As the sustainable agriculture movement in the U.S. evolves, it faces the challenges of integration and inclusivity. Including social justice questions within sustainable agriculture education facilitates broader discussions about inequality and who benefits from this education and its practice. In this article, we present a case study in which we share our process and lessons learned from our student-led effort to integrate social justice work within the sustainable agriculture graduate curriculum at a Midwest public land-grant university. We analyze different sources and data to discuss: a) how students’ efforts can lead to curriculum development, change, and implementation; b) how integrating social justice within sustainable agriculture curricula can fulfill existing gaps in content and pedagogy; and c) professional and personal lessons learned from this process. Conclusions and recommendations center on how programs undergoing or considering embarking on similar endeavors can learn from our efforts.

Within the past couple of years, conversations about the agricultural industry and determining what is fair for consumers along with farmworkers has entered public discourse because of items such as the Farm Bill. These movements discuss monetary hardships and creating sustainable food systems, but what is lacking from the conversation is the issue of race, culture, and space in determining how to support farmers and feed America. In Cultivating Food Justice, editors Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman compile work from numerous researchers that analyzes and challenges current food systems that enable social inequalities from producer to consumer.

This essay analyzes Joel Salatin’s celebrity as a sustainable farmer to explore the ways his public persona manages underlying tensions in the alterative food movement. Using his many film appearances as well as ethnographic notes from a full day workshop with Salatin as data, this paper explores how Salatin’s celebrity status obscures many of the challenges facing food activists behind the veneer of the charming, folksy farmer and the rhetoric of freedom (freedom from the corporate food system and corrupt government practices). The tensions between Salatin’s free-market, anti-regulation politics and the mainstream environmental movement, we argue, are managed and contained through nostalgic images of Salatin as the white, male, yeoman farmer and the masculinization of sustainability. By using an appeal to traditional masculinities to market sustainable food to the mainstream, Salatin’s celebrity (like all celebrity identities) works to support consumption and market-driven solutions to current environmental and food justice crises. In the process, these solutions ignore how the market itself is culpable in creating such crises. By obscuring this tautology, Salatin’s celebrity suggests we can consume our way out of the injustices of the current food system.

The following is an interview with Dr. Cornelia Flora, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University. Dr. Flora has led an amazingly rich career in partnership with her husband, Jan Flora, also a Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University where they developed the Community Capitals Framework and have engaged in participatory research with farmers and organizers across Latin America and with the Hopi Nation. JCTP Editor, Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, had the opportunity to engage in a discussion with Dr. Flora after a seminar session at her home in Ames, Iowa this past January, 2014.

Abstract

Problems of food access, food insecurity and hunger, are linked to numerous adverse health outcomes as well as highlight social justice problems, such as spatial segregation and neighborhood deprivation, within the larger food system. This project explores the links between food systems, access, and food practices among low-income residents living in the Queensbridge micro-neighborhood located within the larger neighborhood of Long Island City, NYC. Given the complexity of the issues surrounding the food system and the differential impacts on people across various socio-economic statuses the aims of this study include gaining a better understanding of the issues and processes involved among low-income community members related to the ways in which they source and consume food in the conventional and alternative food systems. These issues are examined through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research with members of a community-based advocacy organization, as well as community members living in and around the Queensbridge micro-neighborhood, and staff members and volunteers of area community-based organizations. Findings in this study focus on participants’ perceptions and experience of the food environment in this community utilizing a food justice framework to interrogate the forms of race and class based differences that undergird residents’ food practices.