Craft food and beverage makers regularly emphasize transparency about the ethical, sustainable sourcing of their ingredients and the human labour underpinning their production, all of which helps elevate the status of their products and occupational communities. Yet, as with other niche ethical consumption markets, craft industries continue to rely on employment conditions for agricultural workers that reproduce inequalities of race, class, and citizenship in the dominant food system. This paper interrogates the contradiction between the exaltation of craft cidermakers’ labour and (...) the devaluation of farmworker labour by assessing how craft beverage actors make sense of inequalities facing manually skilled agricultural workers. Through a focus on the emerging craft cider industry, this paper draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data with a range of urban and rural cider actors in the Pacific Northwest. I find that actors in the craft cider industry engage with inequalities affecting farmworkers through three main patterns: Justifications of the status quo; Supply chain fog; and Misgiving/critique. By using an analytical framework that integrates critical agrarianism and the politics of sight, this study provides insights into both barriers and opportunities to redistribute social recognition and material rewards across food supply chains. (shrink)

More and more cities develop urban food strategies to guide their efforts and practices towards more sustainable food systems. An emerging theme shaping these food policy endeavours, especially prominent in North and South America, concerns the enhancement of social justice within food systems. To operationalise this theme in a European urban food governance context we adopt Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice: economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation. In this paper, we discuss the findings of an exploratory document analysis (...) of the social justice-oriented ambitions, motivations, current practices and policy trajectories articulated in sixteen European UFSs. We reflect on the food-related resource allocations, value patterns and decision rules these cities propose to alter and the target groups they propose to support, empower or include. Overall, we find that UFSs make little explicit reference to social justice and justice-oriented food concepts, such as food security, food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty. Nevertheless, the identified resources, services and target groups indicate that the three dimensions of Fraser are at the heart of many of the measures described. We argue that implicit, fragmentary and unspecified adoption of social justice in European UFSs is problematic, as it may hold back public consciousness, debate and collective action regarding food system inequalities and may be easily disregarded in policy budgeting, implementation and evaluation trajectories. As a path forward, we present our plans for the RE-ADJUSTool that would enable UFS stakeholders to reflect on how their UFS can incorporate social justice and who to involve in this pursuit. (shrink)

Research has established that the burdens of externalities associated with industrial production are disproportionately borne by socially and politically vulnerable groups, and this is particularly true for farmworkers who are at high risk for environmental exposures and illnesses. The impacts of these risks are often compounded by farmworker communities’ social vulnerability. Yet, less is known about how the intersection of race, class, and gender can position some farmworkers to be at higher risk for particular types of oppressions. We extend the (...) literature by analyzing the case of Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida, which was historically home to a large agricultural community. Drawing on the concept of critical environmental justice, we investigate the lived experiences of these women in the context of racialized, gendered, and economic oppressions during their time working on the farms. We use the case of Apopka to ask: how the policies and socio-historical context of the agricultural industry in the American South contributed to injustices experienced by Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida; and how race, gender, and class intersected and intersect to create and legitimize environmental injustices in the workplace for these farmworkers. Our data include semi-structured in-depth interviews, newspaper and media coverage, and archival materials. Our analysis advances work on critical environmental justice and intersectionality by mapping the relationship between structural and environmental intersectional oppressions for Black women farmworkers. (shrink)

This article reflects on how Agriculture and Human Values has approached women, gender, and agriculture over the years based on a content analysis of the journal. Overall, the journal has a long history of dealing with these issues with increasing interest over time. The predominant research themes in this area are women on farms; gender, agriculture, and environment; and gender, agriculture, and intersectionalities. Feminist political ecology constituted the major theoretical orientation of this scholarship. Two themes in gender scholarship that received (...) scant attention were masculinities and sexualities. Although many articles focused on women and gender over the years, little evidence exists that the findings from this research penetrated the main issues in the journal. Studies in which gender is not the central focus, such as those related to sustainability, work, and supply chains, would benefit from attention to feminist work in these areas. (shrink)

In this study, we examine cases of food insecurity and food justice issues in Vermont’s environmentally vulnerable communities. Using a structured door-to-door survey (n = 569), semi-structured interviews (n = 32), and focus groups (n = 5), we demonstrate that: (1) food insecurity in Vermont’s environmentally vulnerable communities is prominent and intersects with socioeconomic factors such as race and income, (2) food and social assistance programs need to be more accessible and address vicious cycles of multiple injustices, (3) an intersectional (...) approach beyond distribution is required to address food justice issues in environmentally vulnerable communities, and (4) paying attention to broader contextual and environmental factors may provide a more nuanced approach to understanding food justice. (shrink)

Research on women in U.S. agriculture highlights how, despite real challenges, women have made and continue to make spaces for themselves in this male-dominated profession. We argue that, partly due to data accessibility limitations, this work has tended to use white women’s experiences in agriculture as universal. Analyzing micro-data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture, this paper offers descriptive statistics about women and race in U.S. agriculture. We examine numerous characteristics of U.S. farms, including their spatial distribution, the average number (...) of acres farmed, predominant crop types, and other characteristics to describe how white, Black, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander/Asian women farmers are faring. Our findings suggest significant differences in women’s farms by race. We argue that these are related to the history of forced and voluntary migration within the U.S. Our results indicate that understanding women’s experiences in farming requires understanding the impact of race and these broader historical patterns. Finally, because of these differences across races, we suggest that supporting “women in agriculture” may require tailored responses from agricultural policy and programming that addresses unique needs in specific communities. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted food and educational systems, laying bare institutional inadequacies and structural inequalities. While there has been ample discussion on impacts to the food system and higher education institutions separately, there has been little written through the perspective of people who navigate both. Farmers, researchers, graduate students, chefs, and many stakeholders contribute to community engaged scholarship (CES) in food systems, facing novel obstacles and opportunities with the spread of the pandemic. In this article, I utilize institutional ethnography (...) to center the experiences of the people who participated in or led CES projects during the spring and summer of 2020. The goal of this study is to understand how discourse and texts in the academic institution constrain the reality of CES partnerships and identify areas for change. My findings show that tenure and promotion guidelines and funding opportunities constrain CES partnerships, reducing opportunities for relationship building and discouraging innovative models of participation. Quantified evaluation metrics on grant rubrics and tenure and promotion guidelines privilege individual academic researchers growing large programs, writing lucrative grants for the university, and publishing profusely. However, community-led and decentralized projects were able to adapt to community priorities and sustain research projects during the pandemic. COVID-19 created obstacles to community engagement and allowed for creative approaches to community participation. By restructuring academic evaluation and funding processes to support problem-solving models of CES led by community partners, CES projects can support both academic and community priorities in times of disruption and relative stability. (shrink)