About This Unit

Who eats well, who labors in the fields, and whose neighborhoods get supermarkets are not separate questions — they are one geography. This unit examines food as a system through which racial inequality is produced and contested: from the plantation economies that organized American agriculture around unfree Black and, later, exploited immigrant labor, to the present-day distribution of grocery stores, farmland ownership, and farmworker protections. The unit's vocabulary begins with a correction: Bronx farmer and organizer Karen Washington's argument that "food desert" — a term suggesting natural barrenness — should be replaced by "food apartheid," which names a human-made system of unequal access with discernible causes and beneficiaries.

The unit's scholarship insists equally on the other half of the story: food as a tool of Black freedom. Bobby J. Smith II shows that the Mississippi civil rights movement was also a food struggle — white officials weaponized food aid against sharecroppers who registered to vote, and activists answered with cooperatives and food programs. Monica White recovers the agricultural resistance behind the freedom movement, from Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative onward, while Leah Penniman's Soul Fire Farm carries that lineage into the present as practice. Alongside, the unit holds the labor question — the largely Latinx and immigrant workforce whose bodies bear the food system's costs — so that "sustainability" is asked to include the people who do the work.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain "food apartheid" and distinguish it from "food desert," identifying what the change in language changes in analysis and remedy.
• Trace how food has been used as a weapon of racial control and as a tool of freedom struggle, using the civil rights–era South as the central case.
• Analyze the racialized organization of agricultural labor, from sharecropping to today's largely immigrant farm workforce, and evaluate one current labor-rights model.
• Assess a contemporary food justice practice — urban farming, cooperatives, land return, fair-food certification — for what it remedies, what it cannot, and how success should be measured.

Keywords

• Food justice
• Food apartheid
• Food sovereignty
• Agrarian racial capitalism
• Farmworker justice
• Collective agency and community resilience

Open Educational Resources

• Brones, Anna. "Karen Washington: It's Not a Food Desert, It's Food Apartheid." Guernica, May 2018. Read the interview.

Interview · Open access.

The interview in which Washington — Bronx community gardener, farmer, and food-justice organizer — makes the case that "food desert" naturalizes what policy created, and offers "food apartheid" because it "brings us to the more important question: What are some of the social inequalities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices?" The piece grounds the unit's central term in its author and her Bronx organizing — Garden of Happiness, La Familia Verde coalition — rather than in abstraction, and models how movement language reshapes scholarship: the unit's books cite this interview.

• Soul Fire Farm (organizational site and resource library). Explore the site.

Organization site with curricula, reading lists, and action guides · Open access.

The Afro-Indigenous-centered community farm co-founded by Leah Penniman in upstate New York, working "to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land" — through farmer training for Black and Brown growers, food distribution, and policy organizing. The site's open resource library (reading lists, reparations map, curricula) makes the farm a teachable institution: learners see food sovereignty as an operating practice with budgets, programs, and politics, not an aspiration.

• USDA Food Access Research Atlas (interactive mapping tool). Open the Atlas.

Federal data tool · Open access.

The USDA's census-tract-level mapping of food access — the empirical instrument behind most "food desert" statistics, mapping distance to supermarkets crossed with income and vehicle access. Included deliberately as a text to read critically: learners use the Atlas to profile a neighborhood, then apply Washington's and Reese's critiques to the tool itself — what its supermarket-distance definition of access captures, and what (quality, prices, ownership, dignity, gardens, corner stores) it cannot see. A lesson in how measurement frames remedy.

• Coalition of Immokalee Workers — Fair Food Program. Visit the coalition's site.

Organization site · Open access.

The farmworker-led human-rights organization that transformed Florida's tomato fields — historically among the most abusive workplaces in American agriculture, with documented slavery prosecutions — through the Fair Food Program: worker-drafted codes of conduct, penny-per-pound premiums, and legally binding agreements with retail buyers, enforced by worker-to-worker education and independent auditing. Gives the unit's labor thread a working model with measurable results, and the scaffold for the unit's second case study.

Key Scholarship

• Garth, Hanna. Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement. Oakland: University of California Press, 2026. Publisher page.

Book.

Garth's ethnography turns a critical eye on the food justice movement itself. Drawing on twelve years of research, much of it in South Central Los Angeles, she asks why efforts to expand access to healthy food in low-income communities of color so often reproduce the inequalities and stereotypes they set out to undo. Her central argument is that "food justice" and "healthy food" can operate as racially coded language — framing the health problems of Black and brown communities as matters of individual behavior to be corrected rather than structures to be changed, and casting mostly white, more affluent outsiders as the agents of improvement. Examining both large structures and the micro-level dynamics of particular programs, Garth shows how power operates inside movements that understand themselves as progressive. The book gives the unit its most searching internal critique — a caution that good intentions and better access do not by themselves make justice — while holding open the possibility of genuine multiracial coalition.

• Smith, Bobby J., II. Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Publisher page.

Book.

Smith re-examines the Mississippi movement as a food struggle: in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, white officials weaponized food — cutting federal commodities to counties where sharecroppers registered to vote, as in the 1962–63 Greenwood food blockade — and Black communities answered by making food a tool of resistance, from relief drives to cooperatives. The book follows the story to the Delta's present-day youth-led food justice movement. Inaugural title of UNC's Black Food Justice series and winner of the 2024 ASFS First Book Prize, and the unit's bridge between history and the contemporary movement.

• Reese, Ashanté M. Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Reese's ethnography of D.C.'s Deanwood neighborhood documents how segregation, disinvestment, and supermarket flight produced unequal food access — and refuses the deficit narrative, centering residents' "geographies of self-reliance": gardens, memory, corner-store relationships, and everyday navigation. The book gives the unit its scholarly elaboration of food apartheid (with Washington's interview as a named source) and its methodological lesson: how to study deprivation without writing people as victims only.

• Penniman, Leah. Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2018. Find the book.

Book (practical guide and history).

Equal parts farming manual and freedom genealogy: Penniman interleaves practical instruction — soil, seeds, business plans — with the African and African American agricultural knowledge it descends from, from West African dark-earth practices to George Washington Carver's regenerative methods and the cooperative tradition. The book embodies the unit's claim that sustainability talk is incomplete without its Black intellectual history, and pairs directly with the unit's Soul Fire Farm resource as theory with dirt under its nails.

• White, Monica M. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Publisher page.

Book.

White recovers the agricultural wing of the freedom struggle: Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and Detroit's urban growers, developing "collective agency and community resilience" as the framework — land and food as the material base of political independence. The book supplies the unit's conceptual pair to Smith's food-as-weapon: agriculture as the freedom movement's quiet infrastructure, and the lineage today's urban farms explicitly claim.

• Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013 (updated ed. 2023). Publisher page.

Book.

Holmes — physician and anthropologist — migrated, picked, and was detained alongside Triqui farmworkers from Oaxaca to document how the food system's hierarchy is written on bodies: who picks crouching, who supervises standing, whose knees and backs absorb the strawberry's true cost, and how clinics misread the resulting injuries as cultural traits. The book carries the unit's labor thread and its Latinx and Indigenous archive, insisting that "sustainable" food systems be audited for the workers inside them.

Case Studies

• Food Apartheid and the Bronx: Karen Washington's Borough

The USDA Food Access Research Atlas and Bronx food-justice institutions · Local mapping and institutional profile.

A two-part activity in which learners use the USDA Food Access Research Atlas to profile food access in the Bronx and then test the tool against Washington's critique, before profiling the borough institutions answering food apartheid — community gardens, garden coalitions and their farmers markets, and local farms. The case study asks what community growing changes at neighborhood scale and what only policy can.

• The Fair Food Program: Can Workers Govern a Supply Chain?

Coalition of Immokalee Workers materials and independent assessments · Labor-model evaluation.

A labor-model evaluation in which learners reconstruct how the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' Fair Food Program works — worker-authored code, binding buyer agreements, market consequences — compare it with the corporate social-responsibility auditing it was built to replace, and debate why worker-driven enforcement has spread to some crops and states but not others. The case study gives the labor thread a genuine evaluative question rather than a settled moral.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Washington: "Food desert" versus "food apartheid" is a one-word dispute with large stakes. Lay out what each term implies about cause and remedy, then take a position: does the language we use for a problem change what gets done about it? Use one concrete example.
2. On Smith: In the Greenwood blockade, food aid was cut precisely because sharecroppers registered to vote. What does this episode reveal about the relationship between material dependence and political freedom? Where do you see versions of that relationship now?
3. On White and Penniman: Both present farming as a freedom practice — an inheritance from Hamer's cooperative to today's urban farms. What does land offer a freedom movement that marches and lawsuits do not? What are the limits of agriculture as politics?
4. On Holmes: Holmes shows the food system's hierarchy inscribed on workers' bodies — who stoops, who stands, whose pain is misdiagnosed as culture. Trace one item from your own table back through its labor chain as far as you can. Where does your knowledge stop, and why does it stop there?
5. On Garth: Garth argues that "food justice" and "healthy food" can work as racially coded language — locating the problem in the eating habits of low-income communities of color rather than in the structures around them. Take one food justice intervention you have seen or read about — a farmers market, a nutrition program, a new grocery store — and ask whose behavior it treats as the thing to be fixed. What would the same goal look like if it targeted structures instead?
6. Synthesis: A supermarket opens in a neighborhood long without one. Using at least two of the unit's frameworks, write the optimistic reading and the skeptical reading of this event — and name what you would need to know to decide between them.

Further Readings and Resources

• Garth, Hanna, and Ashanté M. Reese, eds. Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Publisher page.

Edited volume.

An edited collection that gathers scholars and practitioners around Black food practices, centering Black communities as agents rather than objects of food justice work. The essays range across urban agriculture, foodways, land, and health, and take up the question the volume's subtitle poses — what comes "in the wake of" a food justice movement that has often spoken about Black communities more than with them. A natural next step after Reese's monograph for readers who want the wider field.

• Smith, Bobby J., II. "Food as a Weapon" (excerpt from Food Power Politics). UNC Press Blog, 2024. Read the excerpt.

Openly available book excerpt.

An openly readable excerpt from the introduction to Food Power Politics, laying out Smith's central claim that food functioned as a weapon in the Mississippi movement — withheld from communities that organized and registered to vote. It carries the argument of the full book in compact form, making it a useful pre-reading before the monograph or a stand-alone substitute for learners who cannot access the book itself.

• "The Greenwood Food Blockade." Southern Foodways Alliance, 2018. Read the feature.

Documentary feature (online).

A documentary feature from the Southern Foodways Alliance on the 1962–63 Greenwood food blockade, when officials in the Mississippi Delta cut federal food aid to punish Black residents for voter registration drives. Told through narrative and oral history, it puts faces and detail to the episode Smith analyzes, and pairs closely with the opening of Food Power Politics as an accessible entry into the unit's central historical case.

• Penniman, Leah. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists. New York: Amistad, 2023. Publisher page.

Book (interview collection).

A collection of Penniman's conversations with Black farmers, scientists, artists, and spiritual leaders on the relationship between Black communities and the land. Ranging beyond agriculture into ecology, climate, and environmental justice, the interviews widen the unit's frame from food specifically toward Black environmental thought more broadly, and offer learners a chorus of contemporary voices extending the tradition that Farming While Black and Freedom Farmers trace historically.

• Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne. The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

A study of immigrant farmworkers — many from Mexico and Central America — who become farm owners themselves, bringing agricultural knowledge from their home countries to U.S. land. Minkoff-Zern examines both the obstacles they face and the alternative, often more sustainable practices they introduce, raising the mobility question that sits between Holmes's account of exploited labor and Penniman's account of liberatory ownership: under what conditions can a farmworker become a farmer?

• Sbicca, Joshua. Food Justice Now! Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Publisher page.

Book.

Sbicca argues that food justice is strongest when it connects to other struggles rather than standing alone, tracing coalitions that link food organizing to labor rights, the fight against mass incarceration, and immigrant justice. Through case studies of activists and campaigns, the book maps how food becomes a site where broader movements meet, offering the unit a coalition-minded counterpart to Garth's caution about the movement's blind spots.

• White, Monica M. "'A Pig and a Garden': Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative." Food and Foodways 25, no. 1 (2017): 20–39. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

The article-length version of White's study of Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative, which appears in expanded form inside Freedom Farmers. It reconstructs how Hamer built a cooperative that grew food, raised livestock, and secured a measure of independence for Black families in the Mississippi Delta, and it stands on its own as an assignable case in agricultural resistance for readers not taking on the full book.

• GrowNYC and NYC GreenThumb (community gardening infrastructure). Visit GrowNYC.

City and nonprofit gardening programs.

Two programs that sustain New York City's community gardens: GrowNYC, a nonprofit running greenmarkets, gardens, and environmental education, and NYC GreenThumb (greenthumb.nycgovparks.org), the parks-department program that licenses and supports hundreds of community gardens across the city. Together they are the practical infrastructure underpinning the unit's Bronx case study, and an entry point for learners who want to participate in urban growing, not only analyze it.