Food Justice et. al.

One of the fascinating trends that I have been trying to pay attention to over the last few years is the shift of the economy from economic power to intellectual power.

I happened to stumble across a link to something called "Food Justice" - a movement trying to do just that in the food sector of the economy. I really can't add much to the article; if you can read through the moralizing, the aim is pretty obvious.

Update:

It seems I live in my head sufficiently that I don't know when to spell things out.

Ryan says:
I seems to me that this food justice concept is borne of an extreme misunderstanding of why the food options that are available, are available.

I get an entirely different take on this article. It strikes me that the following is really the heart of the matter.

From the article:
While government bureaucrats and international non-governmental-organizations alike have been using food security to call attention to a whole host of agriculture- and hunger-related issues, activists have also used it to focus on creating community-based ways of producing food in an affordable, sustainable and environmentally-friendly manner.
[...]
According to Bryant Terry, the founder of the youth-based, not-for profit B-Healthy, food justice starts from the conviction that access to healthy food is a human rights issue and that the “lack of access to food in a community is an indicator of material deprivation”. Food justice, Bryant suggests, goes beyond advocacy and direct service. It calls for organized responses to food security problems, responses that are locally driven and owned.
[...]
Still, some are hinting at a slightly more aggressive march towards progress. Terry sees the young people he works with as one day creating community organizing campaigns. He looks to take on the perpetrators of structural, food-based racism that, he feels, has kept areas like Red Hook and Central Brooklyn flooded with toxic foods and empty of choices. Of course, these days, racism is often easier to feel than prove.

The author is obviously an activist himself, and the entire point of the article can be distilled to this message:

I (or someone like me), as an academic/administrator, should be the one to decide what sorts of food should be eaten. I should be the one to decide who gets to set up restaurants and how they sell food. I should be the one to decide how food is grown and who gets to grow food.

And all through the article is laced the stink of: ... and it should be funded by the government.

If people like this author actually cared about getting poor people to eat good food, they wouldn't focus on organics and other hip trends. They urge people to eat healthy non-certified food for less than half the price. They would support big box stores, instead of the easily bullied mom-and-pop stores, which offer lower prices due to economies of scale.

The real point of this story is control - people like this author and these activists want it. Anything less is racism an outrage.