Food Justice Undone

Why Hanna Garth's latest is important reading

There’s a lot to love in Hanna Garth’s Food Justice Undone, including the ambiguities of the title:

“Undone” in that these projects did not shift the everyday realities of healthy food access for South Central residents. On a more profound register, justice was undone in the sense that the liberatory potential of this movement was foreclosed, and nascent forms of trust and collaboration that blossomed in some food justice work were inevitably unraveled as outsiders took over within movement spaces that had potential for radical change, instead undermining the desires of residents. Justice was also undone in the sense that it is not a finished project.

Within those three registers of ‘undone’, she relates a rich and engaged history of different folk within the world of food justice, across class and race in Los Angeles.

In the intersection of race and class, I was taken with a particularly heartbreaking story of an activist whose obligations to donors ended up blunting his duties to the community, and betraying a fidelity to emancipatory politics. There’s a book about this too, which Hanna cites, as relevant now as when it was published in 2007: the Revolution will not be Funded.