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

urban America

Ariel DilibertoVassar College Independent Program, Urban Ecology

May 3, 2011

Senior Thesis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor 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

injustice—namely poverty and inequality—and allowing food to become a myopic focus—an

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.

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Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….. 2

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………….4

Introduction………………………………………………………………………….…5

Chapter 1 : Food Justice?: Why local food has arisen as a solution to marginality......11Neoliberalism, Hunger, and the City….....….……….….……………..….…..13Urban Agriculture: trend or tactic?…………………………………………..28Internal Divisions in Food Justice-Related Movements..………….…..….......32

Chapter 2 : Case Studies..………...…………………………………….……….…….48Qualifying Studies……...……………………..………….………….…...…....48Hearty Roots Community Farm….……………………………………..…..…53High School for Public Service Youth Farm….…………………….……..….59

Chapter 3 : From Food Justice to Socioeconomic Justice: Strategies and tactics..…...65Political Engagement………………………….……...….…….……….……..65Transregionalism..………...……………..……………………………..…..…76Organizational Synthesis….……..……….……………………….……......…88Case Study Review..………...……………..……………..……………….…...99

Conclusion…………………….…………………………………………...…..…….107Developing Cognitive Praxis..….………….……………………….…..……108Uniting Diverse Projects.…...……………..……………..………………….112

Bibliography…………………..………………………………………………..……117

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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 I’d 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 I’ve 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. You’ve 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.

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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 URA—“look at what is”—and to compose2—“look 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

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.

1 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): 4713 Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 321.4 Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 18.

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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 hand-

crocheted 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 garden’s mission was to provide food to

Poughkeepsie’s 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

agriculture as panacea. I interned with a progressive, experimental architecture studio: L’atelier

d’architecture autogérée (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. What’s more, the

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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 they’d received, and were even seen as exclusive by some of

the communities they were situated within. By the time I left Paris, I’d 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 shortcomings—such as those I witnessed in the

atelier’s projects—and 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

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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

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

5 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 people…inclusiveness 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, 7.8 Ibid., 8.

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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

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

synthesis.

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Chapter 1Food 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 administration’s failure

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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 month’s installation of

food stamps, or did not qualify for food stamps due to the Reagan administration’s 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 good—for the environment, for the local economy, for their own health—with 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

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.

9 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 administration’s 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).

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During the 1990s, some of those in the farmer’s market line became aware that only

certain residents were waiting with them—residents who looked like them and lived near them.

Elsewhere, in lower-income areas of the city, not only were there not farmer’s 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

I’d 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

of immense prosperity for a very select minority.10 The question is whether the movement’s

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

10 These issues, though not a complete list, summarize the array of concerns that qualify as “food issues.”

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Persistent hunger in the United States is a result of a complex constellation of political,

economic, and spatial arrangements:11 In dissecting them, I’ll begin at the core: what has been

labeled “the political rationality of neoliberalism” is evident in both hunger’s 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, neoliberalism’s 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-making—that pervades the human experience.15

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 don’t 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

11 “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 Bauman’s 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/.16 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, Hervé Kempf, How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), 7217 Brown, “Economic liberalism,” 42.

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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

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 anyway—this 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 Reagan’s

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

18 “Integrated World Capitalism has successfully ‘neutralized’ the working classes, offering them a ‘pseudo-participation’ in political debate as ‘consumers,’” Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, translators’ notes, in Félix 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).

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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

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 America’s

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

20 David Harvey, “The Enigma of Capital,” lecture presented at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, March 24, 2011.21 Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity, (Verso: New York, 2003), 8.22 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.

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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] competition”24 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

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 schemes…and 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

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 services…Even 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. 29 Peck et al., “City as Policy Lab,” n.p.30 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.

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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 neoliberalism—and capitalism more

generally—operate 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,

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 logic”35 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

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), 435.35 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-haiven-food-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 living…the 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 today’s conditions,” Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Althone Press, 2000), 42.

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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 technicality—getting

food from producers to consumers—but rather is profoundly political, posing important

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 fails—namely,

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

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 Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in political theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 189. 40 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. Food—like water—is 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.

18

individuals to select the best provider from a pool of choices—as 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 (à 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 one’s ability to pay.44 In particular, the market has proven unable to

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

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. 45 Koc et al., “Introduction,” 4.46 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.

19

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

regulation—effectively skewing any sort of free market competition among different farming

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

49 Haiven, “Food, Finance, Crisis, Catalyst,” n.p.50 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 39.51 Ibid., 53. 52 Allen, Together at the Table, 53. 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.”

20

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

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

54 Robert Kuttner, “The Limits of Markets,” The American Prospect, March 1, 1997, accessed February 2, 2011, http://prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=4845.55 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.

21

prices, not to eradicate hunger.56 The New Deal’s 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

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 we’re 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. What’s paradoxical is that it has been demonstrated that growth often

has only a small effect on poverty—especially in unregulated economies—and 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 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. 59 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, xxi.

22

simply bad business practice according to economic rationale.60 Situating supermarkets in low-

income 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

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 experimentation—such as the promotion of local foods as a new form of elite

consumption—and progressive counterexperimentation—community 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 distribution—a reality manifested by Whole Foods and

60 Ibid., 33. 61 Ibid., 88. 62 Ibid., 33. 63 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.

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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

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 provided—such as momentum behind alternative ways to grow, distribute, and buy food—to

foster circumstances that defy the market’s 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-interested—an 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

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#.66 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,.

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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 nation…in 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

Hunger Identification Project’s (CCHIP) surveys of hunger among family households cities,

confirmed this declaration. The findings stated that “the lack of income (poverty and near-

poverty), 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 nation’s 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. Reagan’s 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

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, 10.71 Ibid., 33, emphasis added.72 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.

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stamps do not provide employment, housing, or income. The federal government’s 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 intake—therefore simultaneously perpetuating

hunger and poverty.

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 people’s needs and government

assistance—but 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 Reagan’s 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

74 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]olicymakers…clearly 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.

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more structural effort to eradicate the need for antihunger work. In other words, food security is

defined as an individual’s or a community’s 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

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

people’s 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 phenomenon—quite the contrary, it likely

dates back to the first urban settlement—advocacy 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

78 Ibid., 169.79 Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 6. 80 Wallach and Woodall, “WTO on Agriculture,” 198; Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel, Food Rebellions!: Crisis and the hunger for food justice (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2009), 84.81 Holt-Giménez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 86.82 Desmond Jolly, “Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy,” in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 196.

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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

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 today’s 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 inexpensive…without 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

83 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 56.84 Ibid., 56.85 For more on these processes, see Robert Fishman’s “The American Metropolis at Century’s 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. Feagin’s “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 Müller 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).

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land for food production instead of for built uses or public space.91 The blind advocacy of urban

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 Howard’s

“Garden City” or Le Corbusier’s 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 have…sought to transform undeveloped lots into green space and urban

agriculture. It’s a natural fit…But 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 retailers—all abetting

chronic disease and food insecurity. Yet from the initial wave of excitement over Detroit as the

91 Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen, “More Space with Less Space: An urban design strategy,” in CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, ed. André Viljoen (Burlington, MA: Architectural Press, 2005), 15.92 The cost of the nearest alternative factor or activity—the “next best thing” that might have been done93 Joe Howe, Katrin Bohn, and André 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 Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s 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.

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pilot farm city of the future has arisen much criticism over the assumption that one cannot

purchase healthy, fresh food within the city’s limits. In actuality, there are multiple full-service

grocery stores in the city, readily accessible to Detroit’s 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 disruption…can 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 community-

supported agriculture (CSA). Self-provisioning consists of people’s growing and preparing their

98 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.

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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

102 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/.

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* * *

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

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

109 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.

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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 localism”115

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

democracy, as the community’s political voice will terminate with the alleviation (or relocation)

of a particular grievance.119

112 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 225. 113 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. 119 Diana Mitlin, “Reshaping Local Democracy,” Environment & Urbanization 16 (2004), 5.

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The movement’s 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 issues—such as housing,

employment, the police state, and access to education and healthcare—as 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

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

120 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, 177.124 Andrew Payne, “Sustainability and Pleasure: An Untimely Meditation,” Harvard Design Magazine 30 (2009), 78.

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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 city’s 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 general…but rather there are a series of

urban and environmental processes that negatively affect some social groups while benefitting

others.”127

When treating issues of food and nutrition, the distinction between urban

environmentalism and environmental justice morphs into the distinction between local foodie-

ism and food justice, both of which are reactions to the “[h]unger, supermarket abandonment of 125 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 215; Cohen and Naginski, “Return to Nature,” 136.126 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 216. 127 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.

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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

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 perspective…always needs to consider the question of who gains and who

pays and to ask serious questions about the multiple power relations—and the scalar geometry of

these relations—through which deeply unjust socioenvironmental conditions and produced and

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 there’s no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races…we’ve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right — that this is a consumption club for people who’ve traveled to Europe and tasted fine food,” Elizabeth Roythe, “Street Farmer,” New York Times, July 1, 2009.

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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,” Loïc Wacquant lists the “decoupling of subsistence from work” as one of the three key

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

131 Swengedouw and Heynen, “Urban Political Ecology” (2003), 901. 132 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_june2010.134 Loïc Wacquant, “Sustaining the City in the Face of Advanced Marginality,” in Ecological Urbanism, 404.135 Wallach and Woodall, “WTO on Agriculture,” 190.

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compromise, Beth McKellips discusses the need to “create ways to grow food that blend and

compliment people’s 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

I’ve observed a trend in what I call “apocalyptic gardening books” describing how to

grow food in light of a pending catastrophe, including Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It

Counts: Growing food in hard times (2005), Kathy Harrison’s Just In Case: How to be self-

sufficient when the unexpected happens (2008), and Robin Wheeler’s Food Security for the 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 itself—and 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

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. 139 Dorothée Imbert, “Aux Fermes, Citoyens!,” in Ecological Urbanism, 256.140 Power, “Combining Social Justice,” 34.

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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 “neostewardship”143 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” doomsday—resulting perhaps in the

apocalyptic primitivism of every-man-for-herself subsistence—I 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 agrochemical-

biotech camps is that their approach will “feed the world.”144 Both exhibit ulterior motivations

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

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 chemicals, and other forms of high-input, high-cost farming.

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(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 I’m 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

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

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. 149 Joanna Frank 2011. 150 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 46.

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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

aren’t the effectiveness of the technology but its appropriateness, inclusiveness, and

availability.156

In his preeminent essay The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari describes how the

technosciences are crucial for human and planetary survival.157 Raj Patel, on the other hand,

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-Giménez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 103, or even if higher yields are evidenced, it’s 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.

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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

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 technoscience—the 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

158 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 137.159 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 42. See also: Verena Andermatt Conley, “Urban Ecological Practices: Félix Guattari’s 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, 181.162 Ibid., 160; Felson and Pollak “Situating Urban Ecological Experiments,” 361. 163 Paul Robbins, “The Political Ecology of Ecological Urbanism,” in Ecological Urbanism, 415.

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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 result—part traditional method, part new

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 variety’s

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

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 Cuba’s agricultural self-sufficiency, yet the circumstances that forced this arrangement upon Cuba were historically and politically unique. The country’s 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-of-cuban-urban-agriculture/.. 168 Holt-Giménez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 101.169 Pearce, When Rivers Run Dry, 303.170 Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 74.

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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 and…the 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 experience—identifying

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

“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 within—and thereby vulnerable

to—the resulting consequences.175

171 Allen, Together at the Table, 17. 172 Ibid. 2004, 39.173 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 17. 174 Joeseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 125.175 Narayan and Prasch 2006a, 19.

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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

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”

176 Power, “Combining Social Justice,” 32. 177 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 7. 178 Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 579-583.

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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

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 2Case Studies

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.

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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

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

cities—a 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 rationality—from a regional or mesogeographical perspective, urbanization

affects everyone, everywhere—unevenly, 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

186 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), 2. 187 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 59.

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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 world”192- both are

disenfranchised through various scales of uneven development. “[S]ocial conditions of the

former Third World,” Jürgen 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

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. 193 Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 123.194 Koc et al., “Introduction,” 3. 195 Holt-Giménez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 98.

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serving an urban population, both serving low-income communities demonstrating food

insecurity. Of two models of urban and regional agriculture previously mentioned—alternative

food distribution and self-provisioning—these are both of the former category. While self-

provisioning 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 shouldn’t have to remove themselves from the popular pathways

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 self-

consumption.199

What’s 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 neighborhood-

196 Koc et al., “Introduction,” 5.197 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 57. 198 Power, “Combining Social Justice,” 34.199 Ibid., 34. 200 Smith, “Fighting Doom,” n.p.

49

based 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-profit—or 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

organization’s 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

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

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 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.

50

being based upon the production of an “indispensible commodity”204 (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-profit…firms 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,

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 system…will 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

204 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 18. 205 Daniel Tucker, “Inheriting the Grid #2,” n.p.206 Nevin Cohen, interview by Urban Omnibus, Urban Omnibus: a project of the Architectural League of New York, January 19, 2011.

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* * *

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

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 farm’s 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

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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 wasn’t for them. When asked why the farm operated on a for-profit, as

opposed to non-profit, model, Shute replied:

“There’s [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 they’re 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 wouldn’t 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. I’ve 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, etc…we 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

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

53

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

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 it’s 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: “it’s 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, it’s generally not the most

popular option amongst people who, well, don’t 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 207 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 stamps—a 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.

54

(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

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 Food’s 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 don’t 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

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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. We’re really close, within a couple hours drive, we’re on a big piece of soil that’s 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 we’re going to this community garden where people can connect with ‘how does food grow—when I’m picking up my peppers let’s 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 that’s nearby and the educational and experiential benefits of seeing the plants grow…it’s 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.”

He proceeds to emphasize more specifically the differences in productivity and efficiency

between urban and regional agriculture:

“It’s great to see new projects in the city, and there’s [sic] a few urban farms and rooftop operations, and they’re…exciting but also, [with] a rooftop farm, you’re trucking in all this soil…in order to grow your food—an 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 but—it can’t 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 community—the Mid-Hudson Valley Growers Network—through which they

have dinners, take farm tours, split bulk orders of supplies, and share advice. The growing—and

in the past year or so, plateauing, but still substantial—demand 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 we’re doing generally does have.” He

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describes how the farm is affected by the priorities of farming legislation every day, “even

though it’s this lingering background thing that doesn’t [often] rear it’s 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

(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 aren’t actually making our food any

safer but are making it harder for us to do what we’re 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 area…what’s incentivized is in many cases development…even when land trusts come in and protect land from development, they still don’t 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 what’s 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

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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,

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 farm’s operating costs are

about $80,000 a year, a figure that does not include the approximately $6,000 of in-kind

donations—of tools, equipment, and supplies—the 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 Farm’s 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

208 “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.

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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.

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 farm’s acceptance of public assistance payments attracted more full-

paying 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 Farm’s 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 farm’s 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.

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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,

particularly as the local hospital shift starts at 2pm, and the market doesn’t 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

Food’s 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

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Youth Farm to provide more produce, and different types of produce they could not grow on

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 first-

hand 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

distribution…We 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 Farm’s 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

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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 for-

profit 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

land relegates the farm to not-for-profit status and reduces the amount of farming that actually

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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 school’s cellar for aquaponics or growing mushrooms.

Chapter 3From 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

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.

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* * *

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 with—the state and its ability to address fundamental

issues of equality and basic rights.210 Yet with the usurping of the modern state’s 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

forces—both public and private—that 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

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

209 Allen, Together at the Table, 2. 210 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. 213 Ibid., n.p.

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Thus the political remains central to any vision of a new, just, order—for 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

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

214 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. 221 Riches, “Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada,” 203.

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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 system—they 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.

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

222 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.226 Allen, Together at the Table, 19.

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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 needn’t 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. McAdam’s 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

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 doesn’t necessitate institutionalization, and institutionalization doesn’t implicitly

involve the termination of progressivism. We can work towards new institutions and politics

227 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.

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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 areas—including zoning, infrastructure, public research,

agricultural subsidies, and public assistance—are 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

trends in real estate can only be tackled at a policy level. 234

Another zoning issue is the fact that food retailers can’t be expected to offer their food at

discounted costs or situate their locations in low-income areas in a market society that doesn’t

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

232 Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 113. 233 Koc et al., “Introduction,” 3. 234 Karen L. Krug, “Canadian Rural Women Reconstructing Agriculture,” in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 172. 235 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 156.236 Ibid., 86.

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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 food—that 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

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

237 Lang, “Food Policy for the 21st Century,” 222.238 Lyson, Civic Agriculture, 6.239 Holmes, “Neoliberal Appetites,”240 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 185.

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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 funds—public and private—rather than farmers’ needs.242 However,

instead of writing-off the entire land-grant establishment, these research institutions could be

reoriented towards the regions they’re 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 government’s power to redirect their

research away from corporate interests and towards the farming communities in which they’re

located.

Agricultural and transportation subsidies need to be completely reassessed and

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

241 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). 243 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 41. 244 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

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income and devastation of rural economies.246 Stiglitz’s 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

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 hungry—and 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

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,” 196.247 Allen, Together at the Table, 178. 248 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/

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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 speed”250 in the

transition of responsibility from the private to public sphere, preventing disastrous, cataclysmic

backlash—in 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

government’s 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 [USDA’s] ability to promote health through

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: America’s Struggle Over Guaranteed Income Policy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 250 Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, 387. 251 Winston Husbands, “Food Banks as Antihunger Organizations,” in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 109. 252 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 102.

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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] can’t 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, public-

private, 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

political actions alone will not rectify the profound disempowerment and nonparticipation of the

American political system—indeed 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 transformation…is 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

253 Ibid., 89.254 Lang, “Food Policy for the 21st Century,” 221; Blue, “On the Politics and Possibilities of Locavores,” n.p.255 Gerald Frug, :Governing the Ecological City,” in Ecological Urbanism, 302. 256 Soja, Postmetropolis, 270.

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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

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 permutations—supranational regionalism,

community-based regionalism,261 federated regionalism,262 and municipal-based regionalism.263

Jürgen Habermas claims that as the influence of nation-states wanes in light of

transnational corporations, they’re 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

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. 259 Ibid., 105.260 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.

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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

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, self-

serving circumscription, but as a node on a global grid grounded in extant forms of

communication and transportation infrastructure.269 Transregionalism addresses the “dilemma of 266 McKenzie Wark, “Telegram From Nowhere,” in Mutations, 35. 267 Guthman, interview.268 Ibid.269 Sassen, “The Global City,” 110.

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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 needn’t undermine a political circumscription’s 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

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

270 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. 272 Koc et al., “Introduction,” 5.273 Dreier, Mollenkompf & Swanstrom, Place Matters, 35274 Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, 251.275 Pierre Bélanger, “Redefining Infrastructure,” in Ecological Urbanism, 345.276 Krug, “Canadian Rural Women,” 171.

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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)

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 agriculture’s 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 consumer-

producer 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 fruitless—advancing 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 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, 2010.279 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 68.280 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.

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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

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 don’t have a monopoly on the production of yourself. So the notion, and

284 Mike Hodson, and Simon Marvin, “Transcendent Eco-Cities or Urban Ecological Security?,” in Ecological Urbanism, 214.285 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 185. 286 Sassen, “The Global City,” 113; Pastor, Benner and Matouka, This Could Be the Start of Something Big, 55.

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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 it’s produced, how it’s 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

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

287 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.

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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

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 food—which 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

292 Ibid.293 Riches, “Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada,” 217.294 Power, “Combining Social Justice,” 34; Jolly, “Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy,” 199.295 Thompson, “Agricultural Phenomenon,” n.p.296 Chad Levin, “Pollanated Politics, or the Neoliberal’s Dilemma,” Politics and Culture 2 (2009), accessed March 18, 2011, http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/10/27/pollanated-politics-or-the-neoliberal%E2%80%99s-dilemma.

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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

prejudices in American culture—excluding 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? I’m not so sure that CSAs and

farmer’s markets would be everyone’s 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

297 Ibid.298 Ibid.299 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.

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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 I’m not suggesting hooking up the

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 low-

income 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

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, 2011.302 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.

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freedom of contract that Americans of means enjoy.306 Whether they are given a political-

economic voice as consumers or not, the poor influence the conventional food system: past food

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

What’s more, within the market economy generally, if one doesn’t 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

306 Scharf, “A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution,” 126.307 Allen, Together at the Table, 179.308 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-crisis-consumer-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.

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viable.313 However, these projects can become viable when the contributions of community

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 greed—this 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 rejected—or can be rejected—as the organizing force in

313 Frank, interview.314 Scharf, “A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution,” 126.315 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.

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society. On the contrary, it necessitates confronting the reality of the market as a framework to

work within. The ability to do so is confounded by our increasing confusion, as both consumers

and members of society, about food’s sociocultural, economic role.

Though food is considered a social and cultural good less and less,320 it remains a

“quintessential consumable”—“not only because it has the unique property of actually being

ingested, or because…it 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 categories…to the infinitely

complex and bitterly material relations of power in a globalizing world.”322 The exploitation of

food’s 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

320 Riches, “Reaffirming the Right to Food in Canada,” 205.321 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.

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* * *

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

“metropolarities.”330 There has been much deliberation on how our pluralistic contemporary

326 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 149.327 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 10.328 Ibid., 11.329 Ibid., 12.330 Soja, Postmetropolis, 256.

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societies can be united in a cohesive citizenry—especially when faced with the self-interested

rationality of neoliberalism—without 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 country’s 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 factors—rights, participation, humanitarianism, community, and economic self-

interest—leads 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 public-

spirited 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,

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 331 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, 71.337 Koc et al., “Introduction,” 6.

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Alexis de Tocqueville described as “self-interest properly understood”: comprehending that the

well being of others is a precondition to one’s own well being, that “looking out for the other guy

isn’t just good for the soul—it’s 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

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

338 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. 344 Logan and Moltoch, Urban Fortunes, 8.

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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

exclusive—rather, 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 needn’t

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 group—minorities, gays, janitors or women—and then ask the public at large to support the cause—prison reform, gay marriage, labor rights, or abortion—based 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

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.

345 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.351 Jolly, “Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy,” 199.

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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 minorities—rather, 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

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

352 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 Activist’s Manual, 79.355 Elizabeth Martinez, “Where Was the Color in Seattle?: Looking for the reasons why the Great Battle was so white,” in Global Activist’s Manual, 83. 356 Rajah, “Race in the Globalization Movement,” 87.357 Ibid., 88.

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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, “who’s controlling the power and who’s 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 middle-class 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

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

358 Washington and Clevenger, “Review of Racism.”359 Clancy, “Sustainable Agriculture and Domestic Hunger,” 284. 360 Allen, Together at the Table, 179.361 Crass, “White Supremacy: Thoughts on movement building and antiracist organizing,” in The Global Activist’s Manual, 93.

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quality, health, and the environment. For poor people, the issue is more immediate and more

personal—how to put food on the table for the next meal.362” The divisive conclusion that could

be drawn—that privileged activists and academics have little basis for identifying with the

poor363—does 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 support…is 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

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

362 Power, “Combining Social Justice,” 34.363 Ibid., 34. See also Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop), in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc 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 Activist’s Manual: Local ways to change the world, ed. Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 88.366 Crass, “White Supremacy,” 94.367 Power, “Combining Social Justice,” 35.

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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 injustice—and

potentially, justice—play 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

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

368 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-Giménez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 164.372 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 20.

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“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

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 City’s 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.

373 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. 375 Tucker, “Inheriting the Grid #2,” n.p.376 Winne, Closing the Food Gap, 40.

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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 public-

health movements, fail to see that their concerns have a common theme—the 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

extant groups that provides the initial community infrastructure of the movement.380 The

formation of a new organization is one component of Mike Prokosch’s “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

377 Lang, “Food Policy for the 21st Century,” 220. 378 Husbands, “Food Banks,” 108. 379 Ibid., 108.380 McAdam, “The Political Process Model,” 54.381 Prokosh defines direct action“stopping business as usual and opening up space for direct democracy,” Mike Prokosh, “Three Organizing Models,” in The Global Activist’s Manual, 119.382 Ibid., 119.

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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

* * *

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

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.

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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 farm’s 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

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 Farm’s 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 self-

devaluing 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 produce—which might say “you’re worth it”388—they do so through the stigmatized

387 Scharf, “A Nonprofit System for Fresh-produce Distribution,” 124.388 Ibid., 124.

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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 Shute’s 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

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

people’s 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

389 Koc et al., “Introduction,”5.

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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 two-

tiered 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

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 itself—which, remember, is located within the Flatbush community

it intends to serve—with 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

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“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

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 share—by becoming a

CSA member, an individual is purchasing a subscription rather than individual products

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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

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 food—and 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 Shute’s 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

390 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 Mixed-Income 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-csa-participation.

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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 Farm’s 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.

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.

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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 space—as in, land, that indispensible, precious

commodity391—for community use and programming, implying: “you’re worth it.” In this

capacity, community gardens and community-oriented urban farms can serve as a counterforce

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 Giuliani’s motion, defending the gardens as sites of substantial use-

value, 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.

391 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 17-18; see also Ibid., “Place as Commodities” (Chapter 2) generally. 392 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.

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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 York’s

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

395 Allen, Together at the Table, 77.396 Frank, interview.

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of hope.397 What’s 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

movement’s legitimacy and efficacy. Surely sympathy alone from the privileged is insufficient

for social change: “under certain conditions it can be very powerful. But it won’t 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

397 Koc et al., “Introduction,” 5.398 Moore, “The Rejection of Suffering and Oppression,” 99.399 Power, “Combining Social Justice,” 35.400 Jolly, “Urban Agriculture as Food-Access Policy,” 199.

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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

filtered through mainstream media, without critically reflecting upon or engaging with it. I

recently came across a glossy article on Good magazine’s 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 shouldn’t we grow food right next to our plates to reduce waste?”;

“[as] most Americans live in urban areas…we should re-examine backyards…[as] places to grow vegetables”;

“[t]here are more than 10,000 acres of unused land in New York City…and 1,500 of those acres are in Brooklyn…Farming 36 backyards in Crown Heights or Bay Ridge is the equivalent to farming an acre. In other words, Brooklyn is ripe for decentralized urban farming”401

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

401 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/.

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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

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 apolitical—in actuality,

depoliticized—act of letting someone else garden in one’s backyard in order to “reduce

waste.”402

Murphy’s article exemplifies the distilled, oversimplified rhetoric that too many activists

in the field URA are so adept at adopting and promulgating—which 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

402 Indeed, in a 2010 interview Murphy stated that “it didn’t 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/.

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movement’s 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

of URA discourse have already become hegemonic—problematically so, I would argue—such as

the absolutist “local is good, global is bad” framework; the championing of food as the lynchpin

of social change—as 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 self-

provisioning 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 movement’s 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 movement’s mass base.”408 In other

words, there must be an active effort to articulate harmonized common goals among the entire

403 Allen, Together at the Table, 6. 404 “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.

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spectrum of food activists—from those struggling to meet daily intake needs to those lobbying

for policy.409

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 Color…Activists 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, newcomers…simultaneously 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

409 Kenneth A. Dahlberg, “Promoting Sustainable Local Food Systems in the United States,” in For Hunger-Proof Cities, 42. 410 Martinez, “Where Was the Color in Seattle?” 81.411 Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott, “Building Today’s Global Movement,” in Global Activist’s Manual, 103.412 Crass, “White Supremacy,” 93. 413 Mele, “Asserting the Political Self,” 73. 414 Allen, Together at the Table, 17.

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* * *

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 issues—hunger, ecology, nutrition, access—the

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 activities…emphasis on

macropolicy…transdisciplinary policy development…collaboration 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 city’s profile, but it overrides the trend in “which the wide latitude and autonomy that

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

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we grant local governments…[fosters] competition for favored residents and investments, each

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-urban-

dweller 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 rises—it is currently one in

seven Americans420—the number of people who are given purchasing power specifically to

416 Dreier, Mollenkompf and Swanson, Place Matters, 111.417 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.

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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

these strategies requires understanding of hunger as a chronic societal problem that no longer can

421 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.

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be addressed in isolation from other correlates of poverty such as underemployment, inadequate

housing, or poor education…The time has come for anti-hunger advocates”—and I would add,

URA advocates—“to 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 we’re 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 nation’s 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 capitalism—it has become so ingrained in every facet of quotidian existence, it has

created the modern world we live in—and 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

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

423 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.

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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.

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Title page photo caption: Le 56, urban garden project of l’atelier d’architecture autogérée. 56 rue Saint-Blaise, 20th Arrondissement, Paris.

Photo credit: l’atelier d’architecture autogérée.

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