Food Justice: Access, Sovereignty, and Healthy Food Costs

Introduction: The Cost of Healthy Food

Why is access to healthy food — food without preservatives, additives, or toxic ingredients — more expensive than fast food? This is a question that anyone concerned about nutrition has found themselves asking repeatedly. Healthy food should be more readily available than unhealthy food, yet it often is not; and when it is available, it is frequently more expensive than food containing preservatives and other non-organic compounds.

The generally accepted explanation is that organic food costs more because of the higher cost of production and sourcing. Organic farms typically produce smaller crop volumes, which tend to be more labor-intensive and require more land, leading to higher costs for farmers. These costs are then passed on to the consumer. Additionally, organic produce generally has a shorter shelf life than conventionally grown produce, meaning that retailers must source more frequently and in smaller quantities — further driving up prices.

However, governments have a duty to protect their societies and to foster public health. They should be building infrastructure that supports healthy food access rather than infrastructure that discourages it. By allowing major corporations to dictate what types of food will be available to the public, governments effectively enable profiteers to place profits before people. The food industry is held hostage by these profiteers, who stand to make more money by stocking shelves with well-preserved, artificial, and pre-packaged items rather than fresh, locally produced, organic foods that support and promote health. This is fundamentally a problem of corporate profiteering — and it is this problem that inhibits food justice around the world, especially in developed markets, where "convenience" foods are often promoted as essential to a modern lifestyle.

The Injustice of Food Monopolization and Appropriate Action

As Bonacich and Alimahomed-Wilson (2011) explain, food monopolization marginalizes and oppresses segments of the global population: "sectors of Black Americans, like many people in the Global South, are being pushed out of the formal system of capitalist employment" (p. 213). However, the situation has a silver lining: this marginalization pushes these populations toward self-reliance, encouraging them to establish their own access to healthy foods by growing and harvesting produce themselves through urban gardens (Biewener, 2015). By engaging in small urban farming projects, marginalized communities can pursue self-actualization, as "the development of economic experiments rooted in community economic self-determination based on anti-capitalist values" provides a foundation for this kind of autonomy (Bonacich & Alimahomed-Wilson, 2011, p. 213).

Alternative food initiatives (AFIs) such as urban farming can open up access to healthy organic food options and free people from dependence on corporate-controlled grocery stores, fast food chains, and pre-packaged unhealthy foods sold at convenience stores. As Biewener (2015) explains, "AFIs engage in alternative economic practices by relying on non-exploitative forms of work; and…they foster spaces for enabling progressive social change by engaging in a reflexive local politics oriented toward creating sustainable, democratic, and equitable community food systems" (p. 35). If food injustice is a direct result of corporate inequity and structural power imbalances, then food justice demands equitable solutions that promote democratic systems. Self-reliance and self-determination are its hallmarks.

As Block et al. (2012) show, the deeper issue is one of food sovereignty. Food activists must take control of their own food access by growing, harvesting, and supplying the healthy foods that communities need, rather than passively relying on corporate, for-profit entities that seek to deliver the cheapest food items possible regardless of their nutritional content. Those entities are profit-driven, treating food as a business commodity. Food activists, by contrast, are people-oriented — their primary goal is to put people before profits by providing access to healthy food and reclaiming food sovereignty from for-profit industrialists. Block et al. (2012) note that "the idea of food sovereignty has its roots primarily in the response of small producers in developing countries to decreasing levels of control over land, production practices, and food access" (p. 203). They further contend that "the ideas associated with food sovereignty will lead to the construction of solutions to what is often called the 'food desert' issue that serve and empower communities in ways that less democratic solutions do not" (p. 203). To overcome the problems of the food desert — where access to healthy food is absent because corporate entities either fail to provide organic options in certain communities or price those options out of reach — Block et al. (2012) argue that communities must reclaim food sovereignty by becoming their own farmers and starting their own gardens, even in urban spaces.

Conclusion

The primary reason why healthy food is more expensive than fast food is the cost of production. Organic foods require more space, more labor, and more stringent growing and handling processes, all of which drive up costs. Organic foods are also generally produced in smaller batches than conventional foods, further increasing the per-unit price. Additionally, organic products often travel farther from farm to market, adding transportation costs. Finally, because organic products are rarely mass-produced, there are fewer opportunities for large-scale discounts or subsidies, which keeps prices high.

Yet as the scholarship on food justice makes clear, cost alone does not fully explain the problem. Corporate monopolization, the absence of democratic food systems, and the marginalization of communities from their own food supply are structural forces that compound the economic barriers. Food justice — pursued through urban farming, alternative food initiatives, and the reclamation of food sovereignty — offers a path toward systems in which people, not profits, determine what communities eat and how they access nourishment.

References

Biewener, C. (2015). Paid work, unpaid work, and economic viability in alternative food initiatives: Reflections from three Boston urban agriculture endeavors. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 6, 35–53.

Block, D. R., Chavez, N., Allen, E., & Ramirez, D. (2012). Food sovereignty, urban food access, and food activism: Contemplating the connections through examples from Chicago. Agriculture and Human Values, 29, 203–215.

Bonacich, E., & Alimahomed-Wilson, J. (2011). Confronting racism, capitalism and ecological degradation: Urban farming and the struggle for social justice in Black Los Angeles. Souls, 13, 213–226.