Allison B's List: Food Reading Recs

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  Johnson, the UW researcher, hasn't studied these programs, but is concerned about the big picture. "We don't want people to pour m
• number of kids who said they drink two or more sodas a day dropped by half since 2002.

• two citywide networks exemplify the grassroots’ ability to do what the city, the corporate sector and philanthropic community cannot: create a vision for economic development that includes all Detroiters, and organize to make that vision real.
• coalition programs will teach people how to use digital media to solve community problems; help the city’s emerging small businesses become sustainable; infuse digital media arts into schools; and change young people’s perception of Detroit to see it as a place of hope, not abandonment.
• ew stories acknowledged the decades-long movement of urban farming or the fact that Detroit is home to more than 1,000 small farms and community gardens. Rather, national media portrayed Detroit as a “blank canvas.” As a result, Detroit has attracted people from near and far with bold urban agriculture proposals to supposedly save the city.
• It’s not just about better food, it’s about changing the conditions that makes good food so rare in Detroit
• “Until the emergence of capitalism a few hundred years ago, Jobs or Labor that you did for a paycheck did not exist. People worked to provide goods and services for their communities and to exercise and develop their skills. As we enter the 21st century, we are in the middle of a great transformation or reversal: from increasingly unavailable Jobs to meaningful Work

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• embracing the many ways food helps to bring people together does not preclude redress for the ways by which food has and continues to separate and stratify people on the basis of racial attributes.
• ‘Invisible Food Basket’
• “A movement for food justice must advocate for the dignity of and respect for the workers who help to produce, process, distribute and serve us our food. This will require us to build meaningful and durable bridges between the food, labo[u]r and racial justice movements.” ARC, 2011, p.20

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• Green economy enthusiasts have a vision which seems more “realistic,” but strikes me as toothless in addressing longstanding legacies of economic inequality and the structural hurdles to sustainability engendered by endless-growth capitalism.
• How do social movements succeed? Is it more imperative that they are massive, unpaid, volunteer, collectively-organized, and values-driven? Or that they are organized (into hierarchical bureaucracies), paid, and supported financially by their work?
• We who do consider ourselves as “activists” or part of a “movement” need to do a better job of defining what and who that movement is for. And we can’t allow ourselves to settle with self-satisfaction of “a job well done” without considering the true nature of the problem and the efficacy of our actions to solve them.

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• And why is 52.6 % of those 49.1 million hungry Americans Latino or African-American?
• race, as a complex social construct rooted in the historical roots of the United States, is a significant variable in equitable access to good food
• The problem is systemic; therefore, the solution must be approached with an eye towards understanding those systems and how to change them.

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• The no-supermarket paradigm discourages us from considering that human beings acquire — through childhood experience, cultural preferences and economics — a palate.
• economy
• lavery and sharecropping didn't make healthy eating easy for black people back in the day. Salt and grease were what they had, and Southern blacks brought their culinary tastes North (Zora Neale Hurston used to bless her friend Langston Hughes with fried-chicken dinners).

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• has other supermarket chains running scared, l
• Coalition of Immokalee Workers’
• the combined fortune of the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton total $87 billion,
• costs taxpayers approximately $420,750 annually in public social services used by store employees
• Let’s not be so idealistic about the power relations between our movement and multi-national corporations that, as Will Allen, says, “We hurt the very people we’re trying to help.

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• The food desert problem, these critics contend, is more about poverty than grocery stores.
• Some argue that the retailer’s newfound interest in food deserts is a public relations push designed to help it finally gain entry into lucrative urban markets from which it has long been excluded, thanks to grassroots opposition.
• he term food desert is also contested—it masks the structural causes of unequal access to food, such as racial, social and economic inequality, says Orrin Williams, executive director of Chicago’s Center for Urban Transformation
• in January, in a historically black Washington neighborhood where the chain wants to open stores, Michelle Obama stood before a giant Walmart banner and overflowing produce bins and endorsed the chain’s new plan to cut prices on healthy foods and open stores in food deserts.

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• national grain reserve
• . Overproduction was kept in check
• stable commodity prices functioned like a minimum wage for farmers.
• That, along with the elimination of grain reserves earlier, resulted in farmers overproducing themselves into bankruptcy, and the subsidy system we know today was born.
• develop responsible federal supply management program
• A rural farmer with a few thousand acres of wheat can’t suddenly switch to growing tomatoes to sell directly to consumers at the farmers market.

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