The Practice of Food Justice: How Food Hubs Negotiate Race and Place in the Eastern United States

Abstract

Despite aspirations toward more equitable and sustainable food systems, alternative food movements have been critiqued for reproducing the inequalities of the agrifood system they contest. This article examines the challenges a group of justice-oriented food hubs face in integrating racial justice into their work. We ask whether the financial pressures of enacting alternative approaches to food hub work within market logics can squeeze out racial justice goals. We find that dominant framings of alternative food movements diminish Black activism. We argue that justice-oriented food hubs can get caught in a “justice trap” similar to the “local trap”—the tendency to assume that the local scale is inherently desirable and leads to a socially just food system. The notion of a justice trap signals the assumption that what constitutes justice in the food system is self-evident and that different forms of justice are automatically subsumed within the general concept of “food justice.” Our analysis indicates that the justice trap arises from an inability to articulate the racial justice implications of the everyday realities of running organizations within the market logics that dominate even alternative food movements.