This week’s article took me a minute to understand what Alkon was trying to say. Seeing the term “Whiteness and Farmers Markets” I kept thinking it’s referencing something other than race but wasn’t. Racial inequality is a common problem in food justice but from my understanding this problem in farmers markets was more passive and progressively got worse.
One of the main ideas in the reading was that white cultural dominance in farmers markets and structural barriers are preventing the participation of people of low income, Latinos, and people of color. The alternative agrifood movement believes that just by consumers knowing where the food there comes from can improve social and ecological relations. With that being mentioned, Whiteness in the farmers markets can be promoted just by consumers being misinformed. The Author mentions in the surveys how most of the patrons of the farmers markets believe they are buying straight from the farmer and directly supporting whose going through the hard work of producing the food which isn’t the case. Like I said before, I think this problem has passively gotten worse. It’s mentioned in the Berkeley study that a lot of the patron praises the gathering of the permanent residents of their neighborhood instead of just seeing college students who are mostly people of color and Latino.
Getting toward the end of the article the author begins to list ways to fix this problem in the farmers markets. One approach that mentioned was simply putting people Latino and people of color and power at the markets like management positions and even stands to sell food there. Also, there was the idea of making sure some of the actual farm workers are in attendance to help consumers recognize the role we play in food production. The one I favored the most was a vendor having a large poster posted of its employees. Even spreading awareness within the market can help increase the diversity, it mentioned that some vendors presented farm statistics and customers themselves noticing things like the Chinese New Year or Dia de los Muertos not being celebrated compared to Christmas.
1 comment:
I think that making POC in these spaces more visible is really important to making people actually realize that there are problems in the first place. I liked the picture of all the staff because it helps people realize that even organic programs will need more than just a small family to operate. Something that I remember from the article that I think could be used is incentivizing POC to come to the markets by inviting farmers who grow more niche foods. The Hmong farmer that grew the specific kind of greens could serve as an example of how to bring more diverse produce to farmers markets. It also can help farmers realize there is a market for more specific/cultural foods in these spaces, and help to support them.
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