Jake - Food Justice in Municipal Government

Here are my ideas from the short introduction section: I think the vote with your dollar mentality comes from a sheer distrust and lack of faith in the government actually being able to do anything. People would expect the US government to side with business over citizen's quality of life every time, and they have historical reasons to feel that way. Before going into the municipal government bit, the only relatively new idea I saw was the idea that one cannot separate food justice from wider social justice. I agree that social injustices and their solutions are rarely if ever isolated.

Going into the "meat" of the article, it says food systems planning is used by municipal governments as a revenue generating operation or to further financial goals instead of food justice goals (such as using urban gardens to drive up property price to benefit existing land-owning residents while further pushing those less influential out). I don't see this as shocking especially if you consider how many rural municipal governments will use prison contracts to stimulate rural economies off the back of imprisoned people (which becomes a greater problem when you question why the USA has 20% of the world's prisoners with only ~4% of the global population).

They bring up the inclusion of American Indians and go into how many of them are much more interested in gaining greater access to traditional food sources rather than gaining greater blanket food security. I will say that this topic has been brought up several times over the article's we've looked into and it does once again show a west-coast bias. It certainly is a topic that should be looked into and good things can come out of it, but you can easily see why it's a bigger deal on the west coast than the east coast (Here's a map showing % American Indian by county - https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Indian2017.jpg).

When the article looks into the discussion of how they would use county owned farmland, the over-arching narrative was that of "we don't tell farmers what to do". While it sounds nice, I think it's a classic case of "fool me once, shame on me. Fool me over and over again systematically, and now we have a nation-wide corporate agriculture monstrosity." Farmers doing what they want to do often leads to government subsidies for large corporations out-competing them, John Deere's lack of "right to repair" harming small farmers disproportionately, and a smaller scale means less bargaining power and influence with distributors. Farmers have some of the highest suicide rates in this country for a reason, so carrying on letting things play out the same way they have time and time again just doesn't sit right with me.

Labor got brought up, and unless Americans are willing to pay more for food (You know they won't anytime soon) farming will remain an industry will low wages. My best hope is that AI and robotics advances to the point we can reasonably start subsidizing important but unprofitable sectors like agriculture as a sort of step-down from UBI (Universal Basic Income). I like unions but my belief on the matter is that the changes unions would have to make for worker compensation to be adequate would result in higher food prices and America is not prepared for that, at least not now.

With making the decision-making process more democratic and inclusive, I think a big issues is trying to prioritize this first. It's not good to try and make food justice system for everyone and then proceed to not have the people who needed a new system the most not participate, but there is an underlying issue of trust in any system. Here is a graph show casing voter turnout in US election by race: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2012/10/voting-race.jpg . What I take away from this graph is that those underrepresented by a given system will be less likely to participate in that system. There is a sense of nihilism that comes along with being underrepresented and this is part of how it shows up. I believe it's more worthwhile in trying to make an honest showing of improving a system to restore people's trust in the system than trying to push through that nihilism without starting the change already.

When talking about Seattle's very non-committal and limited funding for food programs, one interviewee said “it is normalized that we can provide an extra subsidy” to support local farming and food access. I think this is very important, as just establishing that culture of supporting these programs is something that will pay dividends in the future. Settings precedents is unbelievably important and just being able to try and plant these seeds of "this is just what we do" is one of the most valuable things I believe anyone can do for food justice.

Overall I would say my thoughts leaving this article is that municipal governments certainly have the power to start change on a local scale. They are capable of doing something. I worry that too many people who are concerned are aiming for perfect, disappointed in good, and then always pushing up instead of out. If we want to really change food justice in this country we need to alter the common culture that we have. Between Seattle or Oakland getting notably better food security or their wider region seeing mild changes as organizations push out of an area rather than growing further within it, I believe the 2nd option will see a quicker change in the average person's relationship with food and therefore change the system more effectively. It's sort of a form of collective bargaining. A few cities here and there having growing food justice movements is annoying for those currently in control of the food system (like Monsanto), but if everywhere sees a mild change it might just rock the boat enough to cause some change.