Just Food Project: Diasporic Foodways

Preface to Module

“Race is always on the table, if not on top of the table, then right under it” - David Billings and Lila Cabbil

Race is a made-up social and political construct originally designed to support world-views that assigned some groups of people as superior and some as inferior; it is “both rigid (in terms of [its] consequences for our lives) and fluid (because [it] can change)”. Race is not biological—there are no distinct genetic differences between races that account for differences in traits such as sexuality, athleticism or mathematical ability. Race is “a deeply complex sociopolitical system whose boundaries shift and adapt over time” and which is used to organize society and its resources. While race is constructed, it does have tangible consequences in our lives.

Recognizing that the food system is a racial project is essential to understanding food justice. In the United States, farmworkers and food service workers are often people of colour whereas farm owners and operators are disproportionately white. Many workers are paid poverty-level wages, face high levels of food insecurity and diet-related diseases, and suffer from labour abuses and resource inequalities. The racial foundation of the food system explains how social and environmental injustices are disproportionately passed to racialized groups throughout the production, distribution, and consumption of food. It also helps to explain why many promising “alternatives” such as farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA) tend to be dominated by people who are privileged by whiteness.

To recognize, identify and confront racism in the food system, we have to first ask: how do we know what we know? Food justice work is rooted in epistemic justice. Racial injustices towards Black people, Indigenous peoples, and People of Colour (BIPOC) in the food system often results from implicit racist biases and stereotypes about what constitutes legitimate knowledge. The hedgemony of dominant western scientistic epistemologies enables epistemic erasure, also called epistemic violence, harming marginalized groups and undermining their sovereignty and rights of self-determination. In order to understand food justice, we must also question who gets to tell the stories we know, and acknowledge how these stories shape our collective disciplinary histories.

Both the Migrant Labour and Diasporic Foodways modules contextualize contemporary food system inequities within structural racism and settler-colonialism and their implications around intergenerational trauma, resistance to oppression, epistemic injustice, and mobilizing for systems change. They seek to create space for learners to critically examine internalized racism, reflect on the perpetuation of racial oppressions within ourselves, and write our own stories. These modules ask: How is racism embedded in our food system due to historical and on-going processes of colonialism, slavery, and other forms of oppression of Indigenous communities and peoples of colour? More importantly, how are communities of colour resisting and creating spaces of renewal and celebration? How can allies and accomplices support this ongoing work?

Introduction

“First you lose your costume. Then you lose your language. The last thing that you lose is your food.” - Patricia Klindienst

This quote is drawn from a chapter titled ‘Place’ in Klindienst's book, The Earth Knows My Name, in which a Polish American vintner and a Japanese American berry farmer speak about the complexities of land ownership, cultivating food, and immigration. It highlights the intricacies of how identity is bound up in myriad cultural associations: clothing we wear, languages we speak, yet the food we eat is a practice that often stands the test of time.

The processes of procurement, preparation, and consumption of food are known as foodways. Studying diasporic foodways means exploring the complexities of racialized communities of the diaspora and their connections to foodways as they have moved from their traditional homes to other parts of the world by choice or due to violent displacement, forced resettlement, refugee movement or slavery as a result of settler-colonialism. It examines how foods have traveled from places origin to adopted homes, and in doing so, how they take on new meanings.

Race and racialization are also entangled in experiences of belonging and unbelonging. Whether folks are recent refugees or fourth generation immigrants, diasporic foodways speak to those trying to grapple with their associations of a homeland with relationships with food, while also home-building in a different place. While the module is contextualized within the geographies of Canada, the concept of diaspora is applicable around the world.

Key Themes: Race; Diet, Nutrition & Human Health; Power Relations; Food Security; Labour; Class; Foodways; Diaspora; Epistemic Justice

Learning Outcomes

1. Examine race as a social construct and the impacts of racism on racialized diasporic communities in the food system.
2. Recognize personal connection to food as a means of (un)belonging based on historical and current inequities in diasporic communities to better understand the concept of epistemic justice.
3. Describe the relationship between cultural appropriation in relation to power and the social construction of race.

Background

Race can be felt in the ways that inequalities are perpetuated in our society. The complicated process of groups of people being placed in a racial category is known as racialization. Non-white and non-Indigenous groups are sometimes referred to as “visible minorities” and people of colour. However, it is important to highlight the differences between racialized groups and the terms BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) are used to highlight the unique kinds of racialization between these groups and as an act of solidarity against white supremacy. The term ‘racialized’ is important as it acknowledges that the barriers racialized people face are rooted in the historical and contemporary racial prejudice of society and are not a product of their own identities. It is also important to note that white people are also racialized. This process is often invisible or to those designated as white and as a result, white people may not see themselves as part of a race but still maintain the authority to name and racialize "others".

Critical race theory (CRT) is a school of thought which examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant modes of expression. It maintains that race continues to exist as a power structure wherein people of color often face tangible challenges in accessing economic and educational resources, professional opportunities, and access to justice in the legal system. It originated in the mid-1970s in response to the critical legal studies and radical feminism movements and sought to transform the relationships between race, racism, and power. CRT scholars trace racism in America through the nation’s legacy of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement to the present day. CRT developed into its current form during the mid-1970s, with scholars like Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado responding to what they identified as dangerously slow progress following the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Other prominent CRT scholars include Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams, who share an interest in adopting and adapting theories from related fields to CRT scholarship. CRT emphasizes the socio-cultural forces that shape how we and others perceive race and experience and respond to racism. In doing so, CRT finds a way for diverse individuals to share their lived experiences. The CRT framework also seeks to eradicate racial inequity by examining laws and policies that restrict African Americans from full participation and citizenship in society.

Race in Canada

The ‘mosaic’ is a popular social imaginary in Canada’s depiction of diversity. It is often seen as superior to the American idea of the ‘melting pot’. However, understandings of race in Canada is complicated by the histories and present-day realities of settler-colonialism and disparities between racial and ethnic groups.

Since the arrival of British colonizers in the 18th century, power has been concentrated in white, Anglo-Saxon immigrants who sought to assimilate Francophone populations and to a more extreme and marginalizing extent, non-white racialized groups including Indigenous peoples. In the following centuries, the nation state vacilliated between encouraging immigration to advance its colonial occupation of Indigenous lands, and racializing, marginalizing, and persecuting some of these groups. By the 1960s, the previous policy of a “bicultural” society prioritizing Anglophone and Francophone peoples became increasingly defunct. Multiculturalism was introduced as a policy in the 1970s to “bring about equal access and participation for all Canadians in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of the nation”. While multiculturalism has recognized the plurality of difference existing in Canada, it has also been criticized because it promotes the idea that all groups are positioned equally in Canadian society, i.e, Canadians of the colonizer nations of England and France and their respective languages, Aboriginal peoples, and the multitude of immigrant communities in the nation. The superficiality of this recognition of all cultures can be seen as a false acceptance—for instance, the official languages are still English and French. There remains vast inequities in cultural participation and expression for racialized groups, especially Indigenous nations.

It is important to note that various groups have endured histories of unbelonging and systemic discrimination in Canada and that the legacies of these live on intergenerationally. Black Canadians were legally enslaved during early European imperialism of the 1600s to the mid-1800s. The turning away of the St. Louis ship in 1939, whose 907 Jewish refugees aboard were denied entry showed the blatant anti-semitism from the nation state. During World War II, Japanese Canadians were interned after a growing distrust after Pearl Harbour. Interned Canadians were only released after the war, and disposesed of their family's possessions and property including real estate. More recently, Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51, speaks to the rise of Islamophobia, since various terrorist attacks of the 21st century, and the villainization of Muslims in Canada.

Diaspora and Foodways

What does Canada’s history and policy of multiculturalism have to do with food? The personal is political, and our varied identities in race impact how we navigate the world. Race and racialization are entangled in experiences of belonging and unbelonging. Diaspora can be a useful tool to examine movements of a racial, ethnic, and/or religious group, which often are unwilling migrations. While the term diaspora has historically been used to talk about the forced dispersal of Jewish people from Palestine in the sixth century BCE with connotations of a forced exile from a homeland, this module explores the concept of diaspora more broadly defined with connections to transnational migration, resettlement, connection and attachment. Diaspora is both a category of analysis in illuminating a process of migration and adaptation and also a practice in the lived experiences of migrant communities who use it for connection. What is often then implicated in the process of home-making in a place, is race as a category for belonging and unbelonging.

As cultural and social theorist Paul Gilroy explains, the spatialities of diaspora represent “a historical and experiential rift between the locations of residence and the locations of belonging”. Food is often used as a bridge over this rift as it is a means to find comfort in the familiar in a new environment of home-building, identity-forming and family-making. The aroma, sounds and ways of preparing and eating food are carriers of identity, memory and tradition. Eating one’s own cultural food is an emotional experience that reinforces the diaspora’s experience of being away from home.

However, accessing foods that are from the home country can be challenging for migrants due to cost and availability, among myriad other factors. There are also racialized, gendered and classed constraints affecting how communities come to settle in a new country and build resilience. In Chapman et al.'s ethnography of two Punjabi-Canadian families, for instance, diet was a means to signify degrees of belonging to a new and different community. To take another example, coffee and tea play an important role in how displaced Iraqi women in Toronto demarcate safe spaces in Jones-Gailani’s research.

As the examples show, the actions and knowledges that people use to procure, prepare, and consume foods are important ways to keep connections alive. These processes can be called “foodways”. A foodway that we can often identify is cuisine. Cuisines emerge from geography and distinct ingredients and techniques, and are important links to the homeland for diasporic communities. However, cuisine can also erase regional differences, objectifying and standardizing complex cultures into products for global consumers (ie. butter chicken as a placeholder for Indian cuisine).

Appropriation and Appreciation of Foodways

Cultural appropriation, also known as cultural misappropriation, is the theft of elements from a culture that is not one’s own, often for profit. Oftentimes, it is applied to fashion and music, but it readily occurs with food. It is important to recognize the power differential involved when members of a dominant culture freely take elements from another culture that they have systematically oppressed.

For example, chefs can borrow ingredients from cuisines they were not trained in as a means to gain status with “exotic” ingredients. However, as Harper notes, what makes cuisines “exotic” or “foreign” constructs ideas of what is the norm, likely the foods eaten by White Americans or Europeans. And as Thai-American writer Padoongpatt remarks, highlighting a cuisine does not equate to highlighting the people behind the food. For Padoongpatt, to see the popularity of Thai food made “Thais recognizable in a sanitized way that rendered real Thai people, with all of their complexities and contradictions, practically invisible”. Food can therefore be objectifying when the food of a culture is privileged over its people.

As professor Ilbram X. Kendi said in an article about cultural appropriation, “when members of minority communities, whose food has historically been sold for less, marketed as lesser, and mocked as odd and unusual (ask any child of immigrants to tell you what it was like to open their packed lunch during primary school), see this food 'elevated' by white chefs—and celebrated by the peers of those chefs—the whiff of colonialism can sting”. He emphasizes that it is problematic when “people seek to brand themselves as authentically part of a particular culture when they’re not.”

There are blurry lines involved in what cultural appreciation of food looks like, because the concept of “authenticity” is complex and power-laden. For example, Rick Bayless is a white, bilingual American chef who has made his career from Mexican cuisine, opening several successful restaurants with staff that travel to Mexico for inspiration and skills training. The chef has even received the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government for his sharing of Mexican cuisine. Bayless’ venture to brings “authentic” Mexican food to Chicago and Los Angeles in a fine-dining experience, however, it has also received heavy backlash from the local Mexican community for misappropriation. His expertise on the cuisine in and of itself is not problematic, rather, the problem is that the processes around his work must be contextualized within the social, cultural and historical understandings of place. Latinos face more barriers in accessing services, finances, language, and the challenges to set up a business are vastly greater than those of Bayless who has had the freedom to travel around Mexico to learn about, and profit from, his social mobility. The question of how Bayless has the privilege to be an ambassador of a cuisine remains controversial. However, this is not to say that we should avoid other cultures. Rather, we need to learn the history, build relationships, and ask questions about our own positionality and power. The lines are thin and require one to take a more nuanced perspective. Dan Pashman, white chef and podcast producer, comments that this relies on a deep understanding of cultural foodways, their origins and processes, and it accounts for the relational dynamics of what is being served and who benefits.

Conclusion

While cuisine is often imagined to be something shared mutually in an egalitarian multicultural society, how cuisines are made popular or dominant speaks volumes about where power resides in society. What foods are prized and what foods are cheap reveal not only personal preference for flavours, but show how cuisine can also be a boundary-marking mechanism for different societies, demarcating “us” from “them”.

Diasporic foodways are therefore not just what is consumed, but also other processes that involve the growing, harvesting, gathering, distributing, and preparing of food. This may involve intergenerational trauma and systems of oppression as they affect communities who have migrated, and it takes into account food as translation, as mediator of cultural divides, of food as involved in processes of healing.

Key Terms

Facilitator Note: Many definitions exist for the following topics. These definitions have been chosen after conducting a thorough literature review, but may be adjusted if necessary.

• Ally: An ally is a person who commits to, and makes efforts to, recognize their privilege (based on gender, class, race, sexual identity, etc.) and works in solidarity with oppressed groups. While the term ally is used in these modules there are several critiques of this term, see accomplice for another understanding of working towards practicing solidarity to lead to collective liberation.
• Accomplice: The term accomplice has emerged in critique of those who have co-opted the term ally, advancing their own careers off of the struggles they are trying to support, producing the ally industrial complex, effectively rendering the term useless. Accomplice is put forth as an alternative to centre a “fiercely unrelenting desire to achieve total liberation, with the land and, together” and to acknowledge the need for those who hold privilege to become “complicit in a struggle towards liberation,” instead of only the temporary shows of support provided by allies.
  • See this guide that provides examples of distinguishing actions between actors, allies and accomplices. While it is an oversimplification (and written for a white audience focusing solely on racial justice), it is a starting point for those working to show solidarity with different marginalized groups to which they may not belong
  • For White and white-passing educators and learners, here is a great guide on how to move from being an actor to ally to accomplice in our collective fight for racial justice. This is a great place to start if you find yourself asking “What can I do? How should I evaluate my actions and intentions?”

• Critical Race Theory (CRT): A school of thought which maintains that race continues to exist as a power structure wherein people of color often face tangible challenges in accessing economic resources, educational resources, professional opportunities, and the legal system.
• Cuisine: An essentialized concept of the food of a culture that narrowly defines the characteristics of a food’s culture or a culture’s food, such as ingredients, flavours, cooking methods, resultant dishes, and rules of consumption. Cuisine can change and evolve and is highly shaped by the social context.
• Culture: A social system of meaning and custom that is developed by a group of people to assure its adaptation and survival. These groups are distinguished by a set of unspoken rules that shape values, beliefs, habits, patterns of thinking, behaviors and styles of communication.
• Cultural appropriation: The theft of cultural elements for one’s own use, commodification, or profit—including symbols, art, language, customs, etc.—often without understanding, acknowledgement, or respect for its value in the original culture. Results from the assumption of a dominant (i.e. white) culture’s right to take other cultural elements.
• Diaspora: The term was first used to describe the forced dispersal of Jewish people from Palestine in the sixth century BCE, and often continues to refer to forced migration and exile. More recently, and particularly since the 1990s, diaspora studies have come to encompass wider notions of transnational migration, resettlement, connection and attachment.
• Ethnicity: A social construct that divides people into smaller social groups based on characteristics such as shared sense of group membership, values, behavioral patterns, language, political and economic interests, history and ancestral geographical base.
  • Examples of different ethnic groups are: African American (Black); Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese (Asian); Cree, Mohawk (Indigenous); Puerto Rican (Latino); Polish (European).
  • For further resource distinguishing race and ethnicity, view Race vs. Ethnicity vs. Nationality: All You Need to Know.

• Foodways: The study of the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food. It is the study of what people eat and why they eat it. Foodways connect people to geographic regions, climates, periods of time, ethnic or religious groups, and families.
• Multiculturalism: A policy in Canada since the 1970s that purports to celebrate difference, and a key strategy for managing racial and ethnic diversity contained within the national frame. Sociologically, it is the presence of people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. In 1985, the Government passed the Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada. Multiculturalism is problematic because it promotes the idea that all groups are positioned equally in Canadian society (the colonizer nations of England and France and their respective languages, people of Aboriginal heritage, and the multitude of immigrant communities in the nation) while leaving structural inequality unaddressed.
• Race: A made-up social and political construct and not a biological fact. Race was a category created to concentrate power within one racial group and legitimize dominance over other racial groups. Racial categorization schemes were invented by scientists to support worldviews that viewed some groups of people as superior and some as inferior. Common racial categories include Indigenous, Black, Asian and Latino.
  • Structural racism: Refers to how interactions between individuals are shaped by and reflect underlying and often hidden structures that shape biases and create disparate outcomes even in the absence of overt racist actors or racist intentions. The presence of structural racism is evidenced by consistent differences in outcomes in educational attainment, family wealth, and even life span across various racial groups.
• Racialization: the process of placing groups of people in made-up racial categories, therefore creating cumulative and durable inequalities based on race. Certain groups become racialized through a social process that marks them for unequal treatment based on perceived physiological differences.
• Racial emancipation: The act and process of liberation from racial discrimination, subjugation, and exploitation.
• Racial equity: A desired outcome where race no longer determines one’s socioeconomic outcomes. The process of working toward racial equity ensures that those most impacted by structural racial inequity and racism are meaningfully involved in the creation and implementation of policies and practices that impact their lives.
  • Learn more from What do we mean by Racial Equity?, a handout guide prepared by a group of educators under the National Public Education Support Fund.
• Whiteness: Whiteness is the normalization of social norms and culture associated with white people as proper for society. This can be implicit such as in common farmers' markets, or explicit, in the case of white supremacists’ ideologies. ‘White’ can be understood as a “position in a racialized social structure,” as it influences access to resources and this whiteness would have no meaning outside of a racialized social structure.

Activity Outline

Facilitator note: These are provided as guidance for instructors and facilitators to mix and match as they seek to fulfil the learning outcomes. Times indicated are an estimate—facilitators should use their judgement on when to move things along and when to tease out certain topics based on their own learning goals.

Activity	Estimated Time	Associated Learning Outcomes	Activity Notes
Pre-Activity: Group Guidelines	30 min		Define your role as facilitator and clarify the group’s expectations of you and each other, as well as foster a safe, respectful, and effective learning environment for participants
Activity 1: Reading Discussion	45 min	1. Examine race as a social construct and the impacts of racism on racialized diasporic communities in the food system. 2. Recognize personal connection to food as a means of (un)belonging based on historical and current inequities in diasporic communities to better understand the concept of epistemic justice.	This activity provides background reading and sample discussion activity to go through the readings. Choose one reading for each learning outcome. Assign the readings before class and offer prompts to encourage in-class discussions. Conduct an in-class discussion to debrief the reading and background material.
Activity 2: Which One of These Is Not Like the Others?	20-30 min	1. Examine race as a social construct and the impacts of racism on racialized diasporic communities in the food system	Identify and understand the difference between race, ethnicity, and culture; encourage learners to reflect on personal understandings of these concepts.
Activity 3: Shark Fin Soup	20-30 min	2. Recognize personal connection to food as a means of (un)belonging based on historical and current inequities in diasporic communities to better understand the concept of epistemic justice.	Conduct an analysis of a case to examine how social constructions of race are implicated in discourses such as sustainability.
Activity 4: Menu Critique	35 min	2. Recognize personal connection to food as a means of (un)belonging based on historical and current inequities in diasporic communities to better understand the concept of epistemic justice. 3. Describe the relationships between cultural appropriation, power, and the social construction of race.	Review restaurant menus and identify the differences between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation through real examples.
Activity 5: Diasporic Foodways Zine	60-90 min (Unstructured)	2. Recognize personal connection to food as a means of (un)belonging based on historical and current inequities in diasporic communities to better understand the concept of epistemic justice. 3. Describe the relationship between cultural appropriation in relation to power and the social construction of race.	Design and produce a zine that reflects the learner’s interpretation of their lived experiences, memories around food and what diasporic foodway means to them through creative storytelling. Copies of the zine to be shared in a future session.

Additional Resources

On Critical Race Theory

• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press, 1995 [Book]
• Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1707-1791.
• hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From the Margins to the Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984. [Book]

On Diasporic Foodways

• Whetstone Media. (2020). Point of Origin Episode 17: Diasporic Foodways. Whetstone Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.whetstonemagazine.com/podcast-blog/episode-17 [Podcast]
• Barrett, P. (2015). Introduction: Texts and Contexts of Blackening. In Barrett (Ed.), Blackening Canada: diaspora, race, multiculturalism. University of Toronto Press.
• Delgado, R., Stefancic, J., & Harris, A. (2012). Introduction. In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition (pp. 1-18). New York; London: NYU Press.
• Bessiere, J. 1998. Local development and heritage: traditional food and cuisine as tourist attraction in rural areas, Sociologia Ruralis 38, 21-34.
• Bradley, K., & Herrera, H. (2015). Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming, Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement. Antipode.
• Broad, Garret (2016) More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (California Studies in Food and Culture)
• Klindienst, P. (2006). The earth knows my name: Food, culture, and sustainability in the gardens of ethnic americans. Boston: Beacon Press. [Book]
• Ku, R., Manalansan, M., & Mannur, A. (Eds.). (2013). Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. NYU Press. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg92s. [Book]
• Lallani, S. S. (2018). The culinary gender binary in an era of multiculturalism: Foodwork in Toronto’s late postwar Italian immigrant community. Journal of Family History, 43(4), 409–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/0363199018787561
• Twitty, Michael W. (2017). The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. Harper Collins, New York. [Book] (Video resource: Michael Twitty: The Cooking Gene by the Chicago Humanities Festival)
• Williams-Forson, P. (2014). “I haven’t eaten if I don't have my soup and fufu”: Cultural preservation through food and foodways among Ghanaian migrants in the United States. Africa Today, 61(1), 68–87. https://doi.org/10.1353/at.2014.0023

On Cultural Appropriation versus Cultural Appreciation

• Video: What is Cultural Appropriation? By Origin of Everything
• Article: The Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation
• Video: What’s the Difference Between Appropriation and Appreciation? By VICE Asia
• Video: Cultural Appropriation vs. Appreciation by CBC Radio
• Podcast: The Untold Story Of Lyndie B. Hawkins

On Decolonizing ‘Local’ Food

• Anguelovski, Isabelle. (2016). Healthy food stores, greenlining and food gentrification: Contesting New Forms of Privilege, Displacement and Locally Unwanted Land Uses in Racially Mixed Neighborhoods. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10.1111/1468-2427.12299
• Blakea, Megan K., Jody Mellorb & Lucy Cranea. (2010). Buying Local Food: Shopping Practices, Place, and Consumption Networks in Defining Food as ‘Local.’  Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 100, Issue 2, pages 409-426.
• Figueroa, Melieza.  2015. “Food Sovereignty in Everyday Life: Toward a People-centered Approach to Food Systems.” Globalizations. Special Issue: FoodSovereignty: Concept, Practice and Social Movements. Volume 12(4).
• Grey, Sam and Raj Patel.  2015.  “Food sovereignty as decolonization: some contributions from Indigenous movements to food system and development politics.” Agriculture and Human Values (32): 431-444.
• Guthman, Julie. 2012. “Doing justice to bodies” Reflections on food justice, race and biology.” Antipode 46(5): 1153-1171.
• Guthman, Julie. “Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative food practice.” Cultural Geographies. October 2008 vol. 15 no. 4 431-447
• Holt-Giménez, E. (2011). Food security, food justice, or food sovereignty?. Crises, food movements, and regime change. In, Alkon, AH, & Agyeman, J.(Eds.) Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability, 309-330.
• McCullen, Christie. “The white farm imaginary: How one farmers market re-fetishizes the production of food and limits food politics.” Food as Communication: Communication as Food. Eds. Janet M. Cramer, Carlnita P. Greene, & Lynn M. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
• McCutcheon, P. (2011). Community food security ‘for us, by us’: The Nation of Islam and the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church. Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability, 177-196.
• Slocum, Rachel. 2007. “Whiteness, space and alternative food practice.”  Geoforum 38(3):520-533.
• Wallace, Hannah. "Malik Yakini of Detroit’s Black Community Food Security Network." Civileats.com Decembrer 19th 2011.
• Werkhseiser, Ian. "Food Sovereignty, Health Sovereignty, and Self-Organised Community Viability." Interdisciplinary Environmental Review 15.2 (2014): 134-46.
• Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Renewing Relatives: Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism.” Routledge Handbook Food Justice, forthcoming.