Food is something many of us take for granted. Supermarkets are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, stocked with foods shipped in from all over the world, providing us with the illusion of health and abundance. We do not often stop to consider where that food came from, whose hands harvested it, how it was grown, and whether it is safe, equally available to all, and produced in a manner that does not degrade and destroy resources and communities.
In this issue of Race, Poverty & the Environment we learn how black farmers in the South are being squeezed from their land, how farm workers are poisoned and underpaid for their work, and how low income people are distanced from safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food. We find out the results of corporate control of our food system, about the threat to the future of the world’s food supply though the loss of genetic diversity, and about the “green revolution” with its high tech, Frankenstein approach to food production.
There is a pervasive paralysis associated with social and environmental reportage—the result of too much focus on the problem and too little attention to the solutions—so we have offered you a section called “Grassroots Models for Change,” examples that can give us all some sense that, even under the most challenging odds, low income communities can gather together and create positive change.
It is our hope that through these diverse perspectives we will discover that a healthy society cannot be separated from a healthy food system, and that a healthy food system must not only sustain human, natural, and biological systems, but must also be equally available to all.
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Editors' Notes
2 About this Issue
by Michael Ableman
Land and Water
3 Reconnecting People to the Land:The Need for Agrarian Reform
by E.G.Vallianatos
5 Black-Owned Land: A Disappearing Community and National Resource
by Jerry Pennick
7 Struggles for Justice in Water Policy: A Perspective on California Water Sales
by Santos Gomez
Biological Diversity
10 Biological Meltdown: The Loss of Agricultural Biodiversity
by Hope Shand
13 Biopiracy, Biodiversity, and People: The Right to Say "No" to Monopoly Patents Exploiting the South's Resources and Knowledge
by Hope Shand
Labor
15 Representing Farm Workers
by Arturo Rodriguez
17 For the Sake of Our Food: A Farm Worker's Story
Food Security
18 Community Food Security and Environmental Justice: Converging Paths Towards Social Justice and Sustainable Communities
by Robert Gottlieb and Andy Fisher
21 Achieving the Human Right to Food Security
by Peter Rosset
Consumer Issues: Food Access
22 No Place to Shop: Food Access Lacking in the Inner City
by Zy Weinberg
Consumer Issues: Food Safety
25 Nuclear Lunch: The Dangers and Unknowns of Food Irradiation
by Jennifer Ferrara and Susan Meeker-Lowry
28 Organizing at the Piers: Creating a Vision for Change
by Wendall Chin
Corporate Agriculture
30 Warning: Corporate Meat and Poultry May Be Hazardous to Workers, Farmers, the Environment and Your Health
by Marc Cooper, Peter Rosset, and Julia Bryson
34 Monsanto's Myths: Examining the Assumptionsof Industrial Agriculture
by Andrew Kimbrell
39 The Industrialization of Agriculture and Environmental Racism: A Deadly Combination Affecting Neighborhoods and the Dinner Table
by David H. Harris, Jr.
42 Hamburger and French Fries: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things
by John C. Ryan and Alan Thien Durning
Grassroots Models for Change
45 Working Towards a Healthy Community: The Laotian Organizing Project in Richmond, CA
by Audrey Chiang and Pamela Chiang
47 Expanded Opportunities in Austin:The Sustainable Food Center
by Kate Fitzgerald
50 Taking the Lead in Building Community: San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners
by Mohammed Nuru and Kate Konschink
52 San Francisco County Jail's Garden Project
53 Gardening as Therapy
53 Words from Tomlyn Shannon, a Formerly Homeless Mother
54 Singing Like We Mean It: NativeFood Systems, Health and Culture
by Tristan Reader
56 Urban Habitat Program News
56 CRPE News
Resources
57 Food Resources