TO FIGHT FOR FOOD? AUSTERITY AGENDAS AND THE LIMITS OF A TORONTO FOOD MOVEMENT LED BY NON-PROFITS

LAURA LEPPER

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GRADUATE PROGRAM IN GEOGRAPHY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO

September 2012

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In the face of municipal budget cuts in Toronto in 2011,1 studied the position of food security initiatives as a starting point to explore the political possibilities of the current food movement in the city. An understanding of the role food insecurity plays in the dynamics of neoliberal capitalist accumulation is necessary in order to assess the opportunities and limitations in current solutions offered by food movement practices. I discuss themes that arose from interviews with thirteen key informants from ten food security initiatives regarding the ability to respond to an austerity agenda and engage in political struggle for food. Ultimately I argue that there are significant limitations to making political gains around food security in a movement led by non-profits. Rather, building mass movements, with Indigenous sovereignty as a foundation, is necessary to achieve the revolutionary social change required to have access to healthy food for all. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... ii Table of Contents ...... iii

Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1 Method ...... 13 Chapters Outline ...... 20

Chapter Two: Austerity and Food Security ...... 24 Food Security under Neoliberal Capitalism in Food Movement Studies and Practice...... 25 The Nature of Food Movement Practice ...... 28 Capitalism and Food Security...... 30 The Neoliberal Project ...... 35 Recent Austerity Attacks in Toronto...... 40 Activism in a Neoliberal Urban Context ...... 46 Downloading to the Third Sector ...... 48 Conclusion ...... 50

Chapter Three: The Limits of Non-Profits ...... 51 Why Study Non-profits?...... 52 Neoliberal Urbanism and the Rise of Non-Profits ...... 55 Toronto Food Security Initiatives and Municipal Budget Cuts ...... 58 Funding Relationships Changing Objectives, Strategies, Organization ...... 60 Issues of Capacity: Overburdened and Underfunded ...... 62 Funding Relationships and the Ability to Take Political Stances ...... 65 Race, Concentration of Power, and Food Security Initiatives ...... 70 Conclusion ...... 74

Chapter Four: Exploring Tactics and Strategies ...... 77 The Need for a Collective Strategy to Resist Funding Cuts ...... 78 Resisting Neoliberal Discourse ...... 81 Limitations of Using “Food” Discourse ...... 84 Combining Social Service and Social Change ...... 92 The Special Diet Campaign: Mobilizing Around Food and Against Austerity.. 100 Food in Tactics and Strategy...... 107 Conclusion ...... 110 Chapter Five: Conclusion

Bibliography Chapter 1 Introduction

There is currently growing attention to food politics in Canada and the U.S., yet a lack of substantial political gains in the face of a capitalist industrial food system destroying the earth, appalling levels of hunger, and unjust, uneven access to healthy food. Thus, it is important to critically assess the political opportunities and limitations of the current shape of resistance in places like Toronto, where food activists make claims under a food movement yet face a deepening neoliberal capitalist agenda. I argue that such unjust conditions of food insecurity, highlighted by food justice advocates, are not limited to the food system but are symptoms of the capitalist system. An analysis of the practice of the food movement can help us to better assess and orient it towards

changing the conditions causing food insecurity.

As someone who is committed to a struggle for social justice, I see critical

reflection on resistance as an important part of the process of building an effective

movement for revolutionary social change. I am interested in using research and analysis

of food justice activists’ experiences to critically and constructively contribute to

struggles for food security, as one struggle for access to, and control of, the resources we

need to live. Thus, ultimately the root question I explore is: how do we fight to win? By

“fight”, I mean politically straggle in a contestation between owners and the exploited

over resources, discourse and space (Swyndegouw 2009). By “win”, I mean achieve

significant social change through shifting the power (and thus, shifting the resources,

discourse or space) in such a straggle. As I investigate issues surrounding politically 1 organizing around food insecurity under a neoliberal capitalist agenda, I explore the lessons we can learn to help answer such a question from this one struggle. In this thesis,

I examine the state of political struggle around food insecurity as a way to critically assess one struggle caused, enhanced and shaped by austerity politics. This research may contribute to the work of scholars and activists of food politics by pointing to current limitations to and possible radical orientations of the food movement.

Dahlberg (1994), Allen (2008) and many other scholars argue that food justice1 initiatives have the potential to mobilize broad-based support and open political possibilities to fight for food as a public good in times of increasing austerity. It is critical to understand the extent to which the frames and practices of particular food justice initiatives are strategically leveraged in the city, or result in oversights, limitations or obstacles to effecting social justice in practice.

In 2011, Toronto was threatened with a deepening austerity agenda in the form of serious cuts to social services, layoffs of public workers and privatization of public services. The potential for mobilization against the budget cuts was an instructive case to explore the connections between austerity measures and food security initiatives in

Toronto. Because Toronto is well known for its network of food justice initiatives

(Wekerle 2004; Johnston and Baker 2005), which have proliferated during times of intensive urban neoliberalizing projects (Keil 2005; Guthman 2008), it is a useful case to consider the political position of food security initiatives under a neoliberal offensive.

I I define and discuss the concepts of “food justice” and “food security” later in this chapter. My study involves a focus on non-profit food security initiatives because there is general consensus in the literature that these groups are an important manifestation of a food movement in Toronto (Levkoe 2006; Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 1998). The “food movement” can be defined as “the mobilization of disparate social actors in resistance to various aspects of the dominant corporate-industrial food system” (Wakefield 2007:331).

I understand the “food movement” in Toronto to be led by non-profits because activists that I interviewed indicated that their work is inspired by, modeled after or supported by

FoodShare and the Stop Community Food Centre (the Stop) - both of which are registered as charities and non-profits. Non-profits by definition use surplus revenues to achieve their goals, rather than distributing them as profit. In Canada, they can be officially incorporated or unincorporated. Charitable status can be granted to an organization for the purposes of tax-exemption, as long as they do not engage in

“political activity” (Canada Revenue Agency 2011). Both FoodShare and the Stop, as well as about three quarters of the groups from which I interviewed activists, are non­ profits with charitable status.

The programs offered by food working groups of health centres and supported by the Toronto Food Policy Council are similar, if not exactly the same as these larger non-profits . These organizations are also similar in that they are at least partially tied to

City funding. Thus I evaluate them as a particular tactic in a struggle for food justice that

21 describe these non-profits as “large” because they have several full time staff members running multiple food-related programs, as well as a budget that can remain stable beyond a year - all o f which the “smaller” non-profits, or food working groups, do not have. holcfs the political goals of ending hunger and an unjust food system in order to live with health and dignity. Because the food movement holds these goals, I also evaluate the movement’s practice in terms of its potential for being one possible strategy toward radical social change. I examine these groups with a critical focus on the political economic context and structure of the food movement, to draw out lessons for political organizing. I hold this focus in order to forefront critical analyses of the political fodder of “food” as a tactic in urban social justice struggles. I contrast the potentials and limitations of a food movement as it currently stands in Toronto, with other forms of organizing that I argue hold potential for the radical social change necessary to obtain food security.

I explore the political mobilization against the coming cuts to city services as a starting point for examining the possibilities and perils for a political response to the structural inequalities causing urban hunger among current food security initiatives in

Toronto. When I refer to “political limitations”, I refer to limits on the ability to challenge the capitalist state in order to shift resources, discourse and space from the owners to the exploited (Swyndegouw in Mananzala and Spade 2008). Guthman states that the shape that the food movement takes is as much about movement politics as the

conditions through which activists must work (Guthman 2008). Koc and Dahlberg

(1999) conclude that little systematic research has been done regarding the trajectory of

multiple urban food security projects and the connections between them, the City and

other social justice struggles in one city. Rather, much existing research analyzes a broad food movement (Power 2010; Levkoe 2006; Bedore 2010) or ethnographic studies of one organization (Johnston and Baker 2005). Existing literature that discusses the food movement lacks attention to the role of food insecurity under capitalism, the role of non­ profits in the movement, an analysis of the rise of non-profits under neoliberalism and the associated political questions that such a context frames.

The food movement encompasses efforts for sustainable agriculture and food

security, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but often have distinct analyses which differ in focus (Allen 1994, 2004). In practice, these efforts may work together or exist in tension. Guthman (2008) and Allen (2004) argue that among a wide range of

actors - public health professionals, sustainable agriculture practitioners and

environmental justice and community food security advocates - the focus remains on

food as opposed to structural inequalities. My work is especially driven by this issue.

Additionally, while the food movement has been critiqued for creating spaces

and discourses which reproduce whiteness (Slocum 2008), neoliberal govemmentality

(Guthman 2008) and an uncritical spatial focus (Feagan 2007), scholarship and activists

still hold that it fosters political possibilities for contributing to a just urban food system

(Dahlberg 1994, Allen 2008; Allan and Kovach 2000). Literature on just urban food

systems and the food movement celebrates the possibilities it creates for democratization

of the food system, self-sufficiency, community building and empowerment, increased

access to healthy food and mobilizing a diverse group of actors (Allen 2010; Levkoe

2006). In a growing literature it is argued that the food movement has the potential to unite diverse groups and mobilize a broad constituency into a movement that has food justice as its centre of gravity (Dahlberg 1994; Allen 2008; Allan and Kovach 2000;

Anderson 2005). I seek to critically explore how the current organization of the food movement shapes the practices and frames of the food movement in Toronto in the context of a campaign against austerity attacks, and the possibilities for ongoing political

action against the structures and institutions creating the conditions for food insecurity.

My work is partially situated in a field of food geography which has significantly

grown in recent years, with researchers contributing to subfields such as alternative agro­

food geographies (Maye et al.. 2007; Watts et al.. 2005; Whatmore and Thome 1997),

agriculture and rural food geographies (Marsden 1995; Morris and Evans 2004), and

cultural food geographies (Bell and Valentine 1997; Cook and Crang 1996). Despite this

diversity, it is argued that one unexplored area that increasingly deserves our research

attention is the stmggle for an urban food system as a cornerstone of urban social justice

(Heynen 2006; Bedore 2010). As Heynen (2006) states, the blatant inequality associated

with urban hunger presents “substantial impediments to the production of healthy and just urban spaces” (Heynen 2006:130).

Urban social justice has been a point of interest for geography scholars of diverse

political perspectives for decades (Castells 1978; Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997;

Harvey 1973, 1996; Marcuse 2009). I seek to focus research attention on social

movements and possibilities for a just urban food system as inextricably tied to questions

6 of the revolutionary social changes needed to attain justice in the city (Marcuse 2009;

Castells 1977).

Reviews of the concept of food security trace a similar pattern of conceptual development from the 1970s to the 1990s. Its roots can be traced to international development work of the 1970s wherein a global scale concern for food supplies drew attention to macro-economic agricultural policies (Carr 2006; Anderson and Cook 1999;

Maxwell 1996). The progression of the concept narrowed in scope from global to local perspectives, especially as the focus on food supply failed to identify causal links between social/material circumstances of groups of people and experiences of food insecurity (Carr 2006). In the 1980s and 1990s, the understanding of food security centred on a livelihood perspective which looked to quality of food, appropriateness in varied diets and reliable food accessibility, as opposed to the assumed objectivity of calorie counts of previous researchers. Addressing domestic food security and the livelihood perspective influenced a turn among researchers, activists, service providers towards community food security (Carr 2006). An often accepted definition of food security is “the condition in which all people at all times can acquire safe, nutritionally adequate and personally acceptable foods that are accessible in a manner that maintains human dignity” (Ryerson University Centre for Studies in Food Security 2003).

However, the historic variation in the conceptualization of food security has led to a wide array of definitions (Mabry 2011).

7 The sustainable food systems approach to food security has its roots in a political-economy critique of the contemporary food system and in the environmental movement (Power 2004:31). Also growing out of the 1970s, this approach advocated for food without chemicals, an alternative distribution system and alternative means of consumption (Follett 2009). The sustainable food system movement generally favours more direct connections between local farmers and city consumers, greater local and community self-reliance and environmentally sustainable food production (Dupuis and

Goodman 2005; Whatmore et 1997). Follett argues that spatial relationships are a focus in the sustainable food systems movement as conventional food is delocalized and alternative food is re-localized (Follett 2009). These spatial alternatives are favored because food can “travel less”, serve areas not usually well served, help create a better

“information flow” between producers and consumers, and increase farmer self-

sufficiency (Watts et al. 2005). However, it is also argued that there is no automatic resolution of equity, race and the environment by working towards the spatial delimitations of the local through food (Allen 2010; Bom and Purcell 2006)

Power (2004) outlines two broad approaches to promoting food security - eliminating poverty and establishing a sustainable food system. The concept of

“community food security” is seen by some scholars and activists as combining aspects of the two approaches (Mabry 2011; Pelletier et al. 1999). It represents a process of re-

spatialization of food systems orientated around the spatial delimitations of community, with a genealogy that can still be traced back to world food security concerns of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as environmental sustainability directives (Pelletier et al.

1999).

The concept of “food justice” also aims to combine both approaches and is a broad term that encompasses many practical and conceptual ideas about an ideal food system (Bedore 2010). Food justice is said to serve as a theoretical and political bridge between scholarship and activism on sustainable agriculture, food insecurity, decommodification, citizenship and environmental justice (Alkon and Norgaard 2007;

Huish 2008; Johnston et al.. 2009; Wekerle 2004). As a social movement frame, “food justice” communicates grievances around such issues - which arguably arise as a result

of the capitalist system, and institutionalized racism and patriarchy (Power 2010;

Heynen 2009; Slocum 2008) - with a focus on mobilizing and enacting solutions around

food.

While the frame of “food justice” may encompass the two broad approaches to

food security in theory, in practice the two approaches may still be separate; one may be

predominant or they may exist in tension. Power argues that the anti-poverty approach to

food security strongly connects to a macroeconomic and social policy analysis and is

concerned with income security, more so than food per se (Power 2004:31). Food

security can be seen as rising as a result of the compounding economic challenge in

terms of rising food prices and growing income disparity (Bedore 2010). Some scholars

draw attention to how hunger is but one factor along with unemployment, child poverty

and homelessness, prompting a critique of the eroding welfare state (Riches 1999; Power 2004; Bedore 2010). However, community food security approaches have been criticized

for being an inadequate response to food insecurity and the erosion of the welfare state

(Tarasuk and Davis 1996; McIntyre 2003; Johnston and Baker 2005). They have also

been criticized for containing difficult and often irreconcilable tensions between the

needs of low-income communities and sustainable agriculture (Allen 1999). I mostly use

the concept of food security in my research, rather than food justice, because of this

closer relation to a trajectory of work and literature related to goals of food access in an

uneven urban geography, as well as critiques based on the ability to achieve such goals.

However, because of overlapping meanings, these concepts are often used by me and

interviewees interchangeably.

My research is also partially informed by a body of work that points to critical

issues within the discursive politics of framing issues of food and hunger (Bedore 2010;

Power 2008; Heynen 2009). Power (2004) argues that while agriculture unsustainability

and poverty both have their roots in the capitalist system, food justice initiatives have

been isolated from larger agendas for structural change. Bedore argues that the all-

inclusiveness of the term “food security” can obscure the nature of the problem. Food

solutions will not solve the problem of poverty (Bedore 2010) or institutionalized racism

(Slocum 2008; Heynen 2009).

This debate points to the need to analyze to what extent a focus on local food,

healthy cooking, and community gardens - as common and celebrated work of non­

profits - has taken the focus off food as but one aspect of structural inequalities shaping

10 low income communities. After all, it is only in recent years that scholars engaged with ideas of justice and food (Bedore 2010). This focus has been “in terms of rights, democracy, sovereignty, race, class, social reproduction and morality, all of which raise important questions about entitlement, control, ownership and responsibility within a food system” (Bedore 2010:1427).

There is much debate as to the conceptual issues, trajectories and efficacy of environmental and social justice approaches to food security. Critical geography scholars began to take issue with fetishistic approaches that equated a certain scale of food processes with a more just food system (Bom and Purcell 2006; Feagan 2007; Guthman

2008; and MacKinnon 2007). It is also argued that sustainable food system advocacy lacks a critical race analysis (Slocum 2004; Pudup 2008; Power 2004) and reproduces spaces of neoliberal govemmentality (Guthman 2008).

Guthman (2008) argues that current arenas of activism around food, as well as the scholarship that supports it, help produce and reproduce neoliberal forms and spaces of governance, at the same time as opposing neoliberalism writ large (Guthman

2008:1172). Guthman (2008) and Changfoot (2007) argue that techniques of neoliberal

governance fundamentally shape the thinkable and actable. Pudup (2008) argues that food and farming is promoted in the food movement as a means to self-improvement - for example, using garden-oriented projects to produce “empowered” self-sufficient

subjects irrespective of actual food production. Furthermore, a consequence of this approach is that individual choices around what to eat become a political end in and of itself (Guthman 2007). Ultimately, Guthman argues that notions of the seasonal, local, organic and accordingly, the move towards consumption-based regulation and self- improvement “hail(s) a foodie/yuppie subject to be the carrier of transformation in agro­ food politics” (Guthman 2006:1177). Food “production” becomes the focus, as opposed to lack of access to food as one aspect of an anti-poverty struggle.

In the context of urban neoliberalizations, where the theme becomes removing urban governance from the responsibilities of social reproduction and shifting public welfare to self-help, some scholars argue that these food “production and consumption” projects may facilitate the depoliticization of struggles over resources and allocations by enforcing a turn to “responsibilization” (Pudup 2008; Guthman 2008). Levkoe echoes this sentiment in arguing that by filling gaps left by government cutbacks and uncritically accepting the responsibility and accountability at the local level, alternative food initiatives are accused of being “complicit in a wider neoliberal consensus and its uneven affects” (Levkoe 2006:37). My study differs from work that argues that food security initiatives are complicit in propagating neoliberal ideals. This literature lacks a framing of the issue of propagating these ideals in relationship to the kinds of political action against food insecurity taken by these approaches. Rather, I engage with literature analyzing the non-profit industrial complex, as well as neoliberal urbanism and social movements. I argue that we need to look at the political-economic context and structural limitations of a movement led by non-profits to help explain why the initiatives are

12 limited from engaging in political struggle against a neoliberal agenda, as well as possibilities for strategic subversion.

While there is a growing body of literature which looks at the limitations on radical work in the non-profit sector and identifies the growth of a “non-profit industrial complex” (Rodriguez 2007; Gilmore 2007), there is very little work that looks to the political consequences of nonprofits as the form of popular organization taken by the food movement in some cities. There is particularly little work which foregrounds the relationships of food insecurity to capitalism and neoliberal strategy, examines the interrelationships of non-profits to neoliberal strategy, and assesses the ability of non­ profit tactics to fight and make political gains against this system. In this research, I speak to activists within several food security initiatives which are well known among food politics scholars and activists, to see the possibilities for and limitations on political gains around food security. I engage with issues of obstacles to political work within these groups in order to assess whether we need to rethink the current orientation in this work, as well as to learn of possibilities and pitfalls that activists who have had experience in and out of the non-profit industrial complex, have identified. I argue that many critiques of the food movement — including ineffectiveness of addressing urban hunger, the dominance of whiteness in the movement and the disconnection of issues of urban hunger and environmental justice - can be considered symptoms of one issue. I argue that a main issue is that the movement is non-profit led, which presents structural obstacles to holding a radical, anti-capitalist orientation. Thus the work is limited when it comes to affecting structural change. In other words, it is important that the food movement confront the political questions that the limiting dynamics of the state and capital pose in these initiatives.

At the time of the mobilization against the municipal budget cuts in Toronto in

2011/2012, previous years of neoliberal clawback of social services had already placed many services in a vulnerable position regarding funding, but also increased the necessity of their programs. Mayer (2004:134) argues that this neoliberal context “limits the arguable and organizable” for social movements and non-profits. In this research, I explore if food security groups were engaging in organizing against austerity measures and if this was because of the effects of austerity measures on urban hunger, or because the funding of non-profit organizations was threatened. Non-profit organizations that are

dependent on municipal funding may not want to “take the risk” of oppositional political

organizing in a political environment that is dominated by neoliberal ideologies. These

questions point to the need for a careful consideration of food justice initiatives within the context of a neoliberal agenda that takes into account the experiences and strategies

of actors involved in political work. I examine these questions by looking at the

responses of food security organizations to the austerity agenda and the factors which

shape possibilities and limits on making political gains around food security, in the

current food movement in Toronto.

14 Research Questions

The goal of this study is to explore to what extent food justice organizing opens or forecloses political possibilities for struggling against structural inequalities causing urban hunger. Examining the who, why and how of organizing against the cuts to city

services, as well as reflections on past and present political organizing in food security

initiatives can help reveal the extent to which the food movement in Toronto is positioned to engage in broader mobilization to respond to deepening inequalities caused

by neoliberal capitalism. My main research questions are:

1. How were food security initiatives affected by the 2011 municipal budget

cuts?

2. How do the municipal budget cuts relate to an overarching neoliberal

strategy?

3. How did food security initiatives respond to the threat of these budget cuts?

4. What factors affect the ability of food security initiatives to engage in

oppositional politics?

5. What tactics and strategies are used to politically organize around food

security within the structure of a non-profit?

6. To what extent can non-profits engage in oppositional politics, or politics

challenging the state?

15 Methods

My introductory knowledge of which food security initiatives were mobilizing or

speaking out against and/or were slated to be directly affected by the 2011/2012 budget

cuts in Toronto came through networks established over two years through my political

work as an activist in the migrant justice group, No One is Illegal. As it became known

in the winter of 2011 that the City was hiring KPMG - a company known for telling

governments to slash spending on social services to manage deficits (Hope 2012; Fanelli

2012) - to make budget recommendations, a meeting was called among grassroots

organizations in the city. A coalition, including Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, No

One is Illegal, and union representatives, formed under the name Stop the Cuts. I

organized with No One is Illegal prior to and during the Stop the Cuts work. As No One

is Illegal was an active part of the coalition, and the coalition was active in a network of

groups and unions resisting the cuts, I was able to keep abreast - through coalition

meetings and actions (e.g., a meeting in Dufferin Grove park in July 2011 which

attempted to pull together all groups and individuals working on this issue to create a

“People’s Declaration” against the cuts) of which food security groups were engaging in

anti-austerity organizing, or at least discussing how the cuts would affect their work.

Additionally, from 2010-2011, No One is Illegal pushed for a “Food for All”

campaign where it would work with frontline workers in food banks and food justice

initiatives to ensure access to food banks regardless of immigration status (currently an

obstacle to accessing food banks). Through my involvement in this work, I established

16 political relationships with organizers at the Stop Community Food Centre and Food

Forward - a municipal advocacy group which also aims to strengthen a network of food security initiatives in the city. Through No One is Illegal’s longstanding relationship with Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and recent work together in the Stop the

Cuts coalition, I also had a political relationship with OCAP organizers. Thus, I was not an objective outside observer, but rather was entering my research from the dual position

of both researcher and organizer standing with anti-capitalist groups calling for a stop to

all cuts and an expansion of services for all people - including undocumented people.

Researchers have studied food security organizations through ethnographic research (Johnson and Baker 2005; Levkoe 2006), social network analysis (Levkoe

2010) or as a broad movement (Power 2010; Bedore 2010). Unlike these approaches, I

studied the reflections and experiences of activists in organizations. I used this evidence to understand the obstacles and strategies around mounting political struggles around

food as experienced first-hand by organizers within these organizations.

I answered my research questions through mixed methods including content

analysis and semi-structured open-ended interviews with thirteen key informants

(Marshall 1996; Steinberg etal.. 2008; Tremblay 2009) from eleven food security

initiatives in Toronto. This mixed method approach (Creswell 2009; Tashakkori and

Teddie 2003) can foster a more in-depth understanding of the topic of inquiry than

would the employment of a single method. I conducted key-informant interviews

17 because this method seeks to gather information from individuals who are recognized as local experts on a particular object of inquiry (Steinberg et al.. 2008).

I identified these interviewees by looking to groups and organizations which were identified in food security literature (referencing Toronto) as significant players in the food security political terrain in the city. Because I studied the reflections of activists

on their political work as shaped by these organizations, I focused on these organizations

and groups as actors, rather than individuals and their histories. The use of key informant

interviews was necessary for this study because I needed to interview people with

institutional knowledge and memory. From these knowledgeable positions I could gain

insight from reflections which would put the mobilizations, or lack thereof, around

recent austerity attacks in a context of a history and present work of the organization.

These key informants, or local experts, may hold such positions because of a particular

status - in this case as leaders in food security initiatives (Marshall 1996; Tremblay

2009). Or, they were local experts because of years of experience as an organizer in the

city and thus, were recommended by other key informants in a process referred to as

“snowball sampling” (Babbie 2008; Berg 2009). Embedded within the particular context

of organizing within food security groups and initiatives, these key-informants are likely

in a significant position to give insight on experiences of potential and limitations of

their political work in a way that literature produced by the organization may not reveal.

Indeed, they could give insight which could significantly push back to literature and

theory on the work of the food movement.

18 In order to appropriately identify key informants, as understood by those with experience in such networks, I used snowball sampling. I asked each interviewee to recommend a person they believed to be a knowledegable organizer within food security initiatives in Toronto. The process allowed me to identify groups and individuals of whom I would not have been otherwise aware. There was significant overlap in terms of who was recommended, which helped confirm that I was speaking to the right people for the purposes of this project. The snowball sampling method was then useful as these activists were better positioned in their political networks, established over years or through recent discussion in their networks around the cuts, to recommend other key informants after learning the research questions.

All of the interviewees were in leadership positions of at least one aspect of their group or organization’s programming. As a result of snowball sampling, I interviewed staff from two large non-profits (FoodShare and The Stop Community Food Centre), as well as staff leading food security initiatives and linked to the Community Health Centre

Food Security Network (South Riverdale Community Health Centre and the Stonegate

Community Health Centre), three smaller food security working groups also operating as non-profits (Stonegate Food Access Committee, Riverdale Food Working Group, Not

Far From the Tree) as well as the director of a municipal advocacy group Food Forward, the director of Toronto Food Strategy, and a long-time member of the Ontario Coalition

Against Poverty who was interviewed for insight into the Special Diet campaign.

Interviewees recommended other key informants who held institutional knowledge and longstanding experience in food security work in Toronto. While I engaged with three different kinds of groups, they are all involved in or promoting similar tactics recognized and celebrated by the food movement (e.g.,urban agriculture, local food promotion, subsidies for fanner’s markets, and cooking workshops). Directors of the Toronto Food

Strategy and Food Forward were interviewed to give perspective on the municipal budget cuts. Their insight helped cross-reference the tactics promoted by non-profits and policy encouraged at a municipal level, in order to see if the tactics were reflective of work in the “movement” in the city, or differed and thus needed to be explored further.

I conducted semi-structured open-ended interviews, which were digitally voice- recorded and lasted a mean duration of 55 minutes. I chose this interview structure because it allows for consistent guidance, but with flexibility (Babbie 2008; Berg 2009).

The flexibility was needed in order to give space for interviewees to highlight what they

identified as important in their work, and to allow for me to probe further into significant

areas of study with them or key informants they recommend. I developed open-ended topical questions which began with questioning if and how the municipal budget cuts would affect the work of their organization, and if and how the organization would

respond. From here I actively probed participants on the nature of possible resistance and

understandings of obstacles. Specific topics in this line of questioning included how

funding and ally relationships related to the nature of work that the organization took on.

After transcribing the interviews verbatim, I conducted a content analysis as I pulled salient themes from the narratives. This process involved closely studying the

20 interviews to identify patterns, themes and meanings (Berg 2009; Denzin 1970). In a close reading of the interview transcription, I looked for repeated phrases or ideas in order to pull out recurring themes and see how informants differently/similarly discussed them. I then looked to see if the themes pointed to a helpful, existing conceptual framework, or if they pushed back against the theory and literature to such an extent that a new framework would be needed as generated through a process of grounded theorizing (Dey 1999; Glaser and Strauss 1967). In my content analysis I cross- referenced interviews with literature produced by the groups, such as pamphlets and websites to make sure we did not miss programs, campaigns or goals in the interview.

I found the political relationships I had developed to be a significant factor in connecting with important key informants for my research. The pre-existing and ongoing political relationships created a sense of assumed accountability. Organizers with the

Stop said they constantly receive requests for interviews and simply do not have time to answer them all. Thus, they choose interviewers based on relationships where work was done as allies in the past and is expected to occur again in the future. Accountability

clearly goes beyond the duration of the research project and rather speaks to the active

support of each other’s work and struggles as allies. This ally relationship as the impetus

for accepting an interview in a busy schedule was similar with OCAP and Food Forward.

The lack of political relationship with another significant organization, the Afri-can Food

Basket, may have contributed to my inability to interview their organizers, who said they

did not have time. I am making this assumption based on the Stop’s description of not having time but specifically making time to speak to people with whom they have or can build political relationships.

Certainly political involvement also shaped what people were willing to talk to me about, and how I interpreted their responses. However, the position of a researcher is always political and could not ever be objective because, for example, researchers

always hold a particular position of power and are beholden to the elite institution that is the university. Thus, both in my research and in my writing, I attempt to address the way my political engagement could affect my work by always being honest about what I am

doing and why, in terms of my political stance.

While my work within the Stop the Cuts coalition gave insight into which groups were active, in the end this was not the main source of identifying key informants

because there was a lack of food security initiatives engaging in anti-austerity work. As

I linked up with Food Forward’s network through discussions on the Food for All

campaign and Stop the Cuts work, I was also added to an email thread with groups

affected by cuts to urban agriculture programs and Community Partnership Grants. I did

find that it was my work in the coalition which, according to many interviewees, made

them express interest in being interviewed. Several interviewees expressed in our

introductory emails that through identifying myself as both a graduate student and an

active member in the coalition and No One is Illegal, it was made clear that I shared

political goals with the interviewed activists who were concerned about the cuts for their

22 organization and/or the community they worked with. Many also expressed an interest in seeing a critical analysis on the state of the movement, which my thesis could provide.

While the position as both an academic and fellow activist in the city was significant and certainly shaped access to interviewees, it also poses the possibilities for tensions and complexities as I am then in a position as a researcher that requires critical analysis of the work these activists are engaged in and often excited about. Tensions include the fact that activist groups take both publicity and academic research as an opportunity to get their message out, and thus research that takes a critical and analytical stance can be the source of potential conflict. Also, researchers could devote time and resources not available in an organization to get the story out. At the same time, a common issue of academic work researching the work of activists is that academics who are not involved in the politically and emotionally demanding work that research participants are engaged in, spend a short amount of time researching and then deem it to not be “radical enough”. Yet, often the activists themselves are aware of the limitations that frustrate and limit the degree to which the work can be radicalized. Of course, the level of critique is always a political question.

Despite sharing many political goals of the interviewees, my position as a researcher aiming a critical eye at the state of the food movement was always made clear, and generally welcomed. As I discuss in chapter three, many activists in food justice initiatives who I interviewed explicitly argued that their ability to fight politically against austerity attacks and a system causing urban hunger was limited. In most cases, a

23 critical analysis in the form of thesis research was encouraged. Ultimately I believe that a movement should always be sincerely self-critical, with an orientation to results, in the form of shifting power - over resources, discourse, space - from owners to the exploited.

The questions and orientation of my research will also come from this political position.

Accordingly, my work looks critically at the extent to which the difficult political work needed for radical change in terms of food security, is possible when non-profits and non-profits tactics making up the current self-identified food movement in Toronto.

Chapters Outline

In chapter two I briefly discuss the nature of current food movement research and practice in order to highlight the ways in which situating the rise of food security non­ profits in the context of a rise of neoliberal strategy underscores possible political limitations. I emphasize the centrality of food insecurity in dynamics of capitalist accumulation in order to discuss the links between rising urban hunger and increased worker precariousness under a neoliberal, capitalist strategy. I argue that this political economic context shaped the rise of food security non-profits and accordingly the political perils and possibilities of the particular tactics of the food movement in

Toronto. I discuss a neoliberal phase of capitalist urban development as the context and agenda for the municipal budget cuts in Toronto in 2011/2012.1 describe aspects of the relationship between neoliberal strategy and social movements over the past few decades to further describe the context and role of non-profits in food security struggles. In chapter three I emphasize the importance of studying non-profits in a context of neoliberal strategy in order to understand the state of the food movement in Toronto. I describe the ways in which Toronto food security initiatives were threatened by and responded to municipal budget cuts as a starting point for discussing the political terrain of these initiatives. I discuss themes that arose from interviews with these groups regarding their ability to respond to austerity attacks and engage in oppositional politics

in a struggle for food security; these include issues of capacity and internal and external

limitations on political advocacy. I draw from literature which critically analyzes the rise

and structure of non-profits to argue that there are significant limitations to making

political gains around food security in a movement led by non-profits. These limitations

also include that the non-profit sector perpetuates a concentration of resources according

to racial hierarchies. I argue that my research reveals on-the-ground experiences of the

ways in which connections to city grants, the need for non-profits and the structure of the

third sector are symptoms of the same austerity politics and thus impede the ability to

challenge the workings of neoliberal capitalism in order to make political gains around

food security.

In the fourth chapter, I explore the examples of subversive possibilities and

challenges to the obstacles to engaging in political work within the non-profit structure

under an austerity agenda. These tactics include developing a collective strategy among

organizations to resist budget cuts, combining programming with political education to

resist neoliberal discourse, and combining direct service provision with political

25 organizing. I contextualize and highlight the significance of these themes by comparing them to the dominant approach by the food movement in the city and the tactics celebrated in literature on this work. I argue that discussions on food security and the food movement are in need of clarifying analyses around tactics, strategy, and orientation towards fighting against the root causes of hunger, environmental destruction and other associated symptoms of a capitalist industrial food system. To clarify this discussion I briefly discuss the Black Panther Party Breakfast Program and the community garden movement in New York City; I argue that there is a significant difference between seeing food and food programming as an end goal (common in non­ profit work) versus using it as one part of a strategy in struggle for revolutionary social change.

In the final chapter, I conclude that a struggle for real food security for all requires challenging the dynamics of capitalism through long-term revolutionary strategy, and confronting the political questions that these dynamics pose. However, findings from this study of food security initiatives in Toronto reveal that a food movement led by non­ profits faces serious limitations to engaging in such radical political work.The structure and political economic context of the non-profit sector result in them perpetuating a relatively narrow focus on food through programming which entirely fails to address root causes. I propose that food security initatives could have more political success if they were funded by people and groups who more closely aligned and serve to benefit from the political work. More importantly, I argue that food activists and scholars should join, support and/or build movements oriented toward being or becoming a force that can make and practice decisions regarding how we treat the land and distribute resources. I discuss an example of working class identification and support for Six Nations sovereignty struggles as one example of such a movement.

27 Chapter 2

Exploring Austerity and Food Security: The Necessity of Precarity

In this chapter, I discuss the political economic context for the recent round of austerity measures, beginning in 2011, which threatened aspects of the work of food security initiatives in Toronto. I highlight an example of the links between a neoliberal phase of capitalist urban development, rising urban hunger and the political perils and possibilities of the particular tactics of the food movement in Toronto. Urban hunger is but one consequence - and, I will argue, is a necessity - of capitalist urbanization

(Heynen 2008). Because neoliberalism is the latest phase of such a process, it is critical to look at food security under capitalism and austerity politics as the political economic context of the Toronto food movement. I argue that food insecurity is fundamental to capitalism, and as one factor in the precariousness of workers’ lives, it is heightened under neoliberal strategy. With an analysis of neoliberal strategy, I outline the municipal budget cuts in Toronto in 2011/2012.1 suggest the ways that neoliberal capitalist strategy relates to both a rise of food insecurity and a rise of non-profits in order to assess their ability to fight against urban hunger.

Though I turn attention to the neoliberal context of an increase both in urban hunger and food security non-profits - two phenomena which are linked in a critical relationship to austerity politics - 1 want to stress that I am always referring to neoliberalism as one phase of capitalism. After all, the neoliberal strategy is one of facilitating capitalist growth and consolidating class power (Harvey 2005). Harvey

28 (2005) and Keil (2009) argue that the problems under neoliberal urbanism are located in

the contradictions of capitalist urbanism - including the ever-growing need to build

urban infrastructure to continue capitalist accumulation and austerity policies that

constrain urban fiscal capacities and further increase precarity in workers’ lives. While a

neoliberal agenda entails the erosion of a social safety net, I also briefly discuss feminist

critiques of the welfare system because they underscore its role in maintaining the

reproduction of the workforce (by women) with no cost to capital. Thus, my orientation

in discussing radical and revolutionary potential is not towards reversing the erosion of

the welfare state under austerity politics, but rather towards understanding obstacles to

anti-capitalist struggle.

Understanding the rise of neoliberalism is essential to understanding the current

context of social justice struggles in the U.S. and Canadian context (Mananzala and

Spade 2008). Examining the political economic context and links between both a rise in

urban food security and an increase in the work of non-profits, is key in understanding if

and when food security initiatives can be politically effective. I argue that a food

movement led by non-profits faces significant political limitations in making successful

political gains around the ability to determine food security.

Food Security under Neoliberal Capitalism in Food Movement Studies and Practice

In the introductory chapter, I explored the trajectories of food movement studies

and practice in order to clarify the contribution of critical analyses of neoliberal

29 urbanism and the associated rise of non-profits in thinking and activism around food security. While the relationship between these processes is largely unexplored, I argue that it provides critical insight into the strategy of increasing worker precariousness under neoliberalism, as well as potential areas of struggle. Some scholars point to the critical disconnect between sustainable food system approaches, the root causes of food insecurity and struggles against urban hunger. I argue that these connections can be understood through an analysis of food security under the capitalist mode of production.

Pothukuchi and Kaufman (1999) argue that the current piecemeal approach in food activism fails to recognize linkages among food systems and other community systems such as housing (consequences of rent default over food intake reduction), transportation (city transit and access to affordable food) and how the local policy context affects and is affected by the urban food system (Pothukuchi and Kaufman

1999:214). Power (2004) argues that while agriculture unsustainability and urban poverty both have their roots in the capitalist system, community development food projects have been isolated from larger agendas for structural change. Clancy (1994) also argues that the food movement should look to how the urban poor have a common political situation as occupants of marginal positions in the highly capitalized food system.

Melanie Bedore (2010) argues that the question of urban food access is still an unexplored area where justice-minded theorization is needed. Lack of access to food is a multi-faceted symptom of broader structures that cause some people in the city to lack

30 physical and economic access to food. Thus a struggle for access to food would seem to be at least conceptually linked to other social justice struggles. Yet there is very little

focus in the literature on the intersections of the food justice movement with other social justice struggles in the city. Perhaps creating or enhancing this critical absence is the lack

of exploration of the political economic context and structures shaping the trajectory of

the food movement in a particular place. Critical analysis of the rise and structure of the

non-profit sector can help us understand perils and possibilities of food movement work

in Toronto because of the predominance of food security initiatives as non-profits.

Literature on the political limitations of attempts to address poverty and chronic

hunger through a system of charitably distributed corporate waste have been well

established (Poppendieck 1998). Scholars and food security activists hold that the move

to a populist “movement” mobilized around a food system and food security builds on a

critique both of the environmental destruction caused by capitalist industrial agriculture

and of food banks as a response to urban hunger (Bedore 2010; Levkoe 2009). Indeed,

Riches argues that “to understand food banks properly, it is important to see their work

as political activity and at the same time to recognize that they are serving a number of

contradictory political functions” (Riches 1998:115). Critiques of food banks and the

charitable sector include that they are protecting and even bolstering inequalities of

capitalism and neoliberalism, while depoliticizing hunger (Poppendieck 1998; Shields

and Bryan 1998). Similar critiques have been articulated of food movement practice

(Power 2009; Allen 1998). However, the political questions surrounding the position of

31 food banks in society are not necessarily reflected or addressed in the practice of the

“movement” groups and organizations, yet still remain as pressing questions.

Food movement scholars (Power 1998; Clancy 1994; Allen 1999; Pothkuchi and

Kaufman 1999) make arguments around the disconnection between food activism and

neoliberal strategy without exploring why such critical gaps exist in practice. They do

not explore what limitations and contradictions are faced by current food movement

work, and what leads to a possible quelling of more radical work that makes such

connections. Thus it is useful to explore these questions through a case study on the

extent to which the current organization of the food movement in Toronto can resist a

deepening austerity agenda. Such a study can also help reveal the extent to which work

is bound by the same structures causing increasing food insecurity and how the

initiatives which shape the food movement can be subversive in such a context.

The Nature of Food Movement Practice

The food movement critiques the quality, uneven distribution of food and

destruction of the environment under the corporate industrial food system. It argues for

local, healthy food for all (Power 2010, Bedore 2010). The work of the non-profits and

working groups identifying as part of the food movement in Toronto, as well as many

recommendations made by the Toronto Food Policy Council, espouse a similar set of

practices to respond to such critiques and goals (Sharzer 2012). The nature of the work

32 in these food security initiatives - as described in interviews for my study and compiled from Toronto food security organizations’ literature (online descriptions and pamphlets describing programming), and supported by policy recommendations - includes workshops related to food preparation and production (composting, gardening, seeds, gleaning, canning, cooking), promoting and supporting urban gardening, voucher programs that subsidize the purchase of food at farmer’s markets, collective meal programming, and farm trips. Some work revolves around supporting political advocacy campaigns (Put Food in the Budget, the Special Diet), but according to interviews, this work seems to occur marginally - except in the case of the Stop’s Community Action

Program - and is relegated to signing on to supporting a campaign .

Much of this programming comes from a critique of food banks and seeks to improve the food to which low income people have access. These tactics and programming are shared in food policy recommendations (Toronto Food Policy Council

2008), non-profit work, and literature celebrating “a more socially inclusive and sustainable urban development model” (Donald and Blay-Palmer 2005) and “a regeneration of local food systems and access to healthy, affordable food” (Baker 2010) in the food movement. However, I argue that addressing issues of quality and choice of food through self-provisioning and subsidized fresh produce, with an orientation to environmentally sustainable initiatives - all important critiques of food banks and environmentally destructive agriculture - address only some of the political questions surrounding food security, in limited ways.

33 Questions surrounding food banks include looking at the role of the state in capitalism and social reproduction, and accordingly, food security under capitalism.

Graham Riches argues that food banks help meet the needs of capital and the state by offloading the costs of social reproduction of the workforce, or having privatized emergency measures as the public safety net is eroded (Riches 1998). Because workers plan for their individual and family reproduction, and capital requires the production of its enterprise, workers pursuing non-market reproduction offloads the costs of production from capital onto workers (Sharzer 2012). Volunteer labour, ethical farming and perhaps a shared sense of community created by urban gardens helps reproduce the labour force without cost to capital (Sharzer 2012).

Political questions surrounding food banks point to issues of wages and income

support, erosion of a public safety net, the political role of food banks in a system of

social welfare (food banks helping meet the needs of capital and the state), as well as

questions regarding their benefit and if they should be supported politically (Riches

1998). These questions can become lost when gardens, farmer’s markets, and cooking programs are celebrated as a critical part of the solution and occur through non-profits,

with the help of grants from the state and private foundations. Yet, these programs are

also often critiqued as having a limited impact on food security (Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk

2009; Allen 2010). By exploring the relationships of food movement organizations to

neoliberal strategy and the political limitations they face, I suggest reasons why these

questions are not raised in practice and why answers are not fought for politically. Situating the rise of food security non-profits in the context of wage labour under

capitalism and the rise of neoliberal strategy re-centres such questions.

Capitalism and Food Security

While recognizing that the connections between a neoliberal strategy and food

security will be important and useful to contextualize more rapidly increasing levels of

food insecurity, I argue that an analysis of food insecurity as both a symptom of and a

necessity in capitalism, should be central in food movement theory and practice. I argue

that if this analysis is central in our understandings of food movement work, we can

better orient food justice struggles which rise from multiple intersecting forms of

oppression for which capital plays a critical role. Furthermore, while rates of hunger

dramatically increased under a neoliberal agenda (Riches 1999), understanding the

agenda according to processes of capital accumulation is necessary so that our struggles

against food insecurity and against neoliberalism are not relegated to just fighting

austerity measures. Centring an understanding of the capitalist mode of production in

my analysis is necessary to reveal the heart of the neoliberal strategy and the limitations

of the current food movement work in Toronto, particularly when dominated by non­

profits. As Margit Mayer (2004:100) has noted, if we do not orient our struggles

according to our understanding of the root issues of the problem, then we are faced with

a movement limited to “skirmishes or mere efforts to delay the downward spiral”.

35 Capitalism is a socio-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production of commodities for exchange, and the exploitation of wage labour

(Perelman 2006). A necessary process to establish these dynamics is primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation refers to “the brutal process of separating people from their means of providing for themselves” (Perelman 2006:13). In other words, the creation of capitalism required that peasants and Indigenous peoples had the ability to feed themselves independently, removed from them. Perelman (2006:30) eloquently explains “Primitive accumulation cut through traditional lifeways like scissors. The first blade served to undermine the ability of people to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stem measures required to keep people from finding alternative

survival strategies outside the system of wage labor”. A class of people - the proletariat

- are created as they are separated from owning the means of production and must then

sell their labour power to the owners of the means of production - the bourgeoisie - in

order to survive. Capitalism as a system thus necessitates that people do not have the

ability to independently feed themselves.

The particular power dynamic between these two classes comes about as the

surplus value from the wage labour is appropriated by the capitalist class for profit. “The

silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist

over the worker” (Perelman 2006:30). Because the value of product is divided into

wages and profit, there is a class struggle over this division (Marx 1976 ch.25 sec.3).

36 This dynamic points to the significance of disorganizing workers as part of neoliberal strategies to remove obstacles to capitalist growth.

While I have discussed primitive accumulation as a historical event in the development of capitalism, Perelman (2006) argues that this process is still happening to

Indigenous peoples now — which also points to reasons why the food movement should support Indigenous struggles. (I will return to this point in the conclusion). Looking at

such a process grounds an understanding of the fundamental relationship under capitalism between subsistence and the need to sell one’s labour power.

Amis (1995) argues this process of proletarianization, or “transition from a

situation where an individual’s subsistence depends upon household consumption and production of agriculture and food, to one where subsistence depends upon wage labour

with which to purchase food” determines urban poverty rather than anything associated

with urbanization. Amis is thus following Castells’(1979) and Lefebvre’s (1970) critique

of urban sociology that the “urban” is a spatial, cultural or ideological term and that

wider societal forces (e.g., capitalism) are determining these apparently urban issues .

The significance of the labour market and wider societal forces in shaping urban

poverty are specific features of the nature of poverty in urban areas. These features are

partly related to the role of urbanization in the development of capitalism and the way

that the urban land market operates (Amis 1995). Philip Amis argues that one of these

critical features in advanced capitalism is that the “urban form necessitates state

intervention in providing for the reproduction of the labour force” (Amis 1995:50). Thus

37 we see that the capitalist state must intervene to provide some social services because it

requires a working population that is at least somewhat healthy and capable to work —

though still with the inability to subsist well beyond the need for even the lowest-paying

work.

Marx argues that capitalism requires a perpetually unemployed “industrial

reserve army” to keep wage rates down (Marx 1976, ch.25 sec.3). The constant

generation of this relative “surplus population” keeps the law of the supply and demand

of labour, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s

valorization requirements (Perelman 2006:31). In other words, over the business cycle,

the expansion and contraction of the reserve army prevents wages from increasing so

much as to endanger profitability (Fine and Saad-Filho 2012:364). The bourgeoisie thus

needs the power of the state, and uses it to “regulate” wages, i.e., to force them into the

limits suitable to make a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker

himself/herself at a normal level of dependence (Perelman 2006:31). These dynamics

point to the need for precariousness(including food insecurity) to create these levels of

dependence. The reserve army of labour is therefore not only a systemic outcome of the

capitalist mode of production, but a necessary foundation (Fine and Saad-Filho

2012:364).

Accordingly, Blaut adds a critical concept to this understanding of urban poverty

as he explains the process of “ghettoization” in cities as segregation at the point of

production and segregation within the workforce, including “the reserve army” of

38 unemployed (Blaut 1984: 37). Unemployment rates in Canada for racialized people were

16% for racialized groups, compared to 9% for white people, in 2005 (Galabuzi

2005:13). In Toronto, 33% of racialized groups and 46% of recent immigrants in

Toronto are living in poverty (Galabuzi 2005:13). Urban poverty and urban hunger are racialized (Slocum 2006). Blaut argues that it is therefore clear that, as a policy under capitalism, the working class is divided into a “no-more-than- ordinarily exploited and oppressed sector, and a sector which is super-exploited and super-oppressed”, or exploited to the point where reproduction of labour is barely possible (Blaut 1984).

The class is divided further according to gender, sexual orientation, ability, immigration status. While this is a mechanism that workers can and do resist, “it is indeed policy because it is needed for capital accumulation” (Blaut 1984).

For example, Blaut describes the situation of undocumented migrant workers and temporary foreign workers as a “super-exploited” class which is directly beneficial for the capitalist state. As the state legally defines migrants as “foreigners” and “illegals”, they are denied explicit rights (including healthcare in Canada) and more importantly, can be deported if presumed to be demanding higher wages, unionizing, or changing employers (Blaut 1984). In a summation resonating with the current immigration policy in Canada , Blaut (1984: 36) states: “It is clear that this “illegal” migration is deliberately encouraged by United States capital, or certain of its sections, behind a smokescreen of condemnation.. .because “illegals” are under even tighter control than other “foreign” workers”. This example shows how a super-exploited class - in which improving conditions for reproduction of labour is barely possible - is actively created. It further reveals the ways in which precarity and insecurity are actively created by the state to facilitate further capital accumulation. Here we see that despite the need for state intervention to help reproduce a labour force at basic levels needed to survive, it is clear why entire neighbourhoods and parts of the population experience appalling rates of food insecurity and precarity (Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 2009) - and that this is endemic to capitalism.

For the purposes of this thesis, I have only explained one dynamic of food security as it relates to capitalism because I especially focus on political work around food access in the city. Important to consider, but an explanation of which is beyond the space and purposes of this work, is that because food is a commodity, the food system is necessarily part of the global capitalist system. Thus, it is subject to increasing monopoly multinational control, a push to centralization and intensification of production to increase profit. The divide between “ecologically sustainable and environmentally catastrophic agro-industrialisation” is endemic to capitalism (McMichael 2005). The neoliberal agenda will further increase the control of multinational companies over food

(Watts et al 2005), further turning food production into a mere sub-section of capitalist industry and thus destroying more and more possibilities for subsistence (outside of wage labour) around the world.

One of the significances of centring such root causes in food movement theory and practice is that it reveals a critical need for food justice struggles to be linked to - or

40 even grounded in - other struggles such as migrant justice and Indigenous sovereignty.

It also points to the idea that a focus on food and food systems as separate from analyses of capitalism could cause food movement work to turn a blind eye to strategies and tactics which build a movement and have significant impact on food security. I will

discuss these points in the following chapters.

The necessity of a “reserve army of labour” for capitalism sets the stage for

discussing the ways in which food insecurity is not just a consequence of, but rather is a

part of neoliberal strategy to consolidate class power and further facilitate capitalist

growth (Harvey 2005). This dynamic reveals why it is critical, but limited, to merely

resist rounds of austerity attacks. Rather, it is clear that challenging and overcoming

these dynamics is needed to attain food justice. Accordingly, organizing around food

security is theoretically a matter of class struggle. In practice, we see several factors

culminate in a lack of such a political struggle around food, in what is commonly

identified as the food movement. Attention to the foundations of capitalism can reveal

the ways in which a non-profit led movement may limit the radical orientation needed

for the food movement to achieve its political goals.

The Neoliberal Project

The political-economic project of neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s to

consolidate class power through a removal of state regulations and support for the free

movement of capital (Harvey 2005). Neoliberalism entails a commitment to the undoing

41 of economic arrangements often referred to as “Fordism” in a push for an economy fuelled substantially by deregulated markets driven by the interests of corporate and financial capital - an economy in which capital’s control over labour leads to increasing inequalities of income and wealth (Harris 2006:1542). As a political philosophy and social policy, neoliberalism was actively developed in the context of the capitalist economic downturn that began in the early 1970s. The downturn involved wide-ranging transformations in labour relations and labour market policies. Neoliberalism emerged in this political-economic moment in resistance to Keynesianism and as a prescription for a return to capitalist profitability (Harvey 2006; Jessop 1993; Fanelli 2011). The discourse of precariousness and precarity emphasizes the effects and implications of neoliberal economic strategies and employment regimes, wherein workers face an endless series of short-term contracts, and increasing uncertainty in their lives (Mole 2010; Harvey 1989).

To understand the current attacks by an austerity agenda and the critiques of the non-profit sector, it is key to understand analyses of the trajectory of the neoliberal project. Urban neoliberalizing processes have contributed to the contradictory re­ regulation of everyday life in the city of Toronto (Boudreau et al. 2009). The local neoliberal project in Toronto came into being as a mix of “half-hearted” market reforms which would make for a leaner local state and include frontal attacks on the poor, and the

Left (Boudreau et al. 2009). Accordingly, Lefebvre highlighted that cities played a significant role in the development of the practices associated with neoliberalization

(Lefebvre in Boudreau et al. 2009:31). As municipalities are responsible for much social

42 welfare, they “first felt the brisk wind of austerity that began to blow hard from the new regimes” (Boudreau et al. 2009:39). Thus it is significant to explore political organizing around urban food security under recent rounds of municipal austerity attacks.

Neoliberalism entails the dismantling of state institutions which create a “social

safety net” and an approach to governance that favors “privatization”, “deregulation” and other policies that transfer political power from governments to markets (Harris 2006:

1542). Proponents of neoliberalism claim that the model is premised on the idea of reducing the role of the state in regulating the economy (Perelman 2006) though the policies create a stronger state in establishing conditions for capital accumulation

(Fanelli 2011:143).

John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty,

emphasizes that a drastic reduction in the adequacy of income supports payments is key to a neoliberal agenda. Despite the balance of a basic social infrastructure in Canada tilted towards employers, Clarke argues that employment insurance and welfare

payments “limit the desperation of the unemployed and the degree to which those with jobs can be forced to make concessions” (Clarke 2010:1). Ripping away at such aspects

of a social safety net helps ensure that the alternative to low wage exploitation and

precarious work is even worse, thus expanding a “reserve army” of unemployed, super­

exploited workers. Clarke states that “the architects of the 19th Century Poor Laws

made this point clear with the concept of ‘less eligibility’”, and that this has remained as

the underlying assumption with welfare systems since then (Clarke 2010:1). Enormous reductions in Canadian federal employment insurance and provincial social assistance have been a key focus in the neoliberal offensive of the last two decades in a move to push people into increasingly low paid, precarious work (Clarke 2010:1). The clawback of a minimal social safety net significantly affects low income and marginalized communities, disproportionately people of colour, and the social movement organizations in struggle with them - as I will explore in the next chapter. This shift is intricately tied to the changing roles of the non-profit sector.

Neoliberal policies shift from redistributive policies associated with the administrative structures of the Keynesian welfare state to strategies that encourage economic development through competition between regions for access to trade, goods, resources and services (Brenner 1999; Harvey 2006; Fanelli 2012:144). This ongoing process of shifting territorialities in order to attract capital investment contributed to an uneven geography (Brenner and Theodore 2002) which greatly affected the low-income neighbourhoods wherein many of the food security initiatives in Toronto are located. For example, the exodus of manufacturing jobs greatly affected the neighbourhoods such as

Davenport-Perth, as well as Downtown East (The Stop Oct. 15,2011; RFWG Oct. 18,

2011) - where the Stop Community Food Centre and the Riverdale Food Working

Group are located respectively .

To recognize the significance of some of the discursive political work of food security initiatives - which I will discuss in greater detail in chapter four — it is important to consider that the onslaught of the neoliberal agenda also entailed efforts to transform

44 “the horizon of individual and collective expectation and altered urban subjectivity”

(Keil 2005:65). In particular, the Ontario provincial Conservative government of the mid

1990s strongly focused on redefining social norms to render invisible deepening social disparities. For example, this entailed a focus on virtues of home ownership while cutting funding for rental or social housing, or remarks on the ability of welfare recipients to survive on low priced tuna fish in the face of welfare cuts (Keil 2005:65).

Accordingly, an activist from the Stop Community Food Centre remarks on the dangers

of neoliberal discourse, in describing the environment in which the organization’s anti­ poverty work operates:

But certainly a lot of people that are targeted with poor-bashing messages

particularly during the Harris years .. .are hurt by poverty, particularly

working poor families and working class families that were told that their

taxes were funding welfare “fraud” and that’s where their money is going

(Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

Thus, she emphasizes the ways in which neoliberal discourse stigmatizes welfare and invisibilizes poverty, at the same time as working class communities experience austerity attacks.

In addition to class dynamics, the gendered dimensions of neoliberal policies that feminist political economists have analyzed are critical in understanding neoliberalism and political strategy for resistance. It is especially clear from the austerity at the Toronto level that neoliberal policies promoting privatization of social services and lack of

45 support for childcare - made necessary by and persisting in the context of a gendered division of labour - extend the demands on women’s responsibilities in the home, or the unpaid responsibilities of social reproduction (Fanelli 2011:147). While the erosion of the welfare state under neoliberalism disproportionately affects women, feminist and anti­ racist scholars (Evans and Wekerle 1996, McKeen and Porter 2003; Jenson et al 2003) have also put forth a longstanding critique of the welfare system as being “part of ideological apparatus of the State, ensuring the acquiescence of the oppressed in their own economic and ideological oppression and exploitation” (Wilson 1977: 30). Scholars point to the ways in which the welfare system prescribes tasks and behaviours to define femininity and hold women to their “task” of reproducing the work force. Because social policy is but one aspect of the capitalist State, social welfare policies are the “State organization of domestic life” (Wilson 1977: 30). Wilson states that the State will sometimes offer economic concessions to the dominated classes, and that welfare is an example of the transfer of a bit more wealth but no transfer of political power (Wilson

1977). Recognizing these critiques is significant to orient what it is people are struggling for as they resist a neoliberal agenda. Furthermore, because the third sector, or non­ profits, stepped up to fill the void in service provision as the welfare state was rolled back

(Peck and Tickell 2002), it is critical to note that there are similar limitations on a transfer of political power within a movement led by non-profits.

Recent Austerity Attacks in Toronto

46 In 2011/2012, Toronto saw increasing austerity measures which aligned with the neoliberal project of the past three decades. In the spring of 2011, the City conducted core service reviews and hired the consulting firm, KPMG, to identify services that could be cut to balance an alleged deficit of $774 million. The areas for potential and existing cuts to city services included daycare spaces, the urban agriculture program and public transit routes. Community centres, libraries and other public spaces were set to see the introduction or increase of user fees (White and Church 2011). In the summer and fall of

2011, there was a growing opposition across the city to such austerity measures, in the

form of a campaign to “Stop the Cuts”. Multiple labour and community groups across the city were plugging into community meetings or holding meetings of their own to plan action before the final decisions were to be made during a council meeting. The meeting was first set for the end of September, but moved to January in the face of mounting grassroots pressure (Hope 2012).

The moves made by the Ford administration in Mayor Rob Ford’s first year in power reveal a dominant neoliberal policy framework exacerbating “the worst features

of Toronto’s fiscal and urban crisis” (Fanelli 2011). Funding for libraries was reduced,

many TTC routes were eliminated, the TTC was declared an essential service by the

province, 22 community housing units were sold, more than 600 units were under review

for potential sale, and a portion of Toronto’s garbage collection was privatized. Ford

and his allies on council also aimed to increase user-fees for rentals of city owned

properties, and recreation and arts programs by about three percent (Fanelli 2012). The

47 core service review also recommended, for example, eliminating or reducing emergency funds to help the elderly and disabled purchase emergency medical supplies; eliminating subsidized recreational activities for low-income earners and children; and closing down a hardship fund that subsidizes funeral costs for poor residents. Food security agencies and activists did not tend to address this broad range of cutbacks. When there was a focus by food security initiatives on austerity attacks, they primarily centred on cuts to urban agriculture services, community partnership grants and student nutrition programs.

Thus, the administration had an aggressive agenda in terms of layoffs, cuts to services and the sale of assets. In turning attention to the strategies and goals underlying the neoliberal offensive, Fanelli argues that the Ford administration is facilitating the shifting of the crisis of the capitalist city onto women, the poor, city workers and social infrastructure. Fanelli (2012:2) argues that Mayor Ford sought to undermine public sector unionism in Toronto “precisely because Toronto has been - and remains - one of the centres of North American unionism and class struggle”. Accordingly, the Ford administration aggressively makes such moves with the support of Toronto and Canada’s ruling classes (Fanelli 2012). As Harvey argues, the underlying purpose of these austerity attacks is to boost capitalist profits, alter the nature of government and disorganize workers (Harvey 2005).

48 Neoliberal Urbanism as the Context for Toronto Food Security Initiatives

Too few food justice/food security scholars emphasize the links between food security and austerity strategies. I argue that we can understand food insecurity as having a place in an overarching neoliberal strategy and that this framing helps recentre the need for food security to be a part of an alternative, anti-austerity and anti-capitalist strategy.

Thus I discuss several dimensions of the neoliberal agenda in order to emphasize these links and to argue that the current organization of a food movement in Toronto focused on non-profits is related to such an agenda.

As emphasized by many food security activists that I interviewed, the non-profits

FoodShare and the Stop Community Food Centre paved the way for other food justice initiatives in Toronto when they came onto the scene in the 1980s. A significant grant from the City helped set up the core infrastructure of FoodShare in 1985 under a mayor often hailed as “progressive” - whose election promise included setting up this particular food security initiative to help end hunger (D. Field, 5 Oct. 2011, personal communication). The Stop grew out of one of the nation’s first food banks in 1980 and incorporated as a non-profit in 1982 (The Stop 2012).

The political economic context that these organizations entered into was arguably a result of frantic economic expansion of Toronto’s global city economy in the 1980s.

Industrial restructuring in the 1980s and an austerity politics that especially characterized governments beginning in the mid-1980s, drastically increased local welfare rolls to more than a tenth of Toronto’s population in 1989 (Keil 2005; Albo 2009). The

49 downloading of service provision and responsibilities from federal and provincial governments to municipal governments, as an important tactic of advancing neoliberal objectives, resulted in fiscal supports to cities failing to match new demands on the city budget. Consequently, service provision - out of necessity and perhaps political convenience - was also downloaded onto the third sector. Furthermore, this context includes that the City of Toronto, for more than a decade, has been “spearheading both new public management budget discipline for social activist and environmental organizations in the city’s governance perimeter and leaner service delivery as mainstays of neoliberal policies” (Boudreau et al. 2005:32).

Accordingly, the first food bank in Canada opened in Edmonton in 1981 as an emergency measure. But by 1985, 75 food banks had opened across the country. The basic principle they embodied was that in a society with so much wealth, food waste could be distributed to those in need (Riches 1986). However, food banks are critiqued for protecting and even bolstering inequalities of neoliberal capitalism and for depoliticizing hunger (Poppendieck 1998; Shields and Bryan 1998). Prior to the economic depression of the 1930s, there were almost no large-scale incidents of hunger in Canada until the recession in the early 1980s (Davis and Tarasuk 1994, Levkoe 2010).

In the 1970s, increased unemployment and poverty under the onset of neoliberal regulatory reform was occurring alongside rising inflation and interest rates. Pressures on workers were increasing, while inadequate response from federal unemployment insurance and provincial assistance programs led to deepening crisis (Riches 1986;

50 Levkoe 2010). Food banks became the predominant response to hunger. As of 2008, there were well over 700 food banks in Canada (Food Bank Canada 2008). In 2010, there were nearly one million visits to food banks in the city of Toronto - a city with a total population of 2.5 million. This represents a 14% increase over 2009, after a 9% increase over 2008 (Daily Bread Food Bank, 2010). Each month food banks in the GTA feed 160,000 people, while an additional 160,000 experience food insecurity but do not access food banks (Johnston and Baker 2005:319).

Increasing rates of urban hunger reveal the consequences of multiple and interlocking factors including welfare cutbacks, a rise in unemployment and underemployment and austerity measures by three levels of government. There is little doubt that increases in hunger are largely an outcome of factors directly related to massive economic restructuring generated by forces of market globalization, and the commitment of nation-states to anti-inflation, deficit reduction policies, labour market deregulation and social spending cutbacks (Riches 1997). Growing poverty, inequality and food insecurity in post-Fordist economies are conditions that are linked to shrinking

social assistance, a lack of affordable housing and structural unemployment and underemployment (Johnston and Baker 2005:319). Like childcare and housing, food is

inextricably connected to human need and embodies the contradictions of neoliberal

globalism’s drive for profits over life and a preservation of the commons (Johnston and

Baker 2005; Johnston 2003). Johnston and Baker (2005) argue that charity-based

approaches to food insecurity, accompanied by municipal powerlessness, are often the norm of neoliberal governance. Scholars and activists argue that the initiation of and increase in food bank activity have assisted the state in eroding people’s rights and entitlements to basic welfare assistance and consequently depoliticized hunger (Riches

1997).

Neoliberal policy at all levels resulted in public transit deterioration, community services gutted and social polarisation due to cuts to welfare, disability services, social housing and increased police budgets - all disproportionately affecting poor and migrant communities (Albo 2000). Chronic underfunding running against clear social needs

created an uneven geography in the city, which is reflected in the communities served by many of the food security initiatives I studied - South Riverdale, Davenport-Perth,

Downtown East. Here is but one example of the inequitable food landscape of cities

expressing the manifestation of capitalism in urban space (Bedore 2010:1425). As the

growth in food banks and usage from 1980s to now shows, the ability to have food

security is intimately connected to an uneven geography that deepened under neoliberal

capitalist urbanization. As food banks are a completely inadequate response to hunger,

the rise in food banks reveals levels of food insecurity that actively perpetuate the

precarity and insecurity of a class of people, and thus maintain a “reserve army” of

unemployed and working poor.

Under the municipal austerity agenda in Toronto in 2011/2012 we saw both the

threats to food security in the city as well as the vulnerability of food security non-profits

under austerity measures. The concept of food security is interesting at this particular

52 political-economic moment because the sell-off of community housing, the gutting of public transit routes in low income neighbourhoods and the increase in user fees for community services - not to mention a context in Ontario where the social assistance rates are already 25% below rates in the late 1980s - will clearly further affect the ability to access food. At the same time, the ability to be food secure fundamentally undermines a neoliberal capitalist agenda which includes ripping away at this social safety net, and increasing pressure on people to be pushed into increasingly low paid, precarious work.

Considering food security and austerity strategies further highlights the need to situate theory and practice of food security activism within the context of the ongoing neoliberal assault and, accordingly, class struggle. Reflections by members of one anti­ capitalist anti-poverty organization, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), on the

Ontario Welfare Special Diet - an additional welfare supplement to help low-income people with health risks cover the costs of healthy food - offers a concrete example of these connections. John Clarke, a longtime OCAP organizer, argues that in 2009, at the time of the cut to the Special Diet, one in five people on welfare and disability was receiving the food allowance. These people thereby had some prospect of paying the rent while enjoying a reasonably healthy diet. These numbers were a result of a concerted effort of OCAP, low-income communities and healthcare providers politically organizing to increase access.

The Liberal government of Ontario’s move to eliminate the Special Diet (but then instead, massively reduce access) in response to these increased numbers,

53 threatened the means by which a significant section of people on social assistance had been able to compensate for the loss in real income that has been occurring in the last two decades (Clarke 2010). Clarke suggests a more specific reason why the provincial government singled out a program aimed at “enabling poor people to pay rent and put food on the table” (Clarke 2010:1). The significant loss of better paying manufacturing jobs in Ontario along with the onslaught of attacks on workers and unions in the past two decades has created conditions wherein one worker in six works at or close to the minimum wage. According to Clarke, cutting the Special Diet helps lower expectations for job seekers and undermines bargaining power for the employed (Clarke 2009). I will return to this point in Chapter 4 as I discuss alternatives to non-profit activist strategies around austerity and food security.

Activism in a Neoliberal Urban Context

The onslaught of the neoliberal project occurred alongside a weakening of social

movements. Julie Guthman argues that neoliberalization can impoverish the imagination

of radical emancipatory possibilities because it structures everday life in ways conducive

to capitalist growth and “limits the arguable, the fundable, the organizable, the scale of

effective action and compels activists to focus on putting out fires” (Guthman

2008:1180). Neil Smith articulates that one of the greatest violences of the victory won

by the capitalist class in the 1970s -secured in the form of neoliberalism - was that “the

Left began to believe that there was no alternative to capitalism” (Smith 2011:82).

54 Despite occasional and dramatic successes, neoliberalism rose to prominence alongside

“defeat after defeat for popular politics in all its forms”, including people's organisations in the global South and trade unions in the North (Estevas et al. 2011). Hackworth argues that neoliberal social policy has had a fragmenting effect on progressive activism

(Hackworth 2006:32). Thus many scholars argue that neoliberalism has “inaugurated the postpolitical realm, where struggle is reduced to two shallow choices: policy-making

(that) bounds any solutions within the market, or an individualism that substitutes local, particularist goals for claims to universal justice” (Manzala and Spade 2008:118).

However, some scholars and activists still seem to hold that food system activism strategically creates political possibilities with neoliberal discourse and within the neoliberal direction of the state (Chang 2007; Guthman 2008) and hence the importance of seeing the perils and possibilities in such organizing. Recognizing the ways neoliberalism shaped the terrain of struggles better contextualizes the limits of non- profit-led movements, as discussed in the following chapter. The important question becomes - what can we learn from these difficulties, challenges and impasses to guide our struggles to achieve social justice?

I see my work as resonating with a call from geographers such as Helga Leitner

(2007), Roger Keil (2009) and Jason Hackworth (2006) to look to the important lessons to be learned from current activist projects operating within a neoliberal urban context.

While a variety of scholars have made clear how neoliberal restructuring strategies have reconfigured Western welfare regimes, with segmented and contradictory effects in

55 terms of on the ground “actually existing neoliberalism”, less attention has been paid to how these policies and consequences have transformed social movement terrains (Mayer

2007; Hackworth 2005). Hackworth argues that there are important lessons to be learned from current activist projects which operate within a neoliberal context (Hackworth

2005).

Roger Keil (2005) also argues that while urban neoliberalization creates new conditions for accumulation of capital, it inevitably creates more fissures in which urban resistance and accordingly, social change can take root. Analysis of what exactly these fissures are and how urban resistance can take advantage of them remain largely absent from studies of neoliberalizing urbanism and food movement literature. By critically assessing the possibilities for an orientation towards resisting neoliberal urbanism on the part of food security initiatives, I point towards (re)direction for such struggles for social

goods through reflection on obstacles and subversive tactics. In the final chapter, I also

offer an example of an environmental and working class struggle that aligns with an

Indigenous sovereignty struggle to strengthen the fight for common goals, which include

effects on long-term regional food security.

While deepening food insecurity in Toronto is clearly a symptom of the current

neoliberal phase of capitalist urban development, a growth of non-profit-led food

security initiatives has been occurring in this same period. Thus I explore the various

ways that food security organizing has a particular relationship with neoliberal strategy

according to interviews with leaders of such programs and organizations. Exploring this

56 organizing provides a particular perspective of activism under neoliberalism because

these initiatives arose at the onset of neoliberal urban policies in Toronto and, at the time

of this study, were facing another round of cuts to social services which threatened their

funding and which will certainly increase urban hunger.

Downloading to the Third Sector

It is critical to note that, like the recent round of austerity measures in Toronto -

including partial privatization of sanitation, and cuts and increases in user fees for city

programs - the downloading of service provision and responsibilities is an imperative

tactic of austerity politics, and includes an attempt to move from universal provision of

social services and public services at higher standards to market provision at lower

standards with user fees and means tests impeding access (Fanelli 2012). Aligning with

an agenda to disorganize workers, the downloading of service provision and

responsibilities onto fiscally constrained and neoliberal urban governance pushes further

downloading onto (non-unionized) non-profits and the voluntary sector. Furthermore, as

seen with this round of cuts, Mayer’s research on German cities argues that as local

administrations resort to cutbacks and competitive contracting to meet their economic

development and social policy duties, non-profits face similar criteria. They find it

increasingly difficult to use state funding for progressive goals and political struggles in

building programs, or even empowerment and solidarity (Mayer 2007).

57 The mobilization around stopping the cuts to city services was important to look

at because it could either have been an example of galvanizing a movement and/or

sustaining political organizing, or another example of activism which fights to put out

fires caused by neoliberal austerity measures. Previous years of neoliberal clawbacks of

social services have placed many agencies and non-profits in a vulnerable position

regarding funding but also increased the necessity of their programs. I explore, through

critical analyses of the non-profit sector, how these conditions can limit the imaginable,

the arguable and organizable. Groups could have been engaging in organizing against

austerity measures because of their effect on urban hunger, or because their own funding

is threatened. However, groups which obtain resources from the City of Toronto could

have been in a position of risk when it comes to oppositional political organizing. These

questions point to the need for a more nuanced look at food justice initiatives and

neoliberal processes, that takes into account the strategies of actors involved in political

work. I explore these questions by looking at the motivations and tactics of food justice

groups mobilizing and not mobilizing to stop the cuts. Examining these factors can help

us better understand the extent to which the food movement in Toronto may open or

foreclose political possibility in times of increasing austerity.

Conclusion

I have discussed the role of food insecurity under capitalism and more

specifically, under neoliberal strategy. An understanding of this dynamic is necessary to

58 understand the opportunities and limitations in current solutions offered by food movement goals and practice. In the following chapter, I introduce the concept of the non-profit industrial complex. I argue that the connection to City grants, the need for non-profits, and the structure of the third sector, are to an extent symptoms of the same austerity politics. I explore activists’ experiences and reflections on their political work around food security within a non-profit structure. I then explore the ways in which activists are tactically subversive even within limits of these organizations. I compare this work to the Special Diet campaign as well as analyze the different examples of programming and organizing according to an understanding of tactic and strategy.

Clearly the links between food security, capitalism and austerity politics are critical to an analysis of non-profits, tactics and strategy of the food movement in Toronto.

59 Chapter 3

The Limits of Non-Profits

A neoliberal phase of capitalist urban development in Toronto frames both the rise of urban hunger and the rise of food justice non-profits in the city. In this chapter I outline the threat that many food justice groups faced as a result of the budget cuts. I discuss the role of food insecurity under capitalism and more specifically, under neoliberal strategies. An understanding of this dynamic is necessary to assess the

opportunities and limitations in current solutions offered by food security organizations’

goals and practice. I discuss themes that arose from interviews with these groups regarding the ability to respond to austerity attacks and engage in oppositional politics in

a struggle for access to food; these include issues of capacity and internal and external

limitations on political advocacy. I draw from literature which critically analyzes the rise

and the structure of non-profits to shed further light on these themes. I argue that my

research reveals on-the-ground experiences of the ways in which the connection to City

grants, the need for non-profits, and the structure of the third sector are, to an extent,

symptoms of the same austerity politics. Thus, they impede the ability of a movement

led by non-profits to challenge the workings of neoliberal capitalism in order to make

political gains around food security. In the following chapter I discuss tactics and

strategies described by organizers to help address such obstacles within the non-profit

structure under an austerity agenda, though the issues delineated in this chapter still pose

significant limitations.

60 Social movements and non-profit organizations tend to be analyzed in quite distinct literatures, yet Esteves, Madas and Cox (2011) argue that one should not consider social movements and non-profits/non-govemment organizations to be two totally distinct spheres. Rather, they can be considered different modes of popular organization. Esteves et al. argue that these forms of organization can ally with one another, play each other’s roles, push each other out of the way, and ultimately be assessed in terms of their effectiveness as strategies and their ultimate outcomes within a single frame of reference. The questions can then turn to what tactics and strategies activists and organisations are pursuing toward the goals of the popular movement, how they are organized and whether these practices strengthen or weaken counter-hegemonic popular struggles (Esteves et al. 2011).

I draw upon the thoughts of activists and organizational leaders themselves, as well as critical political economic analyses of structural issues and trends among non­ profits, to discuss the potential and perils of a significant portion of food security organizing in Toronto. I did not study programs in depth or research the extent to which gains are being made in order to explore non-profit structure and shape of a movement.

Rather, my analysis draws upon activists’ own experiences of organizational and structural limitations of non-profits within a terrain shaped by neoliberal urbanism.

61 Why Study Non-Profits?

The food security movement in Toronto was spearheaded and is significantly shaped by non-profits. Taking seriously the critical analyses of non-profits and the cooptation of activism under neoliberalism - as developed by feminist, anti-racist scholars and activists - is necessary for forging a constructively self-critical movement that challenges, as opposed to perpetuates the concentration of power among those with race and class power (Mananzala and Spade, 2008:54). Indeed, it is only in challenging this concentration of power and resources that food movements can hold revolutionary potential. Accordingly, exploring food security initiatives and austerity measures requires moving beyond questioning funding cuts, to questioning the relationship between such funding and the food security work in the city, leading to issues with the very structure and function of non-profits in a struggle against the root causes of food insecurity. Thus, I explore critiques of the structures and positions of non-profits, with analysis of how these movement organizations’ missions, tactics, financial resources and impacts are interconnected in ways that reveal their inability to challenge the “politics and institutions of oppression” (Mananzala and Spade 2008:54).

Esteves et al. (2011) make the important point that there are often people working hard within non-profits who are sincerely motivated to making structural changes and helping people mobilize themselves to do so. This orientation was certainly

clear in interviews with activists in food security non-profits in Toronto. However, given that social movements and the non-profit sector are two different forms that popular

62 organization can take, it becomes possible to examine the possible orientation of non­ profits to popular organization in different times and places (Esteves et al. 2011). Many scholars and activists argue that in Western Europe, Canada and the U.S., NGOs and non-profits represent a top-down form of popular demobilization which must be understood by locating them within a longer history of activism and a neoliberal phase of capitalist development in the last few decades (Esteves et al. 2011; Rodriguez 2004;

Hackworth 2007; Mananzala and Spade 2008).

The concept of a non-profit industrial complex has been articulated by scholars and activists to critically assess the rise and role of the non-profit sector. The concept of the non-profit industrial complex describes a “set of symbiotic relationships” particularly common in the context of the U.S. (Rodriguez 2004). These relationships “link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements, since about the mid-1970s” (Mananzala and

Spade 2008). Rodriguez (2004) argues that these relationships help discourage potential sites of radicalism or moves them to “non-antagonistic social service and pro-state reformist initiatives”, and thus aid the functioning and reproduction of the state

(Rodriguez 2004:32). The activities of non-profits more generally are accused of

“cushioning” the inequities of corporate capitalism, and enabling the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state (Shields and Bryan in Levkoe 2009:40). Therefore

Rodriguez describes the non-profit industrial complex as maintaining politics and institutions of oppression in the end, as it limits radical political work and comers organizations into “providing basic service to quell unrest” (Rodriguez 2004). I argue that my research findings align with Rodriguez’s argument that demands for what he calls radical freedom, as opposed to White bourgeois freedom, are not possible while working within the non-profit industrial complex (Rodriguez 2004).

In Canada specifically, Esteves et al. argue that there is also a long history of government funding and co-optation of social movements and social service agencies, particularly beginning in the late 1970s, with the same political consequences as described above (Esteves et al. 2011). Arguably, the same level of symbiosis of liberal foundation and state allies may not exist with food security non-profits. Activists in food security non-profits highlighted their relationships with a small number of progressive foundations (e.g., Atkinson and Metcalf foundations) supporting some social change work. However, my research did reveal that critiques associated with the concept of the non-profit industrial complex, regarding the lack of ability to achieve radical social

change, clearly apply. Thus, this concept can help us understand structural obstacles to this work, as well as better learn from sites which may resist such obstacles.

Neoliberal Urbanism and the Rise of Non-Profits

Just as the recent round of austerity attacks in Toronto needed to be

contextualized within a larger neoliberal agenda, exploring the position of Toronto food

64 security non-profits under these austerity policies must also be contextualized in terms of the rise and role of non-profits within neoliberal strategy. Arundhati Roy clearly expresses such a connection as she states “They’re what botanists call an indicator species. The greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of

NGOs” (Roy in Shaw and Oja Jay 2012).

The pressing questions radical political struggles face today, are shaped by the fact that “the rise of neoliberalism from an emergent “state project” to a dominant “state strategy” (Tickell and Peck 2003: 20) in the past 30 years has made social movements and progressive non-profits face significant interconnected challenges (Mananzala and

Spade 2008). Furthermore, Esteves et al. (2011) argue that neoliberal restructuring in the

1980s and 1990s set the conditions for the rise to prominence of NGOs or non-profits as a replacement for radical social movements due to increasing professionalization and depoliticization. Scholars argue that the growth of community-based non-profits acting to absorb cuts in services has been mirrored by weakened political demands and a diminished set of critical perspectives (Mayer 2007; Wolch 2007; Gilmore 2007;

DeFilippis et al. 2009). While there was an expansion of social service agencies from

1933-1973, part of the neoliberal agenda involved an attempt to undo them at all levels

(Wolch 2007). Gilmore argues that the rise of neoliberalism from the 1970s created conditions for non-profits to become a “shadow state” as they orient to meet the social service needs that increased as the welfare state eroded (Gilmore, 2007). The third sector

65 steps up to fill a service void, oversee service provision and is further shaped by a neoliberal strategy of disorganizing workers.

Many of the food security initiatives in Toronto are partially or fully sustained through community partnership grants or grants for environmental work - both of which were initiated as the city experienced an austerity agenda from multiple levels of government in the 1980s. More “green entrepreneurialism”, “community involvement” and “creative city” work has been on the agenda of many or most municipal politicians as well as the Toronto business elite (Albo 2009). These agendas have continued a process of downloading services and responsibilities in ways that can also help bolster attractiveness for business investment, without necessarily any connection to making

Toronto any more socially just (Albo 2009). While food security initiative demands can be picked up by supportive local politicians, Mayer argues that they still confront the problem of very real limits of municipal policy in an age of capital mobility and

neoliberal hegemony (Mayer 2007).

Rather, grant support for food security initiatives can align with a neoliberal

agenda. A grant from the City helped set up the core infrastructure of FoodShare in

1985, as part of the mayor’s efforts to “help end hunger” (D. Field, 1 Oct. 2011, personal

communication).Thus, a grant was given to encourage third sector responsibility, as

opposed to setting up lasting policy change for food insecure marginalized communities.

An organizer with a children’s urban agriculture program, Green Thumbs Growing Kids,

highlights another consequence of such grants. She explains that children’s gardening

66 programs were previously run by unionized city workers. Under an austerity agenda in the late 1990s, these positions were cut and non-profits stepped up as grant streams were established. She states “we allowed this as a city...the challenge (for food security initiatives) is not to play the role of union breaker” (S. Harrison, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Non-profit work replaced unionized work, thus contributing to the

disorganization of workers under a neoliberal agenda.

An activist with Growing Food, Growing Justice contrasts root issues with the

focus of some of the work in the food movement in Toronto, stating “but how do we

eradicate poverty? The City puts money to the Food Policy Council” (Organizer 1, 20

Oct. 2011, personal communication). The issue with this situation was described by a

member of Toronto Food Strategy and Toronto Food Policy Council: “Food Policy

Council, for the most part.. .does take the broader food systems approach. That includes

anti-poverty issues but isn’t really focussed that well and I don’t think they’ve been that

effective at it” (B. Emmanuel, 30 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Accordingly,

Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk (2009) suggest that an uncritical acceptance of food security

initiatives has insidious policy effects allowing governments to provide occasional

funding to non-profit initiatives, such as community gardening, and claim to be

addressing food security rather than creating lasting policy to address income and food

insecurity.

Organizational activists spoke to the contradictions of City grants, by explaining

the severity of the coming cuts, as well as the way that reliance on funding affects their

67 work. First, non-profits are precariously funded by City and provincial grants to help ameliorate conditions worsened by neoliberal urbanism - and then are faced with cuts to their organizations. The director of FoodShare describes that much of their infrastructure and costs are paid for by government grants. However, she also states that it is “scary too, when cuts potentially come”. The cuts to grants would have meant a “devastating cut” that affects “some of (their) core programs like gardening (and) the (subsidized)

Good Food Box...” (D. Field, 1 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

Toronto Food Security Initiatives and Municipal Budget Cuts

Several grants which supported the core work of many food security initiatives in

Toronto - including Community Partnership Grants and grants associated with the

Toronto Environment office - were under threat of being cut to “balance the budget” in

2011. Based on knowledge circulated through the Stop the Cuts coalition, as well as in interviews with organizational leaders, I learned of a number of threats to food security initiatives under this municipal agenda. For some of the larger non-profits such as

FoodShare and The Stop, these potential cuts would mean a small blow to their budget which consisted mostly of foundation grants and donations from individuals. However, it would still affect some of their core work. Effects on smaller food security initiatives largely dependent on funding from the City included the majority of funding being stripped away through municipal austerity initiatives. These effects also included the inability to get a larger organizational partner to stabilize funding - such as a community centre - because of the demand on centres to slash 10% of their budget under this austerity agenda (R. Stimac, 1 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Often, for the smaller groups, the ability to have a full-time staff member was threatened by municipal budget cutbacks.

The response of the people I interviewed to these municipal budget cuts ranged from no response to a few deputations and petitions to city council. One organization,

FoodShare, helped mobilize against cuts to the Student Nutrition Program by encouraging people to speak out at their local councillor’s office. The executive director

deputed before City Hall in defense of a threatened grants stream - claiming to be

“single issue and proud” in reference to FoodShare’s specific fight for the grants that

affect them (D. Field, 1 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Many of the food security

groups did not organize in anti-cuts resistance. At most, the organizations signed on to petitions against cuts to urban agriculture programs, increases in user fees at farmer’s

markets and against the closure of an urban farm. Political engagement was thus limited

to petitions related to “local, healthy” food, which reveals the nature of a relatively

narrow vision of food security in non-profits, and aligned with my expectations given the

literature on non-profits and political advocacy under neoliberalism.

The limited ability to engage in oppositional politics is also reflected in the nature

of these groups’ programming. Programs, including gardens, cooking workshops and

subsidized vouchers for farmer’s markets, have been critiqued by Kirkpatrick and

Tarasuk (2009) and Allen (2010) as having a limited impact on food security. One

69 organizer states that her group’s focus on community kitchens and gardens can have

“just a kind of service orientation.. .’’(Organizer 3,10 Oct 2011, personal communication). An activist in Growing Food, Growing Justice, who organized with the

Toronto Food Policy Council, discussed her need to cut ties with Toronto food movement work because of the disconnection with root causes of hunger. She argues that “people want the jobs and to just feel like they’re doing the political work”, pointing to a common critique of non-profit- led movement work. She argues, in reference to food voucher programs and community kitchen work, “we are not addressing the real issues,

which are related to poverty and a failed political system” (Organizer 1, personal

interview, 30 Oct 2011). Clearly the lack of political advocacy around the municipal

budget cuts is an example of broader issues regarding a lack of engagement in

oppositional politics.

Organizational leaders described issues of capacity and limits on political

advocacy as reasons why their organizations did not engage in broader anti-austerity

advocacy, for example through coalitional politics or mobilizing against the cuts to city

services more broadly - despite the clear connection of the cuts to deepening food

insecurity. These themes speak to a broader issue - echoed by many of the activists - of the limited ability of these food security initiatives (with some exceptions) to respond

politically in a struggle for food security. Accordingly, critics of the non-profit sector

point to its inability to challenge policies and institutions of oppression because of

factors including funding relationships shaping objectives and strategies of the organization, an overwhelming burden from the impacts of neoliberalism, relationships to funders censoring radical political engagement, and the concentration of resources according to racial hierarchies.

Funding Relationships Changing Objectives, Strategies, Organization

The advantages and disadvantages of the precarious and political relationship to city funding is further complicated by the consequences of funding relationships outside of City grants. A recurring statement among leaders in the larger non-profits of

FoodShare and the Stop is that the goals, strategies and discourse of the organizations do not have to be affected by a funder’s requirements because “as an organization (we) have been really good at not shaping (our work) to chase funding” (R. Teitel-Payne, 20 Oct.

2011, personal communication). However, they also speak to the ways in which their agency’s ability to shape a suitable funder relationship, is affected by capacity. Teitel-

Payne of The Stop also states that “.. .a lot of our energy as an organization is directed to running events and getting individual donors, corporations... So we have quite a significant fundraising team that spends a lot of their time doing that...” (R. Teitel-

Payne, 20. Oct. 2011, personal communication). Another organizer from the Stop adds that they “fundraise 90% of the money (they) have and relies on grants for the other 10% and some of that comes from government. So... it definitely impacts how many resources we have to put into fundraising and impacts how many people we have on staff that that’s their frill time job” (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

71 Having a fundraising staff better positions FoodShare and the Stop to choose which funding relationships they will enter into, but requires significant initial resources.

In every interview, issues of fundraising capacity were also discussed in terms of resources being drained by a struggle to competitively chase funding in terms of soliciting donations and writing grants. The organizer of the Political Action Committee at the Stop describes that:

There’s very few organizations to apply to, and they’re limiting who they

fund, and ... I’m funded by the Atkinson Foundation and they basically

cancelled half their grants last year. (They) decided they want to focus on

a few organizations to build up a model of work that they were doing. And

a lot of people got left out and we were basically competing with each

other to try to still stay on their list (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal

communication).

Not only does fundraising drain resources, but groups with similar political goals must compete for the few opportunities to gain substantial funding.

A lack of momentum and the inability of the South Riverdale community members to come together through the South Riverdale Food Working Group (SRFWG) was attributed to a lack of volunteer capacity and funding (R. Stimac, 2 Oct. 2011, personal communication). An organizer from the SRFWG highlights a lack of available funding in a competitive environment of scarcity as she also discussed the restructuring of the Metcalf Foundation’s funding stream - one of the two that the Stop’s Political

72 Action Committee also relies on - and consequentially, the inability to access such funds for her small group.

One immediate issue of non-profits is the extent to which funding has transformed objectives, organization and strategies of groups working on social justice issues which require radical social change. Kivel (2007) argues that reliance on foundation grants tends to shape the work of non-profits to be short-term, program- oriented and lacking goals of radical structural change. As Kivel (2007) and Rodriguez

(2007) discuss, acquiring and maintaining funding forces voluntary organisations to plan reactively as opposed to proactively planning for the long term. Organisations are faced with a cycle of managerialism as funding pays salaries and keeps the organizations alive on a yearly basis, creating a particular kind of dependency (Kivel and Rodriguez in

O’Keefe 2008). Consequently, there is greater dependency on funding among social movement groups than there was before a booming non-profit sector. Non-profits then act as a bureaucracy that inherently needs to seek to justify their continued practice irrespective of the impact upon marginalized communities and the ability to make political gains (Choudry and Shragge 2011; Mananzala and Spade 2008).

Furthermore, as seen with this round of municipal cuts, Mayer argues that as local administrations resort to cutbacks and competitive contracting to meet their economic development and social policy duties, associated tendering and criteria related to non-profits occurs. Non-profits thus find it increasingly difficult to use state funding

73 for progressive goals and political struggles in building programs, or even empowerment and solidarity (Mayer 2007).

Issues of Capacity: Overburdened and Underfunded

Most of the interviewed leaders and activists in food security initiatives in

Toronto described their ability to do political work against austerity attacks, and other policies and institutions which critically affect food access, as limited by issues of capacity. One organizer in Growing Food Growing Justice and a small food non-profit

stressed the limits of food security organizing: “poverty is a tool the system uses to keep us dancing.. .it’s difficult to bring what’s needed to places where need is so immediate”

(Organizer 1, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication). The tensions become especially clear with the Stop wherein they do have stable funding and a Political Action

Committee, but also a food bank and drop-in centre. An organizer expresses: “... when I try and get groups from the food bank to come to the Good Food for All march... they

did!... But they’re woozy at the end of the day here... It’s very easy to get completely consumed with trying to do something about the absolutely limitless need!” (Organizer

3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

The director of Not Far From the Tree also directly attributes the nature of work

that is done to issues of capacity: “We’ve been really stretched thin for staff this year.

Last year we had eight and this year we have four. And yet we’ve doubled in scope. And

that public advocacy piece, or that civic engagement piece, is something that we weren’t

74 able to act on as a result” (L. Reinsborough, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

Stimac of the South Riverdale Food Working Group echoes this response in referring specifically to anti-austerity organizing, holding that a lack of capacity limited their ability to respond beyond simply endorsing petitions (R. Stimac, 1 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

The issue of capacity - often framed as linked to issues related to reliable, stable funding while being overburdened by programming needs - raises serious questions as governments slash grants for such “healthy food” initiatives on top of cutting spending for social services. A lack of funding or vulnerability around funding cuts among food security initiatives could also point to political questions intimately related to symptoms of a movement led by non-profits. For example, a lack of organizing capacity could be related to a focus on a perceived need for funding precluding political organizing. A lack of capacity in groups could also be related to a lack of salience of issues when they do not come from grassroots-identified needs and mobilization. This dynamic could speak to both consequences of and reasons for a lack of funding support from movement groups such as unions, grassroots activist groups, or individuals most affected by the work of these groups.

Furthermore, the rise of non-profits is both caused by and burdened by a context wherein social movements have had to absorb the impact of neoliberalism including an increasing destruction of the economic safety nets of welfare and public housing. At the same time, the very efforts of social movements—especially labor movements—that

75 challenged the fundamental profit logic of capitalism and neoliberalism, were significantly “beaten back” (Mananzala and Spade 2008:56). Neil Smith articulates that the social movements of the 1960s galvanized emerging movements around the globe and raised the question of revolutionary change in many places, but the capitalist class secured victory in the form of neoliberalism (Smith 2011). From the late 1980s to now, the trend has been an increasing institutionalisation of (some kinds of) social movements, as effectively an indirect part of the state, or in much of the Global North, an indirect part of the global neoliberal system. They become dependent upon funding from the very institutions whose policies they once challenged and their discourse is re­ shaped so that it converges with that of funders (Mananzala and Spade 2008).

The conditions of limitless need and disorganization of movements under a neoliberal agenda limit the ability of well-meaning non-profits to be a formidable radical force. Scholars and activists argue that the growing need for help from movement organizations in the form of services means fewer resources are going to support the political work of these groups (Mananzala and Spade 2008). Furthermore, Kivel argues that an effect of the non-profit model on social justice work is the detachment of survival-based services from political organizing (Kivel 2007).

Partially, the detachment of non-profits from political advocacy is encouraged and accentuated by funding streams which often only focus on either overtly political organizing work (as defined by them) or direct service work (Manzala and Spade 2008).

Accordingly there is often a separation between different types of non-profits with few

76 constructive relationships between them. While these multiple factors culminate in this situation of fractures - and thus political obstacles - they all still reflect the roots of the non-profit sector emergence which was a response to a clawback of government services under neoliberal policies. As non-profits are burdened by but working to ameliorate some of the most desperate effects of maldistribution under capitalism, their provision of services and programs can align with maintaining the social order particularly when they work with a depoliticizing charity framework as opposed to a social change model (Manzala and Spade 2008).

Funding Relationships and the Ability to Take Political Stances

In interviews with leaders of food security organizations in Toronto, a significant theme that resonated with critiques of the structural limitations of the third sector was around the fear of overstepping organizational boundaries regarding political advocacy.

These “boundaries” are based on the structural limits of relying on City grants, private donors, and/or a charity framework. About three quarters of groups I interviewed were registered charities, which are a particular kind of non-profit. Charity law makes private donations, and the organization itself, tax-exempt. In 2003, the government of Canada and the courts passed a law that only allows 10% of a charity’s fund to go towards any kind of political advocacy. In order to attain charitable status, organizations are restricted from engaging in “political” activities including the promotion of “political or socio­ economic ideologies” and carrying on charitable works in a “political” way (Shaw and

77 Oja Jay 2012: 57). The institutionalization of such a framework was justified according to the growing need for the voluntary sector and to ensure their “efficiency” and

“accountability” or “transparency” (Revenue Canada 2012), which Gilmore (2007) translates as meaning meager budgets and the ability for the State to pull contracts.

Recently, scholars and activists are providing clear evidence that accepting funding can subject groups to censorship in terms of the campaigns, language, and groups they can work with (Gilmore 2007).

For example, currently the Canadian federal government is spending $8 million to investigate and further restrict the political activities of Canadian charities. The $8 million in administrative changes will fund "education and compliance activities with respect to political activities by charities” (Economic Action Plan 2012). According to the Economic Action Plan 2012, "Recently, concerns have been raised that some charities may not be respecting the rules regarding political activities.. .There have also been calls for greater public transparency related to the political activities of charities”

(Economic Action Plan 2012). Postmedia's Mike De Souza describes the budget's charity proposal as "an $8-million plan to crack down on conservation groups", particularly around political advocacy which opposes oil sands and pipeline projects (Dembiki

2012).

Accordingly, while the executive director of FoodShare made a deputation to

Toronto city hall in September 2011, to resist cuts to student nutrition programs and the community partnership grants affecting FoodShare, she states: “at the same time as we

78 are advocating to not lose our funding, we work within a very retro-grade conservative charity-based framework.. .we can only do so much political advocacy. And there is a

sense of having to be quite political about how you do your advocacy, so as to build

support rather than make people angry and more ready to cut you” (D. Field, 5 Oct.

2011, personal communication). She points to the need to carefully consider how to

strategically advocate without threatening funding, but still ultimately highlights that the

charity framework and reliance on government funding does constrain possibilities.

Organizers spoke both to the current fear around speaking out against the cuts, by referring to City of Toronto Councillor Doug Ford: “Doug Ford promis(ed) that he’s

going to find every person at the city hall demo (against the cuts) that worked for

agencies and go after the funding of all those agencies” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication). They also described the effects of a history of austerity politics: “the chill from Mike Harris years on.... 1995,1996.. .the conservatization is

astounding. But that started then. So now that’s the first thing people say: “We have to be careful...” (Organizer 3, 15 Oct. 2011, personal communication). This statement is

significant as it points to the effects on organizational political culture as a result of previous threats to funding.

While an organizer at the Stop describes the fact that its programs retain a degree

of autonomy by choosing which grants they can align with politically, the trend of

diminished critical political language and actions due to relationships with government

and elite funding, is described by the same organizer. Organizer 2 provides critical

79 insight on this issue because this organization is recognized as being the most politically

active in the City - in that it allies with anti-capitalist groups, organizes marches, has a

Political Action Committee - and yet she can still speak to limitations. Based on her

experiences with the Stop, she states “I think sometimes if you’re doing really vibrant work, that’s really inspiring, then sometimes the funders will come to you a bit more...if

your message doesn’t challenge those in power too much” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011,

personal communication). She adds “.. .but we lost funding over our involvement in the

G20 (demonstrations). Private funders wrote and (cancelled)... and all we did was cook

the meal for the community demonstration and that was enough that people cancelled

their funding” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication). While she points to

strategies and possibilities within an organization wherein a priority is anti-poverty work

and community organizing, some risks and limitations around more radical social change

work are clear.

As activists spoke to barriers to bringing about the desired results they intend,

reasons often mentioned aligned with a common critique of the non-profit sector; the

structure of these organizations often produces circumstances in which they are beholden

to donors and states, rather than to their grassroots. Or, politically desired results are not

achieved because the sector does not necessarily need a grassroots to be responsible to

due to the historical development of the sector. Rather, non-profit activists often wind up

identifying with an organization through their jobs. A significant orientation of the

organization becomes its ability to attract funding from elites and access to policy

80 makers- requiring the development of professional expertise not simply on their issue but on marketing it to elites and policymakers (Esteves et al. 2011). Foundations and donors are “ultimately interested in the packaging and production of success stories, measurable outcomes” (Perez 2007:92). This dynamic can effectively mean that organizations tied to such foundations and donors would not be invested in listening to grassroots pressures which may drive a different direction (Esteves et al. 2011).

An organizer with the Stop’s Political Action Committee describes the dynamic of funding and dissent:

...There are some funders (e.g., Metcalf and Atkinson) that want to see that you

are impacting structural inequality but it’s how they think change happens...So

there’s a lot of funding for civic engagement, for helping poor people become

good public speakers so they can tell their story in a convincing enough way to

politicians so politicians will want to do something. So, it’s all this money to

make yourself worthy to people in power so they will hear your cause. And it’s

hard, in a context where we’re not making policy wins right now. People are

getting poorer, it becomes harder and harder to show those funders how you’re

going to impact policy change. Which is what they want to see (Organizer 3, 10

Oct. 2011, personal communication).

In the quotation above it is clear that through such relationships to funders, community

organizations can contribute to structuring and managing processes of dissent,

81 “channeling it into organizational structures and processes that do not threaten underlying power relations” (Choudry and Shragge 2009:507).

The concept of the non-profit industrial complex especially refers to the managing of dissent through the non-profit structure, which indirectly enables more state repression (Rodriguez 2007:23). Accordingly, critics have pointed to a growing prevalence of service-based and policy reform work associated with the increase in non­ profits, as opposed to base-building organizing in social justice movements (Ahn 2007).

While relying on wealthy individuals and grants from the state and corporations, the strategies of the work become more conservative in order to better fit the funders’ goals which tend to be reformist and thus cannot question capitalist accumulation of wealth on the backs of poor communities. These goals greatly differ from the base-building and visionary organizing which social movements in previous decades saw emerge more directly from communities facing oppression (Ahn 2007). As funders favor seeing results defined according to policy and service work over collective organizing and base- building, opportunities are lost for building political power among those most affected by oppression (King and Osayende 2007).

Choudry and Shragge (2011) argue that community partnership grants can speak to a critical movement towards blunting oppositional politics. Community organizations can aim to work from the “bottom-up”, initiating services and programs. Governments tend to see “community as policy” and organize interventions and funding programs that shape local activity to become responsible for services and programs which result in an

82 increasingly collaborative relationship between community and government with diminished conflict. The structural and perceived limitations on anti-austerity advocacy among food security initiatives, speaks to one example of such a relationship of

“diminished conflict” (Choudry and Shragge 2011).

Race, Concentration of Power, and Food Security Initiatives

Another critique of the shadow state that aligns with critiques of food security activism is around issues of Whiteness and professionalization of dissent. Scholars and activists have made critically necessary interventions in food movement literature and practice to forefront the issue of a concentration of power and resources according to racial hierarchies in food security thinking and practice (Guthman 2008; Slocum 2006;

Allen 2008). However, in these critiques of food movement discourse and practice,

Whiteness is often a separate critique from discussion of structural limitations of tactics.

Rarely is this critique woven into a wider analysis which centres these dynamics as part of the major factors limiting the political potential of the way that we see food politics practiced in our cities. Linking an analysis of the rise of the non-profit sector under neoliberalism and its dominant representation in the food movement with critiques of the non-profit sector, helps centre such an intervention because it points to concentration and distribution of resources and power, including control of discourse. These critiques are critical to address because they affect our ability to build a movement and meet its political goals, including health and dignity for all. King and Osayende (2007: 81) discuss a “concentration of power as result of internal position and training - e.g., centrality of paid staff (board of directors, staff directing day to day and long-term agendas) - and increasingly staff are not movement activists but found paid work in organizations after university training. Professional staffers tend to represent their organizations as staff people”. King and Osayende link this professionalization process with the maintenance of racial hierarchies within non­ profit led activism. While recognition of this critical structural issue was discussed marginally in interviews (perhaps a symptom of this issue), some interviewees did raise this topic directly and indirectly in discussion of factors which lead to a disconnect between the food movement and root issues causing poverty.

While I did not ask specific questions regarding the racial hierarchies of food movement work in Toronto, discussion on this topic occasionally arose in the open- ended interviews and it is a critical factor shaping the work of the food movement and non-profit sector. For example, one organizer in Growing Food, Growing Justice did stress that “there is racism in the movement. The movement has hierarchies. A large percentage of the movement is well-intentioned white folks” (Organizer 1, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication). As the food justice movement is critiqued for its Whiteness and as in this case, is non-profit led, we need to seriously address such analyses of the non-profit Left. As activists King and Osayende state - while there is a gap in wealth between organizations and wealthy funders, the gap is less for the white Left, because

84 “Wealthy whites often count on the white Left to protect their money and interests”

(King and Osayende 2007:810).

Critics of the non-profit sector (Kivel 2007; Rodriguez 2007) point to the ways in which resources and power are concentrated according to the governance structure of most non-profits, which perpetuate dynamics of dominance. The governance structure of

most non-profits is characterized by donors and elite professionals making up the boards,

which, Manzala and Spade note, sometimes hold spaces for tokenistic membership for

the community members directly affected by the issues focused on by the organization

(Kivel 2007; Manzala and Spade 2008). For example, the staff member for the Riverdale

Food Working Group describes the steering committee as “one representative from each

of the action groups - education, fundraising - one from each organizational partner,

myself, a community member or two who are participating and stuff but who are more a

sounding board for community, not necessarily participants” (R. Stimac, 1 Oct. 2011,

personal communication). The make-up of the Stonegate Food Access Committee is

described in a similar way (J. Graham, 28 Oct. 2011).

Governance and staffing positions of these non-profits - despite primarily

serving low-income and accordingly disproportionately non-White populations-are filled

by almost entirely white people with college and graduate degrees. This point has been

argued by food movement scholars (Slocum 2008; Guthman 2009), and was mentioned

in several interviews. Thus, the infrastructure of these non-profits often leads to the

concentration of decision making power among people with race, education and class

85 privilege as opposed to being directed by those most directly affected by the oppression

(Manzala and Spade 2008; Osayende 2007). As a result, both the priorities and implementation methods of such organizations can be expected more often than not to reflect the approach and point of view of such people in decision-making positions, and not those bearing the brunt of oppression (Manzala and Spade 2008, Osayende 2007).

This issue further suggests reasons why food security work faces a limited ability to address the needs of those most affected.

An organizer doing work around food security in the South Riverdale

Community Health Centre, as well as in Growing Food, Growing Justice, describes some

of the consequences of such dynamics: “How do we lift the dependencies the community

has? I advocate for communities not to need people like me, with that power and

privilege I can speak out, but agencies create dependencies - community should be

doing it” (Organizer 1, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Furthermore, she

remarks on the resulting problem of disconnect between people leading the movement

and people experiencing hunger. She describes what she considered to be one example

of this dynamic: “people (are) talking about teaching people how to cook. They’re

activists! The system has manipulated people, people buy cookies over cooking not

because they’re stupid!” (Organizer 1, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

Anan Lolilo, the Executive Director of the Affi-can Food Basket, along with

other organizers in the activist coalition Growing Food, Growing Justice, have organized

spaces for discussions on anti-racist action in the food movement (S. Harrison, 11 Oct.

86 2011, personal communication). Harrison, an organizer with Growing Food, Growing

Justice, states that “Growing Food, Growing Justice actually came out of a failure by the

Community Food Security Coalition to deal with the contradictions around race (in the food movement)” (S. Harrison, 11 Oct. 2011, personal communication). The Affi-can

Food Basket prioritizes hiring from and working with racialized, low-income communities (Affi-Can Food Basket 2012).

While some work, in the form of discussion forums and the mandates of organizations like Affi-can food Basket, is attempting to address the issues of a lack of anti-racist discussion and practice in the food movement, it is also critical to recognize the ways in which the non-profit sector has perpetuated racial hierarchies and, as discussed in this chapter, is limited from engaging in the radical social change work required to seriously address the unjust concentration of resources in our society. King and Osayende also argue that an issue in the non-profit sector is the perpetuation of a hierarchy and circulation of capital within the establishment Left alongside claims to

improve socio-economic conditions of oppressed communities in which they operate

(King and Osayende 2007:81). Similarly, articles by Allen and that of King and

Osayande highlight the racialised nature of the non-profit industrial complex, including that the leadership of the philanthropic movement is predominantly white, and this white

leadership protects white wealth and undermines the work of oppressed communities of

colour. In essence, white capital is circulated among white people and thus maintains white supremacy (O’Keefe 2008).

87 Therefore, challenging the maintenance of racial hierarchies within food movement work requires seriously questioning the work of the non-profit sector wherein the distribution of power and resources mirrors such hierarchies.

Conclusion

Adjoa Florencia Jones de Almeida asks the provocative question “why are we so concerned with saving organizations if they are not fully able to address the root of the problems we face?” (de Almeida, 2007:187). James Petras sums up the critical issues with the non-profit industrial complex, in ways that clearly align with concerns expressed by interviewed activists :

NGOs (or non-profits) emphasize projects, not movements; they "mobilize"

people to produce at the margins but not to struggle to control the basic means of

production and wealth; they focus on technical financial assistance of projects, not

on structural conditions that shape the everyday lives of people. The NGOs co-opt

the language of the left: "popular power," "empowerment," "gender equality,"

"sustainable development," "bottomup leadership." The problem is that this

language is linked to a framework of collaboration with donors and government

agencies that subordinate practical activity to non-confrontational politics. The

local nature of NGO activity means that "empowerment" never goes beyond

influencing small areas of social life, with limited resources, and within the

88 conditions permitted by the neoliberal state and macro-economy (Petras

1997:12).

Evidently many activists doing food security work in Toronto are questioning the non­ profit sector’s successes in terms of fighting urban hunger and recognizing the limitations of both needing to respond to and being shaped by neoliberal capitalist processes. The political consequences in the non-profit sector are intimately related to the fact that funding - whether government or foundation money - emerges from the

“deepest ranges of capitalist inequality” (Duranzo 2007).

The dynamic of the necessity of food insecurity under neoliberal capitalism reveals why it is critical, but limited, to resist rounds of austerity attacks. Rather, it is clear that challenging and overcoming these dynamics is needed to attain food justice.

Accordingly, attention to these foundations of capitalism can reveal the ways in which a non-profit led movement in fact limits the radical orientation needed for the food movement to achieve its political goals. I argued that we can understand food insecurity as having a significant role in an overarching neoliberal capitalist strategy and that this framing helps recentre the need for food security to be a part of an alternative, anti­ austerity and anti-capitalist strategy. In light of such ideological and structural obstacles the subversive tactics described and discussed by organizers in the following chapter, become particularly significant.

89 Chapter 4

Exploring Tactics and Strategies

I have discussed the political economic landscape in which food security initiatives operate, as well as organizers’ experiences of their organization’s political limitations within such a context. However, interviews with activists did reveal that there are some challenges to these hegemonic trends. There are also calls for strategic action from within the food justice non-profit organizing milieux. Despite the limitations on making political gains around food security within the non-profit sector, I explore themes from interviews regarding organizers’ views of tactics and strategies for resisting aspects of a neoliberal agenda and the associated limits of the non-profit sector. These themes include the emphasis on a need for a collective strategy regarding funding.

Furthermore, many activists held to the idea that food as a tactical focus was still useful in community organizing against a neoliberal capitalist agenda. They described the usefulness of food justice discourse in resisting neoliberal discourse, and in combining direct service provision and political organizing.

In this chapter I critically explore these three themes and contextualize their significance in comparison to and discussion of commonly celebrated tactics of the food movement. I discuss the Special Diet campaign as an example of analysis and action that connects food security to an austerity agenda. I briefly discuss other examples which exemplify the use of such strategies. Engaging with critical analyses of the non-profit sector provides insight into the political terrain of these tactics, and the limitations in the

90 current food movement in Toronto. It also helps highlight exceptions that could hold important lessons and opportunities for a struggle for food security.

To illuminate the differences between the tactics of non-profits and radical strategies which involve food as a tactic to challenge the state and capital, it is useful to look at analysis of social movement tactics and strategy. If we understand the use of food provision and gardens as a tactic - or part of a tactic - in broader strategies to achieve health, dignity, food security, then it is useful to look to the relationship between tactic and strategy since they have no meaning outside of their relationship with each other

(Mohandesi 2012). Drawing on Alberto Toscano, Mohandesi writes that tactics and

strategy form a reciprocal relationship in practice and theory because a tactic is often

said to be a “specific set of maneuvers used to win a localized engagement” whereas a

strategy is the way these separate engagements are coherently pulled together to accomplish a broader objective (Mohandesi 2012).

He holds that a continued obsession with a single tactic “prevents us from

seriously interrogating the necessary other term in this relationship: strategy”

(Mohandesi 2012). Rather, it is the “hypertrophy of this tactic (that) is actually a direct result of the atrophy of any corresponding strategy”. Because they exist in a reciprocal relationship, the lack of the former “can only lead to a destabilization” of the latter

(Mohandesi 2012). Accordingly, I argue that there is a significant difference between

seeing food and food programming as an end goal as opposed to using food as a tactic in a broader strategy to push for the structural change needed to have food security.

91 The Need for a Collective Strategy to Resist Funding Cuts

While critical literature on non-profits (Rodriguez 2007; Manzala and Spade

2008) speaks to the issue of carefully making an organization’s work apolitical or “under the radar” in order to not have funding cut, findings from interviews revealed insight into possibilities for resistance. Activists within food security organizations, and agencies which do very similar food security work, spoke to the need for a collective strategy in the face of austerity politics affecting their organizations. In regards to the concern over losing funding, one activist working at the Stop states:

I think my personal opinion, and a lot of management would say, that 80

to 90 percent of (the concern around cuts to funding) is an excuse to be

doing nothing absolutely. And they do a lot of speaking to other groups

and other boards and other (Educational Directors) about not hiding

behind the 10% advocacy law and being involved. (They) really learned

through a lot of the groups that have been defunded that being apolitical is

not a surefire way to not lose your funding but that it is a surefire way to

make sure that you don’t have support to back you up when your funding

gets cut, because you haven’t built those networks over the years... cause

you’ve been trying to isolate yourself from political organizing (Organizer

3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

92 An activist working around food security within a community health centre echoes this sentiment as she speaks to the need for groups to come together to refuse to make budget cuts. She exclaims . .and there’s so much fear. Absolutely.. .it drives me crazy. Cause I think well they can’t freakin’ cut everybody” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Speaking to the need to remain politically engaged to build a support network, and accordingly, the need for a collective strategy, stands in stark contrast to the climate of fear fostered by austerity politics, as discussed in the previous chapter.

Accordingly, building and using alliances is discussed by these same organizers as being rare, but necessary. Before the Stop endorses a campaign, such as Ontario

Coalition Against Poverty’s Raise the Rates campaign, the management will call other organizations to see if they will also sign on because “you don’t want to be the only government-funded group that sticks its neck out there” (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication). This effort provides a clear example of practicing a tactic that both builds political alliances and engages in a campaign that puts political pressure to shape conditions that preclude food security.

Another tactic used by the Stop and the South Riverdale Community Health

Centre is supporting a group that can officially act autonomously. This relationship helps ensure that these organizations’ work consists of political organizing in clear opposition to political structures causing hunger and poverty, while overcoming the obstacles related to the threat of funding cuts. The Bread and Bricks Social Justice Group acts semi-autonomously from the Stop. While the Stop provides space and resources for the

93 group, Payne stated that “they’re a separate entity, they get support from the Stop, but at the same time we don’t have control over what they do, they can do and say what they want” (R. Teitel-Payne, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

The South Riverdale Community Health Centre has a similar group called the

Health and Strength Action Group which is also more autonomous from the health centre allowing them to “do more direct action” work as well as go to demonstrations, such as

Stop the Cuts rallies, and organize forums such as for the Ontario Coalition Against

Poverty’s Raise the (welfare) Rates campaign (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication). While we can see that there are possibilities for more radical tactics that are at least connected to and supported by non-profits, this example complicates the argument that non-profits cannot engage in such political work. The Bread and Bricks

Social Justice Group and the Health and Strength Action committee engage in and act according to a need for oppositional politics for food justice in an arms-length relationship with the non-profits. But as the non-profits and agencies support the work of these groups with funds and labour capacity, clearly these tactics help subvert some of the obstacles to political work faced by non-profit food security initiatives.

Resisting Neoliberal Discourse

In the face of austerity, it was clear that some organizers in food security groups

understood there to be political potential for broader anti-poverty movement building through a discursive strategy associated with the momentum of a “food movement”.

94 Many organizers believed that “there’s been a huge surge of interest in (food security), at the public level too” and that “there isn’t a single day that goes by that a food issue isn’t in the media. There’s incredible momentum around food” (B. Emmanuel, 30 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Accordingly, the idea of “healthy food for all” was understood by many people working in these food security groups as a way to build more possible alliances and to combat neoliberal discourse around poverty which props up an austerity agenda. The sentiment was echoed that “people ‘get’ food” and that “food is an easier sell” than issues of social assistance rates and poverty. Organizers generally attributed this to the fact that healthy food appeals to and is forefronted as an issue by both the middle class and working poor. I complicate this perspective with analysis of the non­ profit industrial complex and contrasting opinions from other organizers because the use

of, absences in, and consequences of a focus on food to discuss and build political work

on poverty issues can be critically assessed.

The concept of the “frame” from social movement literature is useful for

describing the practice that these organizers are engaging in. Frames are defined as

“schemata of interpretation” (Goffman 1974:21) which function to organize experience

and guide action by rendering events or occurrences meaningful (Snow et al 1986).

Snow and colleagues (1986) introduce the concept of frame alignment strategies that

movements use to increase the resonance of their frames. Interviewees described the

opportunities and limitations of a “food issue” frame. The strategy of frame extension is

95 described as extending aspects of the frame to new areas that are assumed to be important to the target audience (Snow in Toakes and Johnston 2005).

Accordingly, some organizers - particularly with the Stop - identified their political work in terms of extending the frame of issues regarding access to healthy food to forefront an anti-poverty analysis. Many interviewees made reference to the act of framing issues associated with a fight against poverty in terms of a “food issue”, for reasons including its salience in the mainstream as a “recent trend” and as an issue that people “understand” and “can’t argue with”. One activist states, in reference to the

Health and Strength Action committee’s involvement with organizing in a Put Food in the Budget campaign “I’ve been involved with...raising social assistance so people can afford (food) - 1 mean (if) it’s framed as a food issue, like who the hell can argue about food?” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication). She explains that “(In terms of food), I would say it’s more of a tactical (move), rather than strategic. It’s kind of a language and it gives us tons of fodder” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

An activist with the Stop explains:

People get food. It’s a bit of an easier sell. People get a roof over your head;

people get enough food to feed your kids. And that messaging around not having

to choose between feeding your kids and paying the rent has been really powerful

in terms of making those links between different sectors that are really doing all

anti-poverty work. And I think in the city in the past five years there’s definitely

96 been a shift in terms of focusing on food because it helps people get anti-poverty

messages (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

Thus, strategically extending the framing of food issues to forefront anti-poverty messages is understood as having significant political clout as well as movement building potential.

An activist with the Stop speaks to their analysis - promoted in working groups, children’s programs, speaking engagements - on the ways in which austerity attacks have been backed by targeted neoliberal messaging against low income, marginalized and working class communities:

Particularly working poor families and working class families (during the

years of Conservative premier Mike Harris) were told that their taxes were

funding welfare fraud and that’s where their money is going. Or say the

average white Canadian really believes that immigrants are bleeding out

the welfare system and healthcare system when statistically that’s

completely not true. So I do think that people who are targeted with those

poor-bashing messages are actually hurt by what’s happening right now

(Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

The Stop therefore uses the frame of “healthy food for all” as well as using food tangibly to create space “to be bringing people together to have conversations about why we’re all getting poorer. It’s not because of each other” (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Such work is significant because, as Hackworth states “Political

97 organizing is, at minimum, about scripting a version of reality that differs from the one being used to suppress, distract, or confuse the reality of those affected” (Hackworth

2006:46).

The Stop consciously and actively uses this tactical language around food because of recognition of the strength of such carefully constructed neoliberal messaging, as well as a belief in the potential for using and shaping “food movement”

discourse to resist it:

We’re also trying to mobilize working class and middle class communities that

are interested in local food, growing their own food and organic and making sure

their kids can be raised healthy in urban settings into this anti-poverty analysis

that we have. So our (Educational Director) when he goes out and talks to

communities there are three messages that he tries to get across. That nobody

wants to be poor, which I think the vast majority of Canadians don’t agree with.

That nobody wants a handout, which Harris spent billions of dollars convincing

people otherwise. And that poverty hurts everybody (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011,

personal communication).

Because of a relative lack of anti-poverty analysis in the food movement (Power 2004)

such work of the Stop exemplifies a different approach to food movement practice. It

becomes especially important when work around movement discourse is a part of a

larger strategy. The Stop’s political education work corresponds to their active support

for Raise the Rates and Put Food in the Budget campaigns as well as their Community

98 Action Program which works to politicize community issues identified through direct

case work.

Limitations of Using “Food” Discourse

Organizer 2 explains that the Put Food in the Budget (PFIB) campaign accounts

for the limitations of framing issues in terms of food issues:

“(In) our organizing work.. .we don’t say we want people to be able to eat well so

raise social assistance. We say we need resources. For health and dignity.. .But

certainly the kind of solutions that come forward, like the grocery card or farmer’s

market voucher, well ok so you’re doing stuff around food but nothing around

income. And the dignity that is attached to being able to make your own choices.

So that’s been a big focus for the PFIB campaign. We’re talking about health and

dignity..” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

This organizer stressed that the “food issue” frame was useful but also limited in accounting for the scope of resources people are demanding to achieve health and dignity.

The Stop also works to ensure that such connections between food movement and

anti-poverty analysis and action are made through the work of their Political Action

Committee. An activist in this committee presented several issues which were drawn into

a frame of food security and which were not mentioned by any other interviewed

organizers in other food justice groups. She described her work as:

99 ., .in fact none of the work we do is directly food-related ... we’re always making

those links as to why all those other pieces are related to food security. So the

absence of rent control is a huge issue when it comes to food security for folks in

this neighbourhood. Unaffordability and accessibility of TTC is a huge huge issue

in this neighbourhood. Imposing visa requirements on Roma and Mexican people

in this neighbourhood was a huge huge food security issue and literally decreased

the number of people we had using our food progams by 75% in three

months.. .So making those links is a big piece of my job and I think is a benefit

(of the frame of food security) in terms of making connections between

movements and between groups. (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal

communication).

This activist stresses that extending the food security frame of the Stop is strategically useful for political discussions and movement building around structural issues that often remain isolated theoretically and in practice. Here, a non-profit that organizers in the

Stop describe as “well-funded and “well branded” can use its space, resources, and political clout in the network of food security work in Toronto to build support around more politically marginalized issues such as immigration status, rent control and public transit for low income communities. This example also shows that the use of “food” discourse for movement building and to resist neoliberal discourse, takes political work seriously as opposed to just existing inherently in the idea or object of food.

100 The political education and building of support around these issues was not isolated to discursive struggle, but rather was part of building discussions which could possibly lead to a broader strategy. For example, the Stop co-hosted an educational event with the migrant justice group, No One is Illegal, called “No Rights, No Food”. This event aimed to broaden the political work around urban hunger to include issues of access to food and rights according to immigration status. The impetus for the event came from recognition of the ways that food security is created and enhanced as the state actively creates precarity in the lives of migrant workers and undocumented workers, for the purposes of greater capital accumulation (Blaut 1984). The event included speakers from Justicia for Migrant Workers, No One is Illegal, the Worker’s Action Centre and the Stop. From my involvement with No One is Illegal and organizing this event, I saw that the event was part of the Stop’s movement building work with these three groups to lay the groundwork for campaigns around, for example, demanding access to food banks regardless of immigration status and pushing immigration enforcement out of food banks.

Organizing such events is also another example of engaging strategically with other movement groups to build a network of political support. Because of the connections made through organizing this event, No One is Illegal members promoted and came out to the community demonstration “Poverty Makes Us Sick”, demanding community access to healthy food. Thus we see clear examples of efforts to radicalize

101 both the analysis and practice of the food movement. Clearly, some non-profits are not completely bounded by the political vulnerabilities and limitations of a non-profit sector.

The Stop is known for being an exception in terms of this “boundary-pushing”,

“radicalizing” work among the food movement (Levkoe 2006). However, critical analyses of the non-profit industrial sector (Rodgriguez 2007; King and Osayende 2007) do point to significant pitfalls in terms of non-profits setting the terms of debate for social justice issues.

One organizer with the Stop discusses both the significance of the political clout held by the Stop, as well as reasons for it:

I think absolutely I see (food movement) messaging getting rebranded and that

we certainly played a pretty big role in that.. .The Stop had a really important role

in the Special Diet campaign. The messaging like “united we eat, divided we

starve” has been like a lot of the messaging here. If you hear the mission

statements (of Toronto food groups) ... how similar they are ... a lot of food

groups are saying good food for everyone in one way or another. I think the

Stop’s connections with media and the Stop’s connections to people with money

helps to get those messages out (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal

communication).

This organizer’s analysis of the role the Stop plays in setting the messaging around food significantly aligns with statements by organizers I interviewed in other food groups.

This point highlights the significant role of the Stop in the food movement in Toronto.

102 Perhaps its political clout can be celebrated because of its efforts to fight neoliberal messaging around poverty and engage in movement building. Accordingly, it is important to again note the ways in which the Stop builds political support, for example through employing a collective tactic with allied organizations around more radical campaign actions. However, the reasons for their ability to “get messages out” align with analyses of the non-profit sector which argue that the better resourced groups set the terms of debate (Rodriguez 2007). The Stop clearly seems to pave the political pathway with its messaging and accordingly, the campaigns it highlights - but is still limited by factors related to funding relationships, the impacts of neoliberalism, and the concentration of resources according to racial hierarchies.

Despite the fact that the Stop engages in inspiring movement building work, it is important to note the limitations on political action, as discussed in the previous chapters, to recognize the context of this work in order to further focus on work that can overcome such limitations. In the previous chapter, interviewees discussed how the political work of the Stop is still partially bound by city funding and wealthy private donors. They referenced examples such as the fear around organizations being present at demonstrations against the budget cuts when Councillor Doug Ford threatened to cut funding and the issue of funders pulling out of the Stop because of their involvement with the G20 demonstrations. Critically assessing the political clout of the Stop can shed light on the potentials and pitfalls of non-profits shaping the discourse/frames for the food movement in the city. These examples of threats to funding highlight the limitations of a non-profit setting the terms of debate and possibilities for action for a food movement in the city.

While a well-resourced non-profit like the Stop plays a pivotal role in shaping the messaging around food security, it faces limitations regarding maintaining its reputation and thus its funding. Being well-funded may better place the Stop in a position to hold political clout and radicalize messaging of the movement. However, since non-profits are limited from taking a radical stance, due to reliance on and relationship to government and elite funders, then there is the risk that messaging which does not speak to root issues will dominate the political terrain. An organizer with the Growing Food Growing

Justice group and a children’s urban agriculture program points to the issue that “the local organic people (in contrast to anti-poverty groups) are just one small sector, but they’re more vocal and have more resources. So that tends to set the agenda” (S.

Harrison, 11 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Scholars and activists have certainly argued that large non-profits setting the terms of debate is a dangerous symptom of the non-profit industrial complex (Rodriguez 2007; King and Osayende 2007). While the

Stop may be an exception to a certain extent, groups with more radical messaging face compounding obstacles wherein they do not have access to major funders or government funding, and at the same time face a political environment where the terms of debate are set by well-resourced non-profits which face political limitations. Here we can see strong potential reasons for why this non-profit-led struggle for food security has been shaped in terms of projects around self-provisioning and small subsidies for healthier food which are critiqued for a lack of anti-poverty and anti-capitalist analysis and action

(Power 2004; Clancy 1994; Allen 1999).

Of course, being well-funded through foundations and elite donors is not the only way to shape the political terrain. For example, in this chapter I discuss the work of

Ontario Coalition Against Poverty around the Special Diet campaign, which exemplifies how grassroots, membership-funded radical groups can still fight for and win ground on this terrain.

While recognizing the salience that “food issues” have in the mainstream, critically assessing the movement requires looking to the political consequences of a

social movement frame. The idea of “food” as frame that is extended to anti-poverty and migrant justice issues and movements, can be starkly contrasted to the ways in which

some organizers spoke to the disconnection from root issues found within food security projects.

Another activist within the Stop described her experience of seeing increasing

interest in food justice throughout her 20 years of working within the organization:

So there’s been a huge surge of interest (in food security). At the public level too.

I think the average person on the street is thinking about food. I wish I could say

the same thing about people thinking about anti-poverty issues. I think that’s been

kind of stuck. And if anything I think we’re regressing on that (R. Teitel-Payne,

20 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

105 An organizer with Food Forward explained that part of their work as a municipal advocacy group is to both highlight “food” issues and help specifically frame issues around food to gain traction. He explains: “So if a foodie-focussed councillor would think of a community hub, as a food hub, and if it was an overt food project, then that would be easy. But we have to get that in our minds first. This is a food security program, whatever it’s called. So some of the language that’s used in the municipal level, or that we use, some of that can be difficult. Like, poverty language” (D. Higgins,

28 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Many organizers expressed this difficulty in gaining political attention around “poverty issues” or issues of social assistance rates.

Perhaps this is a consequence of the neoliberal discourse secured as the capitalist class won a victory in the form of neoliberalism in the 1970s (Smith 2011). An important question then, is what political ground are movement groups ceding when talking about food and not poverty? Though this also begs the question, what political ground are groups ceding when we talk about poverty, and not wealth?

Another organizer who has been active in a Community Health Centre food justice network and a Growing Food Growing Justice initiative spoke to the political consequences associated with “food security as a trend that appeals to middle class and policymakers” (S. Harrison, 11 Oct. 2011, personal communication). As addressed in the previous chapter, these consequences include putting money to the Toronto Food policy

Council which has been ineffective in addressing structural issues of poverty (B.

Emmanuel, 30 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

106 An organizer also compared the “trend” of food security initiatives to when it was common for governments to “give youth gang initiatives tons of money” in the

1980s because it aligned with a political trend (Organizer 1, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication). However, she argues that both “trends” are framed in such a way that disconnects the issue from root problems causing poverty in marginalized communities.

She also compares the “food security” frame and the focus on “youth gangs” to the framing of the issue of “child poverty”. She argued that a focus on child poverty by

NGOs and policymakers was a way of reframing of poverty amongst women. She

described that the feminist movement in the 1970s pointed to poverty among women as

issues of both capitalism and patriarchy. However, in the context of concerted resistance to feminist movements, the focus shifted to”child poverty” which, similiar to “youth

gangs”, disconnects children from mothers, community and accordingly, root issues. The

organizer stated that it was argued by activists that “child poverty” is an “easier sell”

than poverty among women and single adults, similar to issues of food justice being an

“easier sell” than poverty (Organizer 1, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

These observations point to an example of the consequences of “food issues”

being a trend, including the common celebration of community gardening, particularly

when divorced from broader analysis of and strategy around conditions causing food

insecurity. Bedore argues that the all-inclusiveness of the term “food security” can

obscure the nature of the problem (Bedore 2010). Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk argue that

creating such political currency around “food” makes for insidious policy; governments

107 provide occasional funding for community gardens and food security non-profits as opposed to creating lasting policy to address income security (Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk

2009: 138). Yet, programs, including gardens, cooking workshops and subsidized vouchers for farmer’s markets, have been critiqued by Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk (2009) and Allen (2010) as having a limited impact on food security. Occasional funding is given for such “food” initiatives which face real limitations to addressing the conditions causing food insecurity, for example because of meager budgets and funding that can be pulled “if anybody steps out of line” (Gilmore 2007:45). Further, they align with a neoliberal agenda that includes destroying a social safety net and downloading onto an

overburdened precarious third sector that is limited from building a movement and

addressing the root issues of the accumulation of wealth on the backs of increasingly precarious workers. An uncritical celebration of “food” initiatives as a

solution/alternative accepts this inadequate course of action. An “easier sell” risks

distracting from root issues.

Combining Social Service and Social Change

Gilbert Rist states “The question is whether one can talk about poverty without talking about wealth - and, more specifically, whether one can struggle against poverty

without also struggling against wealth” (Rist in Barry-Shaw and Ojay 2012:50). This

quotation highlights that, while it may already be an issue that poverty is too often

disconnected from food movement discourse, shaping discourse to reflect the root issues

108 requires connecting issues of poverty to problematizing and organizing against the accumulation of wealth, and accordingly, the dynamics of capitalism.

One organizer reflects on her decades of community organizing experience and adds critical perspective to the issue of funding relationships limiting the ability to politicize resistance to the municipal austerity agenda. In reference to a rally against the municipal cuts organized by unions and the Stop the Cuts coalition, she speaks to the fear around making the presence of her organization known because “since ’95 and

’96...the conservatization is astounding”. She states:

I’d say there’s probably only one organization that carried a banner that

identified it as an organization at the Respect rally, and it wasn’t us. And I would

argue for that but I also think that (considering) what we do, it wasn’t a disaster

that (we) didn’t have a banner. If we were able to continue in the community,

focus in the community support and then people went on their own, that’s fine

too. I mean I would like a block speaking out but I’m not going to put tons of

energy into that, I would rather do that in my community. And I’ve worked long

enough trying to do outreach around a million campaigns through community

organizations to know that for the amount of work you put into it, the payback is

minimal. Like to sign onto the minimum wage campaign, or Put Food in the

Budget (versus) actually do(ing) something around it in your organization

(Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

109 The fear around being public with groups’ political stances is still identified as an issue.

However, she holds that the significant issue was not necessarily around a lack of a

“block (of organizations) speaking out” or signing on to campaigns, but rather around building and sustaining community mobilization around the issue. This point reminds us that while tactics for resisting and/or circumventing obstacles to political advocacy among these funded groups are important, having a base of mobilized community support is also important. In chapter three I discussed limitations to grassroots mobilization in the structure and nature of non-profit work. However, I further complicate such points by discussing the use of direct service provision as a tactic in political organizing within non-profits.

Some organizers identified that using “food as a tool to bring people together” was the most significant work their group could do. If food is a good vehicle for bringing people together then this begs the question of how we organize, when we are together, to fight for structural change. Because of the role of food security in a neoliberal capitalist agenda, it is critical to look to these questions as opposed to celebrating food as the solution (e.g., gardens) and “bringing people together” as the end point because neither can bring about food security on its own. Clearly, this discussion requires space for much more in depth analysis. However, I introduce these ideas and questions in order to contextualize the significance, and indeed necessity (Power 2004) of linking political organizing to providing food through service provision, gardens, workshops.

110 Several of the program leaders stated that the most radical potential of their work was in creating the space for people to come together to organize. In reference to the

Stop’s foodbank and drop-in program, one activist stresses that:

.. .food is also a powerful outreach tool. A lot of people who wouldn’t necessarily

come to us for programs, very marginalized people, will come to us for the food

bank. Once they realize they are treated with dignity and respect, they will look at

some of the broader programs. So food is a very powerful tool for bringing people

in but also creating a space where people can interact constructively (R. Teitel-

Payne, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

An organizer in the Political Action Committee at the Stop also stresses that one of the ways the Stop works to fight urban hunger is by “grow(ing) and cook(ing) food together.

Half of the people that come in and use the breakfast and lunch program are working poor, and the other half are on social assistance. So it is a powerful place to be bringing people together to have conversations about why we’re all getting poorer” (Organizer 3,

8 Oct. 2011, personal communication). Here we see an example of a non-profit combining direct service provision with political advocacy. In this context, we see that the Stop is an exception to non-profits which reflect a separation of service provision from political organizing. The common trend is that the neoliberal terrain of non-profits contributes to the separation of social service and social change work because, after all,

“the non-profit industrial complex would not exist without a lot of people in desperate straits” (Kivel 2007:130).

Ill Accordingly, Organizer 3 adds a critical point that still highlights the complexities of service provision and social change work - which is important to recognize in discussions of the “role of food” in organizing. The statement is also important within a neoliberal context which includes fundraising issues and a “limitless need” caused by deepening erosion of a social safety net. She states:

There’s so many amazing people and a large amount of people come into this

space and that’s ... part of our funding. If we don’t have money to serve breakfast

to 180 people in the morning then they’re not going to come because they’re not

getting what they need from here (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal

communication).

Another activist working around food security initiatives linked to South Riverdale

Community Health Centre also discusses this idea of “food as an organizing tool’” in the community, but in such a way that it still emphasizes food provision being a basic part of caring for community needs while engaging in community organizing. She holds that increasing focus on “food” has lead to “recognizing that (when) organizing with people, it’s always a lot better if there’s good food in their stomachs” (Organizer 2, 10 Oct.

2011, personal communication). Food in a very tangible, immediate sense is perceived as almost a necessary way for organizing with low income marginalized communities, but also increases the need for and thus ties to funding. However, I think this comment points to the important need to differentiate between organizing around food as a solution or goal and recognizing it as a complex part of organizing against poverty, against capitalism and for health and dignity. I elaborate on this argument later in the chapter.

While it is stressed by interviewees that “bringing people together” is a critical role that food programs can play, the need for a political organizing perspective is significantly highlighted, because we can not necessarily assume there is anything that inherently moves people closer to gains around political goals of creating conditions for food justice simply by bringing people to eat and cook together. An organizer working in the South Riverdale Community Health Centre remarked that “the community gardens and (other food security projects) which can be very service oriented and program oriented can actually be a vehicle if you have an organizing perspective around some of these issues “(Organizer 2, 10 Oct. 2011, personal communication). In response to the question of factors that allow for the Stop to engage in political organizing in the community, an organizer highlights that “We’ve got management that are freakin’ lefty in comparison to anywhere else and those things matter.. .activist leadership is pretty important. And a culture of activism amongst the staff is really important and it’s really hard to maintain over the years” (Organizer 3, 8 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

She argues that besides a fundraising team, this “culture of activism” is necessary, but difficult to sustain.

An organizer of a community garden in the Eastview neighbourhood and in a

Community Health Centre food security network also highlights the limitations of

113 community gardens as a solution, but emphasizes their role as a space for organizing. In discussing her experience with the Eastview garden, Organizer 4 explains:

It’s a little garden, we’re not really addressing poverty, we’re not

addressing food insecurity because we’re not producing a lot for them.

They grew some okra and we said “well you take the okra”. And they

laughed and said “what am I going to do with one okra, I’ve got seven

kids”.. .So you can talk about how it’s great to grow your own, and it’s

great to freeze and it’s great to can, but when you really think about it,

logically speaking, time and energy, does it really work? So there are

various pieces you need to do. One is around education around growing

your own which is great and that’s one piece, but there’s also advocating,

saying we need to increase Ontario welfare rates. We need to increase

minimum wage. And this is the way you start having those conversations

in a way to not feel like “oh, right, we can’t” (Organizer 4, 2 Nov. 2011,

personal communication).

This perspective on the potential for gardens to be an organizing space, is echoed by a

Growing Food Growing Justice activist who, while recognizing the limitations for

addressing poverty offered by the food movement in Toronto (as a formidable political

force), holds that gardens are an important forum. They are a forum for “knowing

community” and “starting to talk about issues politically” (Organizer 1, 20 Oct. 2011, personal communication).

114 Another organizer with the South Riverdale Community Health Centre also gives an example of the significance of the garden for building organizing capacity;

For sure (gardens are important), depending on if you have an organizing

perspective. Because organizing requires activities... opportunities to get more

info, to meet each other, to build relationships, to build skills... So the garden... it

really came out of a women’s personal development group and having gone

through all the programming what came out was “we want to relate more to our

community, we never go into these schools or these institutions.” And also with

issues around food security, it’s a way to talk about why are we growing this

garden. So it’s a real political project. Now you might not say all of that in your

funding proposal, but I know for sure that’s their perspective. It creates ways

where people can be with each other and build their capacities for organizing. So

that group of women who are involved in a million other things now, were

involved in making posters for the march down to city hall for the anti-cuts

rally.... Now they couldn’t go themselves because of timing but that was a big

huge step. Relating to (municipal policies), and getting a sense of what the budget

could mean for them and their communities and their families” (Organizer 2,10

Oct. 2011, personal communication).

In the first place, the garden was created because women were saying that they wanted to relate more to their children’s schools and community. The garden was a joint project with the school to address this issue, but was justified in terms of a funded project with

115 the health centre around local food and healthy living. But organizers spoke to the ways in which the connections made through coming together for a garden was a way to actively create a political space by discussing and acting on the budget cuts. While literature celebrates the political possibilities around “social integration” (Shinew 2004),

“community development” (Armstrong 2000; Holland 2011; Baker 2004) created simply as people “come together” through community gardens, these organizers emphasize the politicization of these spaces as occurring through active, intentional political organizing wherein people are building awareness and action around the effects of state policy at a community level.

Scholars outline ways we can understand political potential in community organizing, such as in DeFilipis’ study of efforts which demonstrate possibilities “in a time when too much of community practice is formed by pressures exerted by economic globalization and policies of neoliberalism” (DeFilipis 2009:39). The work described by organizers around frame extension, movement building and politically organizing while providing services align with DeFilipis’ framework. He argues that power is through organizing people, looking to broader movements and maintaining the state as a target because it still plays a central role in shaping the conditions of food insecurity (DeFilipis

2009:48). The work of the Stop and working groups in the South Riverdale Community

Health Centre include political education and advocacy inter-woven to build the wider

orientation and actions of the organization, which DeFelipis stresses is important

(DeFilipis 2009). They demonstrate an example of a contemporary community

116 organizing effort which DeFilipis would frame as blending targeting organizations in the

community and increasing workers’ skills and analysis (DeFilipis 2009).

The emphasis here on the ways in which food and gardens play a role in both

direct service provision and political organizing stands in stark contrast to the ways in

which food movement literature and food policy celebrates these components of this

popular movement as solutions in-and-of themselves. However, these examples of

subversive methods of working within the non-profit sector still do not hold or make up

a long-term political strategy.

The Special Diet also exemplifies a contrast in ways of organizing around and for

food security, but offers several lessons for a food movement dominated by non-profits.

The Special Diet supplement is used as a fight for increased access to food as a tactic in

a broader strategy to also build people power around a struggle to increase welfare rates.

The Special Diet Campaign: Mobilizing Around Food and Against Austerity

The Special Diet campaign was initiated in 2005 to fight for a welfare

supplement of $250 available for those people with health issues who are unable to

afford healthy food. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) began holding

clinics, where health providers diagnosed Special Diet items to thousands of people.

Attempts by welfare offices to deny the benefit “were confronted with hard hitting

mobilizations” (OCAP 2012). In activists’ reflections on the Special Diet campaign we

can see that not only was a sustained mobilizing momentum occurring but explanations

117 are offered as to why the nature of the Special Diet allowed for such grassroots organizing. OCAP is a grassroots, membership and union-funded group that was extremely active in the Stop the Cuts Coalition. Their anti-capitalist work goes back to the early 1990s. The Special Diet campaign, initiated by OCAP, is an example of a recent struggle in Toronto (and Ontario) that incorporates and organizes around food security according to its connection to a neoliberal strategy. According to organizers in

The Stop and OCAP, The Stop actively supports (through endorsements, promotional materials, call-outs for demonstrations) the ongoing Raise the Rates campaign and especially built supportive alliances around the Special Diet campaign (Organizer 3, 8

Oct. 2011, personal communication). However, beyond supporting campaigns such as this one, I argue that the food movement has much to learn from the purpose and process of organizing around the Special Diet.

As discussed in Chapter 2, the Special Diet supplement campaign highlights the connection between the erosion of the welfare state, the ability for low income people to access food and an austerity strategy which relies on increasing desperation to disorganize workers. John Clarke, a long-time organizer with OCAP explains:

I think that what we achieve with the Special Diet (campaign) was

undermining one of the primary agendas of the austerity agenda which is

to take income support for people who don’t have jobs down to a level

where the flow of people into the lowest paying jobs is facilitated. If you

start to raid people’s income support as you drive down wages, then

118 people have options and they don’t go into those highly exploitative jobs.

So we were getting in the way of that (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal

communication).

OCAP works to build long-term strategy around the question of income adequacy, and organizers state that it was not until the Special Diet that food as a distinct component emerged (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal communication). Food became a leading question simply because the Special Diet was a food supplement program and was deemed to be tactically useful in their broader work around the concept of “full entitlement”. This concept resists the idea that there could be people who are

“deserving” or “not deserving” of social support. Organizers thought that the Special

Diet:

.. .was the most fruitful area of full entitlement we could possibly go in after. So

that’s when we came up with the idea. Here’s an area that’s not well known and

when most people apply they are rejected and we said “Well, we can change that.

We can make it well known, we can facilitate access to the Special Diet and then

we could back it up with very vigorous advocacy to make sure people actually got

what they were entitled to” (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal communication).

Access to the Special Diet was chosen as a campaign focus because OCAP was “looking through the system for some kind of handhold that we could grab” (J. Clarke 1 Nov.

2011, personal communication). Clarke explains OCAP’s notion that “if we couldn’t win

an actual increase in social assistance rates, one of the ways we could win it is to look at

119 what were the things the system is supposed to provide to people but didn’t” (J. Clarke 1

Nov. 2011, personal communication). A focus on an aspect of income security related to food security was thus deemed to be a useful tactic.

Before the campaign, the Special Diet was relatively obscure, providing about $6 million of benefits in Ontario. However, based on the efforts of many organizations, progressive health professionals and mobilization of poor communities, it became a $200 million program which made a material difference in people’s lives. John Clarke and

OCAP argue that at the time of the cut to the program in 2010, one in five people on welfare and disability were receiving the supplement and thus were seeing material changes as they had better prospects of paying rent while still having a chance to access a healthy diet (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal communication).

Clarke holds that a significant aspect of the struggle to expand access to the

Special Diet included that it was “something people had to fight for”. Welfare bureaucracies and local and provincial governments looked for ways to restrict and deny access. Thus, accessing the food allowance required mobilizing communities. The campaign went beyond a move to get people more money by using a provision within the rales of the system (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal communication). The campaign was a tactic considered to hold considerable fodder - in that it captured imaginations with an attainable victory and won significant grassroot, union, and health provider support, and was part of a strategy around a larger issue of a major general increase in welfare income.

120 Like most of OCAP’s work, the campaign worked to build a broader movement, uniting workers, public service users and the anti-capitalist left to resist aspects of the austerity agenda. They called on union and social movement activists to press for support for the struggles of those living on welfare and disability payments to “build a challenge to this Government that is too broad and powerful for them to act with impunity and impose their crisis on the poor” (Clarke 2010). “Hunger clinics” were formed with medical providers working at them, who then formed a “Health Providers

Against Poverty” political organization. A range of social agencies both helped with clinics and defended the rights of their clients to access the Supplement. Also, a range of social justice groups and unions defended the right to access the Supplement as a matter of “basic working class solidarity” (Clarke 2010). Particularly when it came to the need to defend the supplement against being cut, several years into the campaign, the Ontario

Nurses Association, Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario, Canadian Union of

Postal Workers and certain districts of the Ontario Secondary School Teacher’s

Federation put forward their support (Clarke 2010).

In many ways the campaign was successful in achieving its political goals because many low income communities, especially immigrant communities, organized themselves to ensure that access to the Special Diet was obtained. Clarke stresses that:

The key part of it (in terms of ally support) was not the organizations, it was poor

people and poor communities that were actually the driving force of the

campaign.. .There were neighbourhoods where people were active, particularly

121 immigrant communities where people were active and far and away that was, with

no shadow of doubt, the Somali community in the West End...without the

participation of the Somali community in the numbers and the way they

participated, the Special Diet campaign in Toronto wouldn’t have been one fifth

of what it was (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal communication).

Within the Somali community, this level of organizing was on such a significant scale that a new organization, OCAP Women of Etobicoke, was formed (J. Clarke 1 Nov.

2011, personal communication). These community organizations were starting up in

cities across Southern Ontario.

These successes are of a nature and level that differ from much food movement

work. Several aspects of the Special Diet itself lent the campaign to more possibilities

for this kind of success. For example, it was an attainable goal but required struggle - the

material payoff and gains from building organizing networks was within reach. The

experiences and networks required and built in the struggle could then be used in

expanding community struggles and efforts to “Raise the Rates” in Ontario (Clarke

2010). The organizing around the Special Diet was politically significant as it built

grassroots power to directly “confront the owners of resources” (Swyndegouw 2009). As

DeFilipis argued, this work was politically important because the target was always the

state, which plays a central role in shaping social and economic development “and

should not be abandoned as a target” (DeFilipis 2006) — which often occured through

focus on “community development” in community organizations and non-profits in the

122 past few decades (Fisher and Shragge 2006). The orientation of OCAP and the Special

Diet campaign took on aspects of a food security analysis and frame but these were part of a larger strategy against austerity politics which built power through organizing people and linking to/building broader movements (DeFilipis 2006). Building allies with e.g., the Stop and Daily Bread Food Bank around food and messaging stating “united we eat, divided we starve”, used food as part of a tactic in a larger strategy around raising welfare rates and undermining an austerity agenda.

Direct action components of the campaign served both to mobilize communities and fight back against neoliberal discourse of individualization and self-responsibility which ultimately stigmatizes welfare recipients and denies poverty to prop up an austerity agenda. Three “Loblaws actions”, which were part of the phase of the Raise the

Rates campaign leading to the Special Diet, struggled to undermine the ideas around the

“deservingness” of the poor, and welfare as government “handouts”. It asserted that poor people are actually owed money by the government. Clarke states that at the particular political moment of the actions they argued that Liberal Premier McGuinty owed people money “because he had promised he would not be like (Conservative Premier) Harris, but people were continuing to get poorer” (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal communication). The Loblaws action entailed taking groceries and marching to

McGuinty’s office to say “we’ve taken what you owe (us) but you owe it to Loblaws cause we’ve taken it from them” (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal communication).

Clarke stated that while participants felt empowered and enjoyed the tangible gains (the groceries), the action was just a precursor to the Special diet campaign because they could not conceivably organize people to take groceries on a mass scale. The action and subsequent campaign fundamentally argued against the logic of the neoliberal capitalist

State which seeks to erode a “social safety net” to increasingly force precarity on workers (Fanelli 2012).

The work around the Special Diet Campaign, and OCAP’s model in general,

stands in contrast to the issues inherent in the non-profit sector as discussed in the previous chapter. Their work has more political space to contrast with much of the non­ profit sector as it is funded by grassroots allies, including unions, which contribute funds

in a spirit of working class solidarity. A long-time OCAP organizer explains that their

work has always been based on “The notion that disruptive collective action is the

fundamental weapon that poor people have” (J. Clarke 1 Nov. 2011, personal

communication). This strategic philosophy aligns with that developed by Piven and

Cloward (1979), operating on the principle that the only way poor people can extract

substantive material concessions is through disruption. Such an orientation strongly

contrasts with the impetus for common programs around food access in the Toronto food

movement such as gardening, cooking workshops, and subsidizing farmer’s markets.

The work of OCAP is fundamentally about challenging structures in place and building

political organizing capacity rather than “helping people at the bottom get by” - as non­

profits are often limited to doing (Rodriguez 2007:23).

124 Of course the campaign was not without its pitfalls. The supplement was only an

interim measure. The campaign still relied on the state and thus was subject to being cut.

However, the way in which organizing around the Special Diet used the issue of food

security to build grassroots organizing capacity and solidarity among workers and low-

income communities in struggle to undermine an austerity agenda holds important

lessons for the food movement because of the fundamental connection of food security

to a neoliberal strategy of forcing precarious positions on workers to further capital

accumulation. Fighting for access to the Special Diet was one tactic in a broader strategy

of building grassroots mobilization to raise welfare rates.

Food in Tactics and Strategy

Mobilizing around increasing access to food through the Special Diet as part of

organizing around welfare rates, as well as the examples of gardens and food provision

as a way to organize with marginalized peoples, all used food as part of (an attempt to

build) broader political strategy. Much of the practice of the food movement is through

non-profits and features an abundance of programming around “food” without

connecting it to a broader strategy - often because of the political limitations of non­

profits as a result of funding relationships. These relationships often result in lack of

long-term strategy, censorship of radical ideas and other factors within the context of a

neoliberal capitalist agenda. However, much of the literature on the practice of the food

movement celebrates work that focuses on food (Baker 2010; Donald and Blay-Palmer

125 2005; Levkoe 2006) without the connections to a relationship of tactic and strategy with the ultimate goal of social change to shape the conditions for real food security.

Anderson (2005) argues that two of the main approaches shaping food movement practice include food relocalization and the turn to “quality” food production. He argues that both are “weaker” alternative systems of food provision because of their emphasis on food (Anderson 2005). According to Mohandesi’s (2012) articulation of the definition of and relationship between tactic and strategy, too much of the work in the food movement, when led by non-profits, suffers from a hypertrophy of food as a tactic. I argue that due to the dominant organization of the food movement in the form of non­ profits, there is an atrophy of strategy in making gains when it comes to pushing for structural change to achieve food security.

One example of the way the hypertrophy of a tactic involving food can render invisible context and strategy when pulled into food movement literature, is research on the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children Program ( Heynen 2008). This is considered important literature on the food movement, essentially to discuss the radical potential in “revolutionary, non-capitalist urban food programming” (Bedore

2010:1423). However, the reasons why Black Panther actions, food programming included, were also revolutionary was because it was a strong, militant group

“symbolizing Black Power and the antiwar movement in a critique of American imperialism and capitalism” (Self 2000:46). It is argued that it was the militancy of the

Black Panther Party, more so than their community activities, that strengthened their movement. With a list of demands such as decent housing and education, freedom for black prisoners and from police brutality, armed members of the Party invaded the State

Assembly Chair in 1967, thus instantly bringing the Party onto the political scene

(Carpini 2000).

It is argued that only after the decline of the Party in 1971 did it engage in community activities and then electoral politics (Van Steenist 1999; Carpini 2000).

Community activities did not stop their decline and in 1980 the Party had essentially ended (Carpini 2000). But the breakfast program was a tactic that was part of a radical strategy because it served the purpose not only to feed community and establish community presence, but to build their political power as a vanguard. Programs were combined with speeches and were filled with children saying “Black is beautiful, Free

(political prisoner) Huey!” (Self 2006:46). The breakfast program was one small part of their anti-imperialist anti-capitalist strategy and they combined the service provision with consciousness raising and community organizing “suffused with attacks on the capitalist system and class-based analyses” (Carpini 2000). Taking such critical context into consideration, as opposed to simply celebrating tactics involving food, is essential in order to help build a constructively self-reflexive movement.

Another tactic (or strategy, depending on the context) that is celebrated as part of the food movement are community gardens. The community garden movement in the

Lower East Side, New York City in the 1970s, is well known for inspiring community gardens to take root in many other cities (Pathukuchi and Kaufman 1999; Allen 1999). A

127 significant difference between community gardens in Toronto and New York City is how they came into existence. The gardens in New York City began when land was reclaimed from urban blight by grassroots groups and community members (Mele 2000).

They were fought for through a series of escalating tactics - from petitions to direct actions - when under pressure from a City which was facilitating a gentrification project

(Smith 2003). But they challenged the dynamics of private property and they challenged the State by taking land to make a community-run space. The spaces were never just about food (Martinez 2009). I return to these key points with an example of a way forward in the concluding chapter.

Most community gardens in Toronto were started and run by non-profits.

Academics and non-profits claim that community gardens in Toronto “bring people together” and “build community” (Baker 2010; Saldivar-Tanaka 2004). In the Lower

East Side, community members came together to take land and defend it. The goals of many food programs and food policy include community development and empowerment. I think it is clear that we see those goals achieved in the Lower East Side as people were empowered to resist the forces of gentrification and the authority of the

State in their neighbourhoods. I know from my own political experiences, and the case of the Special Diet campaign, that fighting for something together certainly builds community and potential for further organizing. Because non-profits could not encourage such actions (based on my research and critiques of the non-profit sector) it is important to consider the political limitations on a movement led by non-profits in terms of reaching goals regarding community self-organization and building awareness and radical action around structures causing conditions of food security.

These examples of actions - food provisioning and gardens - seem, at face value, similar to the nature of the programming of non-profits. However, the actions - of taking land for gardens, having a breakfast program as one part of a militant anti­ imperialist anti-capitalist strategy, organizing for access to the Special Diet - embody the opposite of all of the limitations faced by non-profits on doing political work, as discussed in the previous chapter. I think we need to make these critical distinctions - between the use of food as a tactic and food as part of radical strategy challenging the

State - very clear in order to constructively assess the movement and contribute to these struggles. Writing in uncritical celebration of such tactics, actions or programs does not help the food movement reach its own political goals for health and dignity for all.

Instead, the nature of these programs celebrated by literature (Levkoe 2006; Starr

2004) - cooking, gardening - can be understood as encouraging self-sufficiency and pursuing non-market reproduction (Slocum 2008). Understanding these projects in terms of prefigurative politics, or the idea that “we can build the world we want now” (Starr

2000), involves the idea that “challenging power is not possible or even desirable”

(Sharzer 2012). However, because workers plan for their individual and family reproduction and capital requires the production of its enterprise, workers pursuing non- market reproduction offloads the costs of production from capital onto workers (Sharzer

2012). These projects may be “non-capitalist”, but are not anti-capitalist (Sharzer 2012).

129 While survival strategies can be celebrated, spaces supposedly “outside” of

capital are contradictory (Sharzer 2012). While capitalism is globally dominant, it is a

contradictory totality shaped by class struggles between the proletariat and capital. Thus

instead of building strategy from the idea of an “outside” or “line of flight”, rather it is

strategically useful to think through this “immanent contradiction and antagonism

secreted within capitalist exploitation of labor to extract value” (Noyes 2006). Thus

volunteer labour, ethical farming and perhaps a shared sense of community created by

urban gardens helps reproduce the labour force without cost to capital. However, it also

creates new bases for organizing (Sharzer 2012). Activists within this research and in the

examples of the Special Diet Campaign, the Black Panther Breakfast Program and the

Lower East Side gardens remind us these spaces hold significant political potential when

they are a part of a movement that is still contesting the state and structures of capital.

Conclusion

In the spirit of being constructively critical of this food movement - as these

interviewed activists are doing - it is useful to assess the revolutionary potential (an

orientation against the structures of capital) of these food movement initiatives. We can

then seek to understand if and why they face limitations, in order to build our

movements.

130 Accordingly, Tang (2006) argues:

At least the non-profits can clear a path for revolutionary change by dismantling

the policies and practices that prevent autonomous movements taking hold .. .eg

the collapse of the social welfare state.. .So too, it can do the work of coalescing

grassroots forces at opportune times.. .and at the very least it can challenge the

Left’s discernible shift toward purely elitist strategies - pushing legislative policy,

winning over the commercial media - practices which eclipse the mass strategy of

gradually building the base of opposition over time, of truly investing in “change

from below” (Tang 2006:225).

As activists in these organizations are putting efforts toward tactically making space to politically organize, it is critical to evaluate what gains can strategically be made in conjunction with these food security initiatives and against the onslaught of austerity attacks. However, it is also critical to recognize how the non-profit sector is ultimately limited when it comes to radical oppositional politics, and thus reorient the work of the food movement to better address the root causes of food insecurity.

131 Chapter 5

Conclusion

This study contributes a critical analysis of the work of several important food security initiatives in Toronto, according to the on-the-ground experiences of thirteen organizers working within eleven of these initiatives. It is therefore a contribution to our understanding of the current political state of the food movement in a major urban centre, the role of non-profits in this work, and possible ways to overcome some common obstacles to engaging in political work around food security within the non-profit sector.

I think this area of research is needed because scholars writing on social movements have the political responsibility to engage in research which critically and constructively contributes to the struggle. Too much of the growing amounts of literature on the food movement (Levkoe 2006; Donald and Blay-Palmer 2006; Johnston and Baker 2005;

Pudup 2008; Shinew 2004; Baker 2012) celebrates its practice without contextualizing it in the political economic context which is at the root of a lack of food access. Thus, the state of the movement is too rarely explored in relation to the need for significant challenge to the state and capital, or revolutionary structural change, to ensure access to food for all.

Under capitalism, people must sell their labour power in order to be able to buy the basic things needed to survive. I have argued that the inability of people to feed themselves is a necessary foundation of capitalism. Increasing food insecurity is one inextricable aspect of increasing the precarity of worker’s lives under neoliberal

132 capitalism. Centering this analysis in the theory and practice of the food movement points to the need for a struggle against the state and the dynamics of capitalism to achieve the structural changes necessary for food security. In other words, a struggle for real food security for all requires challenging the dynamics of capitalism through revolutionary strategy, and confronting the political questions that these dynamics pose.

However, we can see from this study of food security initiatives in Toronto that a food movement led by non-profits faces serious limitations to engaging in such radical political work.

Rather, Dylan Rodriguez argues that the “non-profit industrial complex (and by extension the establishment Left’s) commitment to maintaining the essential social and political structures of civil society (meaning institutions as well as ways of thinking) reproduces and enables the most vicious and insidious forms of state and state-sanctioned oppression and repression” (Rodriguez 2007: 34). I also argued that a food movement led by non-profits perpetuates a focus on food as a solution to injustices. It perpetuates certain tactics which involve food while remaining unable to enact strategies for challenging the structural dynamics causing food insecurity in the first place. Much of the practice of the food movement in Toronto thus becomes similar to social service work, wherein it is addressing the needs of individuals “reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence” (Kivel 2007:

129). This social service work starkly contrasts social change work which challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence (Kivel 2007). An important question this situation raises is whether the non-profit sector, and nature of the food movement should

“be conceptualized as a fundamental target of radical social transformation (whether it is to be seized, abolished, or some combination of both)?” (Rodriguez 2007: 36). This question will constantly need to be considered while assessing the inhibiting or enabling role of the non-profit sector in the work of building the mass movements needed to struggle for structural change.

Food insecurity is a result of multiple interlocking factors, yet non-profits perpetuate a relatively narrow focus on food through programming which entirely fails to address root causes. My research findings point to the pressing need for a redirection of efforts in order to make real political gains around access to food and control of our food systems. These findings include that the work of non-profits are relegated to hypertrophy of the use of food as a social movement tactic, with a lack of an ability to construct and implement a long-term strategy for the structural change necessary to have healthy food accessible to all. Thus, an important implication of these findings includes that a strategy is needed which will leverage a formidable force against the capitalist state and allow for the grassroots to actually make just decisions on the growing and distribution of resources.

One possible alternative to a non-profit led movement would be for social movement groups in the food movement to look to grassroots funding in order to not be tied to a system of government and elite funding which limits oppositional political work.

For example, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty raises funds for their work through

134 unions, other grassroots groups, and individuals supporting their work. Food security initiatives could have more opportunity and support for such political work if they were funded by people and groups who more closely align and serve to benefit from the political work of struggling against policies, institutions and capitalist dynamics which perpetuate or deepen food insecurity.

However, besides funding sources, groups fighting for food security need to be a significant political force in order to challenge the neoliberal capitalist state. In the face of a deepening neoliberal phase of capitalism which only enhances the precariousness and (food) insecurity in the lives of workers, I propose food activists and scholars join, support and/or build movements oriented toward being or becoming a force that can make and practice decisions regarding how we treat the land and distribute resources.

Supporting Indigenous sovereignty struggles often involves resisting the processes of primitive accumulation which in various ways remove the ability for a communityto independently feed themselves e.g., clearcut logging in Barriere Lake Algonquin

Territory (Shenkier and Meredith 1997). Indigenous sovereignty struggles are also one example of such movements which have the ability to articulate and act according to a different relationship to the land and resources on their nations’ unceded territory.

Though an example of a struggle in the small rural Ontario town of Dundalk may seem far from struggles around local, healthy food acesss in low-income communities in

Toronto, it exemplifies a struggle and growing movement which has the potential to make real political gains around issues of long-term local food security for working class

135 people by supporting and forming a powerful force fighting for demands according to land rights and against the logic of the capitalist state. Additionally, while Six Nations territory as per the Haldimand Tract is located about 150 km from Toronto, the Toronto neighbourhood of Jane and Finch also sits on Six Nations land (P. Monture, 9 Nov. 2011, presentation).

The current fight against a sludge facility in the town of Dundalk, on Six Nations land, is a strong example of a struggle that could critically affect longterm food security for a region, as well as build a movement to sustain and strengthen the ability to fight capitalist dynamics causing food insecurity. The struggle includes Six Nations land defenders, Dundalk residents and Six Nations solidarity organizers - such as myself - from cities all over Southern Ontario. Dundalk is a small, economically depressed, rural town located at one of the highest elevations in Ontario, surrounded by agricultural lands, at the headwaters of the Grand River and Saugeen River watersheds. Plans are underway for the corporation, Lystek, to construct a sludge-to-fertilizer treatment plant which would result in industrial toxic and human waste from Toronto being spread on farmland and seeping into the wetlands and watersheds (Wetlaufer 2012). Thus the ability to grow healthy food in this region would be critically affected.

The struggle in Dundalk is particularly important because township residents only began to make headway in their fight against Lystek and the supportive municipal council, when Six Nations land defenders asserted that the facility would not be built on their land without consultation. After exhausting the official channels to voice opposition

136 through government and still remaining powerless, residents approached Six Nations because Dundalk is on the rightful territory of the Haudenosee Confederacy according to the 1763 Haldimand Proclamation (Wetlaufer 2012; Simon 1983). Working class residents were joined by allies from Six Nations in blockading the access road to Lystek’s construction site, in the name of Six Nations land rights (Wetlaufer 2012). In supporting

Six Nations soveriegnty struggles, Dundalk residents - unaffiliated with any official group - were able to have a more powerful voice in protecting their food, health, community, and the land. In supporting both communitys’ own interests, the struggle in

Dundalk and the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty engaged in a common struggle against the capitalist logic of private property and endless growth at the expense of the health of the land.

In my organizing experience, I have seen that throughout the Haldimand Tract, or

Six Nations of the Grand River territory, there have been many examples of this kind of local, grassroots and working class identification with Six Nations land rights. This identification has occurred because of the way these rights benefit non-Native people and the success non-Native people have had in protecting their land, food and rights through supporting Six Nations land rights struggles. For example, the Canadian Autoworkers

Union has stood with Six Nations (in marches, rallies and statements of support) to demand that treaties be respected, just as union contracts must be respected (Canadian

Auto Workers 2006). Six Nations people have also supported Canadian Autoworkers directly on the frontlines of their strike, as well as indirectly in their struggle against

137 injunctions (Canadian Auto Workers 2007). This identification and support for treaty rights and Indigenous sovereignty struggles could be a long- term strategy for Jane and

Finch, because it is on Six Nations land. Perhaps the ability to address obstacles to living a healthy and dignified life, which includes paying rent, could better be achieved by struggling to strengthen the ability to live according to laws and decisions made by the rightful owners of the land and the people now living on it.

These worker and Indigenous sovereignty struggles become one of shared liberation, as opposed to perpetually uneven power dynamics associated with social service work wherein limited resources are given to those dealing with the impact of institutional systems of exploitation, without any transfer of power or resources to challenge the same systems. The shared struggle also engages with the “immanent contradiction and antagonism secreted within capitalist exploitation of labor to extract value” (Noyes 2006). Supporting Six Nations land rights struggles as well as working class engagement in the struggles is one example of a potentially revolutionary movement which could challenge the state and capitalist dynamics in a way that opens political opportunity to realize grassroots demands around interlocking factors related to food security e.g., access to healthy food, land protection, workers’ rights.

Scholars of food security (Power 2010; Allen 1998; Sharzer 2012) and neoliberal urbanism (Harvey 2005; Fanelli 2012) argue that structural change is necessary to address the root issues of inequities under capitalism, in order to achieve more healthy and just distribution of resources, such as food. While a growing number of initiatives

138 may involve food in their focus and programming, Rodriguez (2004) and Harvey (2003) remind us that to radically change society, we must build mass movements that can topple systems of domination, such as capitalism.

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