Food Justice and Woman S Role in Food Preparation

¶ … Food Justice Movement and Its Themes

Intersectional Theory is the study of systems that intersect in terms of power structure dichotomies -- oppression vs. hegemony -- and approaches this intersection from the standpoint of focusing on how various variables (such as gender, age, class, etc.) interact with cultural, ecological, environmental, economical categories in different ways. In the food justice movement, "the social relations of food have been organized along lines of gender" with women predominantly in the role of food preparer, thus projecting woman's role in the world "in deep, complex, and often contradictory ways" (Allen, Sachs, 2007, p. 1). Yet, with the globalization of food through the rise of multinationals, the powerful role held by women in food preparation and production has been taken from them and placed in the hands of the corporations (Shiva, 2009, p. 17). Food simultaneously elevates and impoverishes women in terms of the social power structure within the modern patriarchy and the corporatization of food today has altered the terms of woman's role by essentially delegitimizing it. The food justice movement, on the other hand, recognizes the oppression of classes and genders via the usurpation of food provision and preparation by the same corporate entities that put fast food chains on urban street corners in neighborhoods where grocery stores are closed. This paper will take an intersectional view of the food justice movement and show how the goal of the movement is to restore food power to all classes and individuals and especially to women, who historically have yielded an important role in food preparation.

The control over food and the resources needed to give us food is what the food justice movement is all about. Today's resources are controlled by industrialists, corporations and multinationals (who have even collected the world's seeds and placed them in vaults called seed banks in order to preserve life should their own efforts to control the movements of the world end in catastrophic failure). The food justice movement aims to wrest control away from such monolithic giants and place it back in the hands where it organically and naturally has a right to be. If the history of the world tells us anything, it is that women are important when it comes to providing food. This role may limit the way that women are perceived in the wider social realm (Allen, Sachs, 2007) but it cannot be denied that their role in the food preparation process has even been anything but authentic and dominant (Shiva, 2009). Yet, even as women are recognized more and more in the workforce, their role in food preparation is more and more stripped as the "authentic" food experience is taken over by the multinationals who view the process solely as a means for them to accrue greater wealth and control over systems and societies. It is a new era of oppression -- this time not centered around labor in the workplace but rather labor in the food prep process.

As Patel (2012) notes, "people have died not for want of food, but for want of the entitlement to eat it." Indeed, the right to eat good, wholesome food has slowly but surely been drained from modern advanced, industrialized nations (and even third worlds where modern societies' pre-packaged foods are imported to the detriment of the third world's population) to the point where now if something is produced naturally and organically, without chemicals or genetic mutation it is labeled as such and viewed as something special and almost anachronistic. The control of food has been handed over to companies like Monsanto and corporations like McDonald's which has trained generations to think that good food should be able to be gotten from a drive-thru window. This process of food preparation, however, not only removes the matriarchal role from the process but virtually enslaves an entire class within a system of fast-food labor and low-paying wages (advertised as good paying jobs, no less). And in an economy that is so stalled it is now going backwards due to Wall Street excesses and the abrogation of tax payer funds like Social Security, the enslavement of the working classes not just in fast food or service sector industries but also literally in prison farm systems where inmates are obliged to work for the corporate oligarchy for slave labor wages, which a critical theory perspective would not deny. Food justice thus integrates all these different strata -- class oppression, gender oppression, economic pillaging, and new colonization -- by identifying a common theme that affects all people in all places, and that theme is food.