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.