Why food justice isn’t being served in America | Hanna Garth

A view of produce on display at Smart & Final grocery store on Crenshaw Boulevard in south Los Angeles on 29 March 22024. Photograph: Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A view of produce on display at Smart & Final grocery store on Crenshaw Boulevard in south Los Angeles on 29 March 22024. Photograph: Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images This article is more than 1 month old Why food justice isn’t being served in America This article is more than 1 month old Hanna Garth Advocates often assume communities of color just don’t know any better when it comes to eating healthy I met the man I’ll call Randy Johnson 13 years ago, as I began research in South Central Los Angeles . I’m an anthropologist who explores how people think about food and use food in their everyday lives. As executive director of a large food justice organization focused on K-12 education throughout the city, Randy was a key source. He talked to me about South Central’s status as a food desert, where its majority Latinx and Black residents had little access to groceries or healthy food. A middle-aged white man, Randy told me of his work in South Central, which centered around encouraging school-age children to eat more fresh vegetables. He described South Central as a wasteland of sorts. “There is just nothing there,” he said, pointing to the common but false idea that there were no grocery stores there. He then pivoted to talking about the residents. “I see them having almost zero education when it comes to [making healthy eating choices]. They don’t know that what they’re eating is destroying them slowly. It’s just that we, as a society, have failed our citizens to educate them that they shouldn’t be buying the fries every day.” Randy was not alone in portraying South Central as a place with nothing, filled with people who know next to nothing. Over and over again, I heard this idea of a knowledge and resource gap from food justice advocates, usually applied to communities of color. In 2024, a call for grant proposals stated that “fresh fruit and vegetables are almost non-existent in South Los Angeles food retail stores”. My research found quite the contrary, documenting the dozens of full-service grocery stores, smaller independent markets, fish markets and myriad other places where residents access food in South Central. For over a decade, I have watched groups of well-meaning food justice activists, who were rarely from South Central, draw on a range of assumptions about what people in places like South Central eat and how they should change what they eat. Their assumptions were wrong. But they still built programs and projects based on those notions. And as I explain in my new book Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement , that mistaken foundation – and the fact that advocates rarely asked what people actually ate and what they wanted – is one of the fundamental problems with the food justice movement and why