The Intersection of Environmental, Climate, and Food Justice

Joan McGregor

The current food system is harming the most vulnerable people in our society. If you are poor and minority, you have a much higher chance of being obese, having diabetes, and the diseases related to it. African Americans are nearly 1.5 times as likely to be obese as whites are, and African American children are at even higher risk of obesity than white children are. With Latino and Native American children, the rates of obesity and diabetes are even higher (GAIN n.d.). Many of these same people have high rates of food insecurity, namely, lack of regular access to sufficient nutritious food; these people include farm workers, who have the highest levels of food insecurity in the nation (Grauel and Chambers 2014). "Food deserts," areas without reasonably close access to grocery stores with fresh foods, are also most prevalent either in inner cities with high concentrations of low-income and minority populations or in rural areas, such as agricultural areas and tribal nations. Many workers in the food system, such as farm workers, meat processors, and restaurant workers, are minorities and women, subject to low wages and often dangerous working conditions, such as exposure to high levels of chemicals in fields or dangerous equipment in the meat industry. The current system of industrial food production not only results in environmental harms such as soil depletion, chemical runoffs in streams and other waterways, and the subsequent loss of biodiversity but also has detrimental health effects on the surrounding human communities because of its intense chemical burden (Nicolopoulou-Stamati et al. 2016). That same industrial agriculture system that is causing harm to vulnerable humans' health has a substantial impact on the amount of global greenhouse gases, constituting somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the total amount (Gilbert 2012). Excessive carbon in the atmosphere will harm future generations but is already having effects on current populations, often the most vulnerable ones. Climate change is harming the food systems of vulnerable communities now; for instance, with seas rising and permafrost melting, the Inuit people are forced to relocate, inevitably to places where they cannot access their traditional foods (Tsosie 2007).

Until recently, the food system was not recognized as a locus of social justice problems. Its effects on the environment and the climate were mostly ignored as well. Largely fueled by popular writers and filmmakers Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, 2007), and Marion Nestle (Food Politics, 2007), food is now on the radar for many more people. These popular writers exposed the problems with the growth and ubiquity of "bigag" with its monocultures cheapening the price and the quality of food, leading to an abundance of low-quality food and in turn causing a burgeoning health crisis of obesity, cancer, and heart disease. Additionally, they exposed industrial agricultures' reliance on artificial fertilizers and pesticides, resulting in devastating effects on the environment. Out of this attention to the health and environmental problems of the food system grew a robust nationwide food movement focused on healthy, organic foods that are good for people and the planet. Michelle Obama even got into the spotlight, growing a garden at the White House and making "Let's Move," a healthy eating and fitness campaign for children, a centerpiece of her mission as First Lady. This food movement is largely populated, however, by the white upper middle class who have the resources and the ability to access healthy, environmentally friendly alternatives. With it, we have witnessed an explosion of farmers' markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), community gardens, and farm to table restaurants. The organic food industry is the largest growth area in the food system (Organic Trade Association 2017). While this movement is bringing needed attention to the food system, its concentration has not been on the social inequities in and around the food system and the barriers faced by low-income and minority communities that prevent them from participating in the food movement's proposed solutions. Much of the food movement has been focused on changing people's behavior, namely, calling them to make better choices, and has not acknowledged the structural and interrelated problems that make individual choices and market solutions very difficult or not viable at all in many communities. For members of low-income and minority communities, the proposed solutions, such as Pollan's "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves" (2009) are not necessarily possible, since many of those communities are food deserts with no access to full-service markets with fresh vegetables. Furthermore, the income of the poor has been steadily declining since the 1970s (Pew Research Center 2015) and, ironically, if the inner city poor have access to fresh vegetables in their neighborhoods, the vegetables tend to be cost-prohibitive, even more expensive than in predominately white, suburban neighborhoods (Treuhaft and Karpyn 2010).

Another food movement, the food justice movement, has been emerging as well, led by grassroots organizations focused on the inequities in the food system. "Food justice" is defined as "communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat [food that is] fresh, nutritious, affordable, culturally appropriate, and grown locally with care for the well-being of the land, workers, and animals" (Alkon and Agyeman 2011, 2). This movement's attention is to issues of affordability, access, and participation and thereby is concerned with how people are differently affected by food injustices by virtue of their social position/identity/group. These dimensions of social position/identity/group are also a basis for collective resistance to injustice. At the global level, for example, La Via Campesina is championing the rights of peasant farmers to sustainably grow foods for their own communities and resisting the corporate global markets in food (La Via Campesina n.d.).

What is missing from both these food movements is recognition that the food system sits at a unique intersection of problems of justice: the trifecta of food justice (focused on a right to access healthy, nutritious, culturally appropriate food and rights to participation in the decision-making about the food system), environmental justice (focused on exposing and rectifying the differential impact of our industrialized system on marginalized communities, mostly poor and minority communities, and the procedural exclusion of those groups from the decision-making that resulted in those impacts), and climate justice (focused on the distributional inequalities of the effects of greenhouse gases on the planet). Tackling the injustices of the food system requires attention to all the interactions and interdependencies of these domains and, in turn, solutions to the injustices of food should have positive impacts on environmental and climate justice and on sustainability generally.

In this chapter, I will investigate the intersection of these domains of justice and how the same populations share vulnerabilities to distributional and participatory injustices. I will argue that we need to take responsibility for the structural injustices that limit the opportunities and perpetuate unfair outcomes for the poor and minorities both in the United States and globally. Furthermore, governments need to acknowledge the right to a decent environment (including one that is not detrimentally impacted by climate change) and the right to food as basic human rights, and it is our responsibility, as citizens of democratic societies and moral agents, particularly those with privilege and access to political power, to ensure the social and institutional structures to guarantee those rights are respected. The harms addressed by the food, environment, and climate justice movements are interrelated injustices. They are perpetrated by government policies and practices and are consequences of, as Iris Marion Young argues, the background social structure in which "many individuals and institutions [act] to pursue their own particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms" (2011, 52). The social structure includes the background conditions, rules, policies, practices, and norms that govern individuals' actions, collectives' actions, and government actions. When the social structure unfairly constrains or limits some people's opportunities, including inflicting upon them more of the burdens of collective practices — like fossil fuel use — and those same processes increase others' opportunities and powers, the social structure creates structural injustices. Many of the actions of individuals and even governments are not aimed at limiting opportunities or harming particular groups, such as the poor, women, and minorities; instead, they are working within the practices and norms of that structure. This is one of the reasons that it is not possible necessarily to point out specific intentions to be racist, for example, when heavy concentrations of pollutants end up in minority communities. The actors involved may well act within the particular guidelines laid out for the processes of picking a waste site, for instance, which are de jure race neutral. Understanding these background conditions and how they result in injustice particularly around food, the environment, and climate and how we can take responsibility to change them is the subject of this chapter.

I. FOOD [IN]JUSTICE

The contemporary food system has led to the so-called obesity epidemic in developed and developing nations (Thompson 2014), particularly among the poor and minority populations. Many of these people are undernourished because the foods they eat have little or no nutritional value. Soaring rates of cancer, heart disease, and other lifestyle diseases are also products of our current food practices (Cleveland Clinic 2017). The major killers in the world are no longer infectious diseases; rather they are heart disease, cancers, lung disease, and diabetes, as reported by the World Health Organization. Industrial bioengineered plants and animals, and animals raised in concentrated feeding operations (referred to as CAFOs) have produced more food, but at what cost to human health, animal welfare, and the welfare of the planet? At the same time, malnourishment and starvation remain rampant in less developed nations where wholesale loss of cultural food practices has occurred due to increases in agricultural trade and resulting crop choices. As the Food and Agriculture Organization's 2017 report, The Future of Food and Agriculture, stated, the " 'triple burden' of malnutrition weighing on most countries consists of undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and overweight and obesity" (FAO 2017).

The "obesity epidemic" and health disparities in poor and minority communities in the United States are met with concern but not as injustices perpetrated by individuals, corporate actors, or the state. More often than not, the conditions of the poor and minorities are discussed as consequences of individual choices and not as the product of government or other actors' decision-making and control. This view ignores the background conditions within which people act and how we got to this place in the transformed food system. Further, it does not account for the government's agency in creating and sustaining the background circumstances generating the harms, nor does it acknowledge the complexity of other background conditions, social rules, and norms that limit individuals' choices — for example, the direct, aggressive marketing of unhealthy food to children and the lack of access to other food options in low-income and minority communities. The assumption that the circumstances of the poor and minorities are not injustices to be rectified relies on the idea that we are all free actors, voluntarily making informed choices in markets free from social structures that constrain our options. This conception of the circumstances of individuals is belied by the facts in which we act, particularly with regard to food.

Twenty-three and one-half million Americans currently live in food deserts. Food deserts occur when there is no access or very limited access to healthy and affordable food. They can occur in urban and rural communities (USDA 2017). Lack of access to fresh, healthy foods leaves individuals in those communities with few options except to purchase fast unhealthy foods. Fast-food outlets or mini-marts are often prevalent in poor urban neighborhoods. For example,

West Oakland, California, a neighborhood of 30,000 people populated primarily by African Americans and Latinos, has one supermarket and thirty-six liquor and convenience stores. The supermarket is not accessible on foot to most of the area's residents. The convenience stores charge twice as much as grocery stores for identical items. Fast food restaurants selling cheap and hot food appear on almost every corner. (Freeman 2007, 2221)

Why people live where they do is not, as is sometimes suggested, merely a product of individual choices and impartial market forces. Segregated urban communities developed in the 1940s when the government, the Federal Housing Administration, and Veterans' Affairs in particular, provided white middle-class families with home loans enabling them to move to the suburbs of cities. Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law (2017) details how the FHA subsidized builders creating suburbs with the requirement that no houses be sold to African Americans. With white movement to the suburbs, many businesses followed, and the development of supermarkets grew in the suburbs, leaving the urban areas without investments and reliable sources of affordable, healthy foods. As a consequence of these government programs and the businesses following suit, "African American families were unable to access the same low-interest home loans as white families due to government sanctioned redlining, restrictive housing covenants, and discrimination, and were left stranded in the cities" (Barker et al. 2012). By 1970 the demographics of the country had drastically changed, and the typical northern African American was "more likely to live with other blacks than with whites" (ibid.). In the 1980s cities continued to lose grocery stores, but there was continued growth of supermarkets in the suburbs. It is important to highlight that "segregated living patterns are not a natural consequence of private choices ... but have been significantly influenced by government policies" (ibid.).

Governmental policies in the housing area demonstrates that these housing patterns are a result of historical institutional racism and not the result of a few "racist" actors. The production of food in minority communities has been affected further by institutional racism. The USDA for decades discriminated against African American and Native American farmers as well as other minority farmers by not providing farm loans to them (Thompson 2010). Those practices led to a sharp decline in the number of minority farmers and illustrates one of the many institutional practices that affected access to capital for minority farmers. Furthermore, fewer minority farmers means less production of foods that connect communities to their cultural food ways, eroding the sustainability of those communities. Native communities lost many of their traditional food ways with dislocation to reservations, the government's prohibition on Native people hunting or fishing off reservation, the provisions of surplus foods not part of Native people's cultural traditions and diet, and from lack of support from the USDA farm loan programs.

Extending the government's role in the current food situation, in the 1930s the government started subsidizing commodity crops like corn and soy. The subsidies resulted in price reductions and surpluses of those foods. Those subsidies continue and are given mostly to large-scale farmers (Imhoff 2012). With the prices down, the food industry created new markets for foods loaded with corn syrup and fat, engineering them to be "irresistible" (Kessler 2009). The food industry spends millions more selling the public on these foods, including direct advertising of unhealthy foods to children, building lifelong tastes for food that is unhealthy.