Taqwa Community Farm Director Abu Talib, works in the half-acre park operated as a community farm in the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City. by Preston Keres, U.S. Department of Agriculture is in the Public Domain.
"Food justice is the path to a more compassionate, interconnected, and resilient world."
- Raj Patel
In unit 5 students will learn why agro-industrial products pervade places like the South Bronx and what can be done about it. This unit enables students to learn about how food apartheid makes access to real food even more difficult for the people who reside in or near them – primarily people of color. Students will research the link between land sovereignty, sustainability and solutions to food injustice.
What has been done to address the lack of food security and food justice in inner cities? As social justice creates social medicine problems, and public health is a response to industrialization and its outcome of urbanization, urban planning movements such as the Growing Food and Justice Initiative for all (GFJI) have surfaced to offer food security planning.
Such movements reshape cites so they have more sustainability built-in. These movements involve community-based problem solving as planners and local growers collaborate to create solutions that food industrialization has caused, especially for low-income urban communities. Food systems become visible through outreach, and people of color across the US grow by deciding to do the hard work of creating systems of growing that work for them, and to do the farming themselves. Such reconstruction in the form of farms and community gardens is how people of color can obtain food security and food justice.
Reconstructing empowers such communities in agricultural production, healthier consumption, autonomy and local politics. NY has a system of urban food production and community based activism, as lots of NYC farms and gardens exist and offer their participants to escape victimization of agroindustry food options and retain their culture and traditions.