Guest editors’ introduction: Building a radical food geography praxis

This special issue came together over the course of a turbulent 2020 that laid bare the many injustices in food systems discussed in its collection of papers. During the global COVID-19 pandemic and related economic recessions, rates of poverty and food insecurity have significantly increased, especially among Indigenous Peoples and in communities of color (Bauer, 2020; Perry and Harshbarger, 2020; Roberts, 2020). Among the growing rates of food insecurity in the United States and Canada are restaurant workers laid off due to closings and struggling, as many have continually, to meet basic needs, thus demonstrating the precarious employment of food systems workers who live paycheck to paycheck (Dickinson, 2020). At the same time, migrant workers are forced to return to farm fields, dairies, and meat processing facilities despite inadequate worker protections against the novel coronavirus (Beaumont, 2020). Global systems of food trade embraced by the dominant industrial food system have shown they are inadequately prepared to respond to disturbances such as this, resulting in food shortages in some parts of the world (Chin, 2020). Underlying all of these chronic, yet heightened injustices are racist, patriarchal, and settler colonial structures endemic to capitalism, creating conditions that strip people and communities of their ability to build more equitable and sustainable food systems (Freshour, 2017). Social movements fighting against systemic oppression and police brutality further demonstrate this through calling out the ways that food and systems of power intersect to make many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color more vulnerable to health inequities and economic crises (Nittle, 2020).

In this special issue, we present diverse engagements with radical food geography praxis. This praxis sits at intersections between food systems scholarship and radical geographies and makes theoretical and action-oriented contributions to resisting oppressive food systems and building viable and equitable food futures. These approaches are grounded in a critical analysis of power, oppression, and capitalist exploitation across time and space. But they go beyond those theorizations to use such knowledge for creating change in food systems through scholarship, activism, or both. Importantly, such praxis is rooted in heterogeneous understandings of the systems of history, culture, and philosophy that impact how change is pursued and by whom.

This special issue on radical food geography praxis emerged from a workshop, “Radical Food Geographies: Connecting Knowledges, Cultivating Practices, (re)Imagining Governance” held in conjunction with the 2019 American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. Co-organized by the three guest editors of this special issue and a collective of additional academic and/or community-based collaborators, the workshop included over 100 participants from academic and community-driven spaces who came together to envision the futures for radical food geographies.¹ It built on several scholar-activist roundtables, panels, and field trips organized at AAG meetings in previous years by members of the Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group and the Food Justice Scholar-Activist/Activist-Scholar Community of Practice (including the guest editors of this special issue) in which community-based food systems activists and practitioners have participated. Recognizing that these one-off events in which practitioners attend a scholarly conference or academics participate in a field visit are not enough for facilitating exchanges between various societal actors about how to collectively work toward systems change, the workshop sought a more purposeful engagement on questions about how geographers, policy makers, civil society organizations, and community-based activists/practitioners can work collaboratively and effectively to advance food justice and food sovereignty.

In our early conceptualizations of the workshop, the organizers engaged people from academic and community spaces (especially those living in Washington, D.C.) to envision a day open to exchanging knowledge and experience, questioning the status quo, and exploring opportunities for collaboration. Following the event, we compiled a report with conference notes (Radical Food Geographies Organizing Collective, 2019) that was shared with participants. The guest editors then solicited submissions to this special issue from scholars, scholar-activists, activist-scholars, and activists who had presented or participated at the workshop and/or whose work was influential for that day’s discussions. Instead of issuing a broad call for papers, we intentionally sought authors working from a variety of standpoints, projects, and ideas in order to expand the diversity of scholarship that, we argue, contributes to nascent ideas of radical food geography praxis (see Hammelman et al., 2020). We sought to include authors whose work on food systems aligns with or directly engages radical geographies, by exploring issues important to marginalized communities (including Black, Indigenous, and Latinx geographies), and centers diverse ways of knowing, while also being actively involved in socially relevant efforts for change. We are certain that there is a wider range of researchers within and outside the academy who are engaged in radical food geographies work who did not attend the D.C. workshop or with whom we are not connected. As such, this special issue is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather an invitation to begin a conversation about how to move forward a radical food geography praxis.

Our efforts to forge this starting point encountered a handful of constraints that reflect broader challenges in pursuing radical scholarship. First, the papers in this special issue focus largely on case studies in North America (although with a wide variety of positionalities within that geography). This is a result of starting the discussion within and connected to the AAG, a North American association holding an event in North America. But, it also reflects the hegemony of North American and Western European research and/or analyses written in English, in scholarly publications (often only available behind paywalls). The result is the obscuring of major and minor praxis from geographies worldwide that are needed to better understand lived experiences and modes of resistance. As a result, we see this special issue as a starting point and recognize the need to include more diverse sets of scholars and forms of scholarship in these discussions. Additionally, while the three guest editors teach and research within frames of community-engaged scholarship in several countries and world regions, we are all white academics employed by universities in North America, affecting the perspectives we bring in soliciting contributions and reviewing papers, despite our commitment to unlearning white supremacy. Also, some of us have tenured or tenure track positions, affording us the time and access to resources to support this endeavor. Finally, norms of academic scholarship regarding engagements with literature and theory, research methods, and timelines for publication shaped this special issue in ways that required conforming with hegemonic norms instead of breaking them open. Recognizing those limitations, we call for more journals to open up their pages to scholarship from often less-visible locations and positions producing important radical geographies scholarship.

The special issue begins with a review article from the editors, Reynolds et al. (2020), “Towards a radical food geography praxis: integrating theory, action and geographic analysis in pursuit of more equitable and sustainable food systems.” Here, we consider the ways a radical food geography praxis pulls from intersections of radical geographies and food systems scholarship. We propose that such praxis includes theoretical engagements with power and structures of oppression, direct action to create social change, and geographic analysis. Through the piece, we issue an invitation to a shared project of radical praxis for building more equitable and sustainable food systems. The remaining articles engage with these ideas in more empirical terms presenting the expertise and experiences of activist-scholars and scholar-activists on a wide range of food systems concerns.

Following what we hope sets the stage for considering radical food geography praxis, several papers contend with connections to land and land dispossession and present movements seeking land justice through food justice. In “Pathways to reparations: land and healing through food justice,” Gilbert and Williams (2020) explore the entanglements of racial justice, land justice, and healing through identifying overlaps between food justice initiatives and social movements for reparations. Importantly, they find that food justice efforts to transform systems of oppression can provide alternative pathways for meeting reparations demands of equitable land access and opportunities for healing from intergenerational trauma. Brown et al. (2020) further bring to light the importance of land relationships in their paper, “The history of the land: a relational and place-based approach to teaching (more) radical food geographies.” In presenting a popular education method utilized by Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans, the authors reflect on the deep and personal ties to land that bring out critical histories necessary for generating anti-oppression work in alternative food initiatives. Recognizing the divisions between those who have historically worked the land (Indigenous groups and enslaved people) and those who decided acceptable land uses and ownership (white people) from the beginning of colonialism to today, the authors begin imagining alternative futures grounded in new relationships of land access, redistribution, and reparations.

Some of the papers consider both the impact of global political economic regimes (such as cultural appropriation in the context of gentrification and immigrant labor policies) and the everyday relationships that resist such regimes in pursuit of food justice. In “‘D.C. is mambo sauce’: Black cultural production in a gentrifying city,” Reese utilizes mambo sauce as a lens for understanding race, class, and power tensions in intensely gentrifying neighborhoods in Washington, DC. In particular, she examines the cultural appropriation of mambo sauce as it moves from carryout restaurants in Black working-class neighborhoods to upscale restaurants in gentrified neighborhoods. Reese argues that mambo sauce is a Black cultural production that provides means of belonging, yet becomes a marketing tool through which new residents can experience the “real DC” without venturing beyond upscale restaurants. In “‘Because they are connected’: Linking structural inequalities in farmworker organizing,” Sbicca et al. (2020) consider the relations between compounding forms of farmworker exploitation in the United States and immigrant-, Latinx-, and women-of-color-led resistance. They center the perspectives and experiences of Community to Community Development (C2C) in Washington state to demonstrate the radical frontlines of intersectional farmworker organizing, especially with regard to class, immigration status, gender, and race. C2C links structural inequalities to both democratize its everyday cultural and organizational practices and confront the xenophobia, racism, and labor abuse facing immigrant farmworkers. The authors argue that through its community organizing and political education, unionizing, protest, and care work, C2C shows the power of an intersectional praxis for farmworker movements.

In engaging with a radical food geography praxis, many articles in this special issue also reflect on mechanisms of knowledge creation and utilization by both academics and activists. For example, in “Envisioning radical food geographies: shared learning and praxis through the Food Justice Scholar-Activist/Activist-Scholar community of practice,” Reynolds, Block, Hammelman, Jones, Gilbert, and Herrera discuss scholar-activism and activist-scholarship within the food system through the lens of a community of practice within the AAG Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group that developed in order to foster collective learning and action built on the recognition that knowledge is created through lived and historical experience, in addition to academic work. The authors pay particular attention to the ways in which power is articulated in food justice scholarship and activism, and ways to disrupt uneven power relationships through contesting binaries of scholar : activist and engagement with radical geographies. In “Scholar-activist perspectives on radical food geography: collaborating through food justice and food sovereignty praxis,” Levkoe et al. (2020) further consider how academic and community collaborations can pursue a radical food geography praxis. Building on the voices and experiences of practitioners, activists, and academics, the authors demonstrate that scholarship on food injustices cannot be separated from social movement work to combat those injustices. Instead, deeply collaborative scholarship and action have the potential to more effectively mobilize knowledge and action in creating alternative futures.

All of these papers shed light on the important connections between producing knowledge and practicing activism. While many of the papers in this special issue emphasize the actions of social movements for creating change, Reese (2020) and Levkoe et al. remind us that radical food geography praxis also occurs in the everyday remaking of relationships with place-based food systems. As such, it is important to also attend to the less visible, everyday, quiet resistances to systemic injustice in particular places and across space (see also Bayat, 2013, on everyday resistance). A radical food geography praxis provides us with such an opportunity for building more equitable and sustainable food systems, and our hope is that this special issue will be one step in this direction.