“First Feed the Face”: Environmental Justice and Community Food Security

Abstract

Environmental justice and community food security represent parallel though largely separate movements whose linkage would help establish a new community development, environmental, and empowerment‐based discourse. Environmental justice has been limited by its risk discrimination focus, even as environmental justice organizations have shifted to a broader social justice orientation, eclipsing their earlier environmental focus. Community food security advocacy, while offering a concrete example of linked agendas and constituencies, has yet to effectively outreach to environmental justice groups. Coalition building efforts, such as the Community Food Security Empowerment Act, presents that opportunity.

Paradise or pavement: the social constructions of the environment in two urban farmers' markets and their implications for environmental justice and sustainability

“…Recent environmental justice scholarship focuses not only on the distribution of risk, but also on environmental benefits (Romm 2002, Porter 2001. Food security activism often parallels environmental justice, casting healthy food as an environmental benefit to which the food-insecure are denied access (Gottlieb and Fisher 1996) The environmental justice movement claims that the reform movement's focus on wild places reifies white and middle-class privilege. This is evident when one examines how local productive use of environmentally protected land is often restricted; only elite visitors are able to enjoy such places (LaDuke 1999, Neumann 1998).…”

Local food systems and sustainable communities

“…However, community food security means more than simply ensuring access to food for all individuals. It has also come to represent a community-based, preventionoriented framework that includes empowerment of community members, economic development strategies and more direct relationships between producers and consumers (Gottlieb and Fisher, 1996). To ensure a more coordinated approach to community food security, nutrition, health and agricultural issues, some cities have established various forms of food policy councils (FPCs) (Minneapolis Food Policy Task Volume 12, Number 1,1997…”

Growing food justice by planting an anti-oppression foundation: opportunities and obstacles for a budding social movement

“…Frames are the cognitive structures ''that enable participants to locate, perceive, and label occurrences, selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of action within one's present environment'' (Snow et al 1986, p. 464). Understanding the process of framing is especially important in light of the insistence by many scholars that social justice concerns be integrated into efforts to remake the agrifood system (Allen 2008;DuPuis and Goodman 2005;Gottlieb and Fisher 1996). But as has been pointed out by others, social justice means different things to different people within social movements, thus complicating the ability for maintaining unity in diversity (Harvey 1996).…”