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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
- I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
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Food Justice Now! is a welcome intervention in research on food politics, which has not focused enough on how marginalized communities think about the need for political action, or the means by which they take it. Such a focus necessitates an open and evolving politics of justice that can broaden a narrow interpretation of food politics to other issues. By focusing on less conventional subjects (e.g. food systems workers, people impacted by the prison industrial complex, and immigrants) Sbiccan pushes food systems scholarship towards food justice, illustrating the fulcrum on which US food politics (and its study) is pivoting. The book also exemplifies activist-scholarship, relying heavily on movement participant quotes to think with and alongside movement actors in developing social theory and practice.
Food Justice Now! covers important histories to contextualize food justice movements, using the idea of conjunctural analysis to emphasize the weight of specific local, regional, and national legacies of injustice along with struggle against it. Within these struggles, Sbicca attempts to appreciate the relevance of both state-oriented and prefigurative approaches. That is, he covers how food justice movements’ theories of change encompass both confronting state powers and seeking power in the state, but also working outside the state to build autonomous forms of power from below (which are often helpful in confronting the state and capital). There are gems of analysis sprinkled throughout the work. Sbicca excels at seeing through surface level analysis to more uncomfortable aspects lying beneath. For example, many scholars and activists have critiqued conventional food system workers status, but not applied the same critical lens to worker status within alternative food networks (83).
Sbicca uses the terms ‘conjuncture’ and ‘dialectics’ throughout the book. On a basic level I find these concepts useful, but at times, they were convoluted, and sometimes read like tautological analysis. For example, Sbicca’s prescriptions for movements resulting from dialectical analysis of the conjuncture simply follow from initial assumptions; that food justice is about marginalized people, and therefore progressive food politics should prioritize and seek to serve them. This is indeed well worth saying, if one is speaking primarily to non-justice focused food system actors/researchers. If one is speaking to food justice practitioners, it is less clear what such jargon-driven analysis might offer. As an academic text, jargon has its place and makes good food for thought. However, I can’t imagine some of my less social science-literate friends and movement allies finding the book easy to read, or generative of new strategic insights. A suggestion then, is to make more accessible versions of this analysis, including for publications at the boundary of movements and scholarship like Race, Poverty and the Environment, online, or even in comic book form. Related to this and the author’s clear interest in scholarship as activism, the book left me wondering: Have any of the organizations featured in this work found the book’s analytical approach useful? If so, have they used any of the content produced in order to rethink or otherwise improve their work?
My greatest disappointment with the book was found in the contradiction between Sbicca’s analysis of the state and his normative recommendations. Sbicca acknowledges that states are centrally implicated in food injustice (189), and that food justice movements’ histories of struggle include anti-state and non-state elements. Yet the book’s conclusion focuses on national food policy and strategy, indicating a ‘but we have to anyway’ position that ends up prioritizing reformist policy making processes. The implicit acceptance of policy advocacy as the default strategy might be understood as a result of the hegemony of statist thinking, and the uneven playing field between forms and philosophies of politics. On this uneven playing field, both/and kinds of arguments tend to inadvertently reinforce one tactic (i.e. state policy) over others (e.g. tactics focused on building alternative forms of power). Considering how movements continue to deal with the near-impossibility of achieving justice through government action and the fact that inclusion in state processes almost invariably involves the perpetuation of various forms of social exclusion, acknowledging ‘there is no policy panacea’ (189) does not seem a strong enough caveat to inform food justice movement strategy.
