Food Justice
Who Gets to Eat Well, and Who Decided That?
The neighbourhoods with the fewest supermarkets are rarely the ones that grew the least food — they're the ones whose food systems were most deliberately dismantled.
The Idea
Food justice isn't primarily about nutrition education or personal choice — it's about power: who controls land, water, labour, and distribution, and how those controls were established. The concept pushes back against a comfortable liberal framing in which hunger and poor diet are puzzles to be solved by charity or better consumer information. Instead, it asks a harder question: how did certain communities come to be structurally excluded from the food systems that their own labour often built? The term 'food desert' — a place with limited access to affordable, nutritious food — has been critiqued by food justice advocates as misleading. Deserts are natural. What exists in many under-served urban and rural communities is not a natural absence but an engineered one: the result of redlining, agricultural policy that favoured industrial monocultures, supermarket chains following capital out of low-income neighbourhoods, and the systematic displacement of subsistence farming traditions. Food justice scholars prefer the term 'food apartheid,' coined by activist and farmer Karen Washington, because it names a human decision rather than a geographic fact. At its core, food justice holds that access to culturally appropriate, sustainably produced food is not a lifestyle aspiration — it is a civil right. And reclaiming it requires not just better logistics, but a reckoning with the political and historical conditions that created the problem in the first place.
In the World
In the South Bronx — one of the most food-insecure urban areas in the United States — a woman named Karen Washington co-founded La Familia Verde, a coalition of community gardens, in the late 1990s. The gardens were not a quaint hobby. They were a direct response to the near-total withdrawal of grocery infrastructure from the neighbourhood, combined with a political tradition rooted in the Puerto Rican and African American communities' long history of cultivating land collectively, even in cities. What Washington observed was that the problem was never simply logistical. When community members grew their own food, they weren't 'solving' a market failure — they were reasserting a relationship with land and sustenance that had been interrupted. Yet even those gardens faced threat: as the South Bronx gentrified, green spaces became desirable to developers, and community plots were suddenly 'discovered' by urban planners as amenities — rebranded, fenced off, made beautiful for new residents rather than food-secure for existing ones. Washington's response was to name what was happening. She refused the language of 'food desert' in public interviews and writing, insisting that calling it 'food apartheid' forced the conversation toward intentionality and accountability. Her framing spread. It is now used by researchers, policymakers, and activists who want the vocabulary to carry the weight of the history it describes — not sanitise it.
Why It Matters
Most of us, most of the time, navigate food as a matter of preference — what we feel like cooking, what's in season, what fits around a busy week. That ease is real, and there's nothing wrong in enjoying it. But it exists within a system, and the system has a history. Understanding food justice changes how you read a farmers' market, a fast food cluster, a school lunch programme, or a celebrity chef 'reviving' the cuisine of a culture that was never given the resources to sustain its own food traditions. It sharpens the question behind every policy proposal: who benefits from this, and who was already here? It also opens up something more personal. Many people carry a fraught relationship with 'eating well' — the sense that it is always expensive, always effortful, always somehow a moral failing if it doesn't happen. Food justice relocates that shame. The difficulty isn't a character flaw; it's an outcome. And outcomes — unlike deserts — can be changed.
A Question to Ponder
When you think about the food culture you grew up with, what forces beyond individual taste shaped what was available, affordable, and considered worth eating — and who made those decisions?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable