This month we celebrate both World Cities Day and World Food Day. But what happens when our cities don’t feed us?
I’m here to talk about Food Justice, a term that isn’t fully defined in UK contexts – in part because of the lack of clarity on the justice part of the term. You could say that Food Justice has two key goals; healthy/environmentally friendly food systems and equitable access to said food. In the UK, there seems to have been considerable time spent on the former, less so on the latter.
But to really understand Food Justice, it’s useful to look at the history of the Food Justice movement in North America.
If we go all the way back to when North America was first colonised, settler colonialism tore down Indigenous food systems and replaced it with colonial food systems; as a tool of war, to enforce assimilation to a settler diet, and for appropriation of settler food for settler consumption. Creating an unhealthy forced dependence from indigenous people on their settler government.
In the early twentieth century in the US, Black Americans were segregated/redlined (a discriminatory practice in which services are withheld from neighbourhoods that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities) and forced into food insecurity. These same communities developed a network of decentralised small-scale food businesses and cooperatives to gain economic independence and challenge the racist structures forced on them.
White people in power continued to cut off access to food as a strategy of disempowering Black residents who were fighting for civil rights in the 1960s. Community organising, petition and protest galvanised the change to reinstate food programmes.
Food Justice movements in the US have always placed social justice at the heart of their activism. A commitment to justice is inherent in their work. This contrasts with the food activism we see here in the UK which ‘has tended to be dominated by white, middle-class consumers concentrating on the development of local food systems and individualised consumptive logics of social change that reinforce social privilege and fail to address the underlying structural causes of food injustice’.
My question is: why wouldn’t we, in the UK, also place at least as much (if not more) emphasis on the justice element as we do the food element?
We are not lacking food, yet in 2024/25 Trussell supplied 2.89 million food parcels. (Sometimes I think that shortening our numbers doesn’t help when trying to emphasise the sheer number that we are discussing. 2.89 million aka 2,890,000).
And in terms of food security by ethnicity? The UK Food Security report wrote that white households had the highest level of food security while Black, African, Caribbean, or Black British households had the lowest level of food security. To top that off, culturally appropriate food provided by food banks is insufficient, and there are reports of accessibility issues too.
If you are; disabled, living in a household with children under 16, currently homeless or homeless in the last 12 months, from an ethnic minority group, in care as a child, or of working age living alone then you are more likely to experience food insecurity than the average UK general population.
From my perspective, these statistics are a wake up call to place justice at the heart of our food activism too.
I was interested to see: how are OnePlanet users addressing Food Justice?
At National level, a few policies seek to address these themes. For example, the National Food Strategy for England has outcomes aiming to ‘Reduce diet-related inequality’ and ‘Escape the junk food cycle to protect the NHS’, amongst others.
Some actions listed include:
- School meals and out of school time funded schemes
- School healthy diet education
And the collaborative-co-created Young Leaders Manifesto addresses aspects of Food Justice with outcomes such as; ‘Access to sustainable, healthy diets’. It expands on this, explaining that strategies should ‘Promote planet-friendly diets which are rich in whole foods and provide support to residents so they can access sustainable, healthy foods.’
Some of the grassroots action that has been mapped on the platform seems to be the most relevant to addressing Justice alongside Food including outcomes such as: ‘Increased community food resilience, environmental awareness, and local food production’ and ‘Improved Food Security’ which is linked to ‘Social Support’.
There is a lot that Government strategies and policies could learn from grassroots initiatives. These strategies and policies can be connected to the grassroots initiatives on OnePlanet to build a holistic and representative picture of the work that is happening to address Food Justice in the UK today. I have hope that this approach can build a UK that places Justice at the heart of our food movements.
I have barely scratched the surface here. This is a broad topic with lots of intersecting parts and there is so much more to be discussed and addressed, including;
- Accessibility
- Healthy food rather than unhealthy food
- Food as a weapon
- Food deserts
- Waste
- Rights of people down the supply chain – workers/farmers/distributors