Food Justice and the Industrial Food System

Organizational Food Justice: Exploring Social Movements and Resistance to Industrial Agriculture presents food justice as resistance to the current industrial food system in the US from the perspective of discourse and practice. The book frames the injustices of the current industrial food system with an emphasis on growing levels of hunger and obesity in the US, poor wages among farm and food workers, abuse of farmworker labor, and unsustainable farm incomes. Organizational Food Justice examines the industrial food system from the perspective of discourse and practice and introduces food-related social movements that have arisen since the 1960s as resistance. These movements include the organic food movement, the Slow Food movement, the labor justice movement (including the rise of the United Farm Workers Organization and, more recently, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers), the Food Sovereignty movement as well as growing interest in urban agriculture (including guerilla gardening) and producer agricultural cooperatives. To conclude, the book discusses the future of the food system in the US given these varied and competing discourses and practices. While there has been work on social movements that has emphasized discourse and practice, that work has never been contextualized in the wider industrial food system or in relation to other forms of resistance to the system or books that look at the food system from a discursive or practice perspective with respect to organizational or field change. This unique book offers a critical perspective on the industrial food system and educates readers around how different organizations are practicing food justice whilst also offering readers insight into the future of food system given these competing discourses and practices.