Challenging the Agrarian Imaginary: Farmworker-Led Food Movements and the Potential for Farm Labor Justice

Abstract

This article addresses the need for more engagement between the alternative food movement and the food labor movement in the United States. Drawing on the notion of agrarian imaginary, I argue for the need to break down divides between producer and consumer, rural and urban, and individual and community based approaches to changing the food system. I contend that farmworker-led consumer-based campaigns and solidarity movements, such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) current Campaign for Fair Food, and The United Farmworkers’ historical grape boycotts, successfully work to challenge this imaginary, drawing consumers into movement-based actions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with farmworkers and farmworker advocates in California and Florida, this research illustrates the possibilities for alternative food movement advocates and coalitions to build upon farmworker-led campaigns and embrace workers as leaders.

Making labor visible in the food movement: Outreach to farmworkers in Michigan

“…Alongside the major themes of food justice and access to organic food (Soper, 2020), there is an emphasis on food localism-in fact, thanks to the food movement "locavore" appears in the New American Oxford Dictionary (Gray, 2014). But while food movement initiatives have emerged and spread rapidly, the actual workers who pick and pack food are overlooked (Glennie and Alkon, 2018;Gray, 2014;Minkoff-Zern, 2014;Wald, 2016a). In fact, the alternative food movement is often criticized for turning its back on local racial and ethnic history and migrant farmworker exploitation (Sbicca, 2015(Sbicca, , 2018Wald, 2016a).…”

Rock Stars and Bad Apples: Moral Economies of Alternative Food Networks and Precarious Farm Work Regimes

“…Consequently, proponents of local and organic food generally associate hired farmworkers with industrial and “unnatural” forms of agriculture, which they envisage as being in sharp opposition to AFNs (Alkon ). Farmworkers complicate the traditional agrarian narrative based on private property relations and historically white‐centric racial relations because they do not own the land and are often racialized as non‐white (Minkoff‐Zern ).…”

Images of work, images of defiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice through community-based arts

“…In the past decade there has been a growing interest among food justice scholars regarding a perceived disconnect between the food sovereignty movement and social justice concerns related to the exploitation of food labourers (Allen 2008). With notable exceptions (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010;Gray 2014) it is widely recognized that food movement scholarship has not been actively engaged with challenges facing food workers, particularly those who work in agriculture Minkoff-Zern 2014;Sachs et al 2014). While recent scholarship has examined the dynamics of unpaid labour on organic farms (Levkoe 2017;Ekers et al 2016), a wider concern regarding the exploitation of paid farm employees in the context of industrial agriculture remains uncharted (Sachs et al 2014).…”