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Looking back to look forward

One of the things I have long struggled with in my own writing is whether, how and where in a paper to define the term food justice. In recent years, I have settled on the how, borrowing a definition from Rasheed Hislop (2014, 19) who described the concept as “the struggle against racism, exploitation, and oppression taking place within the food system that addresses inequality’s root causes both within and beyond the food chain”. I like that the definition foregrounds racism, which is supremely important to the activists I have been honoured to work with and write about, but also notes oppression more generally, leaving room for inequalities like gender, class and national status. The definition also includes the word exploitation, which to me implies labour, and coheres with the increasing prominence of workers’ rights issues within the movement. The end of the definition talks about where these inequalities come from. It depicts food justice as both a movement to address oppression and exploitation in the food system, and a lens through which to address oppressions and exploitations more generally. Here food becomes a means to connect our bodies and everyday practices to larger struggles for environmental sustainability and social justice, or as Julian Agyeman (2005) calls it, just sustainability. Rasheed is both Black and a child of immigrants, and it seems important to privilege a voice like his in a movement in which funders and media gatekeepers often foreground the work of white-run organisations (Reynolds and Cohen 2016). Moreover, I appreciate that while Rasheed developed this definition in the context of his master’s thesis research, he currently works for Project Green Thumb in New York City. It seems fitting that the movement should be defined by an activist, and that activists should be involved in a conversation that too often takes place at expensive (inter)disciplinary conferences and in the pages of academic journals. My own research and writing on food justice began about a decade before Rasheed coined his wonderful definition, and in the beginning, I struggled greatly with what I thought the concept means. Indeed, when Julian Agyeman and I first submitted Cultivating Food Justice for publication, the only reviewer comment I clearly remember was that we did not explicitly define the term in the introduction. We borrowed a definition from Just Food, another NYC food justice organisation, which wrote that it was “communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat [food that is] fresh, nutritious, affordable, culturally appropriate, and grown locally with care for the well-being of the land, workers, and animals”. Sensitive to the centrality of race to food justice, we followed with the Detroit Black Community Food Security Coalition’s assertion that those communities that have been most marginalised by the agribusiness system need to “lead the movement to provide food for the members of their community” (White 2010, 204). Julian’s and my task in Cultivating was to set out a vision for an academic field that would complement and analyze this movement, one that could attend to injustices throughout the food system while analyzing activist goals and strategy. We traced the roots of food justice scholarship to four antecedent discourses: environmental justice (which like food justice is both a movement and a field of scholarship), critical race theory, writing about the sustainable agriculture movement, and food studies. We argued that “only in this newly emergent body of work on food justice that the racialized political economy of food production and distribution meets the cultural politics of food