Cultivation Food Justice Reading Response

Elizabeth Zasowski

Cultivation Food Justice Reading Response

Sociology 363

Spring 2015

Professor Randall

Word Count:

Cultivating Food Justice Reading Response

The book Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, is an empowering read about the modern food movement and social justice when it comes to something we cannot live without in our world… FOOD! Cultivating Food Justice is packed with information when it comes to the food movement, why it came about and what is all being done about it to improve our society with not just food, but food when it comes to race, culture, social classes, and everything in between. The book is composed on four different sections. The first section, the “Production of Unequal Access” the second, “Consumption denied”, the third, “Will Work for Food Justice”, and finally “Future Directions”. While all of these sections come together to inform the reader of the motivations, true purposes, and passion behind the food movement and food justice, the very first section is so important in opening up the eyes to those uneducated about food justice.

To begin the ‘food movement’ in introduced before diving deep into the book. The authors paint us a picture of something that is talked about greatly that the food movement is fighting against, industrial monoculture. The authors ask us to “picture a field of corn stretching out into the horizon. Each evenly spaced stalk is genetically identical. Each needs exactly the same amount of water, fertilizer, sunlight, and time as every other… for this reason the cultivation and collection of this field can be entirely mechanized… this approach toward farming, called monoculture, ensures that the finished product will always meet the specifications required for processing, which will transform it into everything from animal feed to Coca-Cola.” (2011). This to me, describes industrial monoculture perfectly and grabbed my attention right off the bat. How unnatural is it...