Abstract
Alternative food movements work to create more environmentally and economically sustainable food systems, but vary widely in their advocacy for social, racial and environmental justice. However, even those food justice activists explicitly dedicated to equity must respond to the unintended consequences of their work. This paper analyzes the work of activists in Oakland, CA, who have increasingly realized that their gardens, health food stores and farm-to-table restaurants play a role in what scholars have called green gentrification, the upscaling of neighborhoods through the creation of environmental amenities. Gentrification has had grave consequences for the low-income communities of color that food justice activists seek to serve. Activists are reflexive about this dynamic, and have developed strategies to push back against displacement. Most commonly, non-profit organizations and individual social entrepreneurs found businesses that seek to raise the profile of people of color in the trendy Oakland food scene while employing long-term residents in well-paying, green jobs. However, while these efforts are an essential component of a broader agenda to create both food justice and development without displacement, even these relatively high paying (when compared to the industry standard) “good food jobs” cannot keep up with escalating rents. For this reason, we also highlight the direct action and policy-oriented strategies engaged by a smaller number of food justice activists, and argue that these are necessary compliments to a market-based approach.
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Notes
Because the nature of non-profit organizational programming changes rapidly, it is difficult to characterize the exact number of organizations engaged in direct action or policy work. Several organizations that we spoke with have done so at a particular point in time, but only one (Phat Beets) has direct action as a primary focus of their work and only two (Oakland Food Policy Council and the HOPE Collaborative) are primarily concentrated on policy.
There is a longstanding debate in critical food studies that regards self-help efforts as reproducing the neoliberal notion that individuals are responsible for their own well-being and must care for themselves, and to a limited degree, one another, without calling on the state when market mechanisms fail to provide for basic needs (for a summary of this debate, see Alkon and Guthman 2017). However, Alkon (2012) has also written about the ways that these dynamics play out differently in low-income communities of color and in Black-led food justice organizations in particular. In this case, the myriad examples of state and city policy as fostering institutional and individual racism (think redlining, criminalization, or the permitting of locally unwanted land uses, for example), provide a clear message to marginalized communities that they are on their own. While we are supportive of efforts to engage these communities in collective action and policy reform, as is clear from the central argument of this paper, we are also hesitant to criticize their efforts to pool meager resources and provide for themselves and one another.
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The authors would like to thank all of the food justice activists and Oakland community members who agreed to be interviewed for this research.
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Alkon, A.H., Cadji, Y.J. & Moore, F. Subverting the new narrative: food, gentrification and resistance in Oakland, California. Agric Hum Values 36, 793–804 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09954-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09954-x