ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of food justice focused on its roots in environmental justice, alternative agriculture and food studies. Food justice scholarship and activism combine alternative agriculture's critique of industrial food with environmental justice's emphasis on the distribution of benefits and harms and food studies' attention to the links between food and identity. The chapter concludes by speculating on future directions for theory and practice. Food justice scholars examine inequalities through the lens of consumption, and argue that low-income communities and communities of colour face a variety of obstacles to the consumption of local and organic food, and that supporters of sustainable agriculture have not done enough to bridge these barriers. North American food justice activists are increasingly connecting with allies rooted in peasant movements for food sovereignty throughout the Global South. In addition, North American communities discuss their struggles in terms of sovereignty and independence, even as they engage the state and corporations around issues of land use.
