ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the edited collection by developing “organizing eating” as a framework for understanding the role of communication in maintaining and challenging the inequities of U.S. food systems. Throughout, the volume demonstrates communication’s centrality by highlighting some of the ways that eating is being organized to maintain inequalities across lines of race, gender, and class. Contributors similarly explore how communication is being mobilized toward greater equity, such as through the creation of communication infrastructures. Throughout, there is a focus on the ways that dominant, hegemonic forms of organizing are actively reproduced, maintained, and sustained. Such a view emphasizes that food systems always have the potential to be undone, reconfigured, and remade around a different set of values or priorities that can better serve the needs of justice and equity. Communication and organizing are at the center of these efforts.
