly exclusive laboratories, far from its respective audience and potential users. However, situating research and experimentation in the environment of their intended application, given the
yields are evidenced, its due to increased inputs, particularly of water, an increasingly precious resource: Fred Pearce, When Rivers Run Dry: Water The defining crisis of the 21st century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 35. 156 [B]ecause the patenting of GM seeds undercuts the ability of poor farmers to replant such seed, even if the seeds produced larger yields those most susceptible to hunger would not be able to afford the use of such varieties, Wallach and Woodall, WTO on Agriculture, 211. 157 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 66. 158 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 137. 159 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 42. See also: Verena Andermatt Conley, Urban Ecological Practices: Flix Guattaris Three Ecologies, in Ecological Urbanism, 138-9. 160 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 139. See also: Michael Hardt and Antionio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 283. 161 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 181.

43

allowance for community input and feedback, can bring science into the social, political, and ecological sphere.162, The localization of research and its application can foster collaborative interactions between traditional/experiential knowledge and technosciencethe former of which is usually disbarred by calls to professional research.163 Cuba provides an example of this collaboration: there, biotechnology is shaped by public means for public ends. The government has established numerous small, cooperatively owned labs placed strategically within the contexts where their resulting technology will be employed (i.e. labs studying agricultural technology are placed in agricultural areas). There is an open dialogue between those in the labs164 and the laborers. Such interactions have been labeled as secondary synthesis between bottom-up self-help/lay science/popular epidemiology and top-down management.165 As a result, the most appropriate technology for specific circumstances is employed, which in the case of Cuba has resulted in the use of limited biotechnology. For example, instead of engineering biological controls into seeds, such as the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), it is applied selectively as a biopesticide only when necessary.166 Based on the case of Cuba,167 it appears that when citizen participation and socioecological considerations are incorporated into research, a semi-technical form of farming tends to resultpart traditional method, part new
Ibid., 160; Felson and Pollak Situating Urban Ecological Experiments, 361. Paul Robbins, The Political Ecology of Ecological Urbanism, in Ecological Urbanism, 415. 164 Cuban labs, to begin with, are far more diffuse and numerous than the few private, enclavized institutions in which most of global North biotechnology is developed. 165 Susannah Hagan, Performalism: Environmental Metrics and Urban Design, in Ecological Urbanism, 466. 166 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 160. 167 Recently, there has been much press coverage and excitement over Cubas agricultural self-sufficiency, yet the circumstances that forced this arrangement upon Cuba were historically and politically unique. The countrys vastly different political and economic terrain renders comparisons between Cuba and the United States, as well as advocacy for a Cuban-esque agricultural arrangement in the United States, irrelevant and largely unconstructive. [E]ven in Havana, with support from the authorities, gardens face serious limiting factors as a result of material conditions, Jolly, Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy, 199. However, the arrangement of their scientific research infrastructure is not as highly dependent on their unique political and economic situation as to render it irrelevant as a model. For more on the topic of Cuban exceptionalism, see Andy Fisher, The Exceptional Nature of Cuban Urban Agriculture, Civil Eats, April 21, 2010, http://civileats.com/2010/04/21/the-exceptional-nature-ofcuban-urban-agriculture/..
162 163

44

technological development.168 The localization of experimentation and research also allows for the selection of the most appropriate crops for local conditions, instead of the production of new varieties and technologies that attempt to alter local conditions to match the plant varietys needs.169 Thomas Lyson describes how the formation of a more just, local food system necessitates an interweaving of modern and technologically advanced forms of agriculture within local food production and distribution networks.170 The urban agriculture and food justice movement must adopt a broader epistemological framework than that of agricultural science in order to overcome technocratic dichotomies and find continuity with other fields.171 There is a need for, as described by Patricia Allen, a general questioning of the relevance of science and technology andthe inability of the agricultural sciences [alone] to resolve fundamental problems in the social and legal systems that led to nonsustainable agriculture [and food insecurity] in the first place.172 The same synthesizing approach between technical expertise and citizen experiential knowledge can be applied to food system organization and other types of planning, such as a synthesis between municipal departments and community leaders. For example, the organizational model of a proposed Hartford local food system called for the city to provide direction and funding while community organizations would implement the strategy on the ground, contributing their street knowledge endemic to their lived experienceidentifying leadership figures, navigating local politics, etc.173 If not a collaboration, the interaction between citizen science and technocratic knowledge is often antagonistic, as seen with the practice of
Holt-Gimnez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 101. Pearce, When Rivers Run Dry, 303. 170 Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 74. 171 Allen, Together at the Table, 17. 172 Ibid. 2004, 39. 173 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 17.
168 169

45

bio-piracy, in which agrochemical and biotech corporations steal free, traditional knowledge from those executing indigenous agricultural practices and proceed to patent it and punish those they stole it from for using it illegally.174 Communities that have had knowledge bio-pirated find it difficult to challenge private corporations that use such practices, as the companies are typically not situated in the communities from which they bio-pirate. Institutions that are localized within the communities that they effect and exert power over are inherently more accountable for their actions by virtue of being spatially situated withinand thereby vulnerable tothe resulting consequences.175

Producer | Consumer: The producer side of the producer-consumer relationship in agriculture has become so differentiated and diversified that it is no longer merely a matter of the farmer and the eater. Active stakeholders in the processes of agriculture and food consumption include: food retailers, agrochemical companies, farmworkers, real estate agents, politicians, non-profits, the emergency food assistance-industrial complex, and public food assistance programs, among others. Therefore the reduction to the discussion of farm subsidies or food stamps to a tension between rural family farmers and the urban food insecure is not just unhelpful, it is inaccurate. Each stakeholder presents a node at which the conventional system could be targeted for change, and reducing the plurality of players involved obscures such opportunities for intervention. Potential shared interests among stakeholders are also hidden: small- and mid-sized farms, farmworkers, and the urban poor actually share a common ideological terrain as marginalized actors in the highly capitalized food system.176
Joeseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 125. Narayan and Prasch 2006a, 19. 176 Power, Combining Social Justice, 32.
174 175

46

City | Nature: This distinction is hardly worth mentioning, but as a token nod to those who persist in contending that cities are antithetical to nature, I will briefly state the case against this allegation. Concurrent to the worldwide consolidation into urban centers has been the exacerbation of the human-nature, urban-nature, and culture-nature dichotomies.177 A renaissance of romantic idealism of nature has resulted from these dichotomies, leading to a dangerously anti-human directive in legislation, conservation, and urban planning.178 This sentimentality for an imaginary natural world is a consequence of the false dualism of external and universal nature, 179 which confounds constructive critique of social, political and economic realities.180 While humans ability to comprehend natural laws and apply them correctly, such as with food production, has furnished us with an advantage over other organisms,181 it simultaneously defines us as humans and moves us closer to, not further from, the center of nature.182 Cities are an environment where humans have applied said mastery and have historically flourished, thus they are natural.183 By focusing on the human environment, which in this era increasingly means cities, there is the potential to transcend these dualistic conceptions of nature and engage the possibility of progressive environmental politics.184 David Harvey describes how the myth than cities are anti-ecological must be exploded, as to not think of [future urban worlds] is the evade one of the most important socioecological dilemmas that human society now faces.185
Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 7. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 579-583. 179 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press: 2008), 7. 180 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 7; Smith, Uneven Development, 84, 107; Felson & Pollack, Situating Urban Ecological Experiments, 356. 181 Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 180. 182 Smith, Uneven Development, 91. 183 Jacobs, Death and Life, xviii. 184 Gandy, Concrete and Clay,183; Robbins 2010, 415. 185 Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 435.
177 178

47

All these binaries must be disengaged to work towards non-cataclysmic, regionally specific action, in order to undo and reimagine the interactions between natural, material, and cultural goods based exclusively on profit.

Chapter 2 Case Studies

In the following chapter I summarize the interviews I conducted with two different farms serving New York City residents: Hearty Roots, situated in the town of Red Hook approximately two and a half hours outside the city, and the High School for Public Service (HSPS) Youth Farm located within the city in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. These case studies are intended to contextualize the conditions described above, as well as to elucidate potential new directions and pathways for social justice within urban and regional agriculture. I begin with an explanation of why I chose to focus on these two specific farms, the city of New York, cities in general, and the Global North.

*** Qualifying selections

48

Why cities? I chose to focus on an urban center for several reasons. It is common knowledge that the world is rapidly urbanizing, with over half the world population now living in citiesa number that is only expected to rise.186 As previously discussed, cities provide a microcosm of the political rationality of neoliberalism. In some senses, they are also the macrocosm of this rationalityfrom a regional or mesogeographical perspective, urbanization affects everyone, everywhereunevenly, nonetheless, but significantly.187 In short, as put by Mustafa Koc et al., [r]ural-urban and local-global interrelationships make it impossible to study urban food-security issues in isolation. Yet it is also clear that extraordinary urban growth in the 20th century and increasing threats to food security for millions of urban dwellers merits particular attention.188 Why America? Firstly, America is both familiar and accessible to me, as a life-long resident of a Philadelphia suburb and student at Vassar College, located north of New York City. Secondly, the Global North-South distinction is an increasingly confining artifact of regimes and economies past. Today, it must be acknowledged that there are many overlapping scales189 of unjust geographies,190 not just one divisible by hemisphere. The distinctions between the core/periphery, industrialized/industrializing are restrictively historical and sociological.191 Edward Soja compares a redlined zone in a city to the developing world192- both are
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), 2. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 59. 188 Koc et al,, Introduction, 3. 189 By scales, I do not mean the traditional, structuralist production of scales as sites of analysis, such as urban, regional, national, or global, but rather the more fluid sense of the term, in which geographic configurations are temporary and shifting as conditions change. For more on the redefinition of scale, see David Delaney and Helga Leitner, The Political Construction of Scale, Political Geography 16 (2, 1997): 93-97; Kevin R. Cox, Spaces of Dependence, Spaces of Engagement and the Politics of Scale, or: Looking for Local Politics, Political Geography 17 (1, 1998): 1-23. 190 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 58. 191 Ibid., 56. 192 Ibid., 58.
186 187

49

disenfranchised through various scales of uneven development. [S]ocial conditions of the former Third World, Jrgen Habermas echoes, are becoming commonplace in the urban centers of the First World.193 Thus the same patterns of increasing poverty and inequality exhibited between nations can be found within the U.S. as well: they are a truly global phenomenon.194 With regard to hunger and food security in the U.S., the outmoded nature of the Global North-South distinction is particularly poignant as food crises are affecting people across the North-South divide.195 Why these two farms? It should be noted that I could have chosen from any number of farms, these two just happened to resonate with my criteria: one urban, the other regional but serving an urban population, both serving low-income communities demonstrating food insecurity. Of two models of urban and regional agriculture previously mentionedalternative food distribution and self-provisioningthese are both of the former category. While selfprovisioning models can serve as a powerful symbol196 and constitute important spatial reclamations of urban fabric for marginalized communities, they are not ultimately solutions to poverty, food insecurity, or their causality.197 To imbue self-provisioning with these goals is to fail to acknowledge that it both allows for the perpetuation of the inequities of the market system and tends to have a low economic return, further disadvantaging those already disadvantaged.198 Calls to self-subsistence may be rooted in frustration with non-participatory government and a sense of powerlessness and lack of control. But people who have been excluded and failed by the normative forms of democracy shouldnt have to remove themselves from the popular pathways
Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 123. Koc et al., Introduction, 3. 195 Holt-Gimnez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 98. 196 Koc et al., Introduction, 5. 197 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 57. 198 Power, Combining Social Justice, 34.
193 194

50

of society to have their needs met. The efforts of poor people in industrialized countries to provide food for themselves represent an (unjustly) extraordinary amount of work for selfconsumption.199 Whats more, self-provisioning is highly individualistic and libertarian, thwarting the interconnectivity and sense of community that urban and regional agriculture claim to engender. While food justice has the potential to be an everybody movement, the patent individualism of self-provisioning models threatens the realization of collective goals and action.200 That said, if self-sufficiency is not the primary standard by which the success of urban community gardens are measured, they certainly offer other, less problematic pay-offs: the creation neighborhoodbased job training and employment opportunities, education, community pride, and realization of leadership capacities.201 Within the alternative marketing and distribution form, both farms are for-profitor in the case of the HSPS Youth Farm, partially for-profit (detailed below). I intentionally chose farms working outside the non-profit sector for several reasons. The grants that non-profits depend upon effectively cause a discursive closure among organizations, forcing them to comply to the terms and ideologies of the grant-giver, prematurely codifying what will be included in an organizations projects and what will be ignored, and dictating methodology (Allen 2004, 57). As described by Dr. Margaret Flowers, key advocate of universal health care in the United States: Those who are working for effective change are not going to get foundation dollars Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used.202 The problematic compromises resulting from the non-profit industrial complex can be
Ibid., 34. Smith, Fighting Doom, n.p. 201 Desmond Jolly, Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 198. 202 Dr. Margaret Flower, as quoted in Chris Hedges, Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion, Truthout, November
199 200

51

summarized as follows: the monitoring and controlling of social justice movements; the diversion of public funds into private possession through foundations; the management and control of dissent that allow capitalism to continue to run smoothly; the redirection of activist energies towards career-based organizing rather than mass-based organizing that is capable of actually transforming society; allowing corporations to use philanthropy to obscure exploitative and colonial practices; and encouraging social movements to model themselves after corporations rather than challenging them.203 Moreover, the threat of financial closure is always around the corner for non-profits that survive on grants year-to-year. This remains true for non-profit URA projects, which, despite being based upon the production of an indispensible commodity204 (food), prioritize their commitment to social justice over financial sustainability, arguably to a fault. Daniel Tucker describes how [there are] serious obstacles to urban agriculture projects with a commitment to social justice, such as competing with for-profitfirms that are more efficient according to their economies of scale. It certainly causes us to wonder what would happen to these grassroots infrastructural efforts if they had more efficiency standards demanded of them.205 I believe the financial fragility of non-profit URA projects is often overlooked in their zealous application, proliferation, and expansion. The recently launched Five Borough Farm project of the Design Trust for Public Space intends to take a system-wide approach to urban agriculture, tying it to regional production as well as the pursuit of social justice beyond the mere provision healthy produce. Though at times succumbing to blind exaltation of urban agriculture,
22, 2010, http://www.truth-out.org/power-and-tiny-acts-rebellion65351. 203 Andrea Smith, Introduction: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 3. 204 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 18. 205 Daniel Tucker, Inheriting the Grid #2, n.p.

52

Five Borough Farm has acknowledged the need to assemble a range of opinions and studies across professions to assess the potentiality and limits of urban agriculture in New York City. Their preliminary evaluation concluded that non-profit projects alone will not support any sort of system-wide agriculture infrastructure. As Nevin Cohen, New School professor of Environmental Studies and the urban food policy expert for the project, states: My sense is that the most vibrant urban agriculture systemwill involve pure for-profit farms that are embedded in their communities, neighborhood-based community gardens run by volunteers, and hybrids for-profit farms that rely at critical moments on Crop Mobs for extra labor, and non-profits that teach young people how to make a buck growing and selling fresh produce.206

*** Hearty Roots Community Farm

Hearty Roots is a CSA-model farm located in Red Hook in the Hudson Valley. It distributes its produce directly from the farm, as well as from two regional drop-off locations in Woodstock and Kingston, and three sites in Brooklyn, in the East Williamsburg, Greenwood Heights, and Bay Ridge neighborhoods. I spoke with Benjamin Shute, who has co-owned and managed the farm since its inception in 2004. The for-profit farm takes two different approaches to improving access to their produce for low-income city residents: sliding scale payment schemes at some of their Brooklyn drop-off locations and a contract with the Local Produce Link

Nevin Cohen, interview by Urban Omnibus, Urban Omnibus: a project of the Architectural League of New York, January 19, 2011.
206

53

program, a collaboration between the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) and two non-profits, Just Food and United Way. Hearty Roots has been remarkably successful, growing to over ten times its original size its seven years of production, to a current total of 18 acres in cultivation. That acreage yields produce for the 600 households in the CSA program as well as 23,000 pounds of produce that are donated to Local Produce Link. The farm has never gone into debt, and expanded each year only to the extent that was financially viable. Shute notes that in the farms start-up years, he and his co-founder were certainly underpaying themselves for the amount of labor they exerted, but that the farm now employs and fairly pays two year-round managers and nine seasonal workers. They aim for a 5-10% operating margin by projecting costs in the spring and pricing their CSA shares for the coming season (summer-fall) to meet that profit goal. The farm has not been significantly affected by the recent financial crisis, in fact the number of Hearty Roots CSA members increased exponentially from 2006 to 2009. That number has since plateaued and dipped slightly but remains at a high point, with waitlists still forming every year. Shute mused that the plateauing may be due to a leveling off of growth or people deciding, after trying out the CSA model, that it wasnt for them. When asked why the farm operated on a for-profit, as opposed to non-profit, model, Shute replied:
Theres [sic] a bunch of farms around our area who are set up as non-profits and whose mission is more set-up around education, etc. and theyre really great farms but that was just not really our goal, our goal was just to be a great farm producing good food for people[and] to make it work in a way that would be self-supporting, where we wouldnt have to rely on grants or outside funds, where we could just kind of create our own value without having to look to outside sources for it. Ive worked for non-profits and it can be really discouraging to see how much good work there is to be done out there and how limited the pool of resources is, in terms of government grants and private donations, etcwe wanted to try to create a model that could be replicated by other people everywhere and be self-supporting, could grow without depending on other sources of value and funding.

When asked about a mission statement, Shute responded that Hearty Roots does not have an

54

official one, but proceeded to summarize their goals as follows: the ecological stewardship of the land, serving as a model for and venue for the education of budding young farmers, and providing fresh, high quality food to both those who can afford it and those who cannot. As for the accomplishment of the last goal, the farm has pursued two programs, as mentioned: participating in Local Produce Link and offering subsidized CSA share prices for low-income residents at their urban drop-off locations. Local Produce Link distributes produce to forty-four soup kitchens and food pantries in the city from regional farms that are paid by the NYSDOH. Hearty Roots receives $1.75 per pound of produce, a higher price than the program pays conventional farms. The produce from Hearty Roots is specifically distributed to five food pantries in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Hearty Roots subsidized share offering was not initiated by the farm itself, but by core groups of CSA members that help organize each drop-off location. The exact form and extent of subsidization at a given drop-off location depends upon the discretion of these core groups. Reduced-price shares are funded mainly by donations from members who elect to pay extra in addition to the cost of their shares in order to subsidize the cost for those who cannot afford to pay the full price. The cost of a full-price share also has about $10 or $15 built into it that contributes to subsidizing shares. As for accepting food stamps (SNAP/EBT)207 or WIC as payment, certain core groups have attempted to do so in the past, with little success. Shute states that incorporating public food assistance programs has proven to be both inconvenient for the core groups and program participants, though he provides minimal evidence to support this statement. He contends that the
The federal food stamp program is technically now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Electronic Balance Transfer (EBT) is the denotation of the physical form of food stampsa plastic payment card, essentially food a stamp gift card or credit card. For the remainder of this paper I will refer to EBT, SNAP and food stamps interchangeably.
207

55

paperwork and regulations of EBT and WIC limited their feasibility as payment methods for Hearty Roots shares, citing specifically the stipulation that food cannot be bought on contract with food stamps (a CSA share is essentially a 3-6 month contract), but rather payments must be made weekly or every other week, in lieu of a lump sum. Shute adds that the core groups have found that individuals using EBT would rather just pay for their vegetables at the subsidized share rate out of pocket and use their EBT card for food at other [retailers], where its easier to use. Beyond payment barriers, Shute lists several other elements that prevent Hearty Roots shares from being equally accessible across income strata, such as being available to pick-up shares at the designated drop-off time and having the time and resources to prepare unfamiliar vegetables: its kind of a big commitment in a lot of different realms and although helping to lower the price can help make it more suitable to some people, its generally not the most popular option amongst people who, well, dont have money. Collecting feedback from members could mitigate the issue of unfamiliar or culturally inappropriate offerings. Hearty Roots does take an annual survey of members, but Shute states that the diversity of tastes (perhaps due in part to the diversity of income levels) confounds this effort. While a few major trends can be distinguished from the results, the surveys have largely led the farm to conclude that a certain degree of flexibility is a prerequisite to purchasing a CSA share. The location of urban drop-off sites is another limiting factor. Hearty Roots Brooklyn sites were selected by Just Food through its CSA in NYC program, which requires the following criteria in order to match regional farms with urban neighborhoods: the existence of neighborhood leaders who are organizing for a local CSA drop-off site and are willing to

56

dedicate time and energy to the effort, and a delivery time and location convenient for the farm. The likelihood of these criteria being met in low-income neighborhoods is slimmer for a number of reasons: a lack community interest in and knowledge of the CSA model, fewer residents with the time and motivation to pursue a neighborhood drop-off site, and incompatible pick-up times among variably employed individuals often working multiple jobs. These factors are exacerbated by the fact that Hearty Roots and Just Food do not advertise the CSA program in the current drop-off neighborhoods, nor in potential new sites, beyond Just Foods inclusion of Hearty Roots in the CSA Finder location of their website. The core groups are free to advertise, but Shute was unsure of how or where they do so. In light of the limitations of the CSA model, Shute believes that the Local Produce Link program is more effective at fulfilling Hearty Roots mission of social justice, in getting more fresh food to city residents who dont have much access to it through other pathways. As for the trade-off between the benefits of urban agriculture and regional agriculture, Shute believes the two meet different needs, with urban agriculture often serving a more educational, experimental role, and regional agriculture actually meeting urban residents food requirements. In East Williamsburg, Hearty Roots combines the benefits of the two by situating their drop-off location at the Red Shed Community Garden:
I really love that one of our drop-offs is at the garden, because Hearty Roots is really well-suited to grow a lot of food for the city. Were really close, within a couple hours drive, were on a big piece of soil thats perfectly suited to vegetable production and can really produce efficiently and we can bring that into the city and we can couple that with the benefits of urban ag[riculture] and urban gardening because were going to this community garden where people can connect with how does food growwhen Im picking up my peppers lets go over here and look at these peppers and make that connection. I think you get the benefit of the efficiency and the larger scale production of a farm thats nearby and the educational and experiential benefits of seeing the plants growits nice to be able to help create that connection to their food in the city while still taking advantage of the economies of scale and productivity that we get from actually having a farm instead of a little plot.

57

He proceeds to emphasize more specifically the differences in productivity and efficiency between urban and regional agriculture:
Its great to see new projects in the city, and theres [sic] a few urban farms and rooftop operations, and theyreexciting but also, [with] a rooftop farm, youre trucking in all this soil in order to grow your foodan acre of topsoil six inches deep weighs 2 million pounds. From an efficiency standpoint, it makes a lot more sense to leave that topsoil where it is and bring in the food you can grow in it. Rooftop farming can work for certain things in terms of growing high value crops and education butit cant work for everything.

When asked about competition for urban consumers among regional farmers, Shute responded that he had no sense of such tension, but rather that regional Hudson Valley farmers have formed a communitythe Mid-Hudson Valley Growers Networkthrough which they have dinners, take farm tours, split bulk orders of supplies, and share advice. The growingand in the past year or so, plateauing, but still substantialdemand for local farm-fresh food has outpaced the supply from regional farms, but Shute muses that perhaps that will change in the future, particularly if the number of new farms and farmers continues to grow. As far as Hearty Roots political role, Shute engages with policy advocacy through the National Young Farmers Coalition, a group aimed at giving young farmers more voice and clout in shaping agricultural policy, particularly policy related to the USDA shifting its priorities in terms of providing funding or cost-sharing for practices that have a lot of ecological benefits or community benefits, which the type of farming that were doing generally does have. He describes how the farm is affected by the priorities of farming legislation every day, even though its this lingering background thing that doesnt [often] rear its head very obviously, because Hearty Roots faces a chronic competitive disadvantage to the more destructive method of subsidized, industrial farming. The recent food safety legislation in particular was cited, which, despite amendments to the contrary, may still contain language designed for large farms

58

(over $500,000 in revenue per year) that will still regulate smaller farms. It remains to be seen how that will cause us potential unnecessary headaches that arent actually making our food any safer but are making it harder for us to do what were doing. Shute ended the interview by highlighting land-use and real estate policies as the most imperative determinants in the future growth of regional farms in the New York City region. He described how local, state, and federal regulations and laws are needed to incentivize our best soils and our best land being used for its highest and best purpose which is
the production of good, healthy food and ecosystem services. Right now, in our areawhats incentivized is in many cases developmenteven when land trusts come in and protect land from development, they still dont set it up in a way that food production is incentivized or ecological farming is incentivized. A lot of the time these lands that are supposedly protected from development for farming are used as hobby farms by estate owners or hay fields etc. So there need to be some major steps forward in terms of how land is made available and used and incentivized in terms of whats happening on it.

***

High School For Public Service Youth Farm

The High School for Public Service Youth Farm broke ground on its Flatbush schoolyard plot a little over a year ago during the Spring 2010. The farm is a partnership between for-profit urban farming collective BK Farmyards and non-profit Green Guerillas. I spoke with BK Farmyards founder and Youth Farm educational coordinator Stacey Murphy, who explained to me that this for-profit/non-profit arrangement was necessary as the farm is located on public land. BK Farmyards is a sole proprietorship, while Green Guerillas provides the non-commercial component allowing the farm to be situated on the property of a public school. The farm was initially funded primarily by a Kickstarter page (which raised $13,192208) and fundraising events,
BK Farmyards: Developing a 1-Acre Youth Farm, Kickstarter, February 26, 2010, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bkfarmyards/bk-farmyards-developing-a-1-acre-youth-farm.
208

59

which covered the salaries of Murphy and a farm manager. A few small grants helped pay for materials, and a grant from the New York City Department of Health enabled the market manager to accept EBT/WIC/Health Bucks. She estimated that the farms operating costs are about $80,000 a year, a figure that does not include the approximately $6,000 of in-kind donationsof tools, equipment, and suppliesthe Youth Farm received this past year and expects to receive the equivalent of again this coming year. Murphy described the specific confluence of factors that led her to join the project when she was approached by the HSPS principal: a larger-scale site (for New York City), a community in need of fresh produce, and an abundance of employable, involve-able teens located in situ. The Youth Farm runs a CSA program and a weekly farmers market, where they are joined by regional growers. During their first season, the farm yielded 9,000 pounds of food on a quarter acre before their remaining crops were destroyed 5-weeks prematurely by a hailstorm, falling just short of their estimate of 10,000 pounds for the season. This was enough to feed 20 families for 15 weeks (what would have been 20 weeks if not for the hail) and to have a weekly inventory at their farmers market, where they accept EBT, WIC, and Health Bucks as payment. As part of a citywide initiative of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), for every $5 in EBT customers spend at the Youth Farms market (or any other participating farmers market), they receive $2 in Health Bucks, which can only be used at farmers markets. In its first year, 15% of customers paid with EBT, WIC, Health Bucks, or Senior Checks at the farmers market, though Murphy adds that the Youth Farm was unfortunately omitted on a heavily publicized list of area farmers markets accepting those payment forms. She estimates the percentage would have been higher otherwise.

60

EBT can also be used to join the CSA, though Murphy echoes Shute in stating that it is tricky. However, the Youth Farm has devised a system to both meeting the biweekly payment requirements of EBT and the guaranteed pay up-front of the CSA model: EBT participants write a check up front that the Youth Farm does not cash, which serves as a form of contract. Despite this solution, Murphy observed that customers paying through public assistance programs still preferred to shop at the farmers market rather than commit to a full CSA season: [m]y theory is that there is too much risk for them to do that: too many unknowns that could occur over the 5 months [the annual duration of the CSA]. The CSA payments are also determined on a sliding scale dependent on income level. When asked if the farms acceptance of public assistance payments attracted more fullpaying customers in their desire to support the farm in participating in these programs, Murphy stated that customers are certainly aware that the farm accepts EBT/WIC/Health Bucks/Senior Checks as there are several large signs stating so, but the reasons full-paying customers give for their patronage are primarily supporting the teen programs and the superior quality produce. Beyond the signs at the farmers market, the Youth Farms acceptance of Health Bucks and EBT is advertised by the DOHMH on the reverse of the Health Bucks themselves (along with all other New York City farmers markets accepting those payment forms). There are also two large (3 foot by 25 foot) banners on the farms fence and flyers that some community members post at their workplaces. For the coming season, the Youth Farm will advertise their public assistance payment programs at local hospitals and churches. The Youth Farm faces fewer issues of accessibility than a regional CSA with a drop-off window of a few hours per week. Regulars are permitted to shop outside market hours,

61

particularly as the local hospital shift starts at 2pm, and the market doesnt open until 3pm. They are also applying for a grant this year to fund a program in which participating teens would deliver produce to older community members who find it challenging to travel to the market. Murphy admitted that [t]his is something we think a lot about, but we work for 12 straight hours on market days, and it is difficult to address individual needs. As for mitigating the unfamiliarity of certain crops for the community members the farm is intended to serve, Murphy cites the cooking demos at the farmers market provided by Just Foods Community Food Education program. At the demos, a Just Food Chef prepares the types of produce the community is not buying, in order to demonstrate how to cook it and how it tastes. The teens who tend to the farm also select what will be grown on 2,000 square feet of the site (the rest of the crop plan is determined by the farm manager). The Youth Farm surveyed the community at the end of the season to determine which crops to grow more or less of, the results of which Murphy confirmed with their sales data. Members of the community have also provided seedlings of crops of cultural importance for the farm to grow. Murphy acknowledged that the Youth Farm is still addressing the issue of unfamiliarity with the CSA model in general and she hopes to conduct additional community outreach through churches in future seasons. By 2014 the farm hopes to grow 5 months worth of produce for 80 families, in addition to continuing its weekly farmers market. When asked about the trade-off between farming on a finite piece of urban land as opposed to a larger piece of regional farmland, Murphy pointed to the fact that the Youth Farm hosted the regional Trinity Farm (Clintondale, NY- across the river from Poughkeepsie in the Hudson Valley) at its farmers market this past year. This enabled the Youth Farm to provide more produce, and different types of produce they could not grow on

62

their 1-acre configuration, such as apples and corn. She reported that these products were well received by the community. One of the results of the survey was a marked community demand for fresh fruit, leading the farm to consider purchasing wholesale from Red Jacket Orchards (Geneva, NY in the Finger Lakes Region) and reselling the produce at the farmers market. In future years the farm hopes to serve as a hub for regional farmers, while maintaining the firsthand connection between agriculture and the Flatbush community that the Youth Farm provides. Murphy concluded: [o]ur farm provides an amazing opportunity for both our farm AND regional farmers to serve this urban population. We provide a logical space for fresh food distributionWe have a very close relationship with our community: they come chat with us on a daily basis over the fence. I think this is a bigger draw than a farmers market or CSA dropped [off] somewhere else in the city. The dual regional-urban food provision model is representative of the Youth Farms goal of mitigating food injustice, as described by Murphy: [t]he farm's role is straight forward: we provide thousands of pounds of fresh produce that the community didn't previously have. The secondary role is to educate a future generation of active food citizens who will demand access to fresh produce. When asked about any competition between the Youth Farm and similar urban agriculture projects, Murphy stated that many worthy projects are vying for grant funding, but they try to collaborate and assist each other whenever possible. For example, the Youth Farm used the greenhouse at Added Value, a farm in Red Hook, to grow seedlings (the Youth Farm greenhouse is under construction). Added Value also shared their EBT machine, as the Youth Farm could not afford one. The bigger source of competition is between food justice-oriented urban agriculture projects and entrepreneurial projects: [t]here is definitely some friction

63

between projects that cater to high end markets and get lots of press versus projects that aim to feed communities in need and lack funding and press. The goals of these projects are completely different, but the general public lumps them all together as urban agriculture projects and doesn't necessarily understand the differences. As for the fiscal sustainability of the Youth Farm model, the farm manager position will be funded by the produce sold on site once the full acre is in cultivation, and once the farmers market has expanded, the part-time salary of the market manager will be covered by the sales of regional farmers produce at the market. Visiting schools and groups paying to take workshops on-site will hopefully pay for the educational coordinator salary. We believe that without financially sustainability, the farm will have a short life. If it is financially sustainable, we can train people to take on these roles in the future. The farm does not plan on expanding its programs until the current ones are financially sustainable. Though it did not see any dip in sales throughout the first season that could be accredited to the financial recession, Murphy noted that start-up funding was notably affected: [t]here is lots of opportunities for grants, but because of the economic crisis, there are more people starting farms to feed their communities and so more competition in receiving funds. There are certainly laws that make it more difficult for the farm to remain viable and productive. Murphy highlights the need for urban public land to become legally available for forprofit farming enterprises, pointing to the fact that rural public land is already used for the grazing of farm animals. Murphy cited how in other states public land is used for the controversial practice of (private) hydro-fracking, and National Forests host privately owned logging businesses. Why the focus on for-profit farming? Currently, urban farming on public

64

land relegates the farm to not-for-profit status and reduces the amount of farming that actually happens. We could be growing MORE food for our communities and supporting our farmers in doing so. The type of farming done on these lands, Murphy adds, should be regulated ensure that it is organic, the only sustainable and ethical practice for public land. The farm does not currently engage in any form of lobbying or political sponsorship, but may do so in the future. Other future plans include the launch of a Community Advisory Board at some point this year, which would help us define and implement our food justice goals to a wider audience and with larger impact. There is also interest in becoming more involved in regional, national, and/or international agricultural organizations. As mentioned, the farm plans to slowly expand to its full one-acre footprint over the course of the next four years. Additionally, the Youth Farm is considering using the high schools cellar for aquaponics or growing mushrooms.

Chapter 3 From Food Justice to Socioeconomic Justice: Strategies and tactics

In this chapter, I explore relevant political, economic, urban, and social movement theory for potential new pathways for URA. As mentioned in the introduction, many URA activists engaged in honorable on-the-ground projects rarely have the opportunity to critically examine their work. I hope to provide assistance in this respect, and below I highlight the strategies and

65

tactics I find most pertinent and cogent. In the last section I apply these theories to the two farms studied, to see how appropriate they are in practice.

*** Political Engagement

Many URA advocates maintain that political institutions have failed to address the problems engendered by the conventional food system.209 This belief can lead to a loss of faith in and subsequent lack of engagement withthe state and its ability to address fundamental issues of equality and basic rights.210 Yet with the usurping of the modern states power by global capital comes the increasing authority and importance of local-level policy making, fostering new roles for urban regions within the global economy.211 This diffusion and decentralization of power from the national government to localities and other institutions does not necessarily suggest the demise of state authority, but rather an increasing plurality in the institutions and forcesboth public and privatethat act upon and engage citizens.212 The new forms that emerge could potentially evolve into neoliberal governance in which individualism, the free market, and deregulation become ever more deeply entrenched. However, they also contain the

Allen, Together at the Table, 2. Gwen Blue, On the Politics and Possibilities of Locavores: Situating food sovereignty in the turn from government to governance, Politics and Culture 2 (2009), accessed March 18, 2011; Michael W. Hamm and Monique Baron, Developing an Integrated Sustainable Urban Good System: The case of New Jersey, United States, in For Hunger-Proof Cities; Graham Riches, Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada; Tim Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century: Can it be both radical reasonable? in For Hunger-Proof Cities. 211 Blue, On the Politics and Possibilities of Locavores; Mustafa Koc and Hulya Koc, From Staple Store to Supermarket: The Case of TANSAS in Izmir, Turkey, in For Hunger-Proof Cities. 212 Blue, On the Politics and Possibilities of Locavores, n.p.
209 210

66

possibility of embodying a new governmentality that hybridizes consumerism and citizenship beyond the current notion of the citizen-consumer in which consumption is considered the primary pathway for political participation.213 Thus the political remains central to any vision of a new, just, orderfor food provision or otherwise. Working with the institutions that have contributed to the current food system, such as the USDA and the land-grant agricultural research system, is essential.214 They have determined the dominant system through public policies and public funds.215 Therefore the power to address the issues the system has engendered is localized in these institutions. Despite decentralization and cutbacks in state power, the U.S. government exerts enormous influence on the market, and in no sector is this truer than in food and agriculture.216, 217 The state mediates between production and consumption, rendering it the institution in which the power resides218 and the only institution that can effectively check and reorient corporate power.219 Food and agriculture in the U.S. represent an anomalous sector in relation to this state control: on the one hand some of the most significant attempts to expand neoliberalism have been waged therein (such as land and water privatization, deregulation of the food safety, and deterioration of public antihunger assistance). On the other hand, greater government control and protection have been extended to food and agriculture, compared with most other sectors.220 By capitalizing upon the latter, the food and agriculture sector could furnish the first inroads to new governmentality. In

Ibid., n.p. Allen, Together at the Table, 16. 215 Ibid., 54. 216 Allen, Together at the Table, 53. 217 Not to deny the fact large agrocorporations exert an immense among of influence as well. The actors whose influence is notably absent are consumers and taxpayers. 218 Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century, 217. 219 Ibid., 220. 220 Julie Guthman, interview by Scott Stoneman, Politics & Culture 2 (2009); Allen, Together at the Table, 53.
213 214

67

turn, achieving food security will also necessarily implicate the environmental, health, and social welfare sectors at various levels of the state and civil society.221 As mentioned in the opening chapter, food has always been political. To depoliticize hunger, by denying the role of government in ensuring the right to food, is to undermine the right to food itself. Depoliticizing food de-responsibilizes governments, businesses, and charity from contributing to food sovereignty, and ultimately erodes the power of the state to intervene in favor of the food insecure.222 To maintain that the government has no role in ending hunger or promoting local food is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. By avoiding engaging and integrating the political sphere, URA efforts can be accused of the same responsibilization of local organizations, charities, and non-profits (in lieu of government accountability) for which emergency food assistance is so often criticized. These private and NGO groups will never provide a degree of anonymity and universality comparable to that of the public welfare systemthey implicitly increase the individualization of assistance, and proliferation of points of access for both outside influence and moralized discrimination against participants.223 It is doubtful that any advocates of food justice would reject the restoration and intensification of the welfare state, even while acknowledging its historic imperfections and prejudices (this is at least certainly the case with those who take an antipoverty approach to food security224,225). This demonstrates at least a tacit amenability on the part of URA proponents to the role of government, despite all suspicions of its demise and susceptibility to the influence of private industry.
Riches, Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada, 203. Ibid., 205. 223 Power, Combining Social Justice, 34. 224 Ibid., 31. 225 Case in point: the Community Food Security Coalition is currently calling on supporters to oppose to current proposed cuts to various social welfare programs.
221 222

68

Engaging the political sphere can include the institutionalization and integration of activist efforts into existing channels and bodies. In its pursuit of justice, the URA movement is confronted with the tension between secession from the current system and institutionalization; a tension faced by all social movements.226 The formalization and permanence resulting from the former certainly have a high potential to be destructive to social movements, rendering them increasingly vulnerable to oligarchization, co-option, and the dissolution of community support.227 But to reject engagement and integration with the political is to ignore is the dialectical relationship between social movements and the social institutions they define themselves in relation to.228 David Harvey contends that indeed, movements such as URA must be crystallized in social institutions, as they are one of the primary maintainers of the social order.229 Such crystallization neednt mean adopting the discursive approaches and ideologies of those institutions. Nor does it entail operating exclusively through established or proper channels of conflict resolution. McAdam claims that utilizing such institutionalized channels leave[s] unchallenged the structural underpinnings of the political system...it is within these proper channels that the power disparity between members and challengers is the greatest.230 However, I believe we are witnessing a decline in normative channels of political contestation themselves. McAdams assertion denies the role of the new economic channels that global capital has created, and the new degree of global interconnectivity that it has fostered.231 Perhaps
Allen, Together at the Table, 19. Douglas McAdam, The Political Process Model, in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 56. 228 Allen, Together at the Table, 7. 229 Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, generally. 230 McAdam, Political Process Model, 57. 231 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: Introducing a Concept and its History, in Mutations, ed. Rem Koolhaas et al. (Bordeaux: Actar, 2000), 113.
226 227

69

at the time that McAdam published the above declaration, the new conditions fostered by an increasingly globalized economic order were not fully recognized, but I believe that there are pathways that can open up democratic space within traditional institutions that are increasingly functioning as nodes in nontraditional global economic networks. In short, for URA political engagement doesnt necessitate institutionalization, and institutionalization doesnt implicitly involve the termination of progressivism. We can work towards new institutions and politics within extant forms, simultaneously acknowledging the power and limitations of electoral approaches and acknowledging new forms of political advocacies. There are several normative political institutions and directives that could be prodded towards fostering a more democratic food system, ideally as part of a larger process of reimagining American polity. These areasincluding zoning, infrastructure, public research, agricultural subsidies, and public assistanceare ripe for political intervention through policy, planning, funding, regulation, and progressive tax schemes and incentives. Zoning laws segregate land uses by dividing localities into districts, or zones, in part to limit potential unwanted land uses or residents. As recommended by multiple federal task forces and commissions, Washington must become more involved in national land-use planning in order to ensure logical and efficient development and layout, diminish spatial segregation, and promote environmental protection.232 As they stand now, zoning bylaws pose a major obstacle to urban and regional agriculture, particularly as they contribute to speculative land markets and the loss of agricultural land to suburbanization.233 Though regional agriculture can purportedly help curb the negative effects of land speculation, the effective halting or significant reduction of

232 233

Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 113. Koc et al., Introduction, 3.

70

trends in real estate can only be tackled at a policy level. 234 Another zoning issue is the fact that food retailers cant be expected to offer their food at discounted costs or situate their locations in low-income areas in a market society that doesnt reward good will or community.235 These food vendors, which account for 80% of Americans food purchases,236 present another node in the system that is fit for political intervention. Currently, a good supermarket business model entails situating stores in the most affluent area possible in order to maximize profit. But what if municipal, state, or federal government was to provide tax incentives to supermarkets that locate in low-income areas or subsidize their operating costs so they could remain competitive? Such a proposal still leaves many unresolved of issues of food security and certainly makes no dent in food sovereignty, but it would actively increase food access in the areas that presently lack it: low-income urban communities. Transportation and infrastructure planning are deeply embedded in the network of foodways that comprise the food system.237 The patchwork system that currently exists of public assistance programs, community-based activism, non-profit and private charity work must be reworked into comprehensive infrastructure that connects a sufficient farmland base and technical expertise with areas of concentrated need for foodthat is, cities.238 However, neoliberal logic presents a significant roadblock to such development:
God forbid that the government should provide for infrastructure like transportation, cooperative storage rooms and coolers, free use of public property and other such arrangements that would make it possible for local organic farmers to supply the residents of New York and Chicago and LA with something decent to eat. Because that would mean interfering with the magic of the marketplace and restricting your freedom of choice.239

Karen L. Krug, Canadian Rural Women Reconstructing Agriculture, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 172. Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 156. 236 Ibid., 86. 237 Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century, 222. 238 Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 6. 239 Holmes, Neoliberal Appetites,
234 235

71

The food system infrastructure that Holmes describes above is one that has already been partially developed privately by food banks, including warehousing, cooling/freezing, and trucking facilities. Mark Winne proposes that these means be appropriated for improving urban food security.240 An examination of the current state of agricultural research in the U.S. offers another opportunity for political retrofitting. As previously mentioned, agricultural research and its application have become dangerously separated. Their spatial and existential mismatch has resulted in the development and application of geographically, culturally, and ecologically inappropriate technologies. This relationship was pioneered domestically by the land grant system of colleges and universities, which was established to apply the methodology of scientific research to agriculture.241 These institutions interactions with the farmers who will use their developments are limited to retailer-client transactions, and the impetus of their research is motivated by allocation of fundspublic and privaterather than farmers needs.242 However, instead of writing-off the entire land-grant establishment, these research institutions could be reoriented towards the regions theyre situated within, and become sites for dialogue and community interfacing, rather than researcher self-advancement and farmer affliction. Because land-grant institutions are public entities, it is within the governments power to redirect their research away from corporate interests and towards the farming communities in which theyre located. Agricultural and transportation subsidies need to be completely reassessed and
Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 185. Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 99. 242 Paul Lasley and Gordon Bultena, Farmers Opinions on the Relationship between Land Grant Colleges and Private Industry (presented at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, Madison, Wisconsin, August 12, 1987).
240 241

72

redistributed if social and economic goals are to be met simultaneously, an outcome that is possible only with deliberate effort and continued state intervention through subsidies.243 Joseph Stiglitz has proposed the eradication of agricultural subsidies and tariffs,244 but this solution does not even attempt to address issues of the privatization of the consumption of food described above. Stiglitz himself points out that this measure would lead to higher urban food prices. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that freeing the market will not necessarily protect small farms, as it does not prevent farm consolidation and the resulting elimination of competition245: the absence of small-farm safeguard programs has lead to the slashing of farm income and devastation of rural economies.246 Stiglitzs proposal would still pit farmer against farmer around the world, all of whom would be susceptible to global market fluctuations. Urban dwellers, in addition to farmers, would continue to be at the mercy of those fluctuations. Vulnerability to access to food would prevail. Even with the unsatisfactory proposal of tariff and subsidy abolition, politicians and citizens alike from both ends of the political spectrum would be outraged- likely it would be considered the neglect of citizens by their government, despite the simultaneous, contradictory contention that creating secure, safe, long-term food supply networks to those in need is a breach of private liberties, a misuse of taxpayer funds, or a socialist redistribution of wealth. But the wealth is already being redistributed, only to one (much smaller) half of the producer-consumer population equation, benefitting industrial farmers, food retailers, agrochemical companies, and

Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 41. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, 87. 245 Monopolization is a pervasive trend that runs contrary to free market proponents touting of competition for yielding the lowest prices and greatest number of choices for consumers. Those proponents who admit to this trend claim that the inefficiencies of monopoly power are counterbalanced by increased innovation, so that the economy grows faster not so that more individuals basic needs are met, Ibid., 108, emphasis added. 246 Wallach and Woodall, WTO on Agriculture, 196.
243 244

73

the other stakeholders in the industrial food production complex. Functioning as an income transfer from consumers to producers, the current farm programs primarily benefit the minute percentage of farms earning over $500,000 a year.247 These programs should be retooled to incorporate the training a new generation of farmers, making small- and mid-sized farms viable particularly if they serve the hungryand counteracting the highly speculative land market. Public food assistance is also in need of serious salvaging and reconfiguring. The WIC and food stamp programs are the front line of defense for individuals lacking sufficient income to feed themselves. To weaken these programs, as was recently proposed for WIC by House Republicans,248 is to further necessitate private sources of assistance, and set new precedents in welfare retrenchment. To bolster public food assistance is to initiate the process of deprivatizing relief to the poor, a process that can only happen through a coordinated effort between charities, NGOs, and government.249 The substitution of private programs for government responsibility is perverse and paradoxical, for reasons described above. An aggressive expansion of public food assistance programs, even if temporary (until, ideally, the productive forces of poverty and hunger are accounted for and addressed), could allow emergency food establishments to transition from bastions of insufficient, corporatized, stigmatized relief to private or even state antihunger organizations, speaking for those who have no political voice in a nation of consumer-citizens. The surge of funding to these programs would govern speed250 in the
Allen, Together at the Table, 178. John Sepulvado, House Republicans want to cut WIC by 10%, CNN, February 25, 2011, http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/25/budget.women.children/ 249 Bolstering food stamps must be a step in the process of relieving hunger and poverty; otherwise the motion will simply contribute to the substitution of in-kind food stamp relief for welfare in the form of income maintenance such as a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). GAI would attack structural issues of the disparity in income, providing a floor, and therefore, a modicum of economic dignity for all citizens. For more on GAI, see Brian Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution: Americas Struggle Over Guaranteed Income Policy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 250 Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, 387.
247 248

74

transition of responsibility from the private to public sphere, preventing disastrous, cataclysmic backlashin this case, widespread hunger due to the retraction and retooling of emergency food establishments. Symbolically, it would reinforce and restore the notion that it is the governments duty to protect their constituents from hunger.251 Though the government has the luxury of turning its back on the politically powerless poor and hungry, the reverse is not an option: pulling the levers of public policy has become virtually the only effective recourse for those whom the marketplace has failed.252 Certainly the WIC and SNAP programs are only one element in ensuring food security, in both the short- and long-term. Limited food access confounds the benefits of these programs, as USDA secretary Dan Glickman stated at a 1995 conference highlighting supermarket redlining in poor areas: Restricted or limited [food] access undermines the [USDAs] ability to promote health through nutrition, because if prices are too high, there is not enough bang for the buck for Food Stamps and WIC, or if choices are limited[Americans] cant make the choices that nutrition education efforts encourage them to make.253 If reformers and activists are to rethink the definition of democracy as not just something that guarantees rights but provides a floor so all citizens have the basic resources necessary to participate in society, the role of the government is integral. With evolving locality-state, publicprivate, global-local relations, it is possible that we are entering a new phase of state intervention, with the state either as a facilitator, educator, and promoter of efficiency that continues to mediate between individuals and corporations to more progressive ends, or alternatively, as a permutation ramped-up neoliberalism.254 The above-detailed progressive
Winston Husbands, Food Banks as Antihunger Organizations, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 109. Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 102. 253 Ibid., 89. 254 Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century, 221; Blue, On the Politics and Possibilities of Locavores, n.p.
251 252

75

political actions alone will not rectify the profound disempowerment and nonparticipation of the American political systemindeed to count on top-down technocratic solutions is further alienate an already disenfranchised citizenry. This is not a thesis on evolving participatory democracy, but it is imperative to note that the most critical design problem facing urban transformationis not the design of any particular building or neighborhood. It is the design of the city governance structure.255 Edward Soja echoes this claim, stating that the unjust distribution of neoliberal capitalism can be tempered by effective planning and public intervention in areas such as the housing, land, and labor markets, but the inequalities of uneven urban development will prevail without more the extensive incorporation of citizens in decision-making processes.256 Some see regions as the missing middle scale in political infrastructure, containing the possibility for civic engagement that present configurations lack.257 According to these theories, if regions are linked in a global constellation of nodes, the sense of powerlessness of local actors faced with the transnational, omnipotent character of mobile capital can be transfigured. In this vision, translocal social activists appropriate the capitalist economic grid as a new topography of political engagement across strategic sites.258 *** Transregionalism

From the ongoing evolution of the nation as a political unit arise the conditions for other
Gerald Frug, :Governing the Ecological City, in Ecological Urbanism, 302. Soja, Postmetropolis, 270. 257 Manuel Pastor Jr., Chris Benner, and Martha Matuoka, This Could Be The Start of Something Big: How social movements for regional equity of reshaping metropolitan America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 258 Sassen, The Global City, 113.
255 256

76

spatial units or scales, including the subnational (cites and regions), the cross-border (including two or more subnational units), and the supranational (exemplified by global digitalized markets and free trade blocs).259 A need has surfaced for intervention between the global and local260: enter regionalism, or one of its many theoretical permutationssupranational regionalism, community-based regionalism,261 federated regionalism,262 and municipal-based regionalism.263 Jrgen Habermas claims that as the influence of nation-states wanes in light of transnational corporations, theyre faced with two undesirable programs: promoting protectionist isolationism or unsavory budget balancing through social safety net cutbacks.264 Yet this notion is myopic, playing directly into global-local polarities. Just as the process of uneven development cannot be solely accredited to global or local institutions,265 the solution cannot be isolated to a global or local scale. To consider localism as panacea is problematically shortsighted, mistaking enclosure for justice,266 and fundamentally misunderstanding how deeply interlaced the global political economy is, at every level of circumscription. For example, the highly protectionist nature of U.S. food and farm policy has fostered uneven neoliberalization across U.S. economic sectors and the global North-South gradient.267 Food localization needs to be considered in the context of these slanted free-trade policies that have fostered huge resource endowments in industrialized countries and a resource dearth in industrializing countries.268 What does American locavore-ism mean for the latter nations, where post-colonial dependencies on
Ibid., 105. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 53. 261 Ibid., 46; Pastor, Benner and Matouka, This Could Be the Start of Something Big, 13. 262 Pastor, Benner and Matouka, This Could Be the Start of Something Big, 28. 263 Ibid., 27. 264 Habermas, Inclusion of the Other, 122. 265 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 59. 266 McKenzie Wark, Telegram From Nowhere, in Mutations, 35. 267 Guthman, interview. 268 Ibid.
259 260

77

export markets prevail? Moreover, events like climate crises, with their global-scale consequences, are proving that protectionist localization is nothing more than illusory. Conversely, the largely unfettered global movement of capital, goods, services, businesses, and people has significant consequences, one of the most significant of which is the externalization of costs. Regionalism provides an appealing alternative to the unaccountable, global-scale production of environmental pollution, labor exploitation, resource depletion, and economic inequalities. Internalizing the costs by placing a selectively permeable regional boundary around their sites of production encourages best practices. The notion of regionalism can be easily applied to URA, which already employs the terminology of regional foodsheds, implying that there is a limit to the distance food can be sourced from and still internalize the costs of production. Transregionalism calls for the reconceptualization of the region, not as an isolated, selfserving circumscription, but as a node on a global grid grounded in extant forms of communication and transportation infrastructure.269 Transregionalism addresses the dilemma of scale governments and organizations alike are faced with,270 providing a median scalar register currently absent in polarized local-federal political arrangements. Predicated on the belief that greater interdependence neednt undermine a political circumscriptions ability to meet its residents basic needs,271 transregionalism transcends the local-global binary of URA discourse. Instead of an archipelago of protectionist, isolated self-sufficient local food systems, the concept proffers a global food system for food security, that balances self-reliance and
Sassen, The Global City, 110. Giovanna Di Chiro, Local Actions, Global Visions: Remaking environmental expertise, in Appropriating Technology: vernacular science and social power, ed. Ron Eglash et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 234. 271 Luc J.A. Mougeot, For Self-Reliant Cities: Urban food production in a globalizing South, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 23.
269 270

78

interdependence.272 Transregionalism posits a degree of solidarity and specificity (rather than enclosure) at the local level, between the city, and its surrounding suburbs and rural areas.273 The spatioecological framework of the bioregion uniquely binds these areas and can be incorporated into a regional political structure that governs land use, development, transportation, and taxes based on this shared natural infrastructure.274 For example, watersheds can serve as hydrophysical infrastructures, providing a natural scale and justification for planning across jurisdictions.275 Urban agriculture up to this point has tended to ignore the interrelatedness of different systems throughout the surrounding region (and beyond). Yet to do so is to fail to acknowledge that rural food production will always have the greatest potential to furnish stable and enduring urban food security276:
Whereas the allure of urban agriculture may lie in its apparent contradictory terminology, the bucolic homestead may fail to function with real economic self-sufficiency. Will we be guided by fictions where the simple act of sustenance production takes on an intriguing new-ness or nostalgia? Or is it more important to be focused on practical matters such as diverting pest concentrations and scattering our production across the region, exchanging urban orchards with rural grains, beans and squash?... [What about] a regional food system in which rural AND urban agriculture has a respectable place in the schemes of regional plans and development.277

As a testament to the interconnectivity of urban and regional agriculture, consider the following: a lack of regional farming poses a threat to the urban water supply, as fallow farmland becomes a candidate for low-density development,278 leading to competition for water (among other)
Koc et al., Introduction, 5. Dreier, Mollenkompf & Swanstrom, Place Matters, 35 274 Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, 251. 275 Pierre Blanger, Redefining Infrastructure, in Ecological Urbanism, 345. 276 Krug, Canadian Rural Women, 171. 277 Heather Sewell, 3 Kind of Produce: Observation from behind the wheel of a farming sedan, AREA Chicago 2 (2006), accessed December 3, 2010, http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-2/3kinds-of-produce. 278 Nevin Cohen, Urban Agriculture: the Opportunity and Obstacles, panel discussion at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, September 21, 2010.
272 273

79

resources between the city and its suburbs.279 The Community Food Security Coalition, a stalwart champion of urban agriculture, advocates for regional farmland and farmer preservation, holding that urban agricultures potential can only be realized through relationships with the surrounding region.280 Such cooperative regional rural-urban relationships can revitalize both rural and urban areas.281 Imperatively, urban-rural solidarity must extend beyond the linking of urban and rural foodways as their needs are connected in ways that go beyond consumerproducer relations.282 The specificity of resources in a given bioregion necessitates connectivity across regions, both for diversity and security. Thus transregionalism requires both rural-urban and interregional solidarity. The automation of agriculture integrated it into the productive networks of the global economy while simultaneously precipitating the trend of urbanization that is only expected to continue.283 Trying to reverse either of these processes will likely prove fruitlessadvancing and building upon the two could yield progressive new networks and organizations. The future will be globally interconnected and technologically progressive, this much is certain. Exactly how these realities will continue to play out is up for debate: connectivity and technology could be provided by highly volatile financial markets ricocheting investments world-over, or by sociospatial agglomerations collaborating for democracy, shared security and mutually beneficial policy.284 By localizing democratic experimentation in cities, and sharing resulting successes and failures across regions, experiments can be adapted place-by-place, resulting in a network of
Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 68. Bailkey et al., Urban Agriculture and Community Food Security, 8. 281 Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 84. 282 Krug, Canadian Rural Women, 172. 283 Manuel Castells, Urban Sociology in the Twenty-First Century: A Retrospective Perspective, in The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 394. 284 Mike Hodson, and Simon Marvin, Transcendent Eco-Cities or Urban Ecological Security?, in Ecological Urbanism, 214.
279 280

80

successes that could potentially lead to the change of national policy,285 or the superseding of it.286 Lastly, linking across regions through trade, polity, and social exchange diffuses destructive interurban and interregional competition described in the first chapter. Unfortunately, discussion of actually operationalizing a transition to transregional forms is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the prescience of regionalism theories are too visionary and apt to URA to fail to mention, albeit abstractly. For more on regionalism see: This Could Be The Start of Something Big: How social movements for regional equity of reshaping metropolitan America by Pastor et al., Regionalism New and Old in Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century by Drieir et al., and Seeking Spatial Justice by Edward Soja.

*** Exploiting economic conditions

Our tastes our appetites are one of the ways we fit into society. You can have a taste for different qualities of social relations, you can have various understandings of what it means to be yourself, what it implies, what consequences it has for others. Neoliberal governmentality works at exactly this level, but the think tanks and the legislators who impose it still dont have a monopoly on the production of yourself. So the notion, and even more, the sensation of sovereign self-interest is something that we can play with. We can do so in a cultural and political projects about food, how its produced, how its distributed, what its economy is and what its ecology could be. -Brian Holmes, Neoliberal Appetites. It would be impossible to proceed in this treatment of food, farming, polity, and justice without incorporating the role of the global economy. For all this talk of government

285 286

Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 185. Sassen, The Global City, 113; Pastor, Benner and Matouka, This Could Be the Start of Something Big, 55.

81

reconsitution and translocalism, the reality is that the current political economic atmosphere would be highly adverse to and punitive of attempts to establish national food sovereignty.287 For a nation to secure food sovereignty would be to incite the flight of mobile global capital, devaluing national currency, fire-selling government bonds, and disqualifying the country for international credit.288 URA advocates calling for food sovereignty must contend with this reality by engaging with neoliberal markets and rationality without reproducing them. Historically, money was derived from food.289 The commodification of food was a pivotal in the transition to capitalism.290 The economics of food and farming have long since departed from simple material flows of commodities, government bonds, and the stocks and shares of enterprise. Food, like all other products on the global market, is implicated in the current and recurring crises of finance that have created tumultuous torrents of digital wealth through speculation and trade in futures and derivatives, undermining state intervention and regulation in the process.291 This is not a thesis on the financial sector, but it is imperative to both describe the matrix of commodity speculation and futures in which the food system is embedded and highlight the fact that global finance remains reliant on the nation-state to provide at least minimum structure and regulation to prolong and protect its fatal volatility.292 The central driving force of the food economy is the desire to make money out of food.293 URA has advanced two forms of local food: economically viable market-based, elite regional
Recall that the operative definition of food sovereignty is the democratic control of food, farming, and food systems by those who eat the food produced, not necessarily the containment of all food production for a given political circumscription within that circumscription. 288 Haiven, Food, Finance, Crisis, Catalyst, n.p. 289 Ibid. 290 Ibid.; see also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). 291 Haiven, Food, Finance, Crisis, Catalyst, n.p. 292 Ibid. 293 Riches, Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada, 217.
287

82

fare for the haves, and precariously funded or dubiously self-provisioned food and farming charity projects for the have-nots.294 Those with means enjoy the secure health and gastronomical benefits of local food, and the projects they purchase from create relatively secure economic niches. The alternative form of local food is furnished by non-profits and private charities for those without means and is neither a secure source of food nor economically viable in the extramarket nature of its projects. [T]he profitable end of urban gardening has so far catered largely to the recent, an decidedly upper-end market for higher-priced local foodwhich puts a few holes in the sails of those who tout it as a solution to the needs of poor city residents.295 Can the neoliberal and humanitarian permutations of URA be reconciled within the market system in a way that provides dependable, local sustenance for haves and have-nots alike? Both approaches to URA fall victim to certain misconceptions of citizenship, social change, and neoliberal economics. The privileged, market-based route of obtaining local food is based upon a limited American conception of political agency solely in terms of consumerism.296 To portray it as the solution to issues of unsustainable, unjust food politics is to exhibit a myopic inability to imagine other possibilities of civic engagement beyond consumption. The proffering of such private, consumer-based solutions is perhaps due to the incapability of envisioning public ones.297 This conception of consumer-citizenship as the primary pathway for political action and participation is highly problematic if it is not coupled with efforts to reconfigure who qualifies as a consumer. That is to say, until every citizen can be a consumer by possessing at least a modicum of economic purchasing power, consumer-citizenship merely enforces certain
Power, Combining Social Justice, 34; Jolly, Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy, 199. Thompson, Agricultural Phenomenon, n.p. 296 Chad Levin, Pollanated Politics, or the Neoliberals Dilemma, Politics and Culture 2 (2009), accessed March 18, 2011, http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/10/27/pollanated-politics-or-the-neoliberal%E2%80%99sdilemma. 297 Ibid.
294 295

83

prejudices in American cultureexcluding the poor and perceiving them as undeserving.298 Treating consumer-citizens as agents of social change within the present context of immense economic disparities implies that those without the means to consume are not afforded citizenship. In short, consumer-citizenship situated in the current political economic context excludes the poor from the political participation and social activities of citizenship. Non-profit-, charity-, and subsistence-based URA projects have often proven unable to overcome the public-private dichotomy that privileges formal, organized action over less obvious but potentially more effective and subversive practices.299 Engaging the market system is one such less obvious but potentially more effective method. Perhaps it is not often considered because it confronts one of the most egregious assumptions of URA food justice programs: that food insecure individuals would rather receive local produce through alternative distribution networks than purchase their food at the supermarket as the majority of Americans do. Perhaps when local produce is the only option, residents are enthusiastic and receptive. But given the full spectrum of choices furnished by the market? Im not so sure that CSAs and farmers markets would be everyones first choice. This is not to say that there is anything inherently unappealing about these local food options, but they lack the socially integrative elements of engaging in normative market-based transactions.300 If economically secure locavores are actually motivated by a desire for social justice, in addition to ecologically resilient farming and personal nurture, they should recognize that the poor represent an untapped domestic market for local foods.301 Im not suggesting hooking up the
Ibid. Mele, Asserting the Political Self, 66. 300 Kathryn Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution: The case of Toronto, Canada, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 124. 301 Power, Combining Social Justice, 32; Karen Washington and Lorrie Clevenger, Review of Racism in the Food System, Just Food CSA in NYC Conference, Food and Finance High School, New York City, March 5, 2011.
298 299

84

poor directly with local food programs, but rather that by virtue of providing them a degree of economic security, the number of potential citizen-consumers supporting local food (out of their free will) would vastly increase. Indeed, if food security is truly the goal, the most effective (and most challenging) pathway to accomplishing it is guaranteeing adequate income for all individuals through jobs that pay living wages, sufficient quantities and quality of low-income housing, and increased welfare benefits.302 Elaine Power implies that purchasing power is the modern-day basis of social justice: Without social justice for the poor in the larger society (that is, a guarantee of an adequate and dignified level of material resources to allow every citizen the stability and security to participate fully in society) programs aimed at improving the food problems of the poor will only reinforce individualistic solutions to structural problems, no matter what the intention of the programmers.303 If the poor are to be independent citizen-consumers, they cannot be told what to purchase. Rather, they must be allowed personal consumer discretion, which acknowledges that lowincome people are also savvy media and material consumers.304 Universal consumer-citizenship would allow low-income consumers, too, to be choosers, communicators, explorers, and [if they so desire] hedonists.305 The individualistic market mechanism prevents attempts to surveil and control low-income individuals nutrition and lifestyle choices, providing the same private freedom of contract that Americans of means enjoy.306 Whether they are given a politicaleconomic voice as consumers or not, the poor influence the conventional food system: past food

302

Katherine Clancy, Sustainable Agriculture and Domestic Hunger: Rethinking a link between production and consumption, in Food for the Future: Conditions and contradictions of sustainability, ed. Patricia Allen (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1993), 257. 303 Power, Combining Social Justice, 35. 304 Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution, 125. 305 Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century, 219. 306 Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution, 126.

85

stamp and WIC program cuts decreased commodity demand, which in turn, necessitated increased allocation of federal resources for farm-programs, the conventional programs locavores vehemently align themselves in opposition to.307 This dispels the notion of consumer sovereignty and implies the necessity of considering the role of low-income individuals in any attempts, no matter how self-interested, to reconfigure the American food and agriculture landscape: [a]s a concept and political practice, consumer sovereignty and the privilege of knowing are not only insufficient solutions for the corporate logic which has wrought our present global food crisis and made entire populations disposable, it is the very ideological source of this inequality.308 Whats more, within the market economy generally, if one doesnt profit, one fails,309 thus the market mechanism can serve as an indicator of the appropriateness and popularity of a URA project,310 weeding out projects that do not meet demonstrated needs or sufficiently incorporate community input.311 This allows, however imperfectly, such input to take the form of a market signal. Most urban agriculture projects with goals of feeding the hungry are not economically viable in terms of a simple labor-for-wages relationship. CSAs and mobile produce markets are extremely labor intensive and expensive to run.312 In cities as dense as New York, urban agriculture essentially means rooftop farms, which have yet to be proven economically viable.313 However, these projects can become viable when the contributions of community
Allen, Together at the Table, 179. Scott Stoneman, Learning to Learn From the Food Crisis: consumer sovereignty and the restructuring of subjectivity, Politics and Culture 2 (2009), accessed March 18, 2011,http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/11/03/scott-stoneman-learning-to-learn-from-the-food-crisisconsumer-sovereignty-and-the-restructuring-of-subjectivity/. 309 Allen, Together at the Table, 17. 310 Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution, 124. 311 Ibid., 126. 312 Ibid., 122. 313 Frank, interview.
307 308

86

development and service ethic (in the material form of volunteers) are accounted for,314 but these extramarket elements effectively negate the role of market signals. This is contrasted with the success of business-driven urban agriculture, which depends upon economic conditions, including market signals, access to capital, risk-management instruments, the cost and quality of labor, and other complex factors.315 The notion of universal consumer-citizenship defies the crude reduction of the food system to two opposing forces, one of economic greed and the other of need.316 The market is more than an arena for greedthis overly simplistic take ignores how the market is the result of tensions between the demands of efficiency, competition, and growth and those of service and meeting community and individual needs.317 Broadly speaking: markets are the results of cultures, bound up with human interests in wealth, power, and affection. Markets work through such interests and the institutions that are derived from and sustain them. These human forces organize how markets will work.318 Thus working not around or outside but with markets is essential. I maintain no illusions about the current market-based system: the claims that it meets consumer needs and provides individuals exactly what they desire are partial truths, with substantial caveats. It is axiomatic that the market, left to its own devices, will not correct the problems of hunger, neglect, and education that are found in food deserts.319 However, this fact does not mean the market should be rejectedor can be rejectedas the organizing force in society. On the contrary, it necessitates confronting the reality of the market as a framework to
Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution, 126. Jolly, Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy, 197. 316 Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century, 218. 317 Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution, 127. 318 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 9. 319 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 125.
314 315

87

work within. The ability to do so is confounded by our increasing confusion, as both consumers and members of society, about foods sociocultural, economic role. Though food is considered a social and cultural good less and less,320 it remains a quintessential consumablenot only because it has the unique property of actually being ingested, or becauseit exists to fuel the body, but because the nourishment and pleasure food provides has a singular character, a certain sovereignty, and is vital to the formation of community.321 The uniqueness and potency of food as a daily requirement for human life, its deeply social and cultural history, and its inherent politicization make it a distinct and powerful focus through which to create sociopolitical change. Max Haiven sums up the universality and potentiality of food: everyone eats (or is prevented form eating) and the thematic of food stretches from our most basic ontological and epistemological categoriesto the infinitely complex and bitterly material relations of power in a globalizing world.322 The exploitation of foods unique conditions for the benefit of all citizens can certainly not be accomplished through an economic framework alone, but rather one tempered by regulation through political action, ideological mobilization, and cultural folkways.323 The challenge this approach presents is clear:
Because attitudes toward markets are so myopic, any social intervention in those contexts runs a heavy risk of generating hostility. This lack of understanding of markets [as coevolved with and dependent upon regulation324] leads to an ongoing ideological asymmetry between those struggling over use and exchange [values], with those pursuing exchange having the advantage. Through their institutional power and a potent ideological context, entrepreneurs have the hegemonic edge.325

Riches, Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada, 205. Stoneman, Learning to Learn From the Food Crisis, n.p. 322 Haiven, Food, Finance, Crisis, Catalyst, n.p. 323 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 47. 324 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 68; Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 28. 325 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 47.
320 321

88

*** Organizational Synthesis

The political reorientation and economic excavation described above can only be accomplished through mass citizen engagement: [w]hen it comes to hunger, food insecurity, nutrition, or agriculture, I can say with categorical certainty that not a single significant social or economic gain has been made in the past fifty years without the instigations and participation of an active and vociferous body of citizens.326 My assumption in this paper is that people have a tendency to organize and coalition-build, including in their market behavior.327 Marxian claims of capitalism remaking itself after its own image ultimately err on the side of functionalism, ignoring the role of human activities in realizing social structures. In analysis this tendency gives primacy to corporate capitalists and the notion of their absolute control and power, denying the human agency of all actors. Privileging capital accumulation obscures the role of every individual as a subject, not merely an object to be acted upon.328 Social groups exercise this agency through their counterorganization and counterexperimentation to the corporate manipulation of space and resources, in pursuit of affection, community and survival.329 Urban distinctions such as the dual city (bourgeoisie vs. proletariat), the hierarchical city (wealthy/middle class/poor), and the two Americas or radically divided city (black vs. white) are now anachronistic. Rather than disappearing, these categories have fragmented into a much more polymorphous social geometry, what Edward Soja describes as a restructured social mosaic or

Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 149. Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 10. 328 Ibid., 11. 329 Ibid., 12.
326 327

89

metropolarities.330 There has been much deliberation on how our pluralistic contemporary societies can be united in a cohesive citizenryespecially when faced with the self-interested rationality of neoliberalismwithout turning to tactics of nationalism. Habermas argues that shared rights instill individuals with a sense of citizenship,331 while Arendt maintains that political engagement validates participants as citizens,332 and Thomas Lyson believes that community provides the grounds for social cohesion.333 Despite the fact that 78% of Americans believe that the countrys strength is predicated on the success of American business,334 the sheer popularity of family- and communitarian-based political rhetoric335 indicates a human desire for a sense of place, organization, and belonging that remains unmet by pure economic relations. Combining these factorsrights, participation, humanitarianism, community, and economic selfinterestleads to a new conception of citizenship: one that is spatially localized, self-serving and accountable in metropolitan areas but connected across regions through shared rights and publicspirited sensibilities. As both a right and a commodity, food presents a useful tool to explore such new possibilities of citizenship, with its local and global scales of production. Not surprisingly, the term food citizen has already entered the lexicon of URA advocates.336 Mustafa Koc et al. see this notion as one that hybridizes self-interested consumer rationality with community, tradition,
Soja, Postmetropolis, 256. Habermas, The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship and On the Relation between the Nation, the Rule of Law, and Democracy, Inclusion of the Other, 105-154. 332 Hannah Arendt, The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure, in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2003), 508-539, originally in On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963). Citations refer to the Penguin edition. 333 Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 40. 334 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 180. 335 Such rhetoric and political maneuvers are misleading and detrimental to actual pursuits of community betterment. Community-based rhetoric is easily appropriated by neoconservative political agendas by combining the ideologies of deregulation and downsizing the government with appeals to the value of communities taking responsibility for many of the functions of the welfare state, Power, Combining Social Justice, 33. 336 Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 71.
330 331

90

and culture, simultaneously focusing on the self and the interests of others (including food workers, other consumers, future generations, and other species).337 This is an example what Alexis de Tocqueville described as self-interest properly understood: comprehending that the well being of others is a precondition to ones own well being, that looking out for the other guy isnt just good for the soulits good for business.338 Tim Lang adds that the distinction between consumers and food citizens is key: consumerism denotes a (dependent) relationship to the market, whereas citizenship representing the continuous struggle to control the market.339 The new social mosaic and opportunities for citizenship have created social movements arranged along increasingly diversified axes of inequality. Yet at the same time that these axes become more pluralistic, they are also more complexly intertwined.340 If interconnected movements can move past the obsolete distinctions described in the opening chapter, the possibility arises for their reorchestration into combinatorial and inclusionary networks that are more adaptive to the precise circumstances of our present moment.341 Indeed, to not do so is to likely be dismissed by those in power, who will view isolated movements as sectarian and esoteric.342 It is neither novel nor radical to call for the wide scale organizing and coalition building of disenfranchised or otherwise concerned groups under a united call for social justice.343 However, with the increasing individualism of our time, the common cause of diverse movements is easily obscured. Obscured, but not disappeared: the assumption that humans are

Koc et al., Introduction, 6. Stiglitz, Of the 1%, n.p. 339 Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century, 223. 340 Soja, Postmetropolis, 273. 341 Ibid., 280. 342 Rajah, Race in the Globalization Movement, 87. 343 The global justice (at times incorrectly labeled antiglobalization) movement comes to mind.
337 338

91

purely self-interested implies that the motive of social justice has deteriorated, which is certainly not the case. The total self-interest contention fails to acknowledge factors such as human volitions, cultural folkways, and political activities.344 Indeed, [t]he challenge for grassroots political action is to transcend both the parochialism of community and the liberal individualism of the market in order to articulate an inclusive agenda based on human diversity, creativity, and interaction.345 More importantly, individualism and collective action are by no means mutually exclusiverather, political activism can boost and shape individual identity, providing discourse and action to identify oneself in relation to.346 Interactions with local unequal gender, race, and class relations are dialectical to political economic subjectivity.347 Lastly, individualism neednt mean autonomy living in society, or even on its fringes still entails minimal external constraints and [t]he very word autonomy itself is suspect on the ground that it tends to obliterate these admittedly variable but still inevitable constraints.348 As mentioned, the notion of autonomy is often the conflation of healthy self-expression and unhealthy striving, obscuring the fact that the former actually affords both individual and collective advancement.349 Brendan Smith captures the zeitgeist of highly fragmented 21st century activism:
The modern progressive movement in the U.S. has traditionally grounded its organizing in the politics of identity and altruism. Organize an affected groupminorities, gays, janitors or women and then ask the public at large to support the causeprison reform, gay marriage, labor rights, or abortionbased on some cocktail of good will, liberal guilt, and moral persuasion. This strategy has been effective at times. But we have failed to bring these mini-movements together into a force powerful enough to enact broad-based social reform. It takes a lot of people to change society and our current strategy has left us small in numbers and weak in power.350

URA advocates are guilty of abetting unhelpful divisions and shortsighted organizing, often
Logan and Moltoch, Urban Fortunes, 8. Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 227. 346 Mele, Asserting the Political Self, 64. 347 Ibid., 65. 348 Barrington Moore, The Rejection of Suffering and Oppression, in Injustice: The social bases of obedience and revolt (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978), 81. 349 Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, 98. 350 Smith, Fighting Doom, n.p.
344 345

92

failing to be mindful of and engaged with all avenues to food security.351 Though dissecting the extensive theories on social movements is not within the scope of this paper, below I include a brief compendium of the theoretical developments I find most salient and salutary for URA. The tactic of recruiting participants in blocs can assist in merging diversified groups: mobilization does not occur through recruitment of large numbers of isolated and solitary individuals. It occurs as a result of recruiting blocs of people who are already highly organized and participants.352 Approaching groups rather than individuals both acknowledges and encourages community self-organization.353 Especially in attempts to retain a firmly antiracist stance, URA cannot consist of merely recruiting individual minoritiesrather, projects must acknowledge that such individuals have already been organizing for decades in their own blocs (organizations).354 Furthermore, such groups cannot be incorporated merely for token involvement and movement diversification: [i]nvolving people of color must be done in a way that gives them real space.355 By failing to include various realities and lived experiences other than those of a white, privileged existence, a homogenous movement is limited in its ability to be relevant to diverse instances of oppression.356 However, homogeneity within organizations is often inevitable, due to the sociospatial separation of race and class in contemporary cities. Rather than trying to force intraorganizational diversification, privileged, white-dominated movements should acknowledge what they are, share leadership roles with other community activists, and work together to create
Jolly, Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy, 199. Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 125 as quoted in McAdam, Political Process Model, 45. 353 Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution, 127. 354 Luu, Challenging White Supremacy, in Global Activists Manual, 79. 355 Elizabeth Martinez, Where Was the Color in Seattle?: Looking for the reasons why the Great Battle was so white, in Global Activists Manual, 83. 356 Rajah, Race in the Globalization Movement, 87.
351 352

93

new alliances and restructure the movement for a broader perspective along the local-global continuum.357 The URA movement is far from realizing these recommendations. For instance, leadership roles for lower-income and non-white community members in New York City CSAs are currently lacking, underlining a failure to incorporate the social networks in which such individuals are situated, as well as a set of assumptions about their ability to contribute and direct CSA/urban agriculture programs.358 These CSAs are non-profits and explicitly intended to serve such individuals, which is why a strategic and critical rethinking of their approach is necessary, asking questions such as, whos controlling the power and whos doing the labor and volunteer work? Katherine Clancy highlights another important question URA must ask itself, pertaining to the inclusive framing of the issue:
Who and what do we want to sustain?...If the answer to the question is only soil and water, upper-income environmental constituencies can be probably relied on for continued support. If the answer is the environment, mid-sized farmers, and rural communities, broader groups of environmentalists, progressive farm groups, rural communities themselves, and some of the general public will lend support. If the answer is the above, plus farmworkers and low-and middleclass consumers, the coalition expands to include many progressive antihunger public health and consumer groups, minority political groups, and low-income consumers themselves.359

Broadly speaking, individuals and groups with the means, time, and status to address the more farsighted considerations of patterns, flows, and structures need to offer their resources, knowledge, and service to the communities and organizations fighting daily, localized battles. The hungry are, by definition, poor meaning they lack the financial resources to lobby or make campaign contributions.360 In exchange for the lived epistemological and narrative evidence they provide of the inefficacy and inequities of the food system and their local struggles therein, those
Ibid., 88. Washington and Clevenger, Review of Racism. 359 Clancy, Sustainable Agriculture and Domestic Hunger, 284. 360 Allen, Together at the Table, 179.
357 358

94

with the temporal and financial luxury to lobby must do so on their behalf. White activists often fail to comprehend the implications of communities of color organizing and building strength to, for example, remove toxic waste from their neighborhood.361 The degree to which URA integrates class issues when accounting for the poor is questionable: [t]he mainly privileged proponents of sustainability are most concerned about collective or public goods, such as food quality, health, and the environment. For poor people, the issue is more immediate and more personalhow to put food on the table for the next meal.362 The divisive conclusion that could be drawnthat privileged activists and academics have little basis for identifying with the poor363does not incorporate the elements of shared human experience and conditions mentioned above. Barrington Moore adds that the unifying power of solidarity should not be underestimated: [a] very small degree of social supportis sufficient to shatter the mystique of oppression and deception and permit a critical response to surface.364 Allying poor- and privileged-peoples movements can and must be done without dictating or appropriating the former groups efforts, but rather through privileged groups offering themselves as strategic allies.365 It is not a matter of helping other people but collaborating with and sometimes even following those other people in order to take responsibility for racial and economic injustice and acknowledging their effects.366 Neither substantial everyday nor longer-term change can be accomplished without the collaborative
Crass, White Supremacy: Thoughts on movement building and antiracist organizing, in The Global Activists Manual, 93. 362 Power, Combining Social Justice, 34. 363 Ibid., 34. See also Pierre Bourdieu and Loc J. D. Wacquant, The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop), in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and Loc J. D. Wacquant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 364 Moore, The Rejection of Suffering and Oppression, 116. 365 Rajah, Colin, Race in the Globalization Movement, in The Global Activists Manual: Local ways to change the world, ed. Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002), 88. 366 Crass, White Supremacy, 94.
361

95

efforts of privileged and underprivileged groups. Coalescing their efforts in the name of food justice requires an extraordinary amount of reflexivity. The various contradictions and incompatible interests of their organizations must be engaged. Without such acknowledgement and excavation they are irresolvable.367 At the same time that neoliberalism has obscured collective needs, rights, and actions, it has the potential to be a collective adversary for diverse efforts and organizations. Yet blaming a concept as omnipresent and intangible as neoliberalism (or the political right, new capitalism, etc.) for the totality of injustices can lead to dormant anticipation of a pending apocalypse to clean the slate. More importantly, it can divert attention from opportunities for progressive change embedded in unevenly developed urbanism.368 Brian Holmes defines counteracting neoliberalism in terms of everydayness, the scope at which such embedded opportunities can be discovered: a revolt against neoliberalism takes place whenever people organize themselves in a way that is not directed and structured by the primary motivation of an interest that can be satisfied by a market.369 Foucault describes this discrete level at which injusticeand potentially, justiceplay out as the little tactics of the habitat little signifying the everydayness of the tactics, and habitat indicating their spatiality, as well as their simultaneous naturalness and humaness.370 While divergent socioeconomic realities and political strategies can create tensions and work at cross-purpose,371 again, this is often because greater collective struggles remain unrealized. It has been suggested that the merger of environmentalism with antipoverty programs
Power, Combining Social Justice, 35. Soja, Postmetropolis, 302. 369 Holmes, Neoliberal Appetites, n.p. 370 Michel Foucault, The Eye of Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordonw, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 149. 371 Holt-Gimnez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 164.
367 368

96

through diversified approaches could not only serve as a force to elevate the poor out of hunger but also to lift entire communities out of poverty.372 I would add that the combined scope of environmentalism and antipoverty efforts is still too narrow, and that considerations of inequality in the built environment and political sphere must be incorporated. The interconnectivity of space, food, and health has already been acknowledged by the City of New York and its subsidiary departments in an unprecedented collaboration between the Departments of Design and Construction, Health and Mental Hygiene, Transportation, and City Planning to formulate Active Design Guidelines, which cite that the [c]hanges in housing, water, and the physical environment were essential to controlling infectious disease [in the preceding centuries]. Today, modifications of the food environment, or of the physical environment to promote physical activity, will be of central importance for chronic disease prevention and control.373 The Active Design Guidelines provide an example of one scale (a city-wide one) at which the URA can be promoted through collaborating with interrelated efforts. However, achieving substantial change will necessitate not only working across issues but across scalar registers:
Local struggles around fair housing, living wages, free education, and environmental justice, each in their own ways, reveal progressive alternatives to neoliberalism. Rolling back neoliberalism, however, will also entail efforts to tackle the corrosive effects of interurban competition and regressive redistribution. One of the keys to the transcendence of neoliberalism is, therefore, the construction of new forms of urban solidarity, between as well as within cities.374

Awareness of the scale in which practices are situated in as well as the scale at which they are intended to intervene is crucial in considering both efficacy and the implications, unintended and

Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 20. Dr. Thomas Frieden, former NYC Health Commissioner and current Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Asleep at the switch, American Journal of Public Health 94(2004): 2059-2061 as cited in New York City Departments of Design and Construction et al., Active Design Guidelines, 17. 374 Peck et al, City as Policy Lab, n.p.
372 373

97

intentional.375 Local foodie-ism isolated from food justice has proven problematically shortsighted in this regard, exhibiting behaviors of local protectionism and a lack of regional, national, and international awareness or collaboration. For example, New York Citys highly successful Greenmarkets, which have provided inspiration and a model for farmers markets everywhere, became so protective and competitive that they threatened to sue a New Orleans organization that wanted to call its new farmers market a greenmarket.376 Mimicking neoliberal the neoliberal regimes of protectionist property rights, merciless competition, or profit-oriented bottom lines will not get the URA movement very far. Coalition building, rather, will propel the movement forward: [i]n food policy, too often progressive social forces, such as the proponents of ecological agriculture or the new publichealth movements, fail to see that their concerns have a common themethe need to change methods of production and control throughout the food chain.377 The common theme of URA and related movements must be based on an eradication model,378 that is, focusing on action oriented toward the eventual eradication of hunger, of unequal distribution of resources, and of a consumer-citizenship in which everyone is not privileged as a consumer. An eradication model incorporates research, public education, public policy advocacy, one-one-on advocacy, and community mobilization.379 Such a multitiered approach can only be accomplished through multiple tiers of organization and geopolitical circumscriptions. Douglas McAdam posits that a common theme among previously disparate movements can also be emphasized through the creation of a new organizational structure different from
Tucker, Inheriting the Grid #2, n.p. Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 40. 377 Lang, Food Policy for the 21st Century, 220. 378 Husbands, Food Banks, 108. 379 Ibid., 108.
375 376

98

extant groups that provides the initial community infrastructure of the movement.380 The formation of a new organization is one component of Mike Prokoschs integrated organizing model: a three-tiered approach in which national campaigns support local organizing without substitution for it, while direction action381 is used strategically, and local coalitions develop a larger political agenda and apply effective national pressure.382 In order to draw together socioeconomically and topically diverse organizations into coalitions and new organizations, outreach must be diversified and inclusive. This includes consciousness of the digital divide, necessitating use of door-to-door and phone contact in addition to online connection means, in order to include the most affected, and potentially most mobilizable, factions of the movement.383 Just as city designers must consider how to equally and better communicate complex information so that all residents can understand and have access to local government agencies in order to participate and influence local decisions,384 the URA movement must reflect these same principles in its organization and actions. Though it almost goes without saying, the inequities of neoliberalism cannot be attacked formulaically at the local level. Regional specificities must be integrated in order to confront the complexities of geographically uneven development.385 The problem lies not in our struggles towards a more equitable and democratic system of agriculture (a goal), but rather in the insistence on some generalized notion of a solution (an end).386
McAdam, The Political Process Model, 54. Prokosh defines direct actionstopping business as usual and opening up space for direct democracy, Mike Prokosh, Three Organizing Models, in The Global Activists Manual, 119. 382 Ibid., 119. 383 Washington and Clevenger, Review of Racism. 384 Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, 77. 385 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 59; Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 86. 386 Adam Prince, Toward an Agriculture of Connectivity, in A Fresh Look: Observations on artistic and social practices in urban farming, graduate project, Departments of Exhibition and Museum Studies, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, and Urban Studies, San Francisco Art Institute, 2010, accessed November 8, 2010 http://www.afreshlook.org/index.php/articles/show/toward_an_agriculture_of_connectivity/index.php.
380 381

99

*** Case Study Review

How do the two farms studied fit into the above dialogue? Both farms cited concern over the precarious nature of non-profits and grants as one of their primary motivations to operate as for-profit. Shute and Murphy both emphasized the ability to sustain projects beyond subsisting grant-to-grant as key to their longevity and potentiality to create change. While Hearty Roots is more profit-oriented and the Youth Farm is more social justice-oriented, both maintain minimal economic goals of achieving financial self-sustainability and perhaps generating surplus capital in the future for programmatic expansion. That is, while economically tenable, neither farm is operating a model that is geared exclusively toward profit maximization. That said, Hearty Roots, the more economically successful of the two (due in part to its earlier inception in 2004, compared to the nascent Youth Farm established in 2010), does not currently offer options for low-income customers that reduce the farms profit. The subsidized shares are subsidized by members themselves through donations and a built-in fee in the share prices, and Hearty Roots contributions to Local Produce Link are paid for by the NYSDOH. Even accepting EBT and WIC would not necessarily decrease financial returns on shares, though it is common for CSAs that do so to offer reduced-price shares to members paying with such

100

means. The Youth Farm is one such CSA, and the farm shoulders the decreased revenue that results from reduced-price shares. As for consumer-citizenship, the Youth Farms acceptance of EBT/WIC/Health Bucks fosters more consumer choice and social integration than Hearty Roots participation in the Local Produce Link program. Donating fresh, local food does not mitigate the stigma and selfdevaluing that accompanies receiving goods from food banks and pantries. There is a prevailing sense of inferior goods for inferior people at these establishments,387 and they deprive recipients of socially integrative action of shopping among the rest of us and exercising their preferences in selecting food retailers and products. While Hearty Roots provides high quality, local producewhich might say youre worth it388they do so through the stigmatized channels of emergency food provision, significantly reducing its social benefits. Though it may be easier, as Shute argued, to reach poor people through these channels, mechanisms that distribute food to low-income people without stigma are a prerequisite for a global food system for food insecurity.389 Despite Shutes claims of public assistance payment formats incompatibility with the CSA model, the fact that the Youth Farm has successfully overcome obstacles to accepting EBT for their CSA demonstrates that with a little creativity and effort, Hearty Roots could better provide low-income people with fresh produce through normative pathways of consumption. Certainly there is a little more risk in taking on poor community members who are faced with substantially more financial uncertainty. But if Hearty Roots, and the CSA model generally, asks members to share in the risks of farming by paying up-front, can low-income members ask the
Scharf, A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution, 124. Ibid., 124. 389 Koc et al., Introduction,5.
387 388

101

farm and their fellow members of greater means to share in their personal risks, risks that are not caused by personal choice but by the very neoliberal program of increasing profit at any cost that Hearty Roots claims to provide an alternative to? I fear that Local Produce Link further ensconces emergency food establishments into the neoliberal political economy, all the way down to the level of what some would consider the alternative economy of regional food. Providing food banks with local food validates those establishments as an acceptable way to feed poor people in the long run, condoning the continued government neglect that makes their operations necessary in the first place. Moreover, the provision of fresh, local food at food banks and pantries quashes arguments about the nutritional inferiority of food available at such sites, while failing to address the issue of poor peoples right to consumer choice or the assumption that poor people want local produce and are willing to use the socially stigmatized pathways of emergency food assistance to obtain it. In short, by donating produce to food banks and pantries rather than configuring their CSA model in such a way that low-income people can participate, Hearty Roots is perpetuating the twotiered food system. In this system, there are market-based local food operations vying for affluent individuals business by offering the highest quality products and engaging their consumer discretion and personal tastes, and emergency food distribution for low-income individuals, where they can local produce being offered or go home hungry; their lack of income does not entitle them to choice and personal tastes. The Youth Farm is seemingly more proactive than Hearty Roots in addressing other socioeconomic and cultural barriers to the CSA and farmers market models. Primary socioeconomic barriers to access are restrictive work schedules or other factors that prevent

102

individuals from traveling to the Youth Farm at the time of CSA distribution or market hours. Currently, the regular communication between farm employees and patrons allows the farm to adjust their hours or make exceptions for such individuals, and Murphy described a program for which they hope to receive grant funding, in which participating teens would deliver CSA shares to older community members. Hearty Roots does not make such concessions for working class or otherwise access-challenged members. Other such barriers to accessing these food sources include the digital divide and a general lack of awareness of the CSA or farmers markets models. The Youth Farm advertises its market and CSA at the farm itselfwhich, remember, is located within the Flatbush community it intends to servewith highly visible signage. It specifically targets low-income customers on public assistance through its inclusion on the list of participating farms on the back of Health Bucks. Next season, the Youth Farm plans on targeting local community workplaces and establishments such as nearby hospitals and churches. Hearty Roots relegates publicity to their core groups, hence Shute was unable to comment on the type of community outreach the farm engages in. By offering cooking and tasting demonstrations at their farmers market, the Youth Farm familiarizes patrons with culturally unfamiliar produce. Most important in addressing cultural barriers perhaps is the fact that the market format ultimately allows all patrons, regardless of income, to choose from the full selection of produce available. The implication of the cooking demos, therefore, is not that low-income people need to make better consumer choices or step out of their cultural comfort zone. Rather, the demos essentially advertise certain kinds of produce, allowing and entrusting low-income customers to make informed decisions, but do not

103

force them to be adventurous or otherwise embrace produce that has been selected by those outside their cultural and socioeconomic spheres. The Youth Farm has been less successful in engaging the same conditions with their CSA model, which Murphy acknowledged and distinguished as a program slated for improvement. Hearty Roots and the Youth Farm both conduct annual surveys of their CSA members, but the results, as Shute indicated, do not carry nearly as much sway as the ability to express opinion through purchases. The Youth Farm mitigates this through their farmers market, where patrons signal the produce they want by purchasing it. The farm has perceived those signals through their sales data, and responded by adjusting their crop plan accordingly for the coming season. Again, this only speaks to the farmers market patrons, who do not necessarily share the same tastes as CSA members. Hearty Roots, by only offering a CSA model, does not have the same sales data-generated feedback loop, and offers end-of-season surveys as the only venue for feedback. The only other way to voice opinion is by not purchasing a shareby becoming a CSA member, an individual is purchasing a subscription rather than individual products reflecting individual preferences. For low-income members who are unfamiliar with the local foodie culture surrounding the CSA subscriptions, being a member may not furnish any more of a sense of identity and independence than being a recipient at a food pantry. The issue may ultimately come down to the limits of the CSA model itself.390 That is not to say that Hearty Roots is in anyway failing to achieve the food justice component of their mission by opting for the CSA model, but rather that CSAs cannot be extended as a holistic
Just Food, arguable the most prominent urban agriculture and food justice non-profit in New York City, has even admitted to this possibility, stating in conference proceedings that it remains ambiguous whether or not CSA [is] a good way to address food security issues. Lauren Melodia and Mark Dunlea, Strategies to Increase MixedIncome CSA Participation, conference notes, Just Food CSA in NYC Conference, Columbia University, Manhattan, NY, 2010. Accessed April 13, 2011. http://www.justfood.org/csa/strategies-increase-mixed-income-csaparticipation.
390

104

solution to urban food insecurity. As it stands now, in neighborhoods where the only options for obtaining fresh produce are a CSA share or a food pantry, there is no opportunity for choice both offer predetermined selections of foodand little opportunity for dignity. The goal of food justice should be extending the full offerings of the market to every individual, regardless of income. That said, what is remarkable Hearty Roots, the Youth Farm, and similar entrepreneurial projects is their diversified bottom line: it is not only profit, but ecological resilience, social justice, and community-building that shape their operations. What would happen to such projects if the above-described universal availability of food options was achieved? Would competition from singularly profit-oriented food retailers quash these activist businesses? Without appropriate policy, it is likely that would be the case. Which brings us to the issue of policy engagement. Hearty Roots is tangentially involved in policy advocacy through Shutes participation in the National Young Farmers Coalition. The Youth Farm is unable to engage in the political sphere due to financial and staffing constraints. Both cite agricultural and land-use policy as highly influential forces that create a competitive disadvantage. Substantially more advocacy, on the part of these farms or allied institutions, could work to reorient regulation in favor of businesses with a diversified bottom line. Indeed, the City of New York has already acknowledged the community health benefits of farmers markets like the Youth Farms through their Health Bucks program, which incentivizes participants to shop at farmers markets. While this consumer-side subsidization is a step in the right direction, I hope to see in the future much more government intervention on the production side, rewarding food and farming businesses that provide their communities with sound practices and food for all, while maintaining the full availability of market options to all residents.

105

While a social-justice focus at the policy level will be years in the making, there is something to be said for the immediate, spatial justice component of urban agriculture: the reclamation of patches of the technocratic urban fabric for those with the least say or sway in planning decisions. Hearty Roots and the Youth Farm both contribute to such use of urban space, the former by dropping off CSA shares at the Red Shed Community Garden, the latter by situating the area of cultivation itself in the city. The Hearty Roots approach couples the productivity of a regional farm with the spatial reclamation of an urban community garden. The Youth Farm accomplishes a similar paring: though the farm produces significantly less food on their spatially limited urban plot, it augments its offerings by providing retail space for regional farmers at their farmers market. The Youth Farm seemingly fosters more community engagement than the Red Shed garden, in part by virtue of employing full-time staff and operating teen programs. As Murphy described the Youth Farm: We have a very close relationship with out community: they come chat with us on a daily basis over the fence. I think this is a bigger draw than a farmers market or CSA dropped [off] somewhere else in the city. The Red Shed garden is a volunteer-based, one-plot-per-participant (until they run out) program, which means participation is highly individualized and inconsistent. Whether, if given the option of turning an abandoned lot into any possible project, a community would choose an urban agriculture project, is debatable and highly variable community-to-community. Assuming such projects are welcomed by a neighborhood, they certainly make a statement in providing spaceas in, land, that indispensible, precious commodity391for community use and programming, implying: youre worth it. In this capacity, community gardens and community-oriented urban farms can serve as a counterforce
391

Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 17-18; see also Ibid., Place as Commodities (Chapter 2) generally.

106

to the revanchist city.392 (For example, in the late 1990s Mayor Giuliani attempted to auction off and effectively privatize the sites of 114 community gardens, simply because they had the potential to produce private profit. By forming a coalition of gardens across the city, a grassroots campaign was able to defeat Giulianis motion, defending the gardens as sites of substantial usevalue, including as providers of neighborhood revitalization and community building.393 The coalition was able to do so not through competing on the open market but by generating and operating in alternative spaces of engagement, shaped by factors other than the market.394 Here we see the potentiality of urban agriculture projects as spaces of contestation, though in this capacity they are not so easily distinguished from parks and other community spaces. The role of the two case study farms in this context proves to be particularly complex, as they both compete on the market and depend upon extramarket factors for their success. This perhaps furnishes them with the dual advantage of market and extramarket engagement, which I see as complementary rather that contradictory.

Christopher M. Smith and Hilda E. Kurtz, Community Gardens and Politics of Scale in New York City, Geographical Review 93 (April 2003), 199. 393 Ibid., 199. 394 Ibid., 201.
392

107

Conclusion

URA has made substantial accomplishments thus far, including but not limited to: drawing public attention to the issues of ecological farming, environmental justice, commercial redlining, hunger, and urban poverty; catalyzing discussion on these topics; creating new experiments, programs, institutions, and practices; and fostering a new consumer-activist network poised to be expanded.395 While urban agriculture will not address most of New Yorks food needs, it has served as a symbol and a tool for awareness raising of the problems it attempts to address.396 However trivial projects such as community gardens are, they have imbued a sense of hope.397 Whats more, the food movement has gained much favorability among the privileged, and has reincarnated a new sense of activism both among a generation of quadra- and quinquagenarians still disappointed by the decline of the 1960s activist spirit, and among their children. The reception and support of society at large is a formidable contribution to a movements legitimacy and efficacy. Surely sympathy alone from the privileged is insufficient
Allen, Together at the Table, 77. Frank, interview. 397 Koc et al., Introduction, 5.
395 396

108

for social change: under certain conditions it can be very powerful. But it wont get food and water into cities and garbage off the streets.398 What distinguishes local foodie-ism and urban agriculture from mere sympathy to sympathy that is backed by purchasing power. While still insufficient by itself, this sympathy is a key element in an effective coalition. URA cannot be placated by current successes, but must continue to work towards addressing deeper, structural issues. Particularly paramount to future work will be the acknowledgement that solutions to hunger and food insecurity are not necessarily solutions to the underlying issue of poverty.399 URA projects are notably prone to conflating the two, and the role of urban agriculture and local food systems in overall food-access matrices can be politically manipulated to mask a net decline in food access brought about by changes in public policy. Beyond masking, non-profit urban agriculture has the potential to be a means by which the powerful devolve social responsibility.400

*** Developing Cognitive Praxis

The challenges URA must overcome and developments that need to be made are substantial. First, the movement must become significantly more self-aware of the discourse it generates and transmits, and how it is distilled and transmuted by dominant institutions. Too many food activists are broadcasting a watered-down version of Michael Pollan rhetoric
Moore, The Rejection of Suffering and Oppression, 99. Power, Combining Social Justice, 35. 400 Jolly, Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy, 199.
398 399

109

filtered through mainstream media, without critically reflecting upon or engaging with it. I recently came across a glossy article on Good magazines website on why decentralized urban agriculture is the future of food provisioning in New York City. I was baffled by the sweeping claims of the piece, even as someone intimately familiar with conventional and radical URA discourses. They included: why shouldnt we grow food right next to our plates to reduce waste?; [as] most Americans live in urban areaswe should re-examine backyards[as] places to grow vegetables; [t]here are more than 10,000 acres of unused land in New York Cityand 1,500 of those acres are in BrooklynFarming 36 backyards in Crown Heights or Bay Ridge is the equivalent to farming an acre. In other words, Brooklyn is ripe for decentralized urban farming401 This is sheer number mongering backed by little justification. In fact the only explanations provided for why urban farming is appropriate are: a vague mention of waste reduction, the fact that un-built space exists in cities; and the fact that urban populations are growing. There was no mention of economic, social, political, or cultural factors that might support or detract from the proliferation of decentralized urban farming. Much to my dismay, the author of the article was Stacey Murphy of the High School for Public Service Youth Farm. Admittedly, she did not write the article as the founder and educational coordinator of the Youth Farm, but rather as a promoter of her organization BK Farmyards, which pairs yard-owners with urban farmers through social media. Perhaps Murphy assumes that her audience is of a certain class, one with the luxury of not considering economic, social, political, or cultural implications in their every decision. But just because economic security is not the deciding factor in the life choices of BK

Stacey Murphy, Is Decentralized Urban Farming the Future of Food?, Good (January 20, 2010), http://www.good.is/post/is-decentralized-urban-farming-the-future-of-food/.
401

110

Farmyards target audience, does not mean we should ask any less of them in terms of thinking critically and considering the broader implications of the seemingly apoliticalin actuality, depoliticizedact of letting someone else garden in ones backyard in order to reduce waste.402 Murphys article exemplifies the distilled, oversimplified rhetoric that too many activists in the field URA are so adept at adopting and promulgatingwhich is easy, and one is certainly not alone in doing so. I speak from personal experience; I know what it is like to be in a room full of well-groomed student food activists who are completely energized by the fact that everyone is saying the exact same thing. I also have experienced the contrast between talking to people just like myself about how superior local tomatoes are and attending workshops on the appalling state of farmworkers rights or working with at-risk teenagers on food issues. The latter experiences not as comfortable, predictable, or fun as the former. But it is precisely from those situations that real change begins: URA advocates cannot expect to stay in their comfort zone if they are actually interested in social justice. If the revolution will not be funded, it will also not be purchased at a farmers market (as the farmers market and income distribution trends stand now). Thus I prescribe to URA critical self-examination, and actively working towards developing a cognitive praxis in which core concepts, ideas, and intellectual ideas form the movements identity and meaning.403 The term praxis implies the plastic nature of this cognition, a trait that avoids crystallizing one hegemonic conception of URA. Certain elements
Indeed, in a 2010 interview Murphy stated that it didnt make any sense to seek political support with the backyard farms, highlighting the apolitical perception of certain URA projects. Organic Garden Project, OGP Catches up with BK Farmyards Stacey Murphy, February 1, 2010, accessed April 13, 2011, http://organicgardenproject.com/blog/urban-farms/ogp-catches-up-with-bk-farmyards-stacey-murphy/. 403 Allen, Together at the Table, 6.
402

111

of URA discourse have already become hegemonicproblematically so, I would arguesuch as the absolutist local is good, global is bad framework; the championing of food as the lynchpin of social changeas an end rather than a means; the unproductive notion of food miles404; and the assumption that the best solution to food insecurity is always local food distribution or selfprovisioning models. To control discourse is to maintain power,405 but many URA advocates disseminate the dominant discourse without reworking it, relinquishing that power to media outlets, corporate capitalists, and public officials who can manipulate it to fit their own agendas. Even more concerning is the fact that the low-income communities URA intends to help have seldom contributed to the movements discursive coming into being. If these communities are not given their own space in URA discourse to comprehend and define their situation as unjust and subject to change,406 they will not undergo the cognitive liberation that is key to any successful movement, in which individuals understand their position as actors (not mere objects to be acted upon) and their potential for collective action:407 [i]t is not simply the extent and speed with which insurgency is spread but the very cognitions on which it depends that are conditioned by the strength of integrative ties with the movements mass base.408 In other words, there must be an active effort to articulate harmonized common goals among the entire spectrum of food activistsfrom those struggling to meet daily intake needs to those lobbying for policy.409
The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions [of food miles] are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food, Stephen Budiansky, Math Lessons for Locavores, New York Times, August 19, 2010. 405 Allen, Together at the Table, 6. 406 McAdam, Political Process Model, 51. 407 Ibid., 48. 408 Ibid., 49. 409 Kenneth A. Dahlberg, Promoting Sustainable Local Food Systems in the United States, in For Hunger-Proof
404

112

This process can mitigate the projectization that is characteristic of community organizing in low-income areas by placing it in a broader, structural context. For example, at the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, one of the main reasons cited by activists of color for the low attendance rate of people of color was a failure to see how the WTO affected the daily lives of U.S. communities of ColorActivists of color felt they had more immediate issues.410 Thus there is a need for collaboration between those with resources, time, and knowledge, and those faced with everyday bread-and-butter issues, in such a way that they are mutually reinforcing. Indeed, the role of such a potential critical mass of people who are conscious of the global and systemic root causes of our problems is not to be underestimated.411 While critical reassessment may risk presenting URA as internally divided, it will ultimately provide a more unified analysis and ethos.412 As mentioned, the process of collective analysis and assessment is identity-forming for both a movement and individual participants: In the process of collectively defining the conditions of their surroundings for themselves and others, newcomerssimultaneously situat[e] themselves as a social group defined in relation to the [localized] politics, economy, and culture.413 Lastly, and crucially, an established yet fluid discourse prevents the co-opting of movement ideas and terms, as has been the case with the concept of sustainability.414

***
Cities, 42. 410 Martinez, Where Was the Color in Seattle? 81. 411 Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott, Building Todays Global Movement, in Global Activists Manual, 103. 412 Crass, White Supremacy, 93. 413 Mele, Asserting the Political Self, 73. 414 Allen, Together at the Table, 17.

113

Uniting Diverse Projects

Once a solidary discourse has been established, the foundation is set for productive collaboration. By hitching for-profit operations like Hearty Roots and the Youth Farm to advocacy groups spanning the spectrum of food issueshunger, ecology, nutrition, accessthe farms can begin to acquire the political voice they currently lack, and lobbyist operations can gain a modicum of financial security. At best, such a collaboration could lead to the expression of the right to food at household and community levels as well as in international declarations and domestic policy, through integrated responsibilities and activitiesemphasis on macropolicytransdisciplinary policy developmentcollaboration with the diverse groups affected by problems in need of resolution[and] food systems policy.415 In New York City, there are several organizations and programs that have the potential to lead such efforts, through URA and related pathways. From personal observation and research, I maintain that the non-profit Just Food, the FRESH Program of the City of New York, the federal food stamp program, and the nascent Five Borough Farm project will wield the most influence on the issues of food access, urban hunger, and URA in the coming years. Collaboration between these programs has the potential to be potent and radical. For example, the FRESH Program incentivizes grocery stores to locate in food insecure, low-income neighborhoods by providing exceptions in zoning laws through the Department of City Planning and tax incentives through the City Economic Development Corporation. Not only does this program exploit opportunities within the citys profile, but it overrides the trend in which the wide latitude and autonomy that we grant local governments[fosters] competition for favored residents and investments, each
415

Rod MacRae, Policy Failure in the Canadian Food Systems, in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 188.

114

jurisdiction has a strong incentive to adopt zoning and development policies that exclude potential residents with below-median income or who require more costly services.416 Yet farmers markets and CSA shares do not currently qualify for the FRESH program, due to their limited operating hours and general incompatibility with the constraints of low-income individuals.417 If these alternative food sources were to commit to meeting the scheduling needs of these neighborhoods, as the Youth Farm has attempted to do, it could open the potential for their participation in FRESH, and thus the direct subsidization of regional, ecological, just food by the City of New York. Hearty Roots was unaware of the program, indicative of the current gap between the local political sphere and for- and non-profit food justice operations. I believe Just Food could play a crucial role in bridging that gap, by using the regional-farm-to-urbandweller network it has already engendered to communicate political projects and possibilities, like FRESH. The federal government and the City of New York directly subsidize farmers markets through two similar programs. On the federal level, the Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) provides coupons in addition to regular WIC benefits to eligible recipients.418 In New York, the city provides Health Bucks to EBT users at farmers markets: for every $5 a participant spends at a market, they receive a $2 coupon valid only at farmers markets.419 As inequality deepens, and the number of individuals on food stamps risesit is currently one in seven Americans420the number of people who are given purchasing power specifically to

Dreier, Mollenkompf and Swanson, Place Matters, 111. Frank, interview. 418 United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program, http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/fmnp/fmnpfaqs.htm. 419 New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Physical Activity and Nutrition: Health Bucks, June, 25 2010, http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/cdp/cdp_pan_health_bucks.shtml. 420 Stiglitz, Of the 1%, n.p.
416 417

115

support these alternative food circuits is also rising.421 That is not to say that rising inequality should be celebrated by any stretch, but it is worth noting that as the government fails to stem this trend or even address food insecurity in a substantial way, it is simultaneously funding the alternative pathways that have risen out of years of program retrenchment and corporate favoritism in policy. That said, while the poor and food insecure may represent an untapped market for URA, and have lent the movement a degree of justification and legitimacy, they cannot be used as a tool to merely perpetuate the consumption practices and ideals of the wealthy. Rather, the haves and have-nots must collaborate on URA projects in a mutually beneficial fashion, which I do believe is possible, because I maintain that URA has the potential to benefit all American residents equally. The have-nots can use their federally subsidized funds to indirectly channel government support towards these alternative, potentially just and radical food pathways. In return, the haves must reorient their advocacy and charity to eliminate the need for public food assistance through strategies that focus on the following: progressive taxation to provide the necessary funding for social welfare programs and to reduce income inequality, discouraging or penalizing the relocation of US-based jobs overseas in order to increased employment; an increase in the minimum wage; wage supplements; (more generally and idealisitically) full employment with an income guaranteed to lift communities out of poverty; funding for better schools in low income areas; food and nutrition education programs in schools and communities; and the confrontation the chronic political neglect of homelessness.422 Serious consideration of
I stand by what I said before; that a just food system must ultimately consist of all residents maintaining equal access, physically and economically, to the entire range of food provision offerings, and acknowledge that this incentivized support of farmers markets by low-income individuals cannot be a permanent component of such a system. 422 Hugh Joseph, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, Become a Champion to End Hunger, e-mail message to the Community Food Security Listserv, May 7, 2011.
421

116

these strategies requires understanding of hunger as a chronic societal problem that no longer can be addressed in isolation from other correlates of poverty such as underemployment, inadequate housing, or poor educationThe time has come for anti-hunger advocatesand I would add, URA advocatesto assume the additional burden of anti-poverty advocacy and to demand that the federal government reclaim responsibility for the food and welfare of its citizens.423

***

It is hard to be optimistic when I consider the neoliberal program were faced with in the United States: the growing disparity in wealth that is becoming increasingly codified both politically and culturally through regressive policy and backwards political rhetoric, the complete lack of participatory politics, and the escalating burden to cities of shouldering both the majority of the nations poor and the brunt of ideologically-steeped national-turned-state cutbacks. In light of these circumstances, there are times when I feel as if all the activity, momentum, and idealism of URA are futile. But I ultimately think it has created new approaches and novel forms of resistance to some of the countless problems produced by the current neoliberal regime we have been submitted to. In looking to future possibilities, two things are certain: there will be no substantial demise in capitalismit has become so ingrained in every facet of quotidian existence, it has created the modern world we live inand no number of benevolent politicians working within the system in situ will be able to serve a more radical role than mere moderators of global

Marion Nestle and Sally Guttmacher, Hunger in the United States: Rationale, methods, and policy implications of state hunger surveys, Journal of Nutrition Education 24 (January/February Supplement 1992), 21S.
423

117

capital. With this in mind, the framework within which all progressive URA projects must work is as follows: an acknowledgement of the citizen-consumer as the new, translocal subject; the treatment of the poor as eligible participants, leaders, consumers, and producers through hiring practices and assignment of leadership roles; the recognition of poverty as the root cause of hunger (and economic security as the root solution); the acceptance of globalization as a precondition to all action; the application of diversified and site-specific strategies; and the recognition of the political sphere as both indispensible and significantly corrupted in its current form. If these conditions can be engaged, I have hope for the URA movement as more than a trend among the urban elite or a highly specific form of activism, but as an inroads toward more progressive forms of activism, and in turn, of American society. Bibliography

Allen, Patricia. Contemporary Food and Farm Policy in the United States. In For HungerProof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. . Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Appadurai, Arjun. Deep Democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Environment & Urbanization 13 (2001): 23-43. Arendt, Hannah. The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure. In The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr, 508-539. New York: Penguin, 2003. First published in On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963. Page references are to refer to the Penguin edition. Bailkey, Martin, Katherine Houston Brown, Terri Buchanan, Anne Carter, Peter Mann, Joe Nasr and Jac Smit. Urban Agriculture and Community Food Security in the United States: Farming from the City Center to the Urban Fringe. North American Urban Agriculture Committee, Community Food Security Coalition. Accessed October 27, 2010. www.foodsecurity.org/FarmingCitytoFringe.pdf.

118

Moore, Barrington. The Rejection of Suffering and Oppression. In Injustice: The social bases of obedience and revolt. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978. Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007. Blanger, Pierre. Redefining Infrastructure. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Bello, Walden. Manufacturing a Food Crisis. The Nation, June 2, 2008. Accessed November 8, 2010. http://www.thenation.com/article/manufacturing-food-crisis. Blue, Gwen. On the Politics and Possibilities of Locavores: Situating food sovereignty in the turn from government to governance. Politics and Culture 2 (2009). Accessed March 18, 2011. http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/10/27/on-the-politics-and-possibilities-oflocavores-situating-food-sovereignty-in-the-turn-from-government-to-governance/. Boeri, Stefano. Five Ecological Challenges for the Contemporary City. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Bohn, Katrin and Andr Viljoen. More Space with Less Space: An urban design strategy. In CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, edited by Andr Viljoen. Burlington, MA: Architectural Press, 2005. Born, Branden and Mark Purcell. Avoiding the Local Trap: Scale and Food Systems in Planning Research. Journal of Planning Education and Research 26 (2006): 195-207. Bornhft, Petra, Jens Glsing, Horand Knaup, and Christian Schwgerl. The Race to Feed the Planet: Why we need a new green revolution to stop hunger. Der Speigel, September 20, 2010. Translated by Ella Ornstein. Accessed October 3, 2010. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,718387,00.html. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loc J. D. Wacquant. The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop). In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, edited by Pierre Bourdieu and Loc J. D. Wacquant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Brown, Wendy. Economic liberalism, political liberalism, and what is the neo in neoliberalism. In Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Budiansky, Stephen. Math Lessons for Locavores. New York Times, August 19, 2010. Accessed April 11, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html.

119

Carrington, Damian and John Vidal. Global Food System Must Be Transformed On Industrial Revolution Scale. The Guardian, January 24, 2011. Accessed January 25, 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/24/global-food-system-report. Castells, Manuel. Urban Sociology in the Twenty-First Century: A Retrospective Perspective. In The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. CITIES. Farming the City: Temporary agriculture as an answer to urban decay. Last modified November 22, 2010. Accessed December 7, 2011. http://issuu.com/citiesthemagazine/docs/farmingthecity_examples. Clancy, Katherine. Sustainable Agriculture and Domestic Hunger: Rethinking a link between production and consumption. In Food for the Future: Conditions and contradictions of sustainability, edited by Patricia Allen. New York: Wiley Interscience, 1993. Cohen, Lizabeth. Black and White in Green Cities. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Cohen, Nevin. Urban Agriculture: the Opportunity and Obstacles. Panel discussion at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York. September 21, 2010. . 2011. Interview by Urban Omnibus. Urban Omnibus: a project of the Architectural League of New York. January 19, 2011. Accessed January 20, 2011. http://urbanomnibus.net/2011/01/five-borough-farm/. Cohen, Scott and Erika Naginski. The Return to Nature. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Conley, Verena Andermatt. Urban Ecological Practices: Flix Guattaris Three Ecologies. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Crass, Chris. White Supremacy: Thoughts on movement building and antiracist organizing. In The Global Activists Manual: Local ways to change the world, edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002. Dahlberg, Kenneth A. Promoting Sustainable Local Food Systems in the United States. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2006.

120

Di Chiro, Giovanna. Local Actions, Global Visions: Remaking environmental expertise. In Appropriating Technology: vernacular science and social power, edited by Ron Eglash, Jennifer L. Croissant, Giovanna Di Chiro and Rayvan Fouch, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Dreier, Peter, John Mollenkopf and Todd Swanstrom. Place Matters: Metropolitics for the twenty-first century. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004. Duany, Andrs. A General Theory of Sustainable Urbanism. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Engels, Friedrich. Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954. Epstein-Pliouchtch, Marina and Tzafrir Fainholtz. Le Corbusier and the Zionist movement. Rural and Urban: Architecture between two cultures, edited by Andrew Ballantyne. New York: Routeledge, 2010. Fainstein, Susan. Social Justice and Ecological Urbanism. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Felson, Alexander J. and Linda Pollak. Situating Urban Ecological Experiments in Public Space. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Fisher, Andy. Hot Peppers and Parking Lot Peaches: Evaluating farmers markets in lowincome communities. Community Food Security Coalition, January 1999. Accessed December 14, 2010. www.foodsecurity.org/HotPeppersPeaches.pdf. Foresight. The Future of Food and Farming. Executive Summary. The Government Office for Science, London, 2011. Accessed January 25, 2011. http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/ourwork/projects. Foucault, Michel. The Eye of Power. In Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, Edited by Colin Gordonw, Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Frank, Joanna. Director of the FRESH Program, New York City Economic Development Corporation. Interview by author. Queens, New York, January 14, 2011. Frug, Gerald. Governing the Ecological City. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Gandy, Matthew. Concrete and Clay: Reworking nature in New York City. Cambridge, Mass.:

121

MIT Press, 2003. Gordon, David M. Left, Right, and Center: An Introduction to Political Economy. In The Imperiled Economy, edited by Robert Cherry. Amherst, Mass.: Union for Radical Political Economics, 1987. Gottlieb, Robert. Where We Live, Work, Playand Eat: Expanding the Environmental Justice Agenda. Environmental Justice 2 (2009): 7-8. Gottlieb, Robert and Anupama Joshi. Food Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. Griffioen, James. Yes There Are Grocery Stores in Detroit. Urbanophile, January 25, 2011. Accessed April 2, 2011. http://www.urbanophile.com/2011/01/25/yes-there-are-grocerystores-in-detroit-by-james-griffioen/. Guthman, Julie. Interview by Scott Stoneman. Politics and Culture 2 (2009). Accessed March 28, 2011. http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/10/27/an-interview-with-julie-guthman/. Habermas, Jrgen. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in political theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Hagan, Susannah. Performalism: Environmental Metrics and Urban Design. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Haiven, Max. Food, Finance, Crisis, Catalyst: Global capitalism and the revolutionary value of food sovereignty. Politics and Culture 2 (1999). Accessed March 18, 2011. http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/11/03/max-haiven-food-finance-crisis-catalystglobal-capitalism-and-the-revolutionary-value-of-food-sovereignty/. Hamm, Michael W. and Monique Baron. Developing an Integrated Sustainable Urban Good System: The case of New Jersey, United States. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Hardoy, Jorge Enrique, Diana Mitlin, David Satterthwaite. Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World. Sterling, Virg.: Earthscan Publications, 2001. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Hartford Food System. Connecticut Supermarkets: Can New Strategies Address the Geographic Gaps? Policy Briefing. December 2006. Accessed December, 15 2010. www.hartfordfood.org/pubs/supermarkets.pdf.

122

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. . The Enigma of Capital. Lecture presented at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, March 24, 2011. Hedges, Chris. Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion. Truthout, November 22, 2010. Accessed December 28, 2010. http://www.truth-out.org/power-and-tiny-actsrebellion65351. Hegel, Georg. Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hester, Randolph T. Design for Ecological Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Heynen, Nikolas C. Justice of Eating in the City: The political ecology of urban hunger. In In the Nature of Cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism, edited by. Nikolas C. Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. New York: Routledge, 2006. Hoagland, William G. Perception and Reality in Nutrition Programs. In Maintaining the Safety Net: Income redistribution programs in the Reagan Administration, edited by John C. Weicher. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1985. Hodson, Mike and Simon Marvin. Transcendent Eco-Cities or Urban Ecological Security? In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Holmes, Brian. Neoliberal Appetites. AREA Chicago 2 (2006). Accessed December 3, 2010. http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-2/neoliberal-appetites/. Holt-Gimnez, Eric and Raj Patel. Food Rebellions!: Crisis and the hunger for food justice. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2009. Howe, Joe, Katrin Bohn, and Andr Viljoen. Food In Time: The history of English open urban space as a European example. In CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, edited by Andr Viljoen. Burlington, MA: Architectural Press, 2005. Husbands, Winston. Food Banks as Antihunger Organizations. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Iles, Jeremy. The Social Role of Community Farms and Gardens in the City. In CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, edited by Andr Viljoen. Burlington, Mass.: Architectural Press, 2005.

123

Imbert, Dorothe. Aux Fermes, Citoyens! In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Jennings, Cheri Lucas and Bruce H. Jennings. Green Fields/Brown Skin: Posting as a sign of recognition. In In the Nature of Things: Language, politics, and the environment, edited by Jane Bennett and William Caloupka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Jolly, Desmond. Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Joseph, Hugh. Adjunct Assistant Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University. Become a Champion to End Hunger. E-mail message to the Community Food Security Listserv. May 7, 2011. Katz-Fishman, Walda and Jerome Scott. Building Todays Global Movement. In The Global Activists Manual: Local ways to change the world, edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002. Kempf, Herv. How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth. White River Junction, Verm.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. Kirkwood, Niall G. Curating Resources. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Koc, Mustafa and Hulya Koc. From Staple Store to Supermarket: The Case of TANSAS in Izmir, Turkey. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Koc, Mustafa, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Introduction: Food security is a global concern. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Krug, Karen L. Canadian Rural Women Reconstructing Agriculture. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Kuttner, Robert. The Limits of Markets. The American Prospect, March 1, 1997. Accessed February 2, 2011. http://prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=4845. Lang, Tim. Food Policy for the 21st Century: Can it be both radical reasonable? In For

124

Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Lasley, Paul and Gordon Bultena. Farmers Opinions on the Relationship between Land Grant Colleges and Private Industry. Presented at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, Madison, Wisconsin. August 12, 1987. Latour, Bruno. An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto. New Literary History 41(2010): 471-487. Leary, John Patrick. Detroitism: What does ruin porn tell us about the motor city, ourselves, other American cities? Guernica (January 2011). Accessed April 2, 2011. http://www.guernicamag.com/spotlight/2281/leary_1_15_11/. Levin, Chad. Pollanated Politics, or the Neoliberals Dilemma. Politics and Culture 2 (2009). Accessed March 18, 2011. http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/10/27/pollanatedpolitics-or-the-neoliberal%E2%80%99s-dilemma/ Lind, Diana. The Bright Side of Blight. New York Times, January 24, 2011. Accessed February 2, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25lind.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=the %20bright%20side%20of%20blight&st=cse. Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The political economy of place. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Luu, Helen. Challenging White Supremacy. In The Global Activists Manual: Local ways to change the world, edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002. Lyson, Thomas. Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting farm, food, and community. Lebanon, New Hamp.: Tufts University Press, 2004. MacRae, Rod. Policy Failure in the Canadian Food Systems. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Martinez, Elizabeth. Where Was the Color in Seattle?: Looking for the reasons why the Great Battle was so white. In The Global Activists Manual: Local ways to change the world, edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002. McAdam, Douglas. The Political Process Model, in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

125

McKellips, Beth. Why food systems planning is a fad (that should not fade). Panorama: Journal of the City and Regional Planning Department of the University of Pennsylvania (Spring 2010): 10-15. Mele, Christopher. Asserting the Political Self: Community activism among black women who relocate to the Rural South. The Sociological Quarterly 41(2000): 63-84. Miner, Barbara. An Urban Farmer is Rewarded for His Dream. New York Times, September 25, 2008. Accessed October 27, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/dining/01genius.html?_r=1. Mitlin, Diana. Reshaping Local Democracy. Environment & Urbanization 16(2004): 3-8. Mougeot, Luc J.A. For Self-Reliant Cities Urban food production in a globalizing South. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Murphy, Stacey. Is Decentralized Urban Farming the Future of Food?. Good, January 20, 2010. Accessed April 3, 2011. http://www.good.is/post/is-decentralized-urban-farming-thefuture-of-food/. Murphy, Stacy. Founder and Educational Coordinator, High School for Public Service Youth Farm. Email interview by author, March 16, 2011. Narayan, Uma, Prasch, Robert E. The Ethics and Economics of Water Privatization: States, markets, and multinational corporations. Unpublished draft, 2006a. Narayan, Uma, Prasch, Robert E. Should Water be a Commons or a Commodity?: A defense of partial commodification. Unpublished draft, 2006b. Nestle, Marion and Sally Guttmacher. Hunger in the United States: Rationale, methods, and policy implications of state hunger surveys. Journal of Nutrition Education 24 (January/February Supplement 1992): 18S-22S. New York City Departments of Design and Construction, Health and Mental Hygiene, Transportation, and City Planning. Active Design Guidelines. New York: City of New York, 2010. New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Health Bucks. Accessed April 13, 2011. http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/cdp/cdp_pan_health_bucks.shtml. Norton, George W., Jeffrey Alwang, and William A. Masters. Economics of Agricultural Development: World food systems and resource use. New York: Routledge, 2006.

126

Organic Garden Project. OGP Catches up with BK Farmyards Stacey Murphy, February 1, 2010. Accessed April 13, 2011. http://organicgardenproject.com/blog/urban-farms/ogpcatches-up-with-bk-farmyards-stacey-murphy/. Pastor Jr., Manuel, Chris Benner, and Martha Matuoka. This Could Be The Start of Something Big: How social movements for regional equity of reshaping metropolitan America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The hidden battle for the world food system. New York: Melville house, 2008. Payne, Andrew. Sustainability and Pleasure: An Untimely Meditation. Harvard Design Magazine 30 (2009): 68-83. Pearce, Fred. When Rivers Run Dry: Water The defining crisis of the 21st century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Peck, Jamie, Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore. City as Policy Lab. AREA Chicago 6 (2008). Accessed December 5, 2010. http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/city-as-lab/city-policylab/. Petts, James. The Economics of Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture. In CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, edited by Andr Viljoen. Burlington, Mass.: Architectural Press, 2005 Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1944. Reprinted with forward by Joseph E. Stiglitz and introduction by Fred Block, 2001. Page references are to the 2001 edition. Pollin, Robert. Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. Verso: New York, 2003. Poppendieck, Janet. Sweet Charity?: Emergency food and the end to entitlement. New York: Penguin, 1999. Power, Elaine M. Combining Social Justice and Sustainability for Food Security. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Prince, Adam. Toward an Agriculture of Connectivity. In A Fresh Look: Observations on artistic and social practices in urban farming. Graduate project, Departments of Exhibition and Museum Studies, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, and Urban Studies. San

127

Francisco Art Institute, 2010. Accessed November 8, 2010. http://www.afreshlook.org/index.php/articles/show/toward_an_agriculture_of_connectivity/i ndex.php. [Note: the website appears to have been taken down, a write-up of the project can be found here: http://activeweb.sfai.edu/newsEvents/eventDetails.aspx?Channel=/Channels/Campus %20Wide&WorkflowItemID=25739c40-0d4b-46b5-bfbe-0872053e4f41] Prokosch, Mike. Three Organizing Models. In The Global Activists Manual: Local ways to change the world, edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond, New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002. Rajah, Colin. Race in the Globalization Movement. In The Global Activists Manual: Local ways to change the world, edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002. Rao, Vyjayanthi. Slum as theory: the South/Asian city and globalization. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30(2006): 225-32. Riches, Graham. Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada: The role of community-based food security. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999. Robbins, Paul. The Political Ecology of Ecological Urbanism. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Roythe, Elizabeth. Street Farmer. New York Times, July 1, 2009. Accessed October 27, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05allen-t.html?scp=2&sq=%22will%20allen %22&st=cse. Sachs, Ignacy. Vulnerability of Giant Cities and the Life Lottery. In A World of Giant Cities: The Metropolis Era Volume I, edited by Mattei Dogan and Dr. John Kasarda. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: Introducing a Concept and its History. In Mutations, edited by Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Bordeaux: Actar, 2000. Scharf, Kathryn. A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution: The case of Toronto, Canada. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1999.

128

Scott, Janny. Cities Shed Middle Class, and Are Richer and Poorer for It. New York Times, July 23, 2006. Accessed December 16, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/weekinreview/23scott.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq= %22cities%20shed%20middle%20class%22&st=cse#. Sepulvado, John. House Republicans want to cut WIC by 10%. CNN, February 25, 2011. Accessed March 19, 2011. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/25/budget.women.children. Sewell, Heather. 3 Kind of Produce: Observation from behind the wheel of a farming sedan. AREA Chicago 2 (2006). Accessed December 3, 2010. http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-2/3kinds-of-produce/. Sheldon, Jennifer Lynn. Community Gardens: Best practices across urban America. Masters thesis, Department of Public Policy and Administration, California State University, Sacramento, 2010. Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy. Lecture presented as part of the Center for Environmental Policys Town Square: Science for Citizens Series. Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, July 14, 2010. Shute, Benjamin. Co-Owner and Manager, Hearty Roots Community Farm. Phone interview by author, January 17, 2011. Smith, Andrea. Introduction: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. In The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 1-18. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2007. Smith, Brendan. Fighting Doom: The new politics of climate change. Common Dreams, November 23, 2010. Accessed December 29, 2010. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/23-1. Smith, Christopher M. and Hilda E. Kurtz. Community Gardens and Politics of Scale in New York City. Geographical Review 93 (2003): 193-212. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 3rd ed. Athens, Georg.: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Soja, Edward. Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. . Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

129

Stein, Joshua David. What an Urban Farmer Looks Like. New York Magazine, September 19, 2010. http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/68297/. Stiglitz, Joeseph E. Making Globalization Work. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. . Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%. Vanity Fair, May 2011. Accessed April 13, 2011. http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105. Stoneman, Scott. Learning to learn from the food crisis: consumer sovereignty and the restructuring of subjectivity. Politics and Culture 2 (2009). Accessed March 18, 2011. http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/11/03/scott-stoneman-learning-to-learn-from-thefood-crisis-consumer-sovereignty-and-the-restructuring-of-subjectivity/. Swengedouw, Eric, and Nikolas C. Heynen. Urban Political Ecology, Justice, and the Politics of Scale. Antipode 35(2003): 898-918. . Urban Political Ecology, Justice, and the Politics of Scale. In The Blackwell City Reader, edited Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 2nd edition. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2010. Thompson, Isaiah. Agricultural Phenomenon: What happens when idealist, entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats all latch on to the same trend? Philadelphia City Paper, April 28, 2010. Accessed October 27, 2010. http://citypaper.net/articles/2010/04/29/urban-gardeningagriculture-in-philadelphia. Treuhaft, Sarah, Michael J. Hamm and Charlotte Litjens. Healthy Food For All: Building equitable and sustainable food systems in Detroit and Oakland. Policy Link, Michigan State University, and the Fair Food Network, 2009. Accessed March 18, 2011. http://www.policylink.org/atf/cf/%7B97C6D565-BB43-406D-A6D5ECA3BBF35AF0%7D/Healthy%20Food%20For%20All-8-19-09-FINAL.pdf . Tucker, Daniel. Inheriting the Grid #2. AREA Chicago 2 (2006). Accessed December 3, 2010. http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-2/inheriting-the-grid2/. United Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Last modified 2010. Accessed November 21, 2010. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml. United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Services. WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program. June 25, 2010. Accessed April 13, 2011. http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/fmnp/fmnpfaqs.htm. Van Esterik, Penny. Gender and Sustainable Food Systems: A feminist critique. In For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable urban food systems, edited by Mustafa Koc, Rod MacRae, Luc J.A. Mugeot, and Jennifer Welsh. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre,

130

1999. Viljoen, Andr. Introductory Glossary. In CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, edited by Andr Viljoen. Burlington, Mass.: Architectural Press, 2005 Wacquant, Loc. Sustaining the City in the Face of Advanced Marginality. In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller Publishers, 2010. Wallach, Lori and Patrick Woodall. The WTO on Agriculture: Food as a commodity, not a right. In Whose Trade Organization?: A comprehensive guide to the WTO. New York: The New Press, 1991. Wark, McKenzie. Telegram From Nowhere. In Mutations, edited by Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Bordeaux: Actar, 2000. Washington, Karen and Lorrie Clevenger. Review of Racism in the Food System. Just Food CSA in NYC Conference, Food and Finance High School, Manhattan, New York. March 5, 2011. Winne, Mark. Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the table in the land of plenty. Boston: Beacon Press, 2008. Yowell, Ed. Farm Views on Labor Practices, June 2010. Food Systems Network NYC, June 2010. Accessed May 1, 2011. http://www.foodsystemsnyc.org/farm_views_labor_june2010.

Title page photo caption: Le 56, urban garden project of latelier darchitecture autogre. 56 rue Saint-Blaise, 20th Arrondissement, Paris. Photo credit: latelier darchitecture autogre.

131