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A Farming and Food Justice Reading List
6 books for learning about how corporate food took over the world and what we can do about it
While the COVID-19 crisis continues to ravage the global population, food workers in the United States have been especially hard hit. From the meat-processing plants deemed “essential” business to the farms where produce is grown, keeping the industrial food supply moving has meant many low-wage, mostly immigrant workers are putting their lives at risk so that supermarkets continue to be well-stocked.
That makes it more imperative than ever to read up on food justice movements and how industrialized, corporate food took over the world. Among Black farmers, especially, there has always been a radical element to working on the land. As Ashley Gripper recently wrote at Environmental Health News:
While some dominant modern narratives talk about urban agriculture as an innovative way to build community and fight food insecurity, Black folks in this country have been growing food in cities for as long as they have lived in cities. Before that, our ancestors lived in deep relationship with the land.
Here, six books to read to deepen an understanding of the connections between farming and food justice.
1. ‘Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement’ by Dr. Monica M. White
Dr. White is assistant professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in this book, she reframes agriculture — commonly and historically understood as a site of Black oppression — as a place of liberation. “This book recovers the efforts of black land- owners as well as the civil rights activism of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers,” she writes in the first chapter. “It focuses its attention on those who refused to migrate and who fought to stay in the South and maintain communities around agriculture. This book…
