Social Impacts of Our Food System. Key Facts Farm workers in the food production system are vulnerable to: Health hazards that result from handling pesticides or inhaling toxic fumes from animal waste.

Injury caused by maneuvering dangerous machinery. Sexual harassment and abuse by their supervisors or other workers. I can go down to the office of my building when I need food. My case worker will bring back bread, meat, stuff like that. At times, I can get the food I like.

Sometimes I get the stuff I need but not the stuff I want. I can walk there. I go to the market next door for food too. I might go to one around the corner after this. I get treatments in Brooklyn so I usually get my groceries in Flatbush and bring them home.

In the nutrition program at the hospital, we swap recipes, we do potlucks, and sometimes they have food for the holidays, so that helps. S:US has urban farms at many of their supportive housing sites including ones where several of us live , providing free fruits and vegetables, nutritional programming, and employment opportunities for people like us who are served by S:US.

When I go to treatment, I see a lot of people who would benefit from S:US. Read the original article here. Careers Contact Us Get Services fb tw ig li donate now. donate now. Press Our News Events. Consumer Perspectives: Food Security is a Social Justice Issue.

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Home In the name of social justice, food security and human dignity.

Food system workers face greater food insecurity and are twice as likely to rely on government supplemental nutrition programs as workers in other industries. BIPOC individuals comprise a significant portion of the food chain labor force, including many immigrant laborers among their ranks. Workers in food harvesting and food processing face particularly high rates of discrimination and denial of rights, but their diverse experiences of injustice are often silenced by economic inequality, language barriers, and lack of bargaining power.

The Agricultural Justice Project has developed a Food Justice Certification program that approves farms and retailers that adhere to fair labor and trade practices. The project provides technical assistance and training to employers to empower food chain workers and grant them dignity and respect.

It also solicits the input and expertise of workers when formulating certification standards. Farmworker Justice is an organization that works to empower migrant and seasonal farmworkers, with the goal of improving the conditions of farm labor and the health and wellbeing of farmworkers.

Food Chain Workers Alliance is a coalition of worker-led organizations encompassing workers in food harvesting, processing, packing, transportation, preparation, service, and retail.

Food Chain Workers Alliance advocates for a just food system that respects, uplifts, and protects workers at all stages of the food system.

Food justice engages with systemic causes of injustice through a variety of actions and topics at all levels of the food system.

Accordingly, advocacy for food justice in each community may take different forms. Additionally, how communities choose to pursue justice also depends on specific ecologies, traditions, and cultural practices.

A variety of approaches commonly employed by food justice advocates appear below:. Agroecology is a systems-based approach to food production that integrates the sociological, cultural, and ecological aspects of a community. Agroecology principles include ecologically appropriate and diverse crops, co-creation and sharing of knowledge within and between communities, returning to and celebrating traditional foods, and restoring direct connections between farmers and food consumers.

Food justice employs strategies that directly challenge and bypass the products and supply chains of industrial agriculture and industrial animal production. Agroecological farming can foster food sovereignty and preserve local land and environments, but it is also a political and ideological approach to overturning harmful and extractive food systems.

Example: La Via Campesina is the coordinating body of an international movement that advocates for the interests of smallholder farmers, including food policy reform and knowledge sharing for agroecology.

Currently active in 81 countries, La Via Campesina represents about million small-scale farmers and agricultural workers and advocates for peasant- and worker-driven agroecological farming that celebrates the value of traditional ecological farming knowledge held by Indigenous and agrarian communities.

La Via Campesina first developed the term food sovereignty and brought it to public discourse during the World Food Summit as a response to the harmful structures of globalized extractive food systems.

Since , La Via Campesina has led opposition to harmful neoliberal food policies such as the subsidization of commodity crops and the dumping of excess commodity crops as international food aid.

In , La Via Campesina coordinated peasant and smallholder farmer resistance to the strong representation of agribusiness interests and priorities at the first UN Food Systems Summit.

Their priorities include national and international support for democratic reform of food and farming to support justice for farmers and calls for an international commitment to agroecology as a solution to global environmental degradation.

Food justice education within underserved BIPOC communities can spread knowledge of nutrition, community gardening, and connections between food and justice, empowering members with resources to grow and obtain healthy, fresh food.

Food education aimed at youth can help young people make connections between food production and systemic injustices in food provision and understand how their choices can contribute to a just food system transformation.

Over 21 million workers are employed in the US food system, yet they are politically and economically disenfranchised. Food workers make valuable contributions to food production and distribution; defending the rights of workers is key to challenging exploitative food systems.

Example: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a worker-led advocacy organization that promotes the human rights of food chain workers. They have fought against human trafficking and gender-based violence, providing worker-to-worker rights education.

Externally, the Coalition educates consumers about the exploitation of food chain labor and operates Fair Food programs where buyers pay a price premium that is passed on to workers. Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been one of the most visible and successful workers advocacy organizations in US history, inspiring many related organizations and empowering the broader food justice movement.

Many communities experiencing food insecurity also face other systemic hurdles, like under- and unemployment, lack of educational opportunities , and barriers to adequate healthcare.

Equal opportunity work and education are contributors to better food access. Food service workers are disproportionately women and people of color, reflecting the continuation of historical patterns of economic exclusion.

Example: Restaurant Opportunities Centers United gathers national data on the demographics and experiences of food service employees, advocating for livable wages and safe, healthy working conditions for all restaurant workers. Expanding food access encompasses community-based initiatives, including urban gardens, farm-direct Community Supported Agriculture, farmers markets, food pantries, and other initiatives that bring additional healthy, fresh food to people and communities struggling with secure food access.

However, achieving universal food access also depends on broader solutions to the poverty and income inequality that contribute to food apartheid. Examples: Black Farmers Collective is one of several organizations working to grow and deliver fresh produce to communities that struggle with food access.

They also provide training to enable food insecure communities to start cooperative urban gardens. Los Angeles-based grocery service SUPRMARKT provides local low-income Black and brown communities with affordable, organic, vegan food to make healthy diets accessible to all. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and intensifying since the mids, US farming has followed a consistent trend toward fewer, larger farms, vertical integration of farms, and corporate consolidation.

Small and mid-size farmers have been increasingly displaced from their land and excluded from markets dominated by agribusiness corporations. Ensuring equal opportunity land access is crucial for historically marginalized communities to take back control of food production, a key pillar of both food justice and food sovereignty.

Examples: The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust uses a community land and conservation trust model to foster BIPOC land stewardship and environmentally sustainable farming practices.

Family Agriculture Resource Management Services F. provides financial assistance and other forms of support to help struggling Black farmers retain their land. Industrial agriculture relies on monocropping—a practice that has vastly reduced plant and soil microbe biodiversity—to produce industrial commodity crops, including the soy and corn that support intensive farming of animals.

As standardized, patented seed varieties proliferate through commercial relationships controlled by agribusiness contracts, crop genetic diversity—and the traditional knowledge held by the farmers of traditional crops—is continually being lost.

Collecting and preserving seeds from traditional and heirloom crops is an Indigenous-led initiative considered vital for ensuring future crop and ecosystem biodiversity.

Preserving and sharing seeds also safeguards culturally valuable foods and plants that are well-suited to their environments, which can help increase farm resilience in the face of climate change. Sustainable farming practices, like agroecological farming, rely strongly on the use of ecologically appropriate plants.

Example: The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance provides support to regional and tribal seed sovereignty initiatives, deeming seed saving not only an integral collective cultural inheritance, but also critical for feeding future generations. Food justice is important not only for providing nourishment to marginalized communities but also because it deconstructs how intersecting oppressions reduce food access.

BIPOC populations experience disproportionate levels of hunger, poverty, and illness due to persistent discriminatory social, political, and economic structures. Simply bringing more food into communities that struggle with food access will not address food access barriers for residents who face underemployment, low wages, lack of mobility, and unsafe environments.

Food justice movements recognize that for BIPOC communities to be well nourished, many intersecting adverse factors, from poor food availability to broader health barriers, must be addressed.

Recognizing that justice is built on equalizing power, food justice advocacy prioritizes initiatives and solutions that come from within affected communities—rather than strategies imposed by outside interest groups—to develop lasting and culturally viable solutions to the systemic injustices that cause food access disparities.

Strategies such as strengthening sustainable farming , promoting community-embedded agroecology, and returning land to its dispossessed ancestral stewards can also help to fight the expansion of large-scale human and non-human animal exploitation by agribusiness and mitigate the devastating environmental effects of industrial farming.

Transforming the dominant industrial food system will require work by allies from many different movements. A transformed food system designed to strengthen the common good will benefit food justice as well as small farmers, farmed animals, and the environment.

Food justice encompasses many different goals and movements responding to the specific history and needs of underserved communities nationwide. Advocates for food justice recognize that food insecurity and food apartheid occur within the context of other intersecting oppressions.

By highlighting the systemic roots of food injustices, food justice movements seek to restore resilience and food sovereignty to BIPOC communities, creating a transformed food system with justice at its core.

In this struggle to establish a new food system paradigm, there is much common ground that can—and should—be found between the food justice, environmental, and animal rights movements. Both food system transformation and food justice can extend the potential of their movements by finding and amplifying shared priorities with the power to achieve multiple overlapping benefits for people, animals, and the environment.

They helped me find pantries. Most of us feel pretty good about our food situations right now because we receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP commonly called food stamps.

We are able to regularly get food from food pantries, and get services and help from S:US. Without this support, we would not have access to sufficient food supplies or food of adequate quality to meet our needs.

Access to a variety of food is especially important for those of us who have various health concerns, like diabetes, kidney failure, and mental illness. And getting SNAP or going to the food pantries carries stigma, despite these vital resources helping many people during different times of their lives.

Sometimes I go to Costco. S:US helps me find pantries. I have a son who has autism. He has sensitivity to textures in foods, low tolerance to certain foods. I go to pantries if I have time. I bring up my food issues with S:US and they help. They gave me a one-time grant to buy groceries and gave me a list of pantries in the neighborhood.

Fruits and vegetables cost more. I would like to get them if I had the budget. I can go down to the office of my building when I need food.

My case worker will bring back bread, meat, stuff like that. At times, I can get the food I like. Sometimes I get the stuff I need but not the stuff I want. I can walk there. I go to the market next door for food too.

I might go to one around the corner after this. I get treatments in Brooklyn so I usually get my groceries in Flatbush and bring them home.

In the nutrition program at the hospital, we swap recipes, we do potlucks, and sometimes they have food for the holidays, so that helps. S:US has urban farms at many of their supportive housing sites including ones where several of us live , providing free fruits and vegetables, nutritional programming, and employment opportunities for people like us who are served by S:US.

When I go to treatment, I see a lot of people who would benefit from S:US. Read the original article here. Careers Contact Us Get Services fb tw ig li donate now.

donate now. Press Our News Events. Consumer Perspectives: Food Security is a Social Justice Issue. Careers Contact Us Get Services.