Table Of ContentMARGINALIZING ACCESS TO THE
SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEM
_________________________
An Examination of Oakland’s Minority Districts
_________________________
Camille Tuason Mata
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iii
Dedication
This book is dedicated first and foremost to my family. I also dedicate this book
to food system activists and policymakers, who inspired this topic. I hope they,
whoever they are, will read these pages and feel equally inspired to promote
inclusive and sustainable food systems everywhere. And finally, to Goddard
College, which supported my effort to complete the Individualized Master of
Arts program and allowed me to finish this study.
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xi
1. Introduction: Framing the Indicators for Measuring
Minority Food Access 1
2. Community Food Security: An Evolving Concept 18
3. Localizing Food Security: Oakland’s Experience 43
4. The History of Farming Access for Minority Farmers 72
5. Historicizing Access to the Sustainable Food System
through CSAs, Farmer’s Markets, and Urban Gardens 105
6. Summarizing Marginalization and Concluding Remarks 134
7. Bibliography 138
About the Author 153
Preface
I cannot say exactly when I first became interested in the sustainable food
system as a matter of life and death. Perhaps it began when case studies of
activists and scholars, who either grew their own food or studied people who
did, began to materialize as I perused through literature, like the Urban
Agriculture Magazine, which showcased different urban food efforts around the
world and the Cultural Survival Quarterly, which brought to light the social and
environmental challenges facing indigenous people, for whom the forest is
livelihood. Perhaps the interest was always there, dormant, waiting to be revived
by the fortitude of people struggling to improve food availability in their
communities. What I do know is that whenever I came across a case study, there
was something about the rawness of the people in need, catalyzing urban
farming to produce food in their community, resonated with that part of my
childhood when I learned how to crouch in the dusk, waiting for turtles to come
in from the sea and lay their eggs in the sands of the seashore signifying the
distinguishing features of my birthplace, Laoag, a coastline city in the province
of Ilocos Norte located at the northern-most part of Luzon Island. I wanted to be
a part of those people, foraging, growing, or gathering their food, for it was
where I felt most at home.
As I learned more about sustainable food systems and began to slowly piece
together its sometimes divergent dimensions, I arrived at new and related
questions, which enquired about larger, systematic mechanisms regarding the
integration of land and ecology with the production, manufacturing, and
marketing operations of food, especially among regional entrepreneurs. How
might these operations come together to truly build a solid infrastructure that
promised security in food access and, presently, how do they not? I was
especially curious about the inclusiveness of the food system that I kept
reverting back to nagging questions: who are chronically left out and how do we
include those who want to be more deeply included? Most of the studies I came
upon have failed to represent the food system as a comprehensive mechanism of
demographics, ecology, economy, and urban dynamics, writing about these
dimensions instead as separate topics. These dimensions, I soon discovered,
were really caveats to a well-functioning sustainable food system that needed to
be reconciled with inequalities in health and hunger conditions resulting from
viii Preface
marginalization.
These knowledge discoveries led me to the central question I sought to
answer with this book: how foods-deficient are minority residents in Oakland
and how has the condition of food insecurity changed over time? Subsequently, I
asked what the connection was between food deficiency and access, but more
specifically how has inequality been inadvertently or intentionally woven into
the sustainable food system. I further enquired about the connection between
environmental health to eating and to the sustainable production of food. I posed
these questions to myself as theoretical as well as grounded queries. Throughout
the framing and doing phases of my study, I found myself continuously asking
where minorities fit into the sustainability of the food system.
Although I learned a lot about what the implications are of studying
minority marginalization to civic action and to making policy (where bridges to
the food system might need to be built) and understood the value of being more
stringent about organic farming, in the course of doing my study I nevertheless
found gaps in research pertaining to minority inclusion in sustainable food
systems. These gaps might serve as research questions for future studies on food
systems in Oakland or elsewhere. Some of these questions were: what policy
measures would help to revive the entrepreneurial spirit among African
Americans connected to food access? Would inquiring about the reasons why
Oakland residents, who qualify for food stamps, are not claiming them aid in
better understanding the causes of food insecurity from a different angle? What
are the food security potentials of a food incubator project that ties food access
with Green Economy projects occurring around the country? What novel
partnerships between CSA farms, food markets, and food manufacturers and
minority neighborhoods can be discovered, and how might food security be
better achieved from this nexus? How might cities expand their urban open
spaces to attain the urban food productivity that has been postulated by some
researchers? What are the national and state participation rates of minority
farmers in organic farming? Research on minority participation in organic
farming is an area that needs to grow before we can get a better sense about the
potential for minority integration into the sustainable food system.
At the core of these intersectional questions is the role of minorities. How
can minorities, who continue to be at the margins of American society, be more
central figures in planning for and maintaining a reliable and sustainable food
system? Clearly, there is much more to learn about how to make the sustainable
food system truly inclusive. It is my hope that this manuscript inspires more
integrated and systematic studies on the food system and eventually leads to
community and regional food systems becoming more sustainable, more
extensive in its reach along the food chain and across geographical boundaries,
and above all, more inclusive.
And now, a word about the complexity of converting this research into a
book-the sustainable food system in Oakland is in constant change. I discovered
this when updating data and information in order to make the knowledge
contained in these chapters more contemporary. In the three years since July
Preface ix
2009, when I completed the master’s thesis version of this book, both old and
new players had emerged in the urban food arena in Oakland. The Mandela
Food Cooperative had finally become a physical reality, Phat Beets Market and
food stalls had become a weekly mainstay in the North Oakland community, and
the Handy Harvest Club CSA, which forays into Oakland upon request, had
come into being. Many of these changes were initiated by residents, which is the
way it has been for a long time and, I suspect, will be for many more years to
come. I have accommodated these recent transformations in the book as much as
I could and to the best of my ability. Any mistakes and/or misunderstandings are
purely my own. My apologies in advance to those, who might see themselves
misrepresented in these pages.
