Farmworker Food Insecurity: Brown and Getz - Sorrel

    This article highlights how so many of the issues with have in agriculture are caused by a failure of the system, particularly our economic system. Some of the main factors contributing to food insecurity among farm workers are low wages, seasonal employment, lack of legal protections, employer control over housing and transportation, and immigration status. There are some programs, like the California Food Assistance Program (CFAP) and local food banks that provide aid, but they do not fully address the structural injustices that keep farmers in poverty. In addition to this, large agricultural businesses have significant political and economic influence, often lobbying against labor protections that would improve wages and working conditions. Policymakers frequently prioritize business interests over workers’ rights, leaving farmers with little influence and power. Policies such as raising the minimum wage, extending labor protections to farmers, expanding food assistance eligibility regardless of immigration status, and improving access to affordable housing and transportation would help address these issues.

    Reading this article makes me wonder about how farming systems are across the globe. In California and even within the rest of the United States, the people producing our food oftentimes do not have enough money or resources to get food for themselves to eat. Is it like this in other countries? Or are farmers generally paid more and therefore do not have the same food security issues that farmers here in the U.S. have. I would suspect that in other developed countries farmers are paid better wages and don’t have as many struggles with food security, but in lesser developed countries food security issues with farmers is even worse than in the U.S.

    It is interesting that this article brings up the issue of undocumented immigrants working on farms. This really makes me wonder about the future of farming, especially in places like California that rely on the undocumented labor force, considering current politics. The Trump administration currently is cracking down on undocumented immigrants and deporting them. If huge populations of immigrants are being deported and can no longer work on farms in the U.S., that could have a significant impact on our agricultural system. I will be curious to see what happens with this situation.

Week 4

 

The article today talks about two ways to fight hunger: food "security" and food "sovereignty". Food security makes sure people have food, through government aid, and food sovereignty focuses on local control. The real problem is that big corporations control the food system, pushing out small farmers and local businesses. Instead of relying on big companies that only care about profit, we should support small farms and businesses that actually help their communities. Local food means better quality, stronger families, and less control in the hands of greedy elites.

To fix food insecurity, we need less government restraints and fewer giant corporations running the market. Big companies use regulations to crush small farms, making communities dependent on them. Instead of trusting global markets or government programs, we should cut "red tape" and help small businesses grow. Real food security comes from strong local economies where small farmers and not massive corporations are in control.

Noll and Murdock- Who's Justice is it Anyway? Week 4 Blog Post

This article highlights, once again, the inequalities in our food systems. Food security is defined by the USDA’s Economic Research Service: "access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.” If we are operating from the stance that this is to be provided by a market-driven system, with the uncapped power we give big businesses, we are doomed to fail. These businesses will continually outmarket smaller and more local farms and food resources. Food sovereignty on the other hand is a system that operates from the position of the consumer. In general, your average consumer is the average citizen who is part of the community they are purchasing food. These are the people consuming the food and giving them the ability to be part of the growing, sourcing, or production of the food they eat is a powerful place to start.  

Food sovereignty organizes food production and processing “according to the needs of local communities, giving priority to local consumption” (Schanbacher). Food imperialism has dominated the United States since the dawn of its inception. This is exemplified by Indigenous People’s Day, a day in which we recognize our Native Americans and their culture and heritage. We do this as a way of attempting to honor them despite having committed genocide and then forcibly removing and institutionalizing those that survived to attempt to “reform them” into a more acceptable American version by erasing their culture, traditions, and values. We shouldn’t continue to allow big industries that have a stranglehold on the agriculture industry, this is allowing the imperialistic agenda to continue.  

The article touches on the imperialistic ideology that is enshrined in our current form of food security when referencing the Western concepts of justice as a pillar of food sovereignty. Because of our history of colonization and the Western bubble most of us live in, even our view of the interconnectedness between our food resources and the humans consuming it is skewed. The article mentions that we have a particular emphasis on “distinctness” rather than connection. Part of the holistic approach to food sovereignty is that it’s rooted to minimize future issues with access to food. Thus, food security is inherently part of the framework of food sovereignty.  

Food sovereignty also considers the essential environmental factors that are part of all food systems. Settler Europeans in the U.S. predominantly used methods in agriculture that exploited natural resources. Most of the focus was on cash crops produced to exert profits. Noll and Murdock continue to point out that there are competing conceptions of justice that need to be taken into account. These can be more easily considered from the standpoint of food sovereignty; food security alone does not address these issues.  

Noll and Murdock

 This weeks reading describes the differences of food security and food sovereignty in ways of hunger, environmental harm, cultural justice and our food systems.  Food sovereignty focuses more on the communities and the rights people have for agricultural practices and food culture, while food security focuses on if people have enough to eat. The article says that food sovereignty is more of a holistic paradigm which includes social concerns. 

A big point in this article talked about the Columbia river salmon. Tribes used to fish in this river and trade. Today they still fish this river for ceremonial, food, and other reasons. They started to notice the fish had deformities which lead to testing in the river revealing high mercury levels. Mercury can lead to very high chances of cancer. It lead to creating a band aid of canned fish as a replacement. It does not really fix the problem of the high mercury though. They fish that river for multiple reasons and they will continue to, but since there is a safer option they can choose, it is seen as “okay”. 

There seem to be many loopholes. There is also so much discrimination, an example the study by the United Church of Christ found that race was an important factor of where toxic waste sites are located. There are just so many parts to think of to create something equal for everyone. The article talked about if everyone have the same amount of corn, which would flood the corn market, it would lead to lost jobs. It’s feels like an impossible task to find something that benefits everyone. 

Week 4 - Lailah ElBouazzaoui

             The article “Whose Justice is it Anyway? Mitigating the Tensions Between Food Security and Food Sovereignty” brought attention to the readers the major approaches to fighting hunger. That is food security and sovereignty. The difference between the two is that food security focuses on the access to food while sovereignty focuses on how that food is distributed and produced. Both approaches aim to help people gain access to food, but they have different methods of getting there which causes tension. 

            Some of the main things I took away from this article was how both approaches are looked at as “opponents” with the common goal of getting access to food when in reality food sovereignty is a more holistic and in-depth approach to food security. Food security follows a ‘distributive justice model’, meaning it aims to make sure food is accessible through aid programs for example. While food sovereignty advocates for control of food systems to ensure it is produced and distributed correctly. This could be through a community, environmental or cultural approach. 

            Although they have the same goal, food sovereignty might cause detrimental effects to small farming businesses. This creates inequality in the system that gives power to these global markets forcing smaller businesses to depend on them. In my opinion I think it would be more beneficial to everyone if we don’t give power over to these big corporations to make decisions of local towns food security needs. Sure, it might help solve the problem but doing so it causes a bigger issue that cannot be fixed as easily.

            I though this article did a great job touching on the point that the problem is never truly fixed even though it might seem that way. For example, if an area is having food insecurity and a larger agribusiness increases the supply it is only a short term fix. The main issue of food injustice is still not solved and will keep reoccurring. Articles like this help advocate for real solutions for food injustice. What we need is an environmentally sustainable solution that helps solve food insecurity within struggling communities but needs to stay within the community. 

            In order to move forward with this issue we need to not only give these communities access to food but ensure they have control over their future because big businesses won’t care for long term and sustainable solutions. 

2/26 Jack

 

This article focuses on the idea of “food security” not being the stand alone ideology for alleviating world hunger. In a way they want to move away from global market scales as the main way to address hunger. I think this shift, like any other major change, would be difficult and met with a lot of resistance. We know people in power don’t like to give up their power, so in terms of global markets it won’t be easy to separate the two. While saying things like “even those that make use of market mechanisms” may help prevent pushback, it won't be a simple task to move away from big corporations and market based mechanisms. 

Getting into what being a food secure nation really means according to the FAO seems questionable. A nation is food secure when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. This seems not just conflicting but seems rare around the world if you think about it. I am almost sure there are people everywhere in the world who don’t meet these standards for a plethora of reasons. I’m not arguing with the definition, I just feel that it’s such a difficult standard for a country to meet. When looking at the WHO and UNICEF, they use “pillars” including economic access, food availability, stability of supply, and food utilization.

When talking about food sovereignty they say this is the right of people and countries to determine their agricultural policy without the negative effects caused by government “takeover”. Losing the small scale farms and moving towards larger scale companies led to the diminishing of our food system as we produced “records” amounts of food. The ideas for this are all there but we see little change, we don’t see a lot of the autonomy spoken of when dealing with food sovereignty. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network is a good start for this, and it shows that these groups can help everyone in the area, not just one group. In my opinion I like the idea of food sovereignty more than food justice. Food justice does a good idea at highlighting the issues of the past, and the root causes. I see food sovereignty as us getting closer to a “solution”. The idea of autonomy could be very effective and helpful in building up what we used to know as the people's food system.

Week 5

        This article examines the relationship between two approaches to addressing world hunger. Food security and food sovereignty. Food security focuses on ensuring that people have economic and physical access to safe nutritious food. It applies more towards individuals and focuses more on fair distribution of resources. The 4 pillars of food security are economic access, food availability, stability for food, and food utilization. Some organizations that work towards food security are the world bank and the world trade organization and their large-scale project is eliminating malnutrition and hunger worldwide. According to a study on poverty by the world bank 200,000 farms disappeared between 1966 and 1995 alone". This resulted in a greater need for food security programs.

    Food sovereignty is food intertwined with political action, culture identity, and place. It focuses on the related concepts of self-determination and self-governance. It includes a wide variety of social justice issues in the broader discussion of food-related changes. Food sovereignty movements demand that environmental impacts be considered. They also are very community focused, and place based. They seek to address racial and gender injustices. They place a wide range of social justice concerns under the umbrella of food justice. Food sovereignty movements are things like community gardens because they focus on getting the community together and participating in something together.

    The main idea of this article is to explain the two different types of approaches to addressing hunger. I think that both do a great job on addressing this because one is more community based and gets people together to work towards a common goal while the other one is involved with bigger organizations. 

Jake | Noll and Murdock

The article's main theme was looking at the difference between food justice/sovereignty and food security, highlighting the problems food sovereignty faces, and highlighting the problems food security (alone) can cause. I find this topic to be good, because the public view usually holds a very basic "give starving people food" (which is certainly better than a "let them starve" narrative) that can lead to many problems. On first glance it would seem as tho food sovereignty requires food security - you'll have to feed everyone before you can do it equitably, no? However, food can become over-commoditized in the pursuit of the most efficient food production to combat hunger, ultimately leaving those with the least access, in whatever form it takes, to be malnourished or even starving. Truthfully, absolute food security might require some level of food sovereignty in order to re-attach food to a local community and make it healthier, more affordable, more stable.

Another basic example they gave was that if corn was mass distributed, it would flood the corn market and corn farmers would be screwed over as well. This was used to showcase that even solving a food security issue can then raise up more issues, and problems do not make good solutions. It's a case of "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Give everyone large amounts of cheap fish, the family in poverty that can't reach you still starve and the fisherman are now all unemployed". It was also given as the general solution to hunger has been to simply increase supply, although access is usually the issue to blame. That being said, the general mantra of food sovereignty of "decentralize the food supply down to local communities" would render this problem much smaller, if even present. I know the article didn't state that as the general mantra for food justice, but realistically if your movement can't be summed up to a simple mantra it's going to have one hell of a time gaining any power, so I figured that statement is good enough for a blog post.

Next, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network criticizes the well-meaning whites who "colonize" the program in Detroit, sort of defeating the point of the "Black Community" part of the organization. Not to then "colonize" the topic myself, but I fear that groups too focused on making these movements minority-led might end up collapsing under the weight of too many good intentions without enough push. Obviously having your organization taken over by California exodus suburbanites is horrible, but real change can only can with power and the people these groups are trying to help the most are often those most stressed and therefore may not have the spare time or effort to do something. This isn't a hill I'd die on, just a thought I wanted to write down. If the organization is doing great, that's awesome and I'm glad for them, but it'd be a shame for an urban food program to suffer setbacks that it doesn't need to.

The most important thing I got out of Columbia River case study is that the most permanent solutions are the temporary ones. If they get used to just eating salmon from a can, than that river salmon population isn't getting helped any time too soon. Once immediate pressure is off, things slow down hard.

As a personal note, this whole article feels like it was written too "academically", only making it harder to digest and alienating it from the average person. They did NOT have to use the words "holistic" or "paradigm" as much as they did, and the whole article felt like it was insisting on itself more than it had to.

Noll and Murdock: Whose Justice is it Anyway? - Sorrel

    The term food security seems to address only the symptoms of hunger, whereas food sovereignty takes a more preventative and holistic approach. Instead of choosing between the two, why not integrate both methods? The ultimate goal should be for people to have the power to determine where and how they obtain their food, though this may not always be immediately feasible. A practical approach could start with food security as a short-term solution while transitioning toward food sovereignty over time.

    I personally favor the food sovereignty approach over food security because it prioritizes the right of communities to define their own agricultural policies. Food sovereignty is inherently community-focused, fostering local resilience and preserving cultural identity. This emphasis on collective well-being aligns with the values I strive to follow in life. Rather than focusing on what divides us, I believe in seeking what connects us. This perspective mirrors the Indigenous model of justice, which views people as interconnected through shared challenges. When applied to food justice, it reinforces the idea that food is a fundamental necessity that links all people – we all eat, and more importantly, we all need to eat to survive.

    The environmental justice aspect of food sovereignty is especially critical in the face of climate change. If we focus solely on food distribution without ensuring that food is sourced sustainably, we will continue to face systemic food shortages. Unsustainable food systems create long-term vulnerabilities, making food justice inseparable from environmental responsibility.

    The case study outlines the importance of addressing the root causes of food justice issues to protect cultural identity and traditional ways of living. For these AmerIndian tribes, fishing for salmon is not just a means of sustenance – it holds deep cultural and spiritual significance. Every community has the right to preserve its local food traditions, and relying exclusively on a food security approach risks erasing these cultural connections. Food sovereignty ensures that food systems remain both sustainable and culturally meaningful, fostering self-determination rather than dependence.

Liam Week 3

 The best way to help minorities and all people in poverty is to fix social "mobility". Right now, the rich keep getting richer, and the middle and lower classes are struggling. New wealth is going to the rich. Instead of overcomplicating things or blaming capitalism and race, we should focus on creating opportunities through free markets, less government interference, and more jobs. The rich elite want us to fight about race (which is irrelevant) to keep us from understanding the real problem which is a class divide.

Laws also make things worse by keeping low-income families in bad areas. Big housing rules force the poor to live close to each other and not have room for agriculture, and huge supermarket chains push out smaller stores and local foods suppliers, making food harder to access. Urban gardens are nice but don’t fix the big problems. To really help, we need to cut restrictions and support small businesses and farms so communities can grow stronger. Activism that annoys people, (like blocking traffic and spray-painting) doesn’t solve anything. Real change comes from empowering individuals, supporting small-scale farms, and improving opportunities.

Week 4

     This article again had a lot of information. A lot of these articles all circle back to the problem with racial and economic exclusion. I never realized how big of a problem this still is. Historically the development of food systems was shaped around racial and economic segregation. But times have changed a lot so why we are continuing to deny poor and color communities' access to healthy nutritious food is unbelievable. They state in the article that this exclusion was not accidental but rather a product of racist policies. 

    During the 20th century many working class neighborhoods -where many communities of color often resided- were pushed out of areas with strong agricultural economies so they became isolated from the wealthier areas. Retailers and grocery stores began to avoid those areas leaving the poor and colored communities without access to obtain healthier and fresh food, leaving them to eat out at the fast food and convenience stores which was full of processed foods.

Unfortunately, it is still like this today, often times from what I have seen living near Allentown. I often have to drive through the city where the poorer communities reside, and I also see just convenience stores and liquor stores. There also tend to be a lot of ethnic grocers in these areas as she stated in the article. But I never see any big-name grocery companies in these areas. It just makes you think that it is on purpose because of how often we actually see it. 

    I just find this all so unfair to these communities because just because of some one's money or color and their skin shouldn't be an indicator if you get to have access to healthy fresh food rather than processed food that has been sitting on the shelves for days. 

Week 3 - Lailah ElBouazzaoui

 The article by McClinktock shared a compelling view on how the food industry is being run in Oakland. The Californian flatland that was once an agricultural ground has turned into an ‘industrial hub’ with mainly fast food and corner stores instead of local food markets. Because of this change into a food desert, it has affected certain minority groups and low-income houses within the community. They are no longer able to get nutritious foods such as fresh produce due to the lack of agricultural practices in that area. 

McClinktock goes on discussing how understanding the historical aspects of the urban landscape is vital to understand how to adapt to its current developments. He then states a connection that “the circulation of money and capital have to be constructed as ecological variables every bit as important as the circulation of air and water.” I completely agree with this statement I believe that money and capital play just as much as a role in our environment as natural resources do. And unfortunately, they do affect the health and well-being of these minority households. There is racial segregation that limits the resources on Black and Latio neighborhoods in Oakland. Because the economic situations worsened in these areas the supermarkets did not do well and relocated to other parts leaving behind a food desert. 

I believe that it is a chain reaction what happened in Oakland. It first started when superstores took over the retail industry but only in locations that could be accessible by cars, as stated in the article. So, families that couldn’t afford it would resort to fast food and corner stores which began to be more popular because there was more demand. Of course prices went up and other services such as liquor stores started to make their stores more convenient. These trends inevitably led to rise in diabetes, obesity and alcohol abuse in the United States and continues to do it to this day. If more people don’t start to realize these trends in our nation’s food insecurity, then we will have more cities like Oakland that will be forced to travel outside of their town to obtain nutritional foods. 

From Industrial Garden to Food Desert – Week 3 Blog Post

This observational article by McClintock looked at multiple components of the food industry in Oakland, California over several decades and analyzed the corresponding factors of these elements. From reading this article, I can draw parallels between our previous article by Alison Alkon. There is a common theme in food justice and that is the pervasiveness of capital gain. Ultimately, we wouldn’t need struggles such as “food justice” without the omnipresent chokehold of capitalism. This article specifically points out the systematic effects that industrialization, population migration, and urban development have had on creating racial and class divisions leading to food deserts for specific areas of Oakland. 

Within the first few paragraphs, McClintock explains the vital connections between society and the environment. He goes on to quote David Harvey as he speaks on how the “accumulation of capital works through ecosystemic processes, reshaping and distributing them as it goes—Energy flows, shifts in material balances, environmental transformations, have to be brought thoroughly within the picture.” Furthermore, he explains how experiencing hunger must be evaluated through a lens that asks what food is available. This topic is very layered and coincides with other parts of societal and economic growth within a particular region. 

The article continues by evaluating several periods of growth and degrowth in Oakland. McClintock outlines early efforts of drawing wealthy merchants to the area around 1910 by building on the flatlands of Oakland. During this time and the next several decades, there was booming residential development to accommodate workers in the factories and warehouses in the area after the completion of the transcontinental railroad terminus in Oakland. In 1934 when the FHA was created, many people of color were not qualified for loans as they were for new housing projects only. And many of the residential neighborhoods that were created in this area were racially exclusive. This legally continued until 1948 and illegally thereafter.  

From this, a wave of things solidified the racial and financial gaps within Oakland. White workers had easier access to affordable housing near their workplaces while people of color did not. Quoted from the text, this “simply fueled racist and exclusionary sentiments by creating a sense of bootstrap entitlement, where hard work alone was seen as the key to material success.” This is another product of systematic racism. Divisions between those who are affected are a crucial element in controlling classes of society. We can see this sentiment still be applied to the working class of America today.  

As a response to the conflicts between races, the housing authority located black-only housing, most of which were in industrial areas, landfills, and adjacent railroads. This is another element that I believe we can see today. You see many lower-income homes and communities built under powerlines, near industrial areas, or further away from services. Additionally, many of these areas are labeled under Residential Security Maps as “D-fourth grade” or “hazardous”. Homes built in these areas rarely qualified for loans, making it even more difficult for those of color to secure adequate housing. All of these limitations play an important role in access to food.  

Generally speaking, after a period of flow in the Oakland region, there was an ebb. During all down cycles of industry, there will be layoffs, buyouts, cuts, and closings. Houses become vacant as people move to where the work is, large manufacturing facilities are abandoned, and the local businesses there to accommodate the residents close due to revenue decline. Leaving a destitute region, a lack of economic production. This cycle continues on and on due to the contentious drive of capital. And ultimately, because of past policies and civil injustices of earlier American industry, systematic racism continues to disproportionately affect nonwhite people.  

Closing out, McClintock reminds us that there are better systems. Food justice organizations have been created to connect those that are cut off from adequate food supplies. The work is not completed, it will take a lot of research and perseverance from communities to change their food systems. Ultimately, I think that it will always be up to the people to make changes to the system. If the system wanted to change, it could easily do so. The problem is that, by design, capitalism is not meant to liberate anyone. So, we must keep fighting alongside our fellow class citizens to liberate all of us, ourselves. 

Jack, Week 3, 2/19

 

Overall, I think this article did a great job at highlighting so many underlying issues in food systems. It’s a very sad thing to see a place that once had a buzzing community and economy have been on a steady decline. We spoke a lot about food deserts last semester in another class and the impact they have. We do often see this is impacting low income areas, which are often as the article said black or latino. The struggle for children to get nutritional food is way larger than it should be, and it starts with some of the urban planning and zoning policies talked about. “The practice of bank redlining also stopped the flow of mortgage and property investment capital into parts of the city where people of color resided.” I took this quote out to focus on one of the main topics mentioned called redlining. This is a direct “jab” at people of color in lower income communities as they try to continue to keep them in a minority and there is proof of it. Being put into specific categories by the HOLC and other organizations would make it harder for people in these areas to obtain loans or anything like that. There are so many detractors that are keeping people in their current situation, and they are all uncontrollable to them. 

I like this article and if I’m being honest the awareness it brought to me. There are so many policies and other rules to keep neighborhoods marginalized. These policies create even more inequality and make it harder for people to fight for the right thing. It’s a very unfortunate thing we have going on today where we still see our communities and big corporations being controlled by prejudice or whatever makes people think that any of these things are for the better. 

Jacob Week 3

 I think the best way to deal with minorities in poverty is to just try and fix the clearly broken social mobility in America. Wealth has been consistently funneled upwards since the Reagan administration. While increases in technology and development will increase the total wealth in an economy or the world (I wouldn't give up my modern lifestyle to be the king of France living in a palace without the internet, air conditioning, or a refrigerator), "rich" vs "poor" will still be relative and in comparison to one another. The United States has gotten richer and richer, but the lower and middle class citizenry has seen a drop in quality of life despite the growth. The only way this makes sense to me is if that new wealth and a large part of the old wealth has been siphoned from the masses and collected in the hands of the mega-rich and the old. I'm not a revolutionary or politically extreme, I just think that the wealth has been funneled upwards so much lately that it would even be in the best interest of the wealthy to redistribute some of the wealth downwards in order to promote stability and protect the skewed system that enables their lifestyle.

On the other hand, redlining and "unideal" zoning is, in my eyes, effectively black-and-white. Looking at cases like Village of Euclid v. Ambler Reality Co. (1926) and seeing at the current state of us zoning laws, the problem is undeniable. There's a good map if you scroll down this link a little: https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/heres-how-las-suburban-style-zoning-contributes-to-racial-disparities-uc-berkeley-study . Urban sprawl is made horrible by massive single-family zones and high capacity apartments are packed next to landfills, power plants, undesirable facilities to immorally let the poor live next to filth. Generally I consider a notable amount of the social justice I see to be either impractical, seeking solutions that don't address the core issue (such as trying to appeal to the issue of minority poverty without firmly tackling the issue of upward mobility in modern America), or sometimes overblown. However, city zoning is one of the cases where it is absolutely designed to discriminate. While some practices are technically illegal, the amount of de facto enforcement of discriminatory policies and NIMBY's ("not in my backyard", a term for people who, regardless of what policies they outwardly support, reject any change in their actual neighborhoods and cities) blocking change is disheartening.

On the food specific problem, the purposely concentrated poverty in these areas already makes buying food more challenging, but due to the associated risk and lower profit it further disincentives supermarkets from opening up in these areas. Combine this with trends and policies in the United States turning supermarkets into conglomerate beasts and running small stores out of business, and the issue is magnified. I believe this is also all a symptom of the K-shaped economy (K-shaped since the middle splits with the top getting richer and poor getting poorer, like the shape of a K) mentioned at the beginning of this post, with developments like the FTC turning into little more than a rubber stamp of an agency making the situation worse. I don't think this problem is on the scale of "develop urban gardens to help combat this issue :)", but on a larger scale such that systematic change is required. Both because the situation is that bad, and because the issues effects a lot more than just urban food deserts. Obviously urban gardens are a good ideal, but I think it'd be like telling people to help fill water buckets during a wildfire. Technically helpful, but worth so little that advocating for it is almost self-detrimental.

I generally like to separate politics and social activism, although I know that they are deeply intertwined. If something is to be changed through government action, I think it should often be done through government change and advocated for in a political sense. This behavior can hinder me, as if everyone was like me methyl iodide would still be on strawberries. However, not everything can be legislated away. Some changes can only be made through social change. Issues that exist in the de facto, regardless of what the law says.
I personally believe a lot of activism only ends up discomforting the more conservative members of society, and ends up pushing them to oppose the activism without accomplishing anything meaningful. Think of people blocking traffic or throwing tomato soup on the Mona Lisa. This is why I'm so critical of activism and may seem pessimistic. However, issues like zoning laws and the culture around them, are something that I think does fall on us, as people in a society, to fix, as people in a society.

Week 3

 This week’s article was neatly written and talks about the history of “food deserts”. There are many parts to this article that I found interesting about the history. Starting off with the fact that in poor communities there are more liquor stores than there are grocery stores. It makes it hard for those communities to have access to healthier foods. Most are these communities are located in flatlands. The average income is about 25 percent lower than the entire city of Oakland.

In 1934, the FHA created low income mortgages for small single family homes to build up the suburbs. These houses were practically built over night creating a cookie cutter community. People of color were rarely accepted for a FHA loan and if they were they were racially excluded from industrial gardens. Even after the Supreme Court case of Shelley v. Kraemer to make racial covenants illegal there were still issues that remained in practice. There was also the issue of banks redlining property investments in communities of color. 

After World War II, supermarkets dominated the food market. Many small chain and family owned food markets went out of business from “price wars”. By 1975, corporate food markets controlled about two thirds of food market. 

It’s honestly quite sad knowing how much divide there is. There are so many hardships and differences in communities of color. Just to find healthy food, instead of junk food or liquor, is even hard to come by. 

McClintock: From Industrial Garden to Food Desert - Sorrel

    One really interesting aspect of McClintock’s chapter is the connection between demographics and the physical terrain. Researchers have found that lower-income communities, often composed of people of color, tend to settle in flatter, more accessible areas rather than mountainous or difficult-to-navigate regions. This makes sense – those with fewer financial resources are less likely to afford housing in remote or elevated areas that require more expensive transportation and infrastructure.

    This geographic pattern also correlates with the presence of food deserts – urban areas where access to fresh, healthy food is severely limited. What’s particularly striking is that these food deserts often coincide with literal environmental deserts, areas devoid of vegetation and biodiversity. The lack of green spaces, community gardens, and access to nature further exacerbates health disparities, reinforcing cycles of poverty and food insecurity.

    McClintock’s discussion of the industrial garden highlights how cities like Oakland are shaped by a long history of segregation and systemic racism. During the peak of their development, these cities were designed to enforce racial divisions. Urban planning and housing policies deliberately segregated neighborhoods, assigning white communities to desirable areas with economic opportunities while restricting Black and other marginalized communities to less favorable, under-resourced locations.

    Even after legal segregation ended, these divisions persisted. Redlining, discriminatory lending practices, and racial covenants prevented Black families from purchasing homes in wealthier, predominantly white areas, forcing them into rental markets or undesirable housing locations. These historical injustices directly contributed to the urban food disparities we see today. Neighborhoods that were historically underfunded and segregated remain so, with limited access to grocery stores, fresh food markets, and other essential resources.

    One aspect of this chapter that I really appreciate is its ability to trace a clear history that explains how food deserts came to exist. It is not enough to simply acknowledge that food insecurity is a problem – we must also ask why our food system is failing so many people. McClintock provides a crucial historical lens, showing that food deserts are not a random occurrence but a direct consequence of racist urban planning, economic marginalization, and systemic neglect.

    The reality is shocking: in cities like Oakland, it is often easier to find a liquor store than a grocery store. Residents can choose from dozens of types of alcohol but may struggle to find fresh produce. This is completely backward – access to healthy, nutritious food should be a fundamental human right, yet systemic inequalities continue to make it a privilege rather than a guarantee.

    By analyzing the historical and social structures that created food deserts, McClintock challenges us to think critically about the intersection of race, class, and food access. If we want to create a more equitable food system, we must first confront the historical forces that shaped the injustices we see today.