The Potential of Food Movements and Intersectional Food Inequalities

With varied goals and constituencies, social movements have mobilized against injustices within the food system and built alternative food practices. Peasant movements have denounced class inequalities in access to land, credits, and production policies. Alliances between agrarian and feminist movements have explored connections between these agendas. Food justice movements emerged in the USA denouncing institutional racism in the food system. Decolonial struggles for territorial rights and food sovereignty led by indigenous movements and black rural communities in Latin America also fight for autonomy to reproduce culturally appropriated foodways. There is an open debate regarding the emancipatory potential of food movements. For instance, whether green and healthy consumption foster neoliberal subjectivities (Guthmann2008), which substitute politics and collective action and creates new inequalities such as class-divided diets (Friedmann 2005). Another issue is how local and alternative food networks create exclusions such as class privilege, racial privilege and defensive localisms, (Goodmann et al. 2012; Allen 2010). The ambivalences of peasant movements are also under debate, such as how to reconcile the defense of family farming with the fight against gender inequalities (Agarwal 2014); the importance of not defaulting to the use of technology tout-court (Kloppenburg 2014); the need to engage with international and domestic markets, as well as with the state, in order to shape an alternative agrarian development model that responds to global challenges (Edelman et al. 2014). The session invites papers working on the emancipatory potentials and limitations of food movements in addressing multiple dimensional and intersectional food inequalities.