Online Resources and Organizations
- FoodPrintYour “foodprint” is the result of everything it takes to get your food from the farm to your plate. Many of those processes are invisible to consumers. Industrial food production — including animal products like beef, pork, chicken and eggs and also crops — takes a tremendous toll on our soil, air and water, as well as on the workers and the surrounding communities. Learn more about what a foodprint is and why you should care about yours here.
Dominican University's Dining Services
- Dining Center's Sustainability Mission & PartnershipsWe feel that nutrition and sustainability are very interdependent concepts. Our philosophy for nutrition programs and sustainability efforts run along parallel paths. What is good for us is good for the planet; conversely, what is good for the planet is good for us.
- Food PhilosophyWe are passionate about food and we believe in wholesome, nutritious ingredients.
- Animal Welfare PolicyClick here to review Dominican's commitments to a humane meat and dairy menu.
Food Justice
Social Injustice in Our Food Systems Contributes to Food Insecurity and Obesity
Entry from Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice
One can define social injustice of our food system as the lack of an individual's access to high-quality nutritious foods. Food systems interconnect where our food comes from, who produces it, and finally who ultimately consumes it. Along this path, there are many stakeholders, and some are driven by profitability rather than nutrient quality. There are many policies in place to support production capacity, consumer education, and food safety. However, nutritional quality of the food system has not always been of paramount importance. Parameters including the consumer's genetic and physiological makeup, economic status, and geographical location can contribute to this social injustice of denying high-nutrient, quality food to individuals. These parameters are manifest in the increasing numbers of households who do not have enough nutritious food to eat (food insecurity) and those where less nutritious foods are abundantly available that contribute to obesity and its related diseases. While it may appear at first glance that food insecurity and obesity are incompatible with hunger, they are actually highly correlated as forced consumption of cheap, high-caloric/low-nutritional-value foods drives obesity in individuals. In response to public health concerns associated with food insecurity and obesity, there has been increased awareness in grassroot communities and legislative bodies to find methods to mitigate the long-term costs in medical care and productivity that social injustices in our food system propagate.
In response to these issues, and many other social injustices within our food systems, both nationwide and local grassroots movements are underway. Some examples include: establishing Food Day to build awareness and advocacy (CSPI, 2014), creating local committees of stakeholders for affecting policy change (ValleyVision, 2014), and establishing nonprofit organizations for nutrition education (CFLC, 2014). Lawmakers at all levels are also trying out new policies such as taxation of select refined foods, regulating the maximum size of sugar-sweetened beverages, subsidies for fruits and vegetables, or facilitating the use of food stamps at farmer's markets. While not consistently studied, the manipulation of the human environment can have an impact on eating behaviors. A recent review showed that some approaches can be successful (Thow et al., 2010); however, these assessments have been done with relatively small sample sizes, making it difficult to be extrapolated nationwide. These efforts are encouraging from a public health perspective due to the goal of reducing the development of obesity and improving health. More discussion is needed about methods for improving access to the most healthful foods in all communities. Only time will tell if these approaches will be successful at working within the limitations of our genetics to reduce the human cost associated with the overconsumption of refined foods.
Videos
Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys."
Books & eBooks
Food Justice Now! by
Call Number: TX360.U6 S25 2018ISBN: 1517904005Publication Date: 2018-07-31A rallying cry to link the food justice movement to broader social justice debates The United States is a nation of foodies and food activists, many of them progressives, and yet their overwhelming concern for what they consume often hinders their engagement with social justice more broadly. Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. It calls on the food-focused to broaden and deepen their commitment to the struggle against structural inequalities both within and beyond the food system. In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than just a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Focusing on carceral, labor, and immigration crises, Sbicca tells the stories of three California-based food movement organizations, showing that when activists use food to confront neoliberal capitalism and institutional racism, they can creatively expand how to practice and achieve food justice. Sbicca sets his central argument in opposition to apolitical and individual solutions, discussing national food movement campaigns and the need for economically and racially just food policies--a matter of vital public concern with deep implications for building collective power across a diversity of interests.
Stations of the Banquet: Faith Foundations for Food Justice by Call Number: BR115.H86 C36 2003ISBN: 0814629385Publication Date: 2003-08-01Food reveals much about our Christian story of salvation. In Stations of the Banquet, Cathy Campbell focuses on a little-explored dimension of our faith - the story of salvation as a food narrative. She provides guidance for individuals and parishes engaged in living out the food and justice challenges of the Gospel. Similar in function to the traditional Stations of the Cross, each of the fourteen stations of the banquet" considers a dimension of the Christian story of salvation and includes litanies for community prayer. Stations of the Banquetis an invitation to become refreshed, nourished, and challenged at the feet of the one who came as the Bread of Life and invites us all to the fullness of the Banquet.
Blood Sugar by Call Number: RC662.4 .H38 2016ISBN: 0816696187Publication Date: 2016-04-10Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges the ways in which "metabolic syndrome" has become a major biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat, and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of them belonging to people of color. Anthony Ryan Hatch argues that the syndrome represents another, very real crisis and that its advent signals a new form of "colorblind scientific racism"--a repackaging of race within biomedical and genomic research. Examining the cultural discussions and scientific practices that target human metabolism of prescription drugs and sugar by African Americans, he reveals how medical researchers who use metabolic syndrome to address racial inequalities in health have in effect reconstructed race as a fixed, biological, genetic feature of bodies--without incorporating social and economic inequalities into the equation. And just as the causes of metabolic syndrome are framed in racial terms, so are potential drug treatments and nutritional health interventions. The first sustained social and political inquiry of metabolic syndrome, this provocative and timely book is a crucial contribution to the emerging literature on race and medicine. It will engage those who seek to understand how unjust power relations shape population health inequalities and the production of medical knowledge and biotechnologies.
- Blood Sugar by Call Number: RC662.4 .H38 2016ISBN: 0816696187Publication Date: 2016-04-10Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges the ways in which "metabolic syndrome" has become a major biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat, and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of them belonging to people of color. Anthony Ryan Hatch argues that the syndrome represents another, very real crisis and that its advent signals a new form of "colorblind scientific racism"--a repackaging of race within biomedical and genomic research. Examining the cultural discussions and scientific practices that target human metabolism of prescription drugs and sugar by African Americans, he reveals how medical researchers who use metabolic syndrome to address racial inequalities in health have in effect reconstructed race as a fixed, biological, genetic feature of bodies--without incorporating social and economic inequalities into the equation. And just as the causes of metabolic syndrome are framed in racial terms, so are potential drug treatments and nutritional health interventions. The first sustained social and political inquiry of metabolic syndrome, this provocative and timely book is a crucial contribution to the emerging literature on race and medicine. It will engage those who seek to understand how unjust power relations shape population health inequalities and the production of medical knowledge and biotechnologies.
Cultivating Food Justice by ISBN: 0262016265Publication Date: 2011-10-07Popularized by such best-selling authors as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser, a growing food movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fresh food produced on local family farms. But many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have been systematically deprived of access to healthy and sustainable food. These communities have been actively prevented from producing their own food and often live in "food deserts" where fast food is more common than fresh food. Cultivating Food Justice describes their efforts to envision and create environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives to the food system. Bringing together insights from studies of environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, critical race theory, and food studies, Cultivating Food Justice highlights the ways race and class inequalities permeate the food system, from production to distribution to consumption. The studies offered in the book explore a range of important issues, including agricultural and land use policies that systematically disadvantage Native American, African American, Latino/a, and Asian American farmers and farmworkers; access problems in both urban and rural areas; efforts to create sustainable local food systems in low-income communities of color; and future directions for the food justice movement. These diverse accounts of the relationships among food, environmentalism, justice, race, and identity will help guide efforts to achieve a just and sustainable agriculture.
Food Justice by ISBN: 0262072912Publication Date: 2010-09-24In today's food system, farm workers face difficult and hazardous conditions, low-income neighborhoods lack supermarkets but abound in fast-food restaurants and liquor stores, food products emphasize convenience rather than wholesomeness, and the international reach of American fast-food franchises has been a major contributor to an epidemic of "globesity." To combat these inequities and excesses, a movement for food justice has emerged in recent years seeking to transform the food system from seed to table. In Food Justice, Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi tell the story of this emerging movement. A food justice framework ensures that the benefits and risks of how food is grown and processed, transported, distributed, and consumed are shared equitably. Gottlieb and Joshi recount the history of food injustices and describe current efforts to change the system, including community gardens and farmer training in Holyoke, Massachusetts, youth empowerment through the Rethinkers in New Orleans, farm-to-school programs across the country, and the Los Angeles school system's elimination of sugary soft drinks from its cafeterias. And they tell how food activism has succeeded at the highest level: advocates waged a grassroots campaign that convinced the Obama White House to plant a vegetable garden. The first comprehensive inquiry into this emerging movement, Food Justice addresses the increasing disconnect between food and culture that has resulted from our highly industrialized food system.
Freedom Farmers by ISBN: 1469643693Publication Date: 2019-01-14In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
Secret Ingredients by ISBN: 1403981051Publication Date: 2005-12-22A series of fascinating chapters analyze cookery books through the ages. From the convenience-food cookbooks of the 1950s, to the 1980s rise in 'white trash' cookbooks, and the surprise success of the Two Fat Ladies books from the 1990s, leading author Sherrie Inness discusses how women have used such books over the years to protest social norms.
Our Food Our Right by ISBN: 9780985342029Publication Date: 2012-06-01Our Food, Our Right takes you on a journey through many of the current food system's failures, and showcases creative solutions that communities are designing to regain control over their food, and the health of their bodies and neighborhoods. "So why a social change cookbook'... It’s a cookbook with politics that can be as joyful as the food. For a publication like this to go into its second edition points to another feature of today& food movement & that is it young, ready to experiment, and looking for lessons and inspiration. Getting active in order to fight the bigger problems in the global food system is hard & daunting even. If only there were some way that we could connect the global and the local, if only there were a reference guide that helped bring it all together with ideas for change, and perhaps with some good recipes. You hold such a manual in your hands. Ideas from this second edition can help us understand our community and responsibilities better, and not feel overwhelmed by the task ahead. So get started." Excerpts from the Foreword by Raj Patel. Selected Topics: Food Sovereignty and Food Systems Farmer Profiles Global Stories of Change Local Stories of Change Resources Poetry Contributors include: Raj Patel, Elise Krohn, Lisa Taylor, Merna Ann Hecht, and many others.
Food History LibGuide
For more information on food justice, food sustainability, and food history, click above to visit our Food History LibGuide!
