Food Justice and Municipal Governments - Week 7 Blog Post

I keep asking myself, how do we end up here? How many generations of unlearning will we have to do? How do we fix the layered damage of our country’s atrocities? There is some hope in this text, however. The research gathered from these two locations, the PSRFPC and the City of Seattle, sheds light on what is happening behind closed doors to address some of our issues within the food industry.

I appreciated Horst's approach when comparing these two channels of food systems. She broke her observations down into 5 essential parts of food justice. She analyzed these two municipalities through this lens. She was not focused on purely examining procedures and processes that implement food justice practices, but also the shortcomings within these two systems. This type of comparison allowed the reader to better understand what food justice policy can and should look like and what or how progressive practices are being taken.

The City of Seattle did a slightly better job with follow-through when it came to fair and just food practices. However, some findings of her research showed that when initiatives were being implemented, they ultimately ran out of funding. Funding and policy changes for programs such as the community gardens effort in the City of Seattle, which was 71% low-income by 2013, eventually ran into land access challenges. They ended up with many interested parties and not enough land for the gardens. Even with the push of farmer's markets, most of these end up in or ultimately surrounded by the wealthy and elite, instead of easily accessible to low-income families who need it most.

A big hurdle to address is the lack of representation in these municipalities. In two situations, there was someone who brought up important focus points during meetings. In both of these instances, one an Indigenous representative and one a union representative, stopped attending meetings. Without representation from the communities directly impacted, these issues were never brought to the front of the line and therefore lost the attention it deserved. 

There are many setbacks when looking to close the gaps to obtain a just and sustainable agriculture system. Changes in government often aim to tackle one problem while consequently creating several other problems in the process. When we are looking at something as serious as food, something we all need to survive, we have to look at every level of that food system. Agriculture systems are vast, with many processes (some very unnecessary ones) and affect real-life individuals, from field pickers to chemists. We need to strive for better wealth equality and safer working environments with liveable wages while making sure to address inequity and land use.