Case 3
Food Justice
A semester later
I took part in the inaugural class of the justice challenge a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary, collaborative course involving leading institutions in the food, agriculture, natural, and human science programs at Land-Grant, Public, and Minority-Serving Institutions of higher education. The justice challenge served as my formal introduction to the term “Wicked problem.”
A wicked problem is a complex, multifaceted problem with no clear-cut solution and no single right answer. These problems are persistent, resistant to simple fixes, and have unique characteristics like irreversible consequences for each solution attempt. The visualization were given in class was that of a tree in which the roots are the causes of a problem, the trunk is the problem itself, and the branches are the consequences. Throughout this course I would come to add many roots to the problem we explored during this course.
The theme for year one of the justice challenge class was “Food Justice.”
What is food justice?
In my first reflection, it was equal access to nutritious and fresh food, but that I did not believe we could ever achieve that because exploitation is inevitable due to free will. My instructors pointed out that the exact opposite is also true-free will makes it inevitable that humans will resist exploitation. As I would learn in class, there are many people doing just that.
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One group was working to restore plants native to an indigenous diet and established a test kitchen to develop and distribute food. Another person started a non-profit that worked to deliver fresh produce to the three zip codes in Houston with the highest poverty rates. Yet still was another organization that held class on nutritious eating—once a person reaches adulthood, even if their access to healthy produce widens, their diet often doesn’t.
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Halfway through the class my definition of food justice had evolved.
“Food justice is an opportunity for all classes of people, especially marginalized or underserved to have access to healthy food, the autonomy to make their own decisions regarding food, or the access to a system that gives them agency over the production, sourcing, and distribution of their food.
But with the grassroots solutions I was being introduced to, came the realization that even if every city were to have a grassroots movement to improve the circumstances of people around them, the system was still fundamentally broken. The cost to remediate brown sites is often out of reach for a small organization, it’s virtually impossible to purchase naked corn(corn with no fungicide/pesticide coating) in bulk unless requested months in advance, and starting a farm with zero infrastructure already in place is prohibitive, Monsanto acquired hundreds of seed companies to consolidate its position as the world's largest seed company and enforce patents. By the end of class I’d explored facets of the agriculture industry I didn’t know existed, and with that, I was able to inspect the solutions being used to hammer away at the wicked problem that is food justice. I was invigorated, but also disheartened. This wicked problem, this tree has so many roots I’m not sure we could eve rip it out.
For my final class reflection I stacked a lot of soapboxes to create my final definition. The paper was long, and yet I felt it wasn’t comprehensive enough.
What is food justice?
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Individual: Food justice is the notion that every individual, no matter their background, deserves access to healthy food, and the autonomy to make their own decisions regarding food.
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Institutional: Food justice is the correction of the deliberate actions taken to disenfranchise communities, races/ethnicities, and demographics, and the empowering of said groups such that they no longer fully rely on the systems that caused the original inequality.”