Food Justice

(Cross-listed as UEP 50.) Food justice as a concept and practice, both historically and in the present. Migration and farmworker organizing; health and inequitable food distribution; finance capitalism, farm lending, and institutional racism; plantations and the under-acknowledged contributions of dispossessed peoples to agricultural development and food culture; cultural appropriation; indigenous land theft and reclamation; food sovereignty and political autonomy; agri-chemicals, toxicity, and environmental violence; and the politics of cheap food. The idea of “justice” is an open question in this class — not a pre-defined ideal: what it means to apply varied and culturally-specific notions of justice to non-human subjects such as landscapes, seeds, and animals. Readings drawn from anthropology and human geography center on the United States and Mexico.