As a political tool, food justice can help create alliances between the environmental justice and sustainable agriculture movements and open each movement’s frames of analysis to include institutional racism and power dynamics, cultural relevance to varying communities, and solution oriented approaches . Similar to how environmental justice activists have worked hard to bring critical engagement with concepts and implications of race, class, and gender into the mainstream environmental movement, food justice has sought to bring these issues into the foreground of the alternative food movement. Food justice activists have brought attention to a variety of social injustices experienced through the lens of the food system. Critiques that communities of color have been disproportionately targeted as consumers of food commodities that cause diet related diseases have spurred various efforts at creating alternatives and changing food policy, such as the 2012 attempt to tax sodas in Richmond, CA . Gottlieb and Joshi , in their popular press book Food Justice, addressed a wide range of the injustices created by industrial agriculture. The exploitation of migrant farm workers and other agricultural laborers has been a foundation for the development and continued success of industrial agriculture .A recent upsurge in attempts to unionize fast food workers and demand living wages has invigorated labor and food movement coalitional work. Food justice organizing also has highlighted the histories of agricultural development and exclusion of black, Latino,10 liter drainage pot and women farmers from many of the USDAs programs designed to empower small farmers.

In addition, food justice scholars have connected the injustices produced in the built environment as issues that go beyond concerns of lack of access to health food stores. McClintock described the urban environment of Oakland’s flat lands as the combined result of industrial location and relocation, residential development, urban planning policy, and racist mortgage lending which caused uneven development within the city.Impacts of capital devaluation have been concentrated within the flat lands, a food dessert in a predominantly black area of Oakland. McClintock called this “demarcated devaluation”. For McClintock how the development of the urban built environment, the distribution of housing and industry, has progressed over the last half century is a food justice issue.Allen suggested that food justice organizing that relies primarily on alternative strategies within the neoliberal framework is more accessible to privileged individuals despite actors’ desires to create change in marginalized communities. Alternatives based in localism may disregard the inequities between communities in the US and ignore the important work that communities of color have done to create larger geographic scale changes in order to escape the racist practices of local level institutions. This disincentives people of color or organizers committed to civil rights and other struggles for racial justice. Food justice non-profit organizations sometimes make the assumptions that lack of knowledge and education about healthy eating are primary barriers to “better” consumption within communities of color . These food justice organizations may be effective in framing issues around historical inequalities, however often these organizations are “coded white” because of white cultural values and practices. Therefore, it could be interpreted as one community deciding how others should eat, reflecting the desires of the program creators not the participants. This assumption and discourses of what constitute “good food” are not without their racial histories.

The aesthetic of organic and natural food have historical connections to projects of nationalism and purity, such as school and urban gardens used in the early twentieth century to aid with assimilation of recent immigrants both through changing work habits and family diets . Many AFIs have also focused on the importance of getting people to get their hands dirty. This discourse ignores the historical context of populations being forcibly removed or denied access to land or people forced or coerced into difficult agricultural labor. It is based in an agrarian ideal that ignored the reality of the US farming system, a system built on land ownership by whites and labor provided by slave or low wage people of color. Nonetheless many organizations remain committed to continuing to refine antiracist practices in their organizing and organizations. Leadership of people of color has been an important theme in the Growing Food and Justice for All conferences . Other groups, like People’s Grocery and Phat Beets both in Oakland, have integrated anti-oppression training into their work with volunteers. People’s Grocery created an allyship program, potentially the first of its kind in the nation, requiring garden volunteers to engage in anti-oppression training. Sbicca observes the allyship program as a commitment to involving people from a wide range of backgrounds and privileges who all share a passion for creating just and sustainable food systems. In the program, trainees are asked to understand linkages between power, marginalization, person access to privilege, and how individual’s social position relates to both their interest in the work of People’s Grocery and the history of the West Oakland community where the project is based. Activists recognize the limitations of training. While community food security activism led to localism as a strategy to address physical proximity to food resources, food justice activists have promoted the need for communities to be able to be more self-reliant through a different lens: that of community self-determination .

Local food production projects have been critiqued as isolationist, individualistic, conservative, and in tension with social justice desires. However for many in the food justice movement. localist politics are not an unexamined commitment to communalistic ideals. In marginalized communities, mistrust of dominant power structures and understanding of historical, systemic and currently institutionalized racism have influenced some workers to emphasize strategies that promote local community self-reliance and community self-determination . The impulse of identity-based, marginalized communities to create self-defined food production or exchange systems has been a common theme of new social movements since the 1960s. The Her Lands, women and lesbian separatist communes of the 1970s, frequently integrated gardening and agriculture into their work as a means to empower members and separate themselves from what were seen as inherently unjust and patriarchal agricultural systems . Similarly, self-determination projects have been a central theme of black liberation organizing for the last half century . The Black Panther Party developed a free breakfast program, which predated and provided a model for the national school breakfast program . The program provided food to youth in the West Oakland community who faced persistent hunger. Another program, the Free Food Program, was designed to both meet the immediate needs of community members and build consciousness of the economic theft of high food prices . Both were a key part of the Black Panther Party Platform and Program of 1966 which expressed steps to forward the goals of black liberation and community autonomy, to enable the community to determine its own future in part through the abolition of “the robbery of capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities” . Today People’s Grocery pulls much inspiration from the work several decades prior of the Black Panthers. Similarly, today two Black Nationalist groups engage in social, economic, and agricultural separatist projects . Because white oppression dominates the current food system, the Nation of Islam and Pan African Orthodox Christian Church have both held to core values of self-reliance and community building through food. They hold that actions,25 liter pot including food production, distribution, and consumption, “must be for blacks and by blacks” . The Nation of Islam believes in the importance of geographic separation and the creation of a nation of only black people while the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church contends separation has already been forced upon the black community so members should take ownership of this and find empowerment through self-reliance in a community of blacks. Salmon, traditionally a staple of Karuk diets, have diminished and Karuk tribe members’ access to them has diminished as well. Because of the loss of sovereignty and diminished ability of community members to harvest and catch healthy food, hunger and disease are extremely prevalent in the tribe. Food justice has been taken up by many other tribes and native activists. Activists argue traditional foods and food ways are intimately linked with cultural identities and cultural survival . The White Earth Land Recovery Project has been a model project connecting traditional diets and critiques of the history of racism that has shaped Native food insecurity today with projects to reclaim Native lands, restore traditional land stewardship practices, promote community development and strengthen spiritual and cultural heritage. Project leader Winona LaDuke has been an outspoken advocate connecting tribal sovereignty with basic right of tribes to engage in traditional self reliant food practices.

In unincorporated areas outside of Oakland, Bradley and Galt have documented the work of a food justice project entitled Dig Deep farms . Herrera and other project leaders hold self-determination as a key pillar to their work. Dig Deep works for self-determination through encouraging project participants to have power in shaping the social relationships of production and exchange, training and developing project member skills, and respecting members’ knowledges and desires for change. Bradley and Galt describe self-determination as collective control over pieces of the food system and as individual autonomy in determining how their work is valued . For Dig Deep, self-determination is not about separating their efforts from other communities but instead about an inward orientation towards its members based on respect, empowerment, and a commitment to individual’s liberation. Calls for community self-determination and separationist politics bring up questions of group citizenship. Who is included within the particular community and how the community is defined have been important questions for activists committed to or experimenting with isolating themselves, in varying degrees, from hegemonic white supremacist and capitalist relations. But many food justice projects are not isolated even while they work for self-determination. Wekerle argues that these local projects are not only focused on the particular conditions of their local, but connect to national and international networks, and engage in oppositional politics, thus creating a translocal movement. In this light, food justice can be addressed with urban planning policy at the local level and can have implications for political institutions across geographical and political boundaries.Food justice activists construct a notion of justice that is focused on historical story of who is included and excluded from economic and social structure of power. Activists argue that in the US communities of color and low-income communities have not only had less access to physical food resources, but also less access to the institutions that provide opportunity such as better paying waged work and equal participation in legal and political arenas. Freedom from the injustices of discrimination based on difference is key to this movement. But many food justice advocates go beyond a liberal conception of justice that identifies the problem as unequal distribution . In highlighting self-determination as a central concern, food justice promotes a conception of justice concerned with both freedom from discrimination and communitarian well-being, a commitment to self determination that is sometimes separatist. Separatism in activist spaces makes room for difference. Cultural theorists have critiqued notions of justice based on universal ideals or perfectionism. Liberal notions of universal human rights align with rational, objective assessment of injustice that has frequently been judged from a position of dominance – western, white, male, etc. These notions of justice are exclusionary, as are communitarian or particular perfectionist notions, when they are unitary and uncritical of the positions of the primary authors of the values of justice . Universal values do not allow for the difference necessary based on the differing knowledges and experiences of diverse communities. Many cultural theorists share a commitment of food justice activists to group autonomy in the sense that groups with different histories, identities, or common bonds along racial, religious, or other lines should be those empowered to collectively define what for them are values of a good life. Food justice activists, urban gardeners have worked to gain access to spaces in their communities for food production as well as worked in solidarity across communities to build networks between local struggles, such as the efforts of the Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative. In addition, some food justice activists, such as D-Town Farm urban gardeners, also engage critiques of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations of production and ownership that have been a part of denying their communities land and well being.