Abolitionist food justice: Theories of change rooted in place- and life-making

ABSTRACT In recent years, communities invested in transformative food politics in the United States have seen the framework food justice become widely accepted as a core framework for anti-racist practice. Critical food scholars often recognize food justice in practices that: underwrite coalitions and solidarities across difference, tend to collective and historical trauma, and expand land-based political imaginations. This paper argues that abolitionist thought can position these elements within in a relational, historical framework that enables organizers to name the underlying racial capitalist logics of food apartheid—including the destruction of Black, Indigenous, and poor peoples’ senses of place, and white supremacy culture’s dehumanization of people who fall outside the norms of liberal individualism—in order build strategic alliances with those who struggle against other manifestations of the same logics, including mass incarceration. Citing work at the intersection of food and carceral justice in New York’s Hudson Valley, this paper humbly affirms what abolitionist organizers already know: that life is possible and is already flourishing well outside of racial capitalism and settler colonialism’s death dealing logics. Abolitionist thought may be an essential tool for strengthening our relationships to and analyses of food and food justice, such that we may organize more effectively to end food apartheid.