Two Americas
11-29-2009, 11:25 AM
This is a good critique of the various programs and ideas promoted by liberals involving food - CSA, coops, organic, farmers markets, sustainable, eat local, grow your own, urban gardening, food pantries, etc.
A few key points:
* The sustainable food movement reinforces and promotes the neoconservative and libertarian political agenda.
* The sustainable food movement inevitably and systematically excludes those most in need, because they "don't belong" in the enlightened inner circle.
* The sustainable food movement distracts people from the root causes of poverty.
* The alternative food programs create more of a burden for the poor than offering any assistance.
* The alternative food programs are woefully inadequate to tackle the problem.
* The alternative food programs are extremely inefficient.
* Activists and academics in the alternative food movement bring a set of gentrified prejudices to the issue that skew their framing of the questions and the solutions they propose.
[div class="excerpt"]Combining Social Justice and Sustainability for Food Security
Elaine M. Power
The sustainable-food-systems approach has been applied to food projects for the poor in both Canada and the United States (TFPC 1994; Fisher and Gottlieb 1995; Torjman 1997b). Such projects are of two major types: first, the creation of alternative food-distribution and marketing projects, such as farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture; and, second, "self-provisioning" activities, including people's growing, preserving, and preparing their own food, often in collaboration with others working in community gardens and kitchens.
...
Community-development food projects for the poor are often only one piece of a larger agenda for addressing social and economic inequities (TFPC 1994; OPHAFSWG 1995), but the food projects are currently receiving the most attention as alternatives to food banks and their indignities. Community-development food projects have been isolated from larger agendas of structural change. The rhetoric of "community" has played a large role in the agendas of neoconservative governments, which have combined the ideologies of deregulation and downsizing of government with appeals to the value of communities taking responsibility for many of the functions of the welfare state. Neo-conservative governments "evoke a (romanticized) past era in which stable, integrative, identity-generating communities were a dominant feature of social organization."
Such communities no longer exist for the majority of the poor, who live in urban centres. But even if they did, the rhetoric ignores the oppressiveness of communities for those who "don't belong," for whatever reason. The rhetoric of community also fails to address issues of power -- who gets to join, to speak, to act, to be heard.
Off-loading the functions of the welfare state onto communities, whether through charitable food distribution or community-development food projects, strips away the relative anonymity and universality on which the Canadian welfare system used to be based. Food programs aimed at the poor tend to reinforce the individualistic ideology of neoconservative policies in that they suggest that the victim is to blame, rather than blaming socioeconomic policies that leave the poor without resources. Jolly (1997) described "the corporatization of public policy and the privatization of poverty," in which urban agriculture becomes essential for the poor, but only as a "defensive option" in a two-tiered food system: a market-based system for those who can afford it; and a subsistence, self-sufficiency-based system for those who cannot.
...
Self-provisioning activities and alternative distribution programs often exclude the most vulnerable because basic levels of resources, which provide stability and an ability to imagine the future (that is, hope), are usually prerequisites for participation.
Community-development food programs may place increased burdens on women, who tend to be primarily responsible for the family's food. Mingione (1985) classified the activities of people to provide for themselves as "extraordinary work for self-consumption" in industrialized countries. He distinguishes these activities from "normal domestic work" and noted that the distinction between normal and extraordinary work for self-consumption changes with time, culture, and place. Self-provisioning activities add to the domestic work time and tend "to be distributed in a discriminative and inequitable manner" (Mingione 1985, p. 32). They also tend to have a low economic return, given the number of hours needed for production. Accordingly, self-provisioning activities tend to be most effective for those with large, multigenerational family structures, in which the household work is shared (Mingione 1985).
More generally, I am uncertain how well the sustainable-food-systems analysis considers class issues in trying to take account of the poor. The mainly privileged proponents of sustainability are most concerned about collective or public goods, such as food quality, health, and the environment (Buttel 1993). For poor people, the issue is more immediate and more personal -- how to put food on the table for the next meal. As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) pointed out, privileged activists and academics who struggle for an alternative, progressive vision of the future often feel marginalized and misunderstood in their own spheres, and they easily identify with those marginalized in other ways. However, the basis for their identification with the poor is limited. What is significant for middle-class activists may be of no consequence to poor people (and vice versa).
...
Food solutions will not solve the problem of poverty. Without social justice for the poor in the larger society (that is, a guarantee of an adequate and dignified level of material resources to allow every citizen the stability and security to participate fully in society), programs aimed at improving the food problems of the poor will only reinforce individualistic solutions to structural problems, no matter what the intentions of the programers.
...
The all-inclusiveness of the term food security can obscure the nature of the problem. This is important to understand, because the way we frame a problem determines the ways we try to solve it (Tesh 1988). I have also called for reflexivity on the part of academics and activists, because our positions in society affect the ways we understand and frame problems.
[/quote]
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-30587-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
A few key points:
* The sustainable food movement reinforces and promotes the neoconservative and libertarian political agenda.
* The sustainable food movement inevitably and systematically excludes those most in need, because they "don't belong" in the enlightened inner circle.
* The sustainable food movement distracts people from the root causes of poverty.
* The alternative food programs create more of a burden for the poor than offering any assistance.
* The alternative food programs are woefully inadequate to tackle the problem.
* The alternative food programs are extremely inefficient.
* Activists and academics in the alternative food movement bring a set of gentrified prejudices to the issue that skew their framing of the questions and the solutions they propose.
[div class="excerpt"]Combining Social Justice and Sustainability for Food Security
Elaine M. Power
The sustainable-food-systems approach has been applied to food projects for the poor in both Canada and the United States (TFPC 1994; Fisher and Gottlieb 1995; Torjman 1997b). Such projects are of two major types: first, the creation of alternative food-distribution and marketing projects, such as farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture; and, second, "self-provisioning" activities, including people's growing, preserving, and preparing their own food, often in collaboration with others working in community gardens and kitchens.
...
Community-development food projects for the poor are often only one piece of a larger agenda for addressing social and economic inequities (TFPC 1994; OPHAFSWG 1995), but the food projects are currently receiving the most attention as alternatives to food banks and their indignities. Community-development food projects have been isolated from larger agendas of structural change. The rhetoric of "community" has played a large role in the agendas of neoconservative governments, which have combined the ideologies of deregulation and downsizing of government with appeals to the value of communities taking responsibility for many of the functions of the welfare state. Neo-conservative governments "evoke a (romanticized) past era in which stable, integrative, identity-generating communities were a dominant feature of social organization."
Such communities no longer exist for the majority of the poor, who live in urban centres. But even if they did, the rhetoric ignores the oppressiveness of communities for those who "don't belong," for whatever reason. The rhetoric of community also fails to address issues of power -- who gets to join, to speak, to act, to be heard.
Off-loading the functions of the welfare state onto communities, whether through charitable food distribution or community-development food projects, strips away the relative anonymity and universality on which the Canadian welfare system used to be based. Food programs aimed at the poor tend to reinforce the individualistic ideology of neoconservative policies in that they suggest that the victim is to blame, rather than blaming socioeconomic policies that leave the poor without resources. Jolly (1997) described "the corporatization of public policy and the privatization of poverty," in which urban agriculture becomes essential for the poor, but only as a "defensive option" in a two-tiered food system: a market-based system for those who can afford it; and a subsistence, self-sufficiency-based system for those who cannot.
...
Self-provisioning activities and alternative distribution programs often exclude the most vulnerable because basic levels of resources, which provide stability and an ability to imagine the future (that is, hope), are usually prerequisites for participation.
Community-development food programs may place increased burdens on women, who tend to be primarily responsible for the family's food. Mingione (1985) classified the activities of people to provide for themselves as "extraordinary work for self-consumption" in industrialized countries. He distinguishes these activities from "normal domestic work" and noted that the distinction between normal and extraordinary work for self-consumption changes with time, culture, and place. Self-provisioning activities add to the domestic work time and tend "to be distributed in a discriminative and inequitable manner" (Mingione 1985, p. 32). They also tend to have a low economic return, given the number of hours needed for production. Accordingly, self-provisioning activities tend to be most effective for those with large, multigenerational family structures, in which the household work is shared (Mingione 1985).
More generally, I am uncertain how well the sustainable-food-systems analysis considers class issues in trying to take account of the poor. The mainly privileged proponents of sustainability are most concerned about collective or public goods, such as food quality, health, and the environment (Buttel 1993). For poor people, the issue is more immediate and more personal -- how to put food on the table for the next meal. As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) pointed out, privileged activists and academics who struggle for an alternative, progressive vision of the future often feel marginalized and misunderstood in their own spheres, and they easily identify with those marginalized in other ways. However, the basis for their identification with the poor is limited. What is significant for middle-class activists may be of no consequence to poor people (and vice versa).
...
Food solutions will not solve the problem of poverty. Without social justice for the poor in the larger society (that is, a guarantee of an adequate and dignified level of material resources to allow every citizen the stability and security to participate fully in society), programs aimed at improving the food problems of the poor will only reinforce individualistic solutions to structural problems, no matter what the intentions of the programers.
...
The all-inclusiveness of the term food security can obscure the nature of the problem. This is important to understand, because the way we frame a problem determines the ways we try to solve it (Tesh 1988). I have also called for reflexivity on the part of academics and activists, because our positions in society affect the ways we understand and frame problems.
[/quote]
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-30587-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html