Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 295–308 doi:10.1093/cjres/rsq015 Advance Access publication 14 May 2010 Realizing justice in local food systems Patricia Allen Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA,
[email protected] Downloaded from Received on November 9, 2009; accepted on April 14, 2010 For alternative agrifood social movements, food-system localization is both an ideal and a pathway to resolve environmental, social and economic issues in the food system. This cjres.oxfordjournals.org article addresses the potential for equity within food-system localization in practical and conceptual terms. Historical processes have shaped regions and social relations with vast differences in wealth, power and privilege and this has implications for thinking about and enacting equity through food-system localization. If food-system localization efforts are to work toward equity, they must consider inherited material and discursive asymmetries within frameworks of economy, demography, geography and democracy. Keywords: food systems, localization, social justice, agrifood movements, sustainability, democracy by guest on September 11, 2010 JEL Classifications: I3, Q1, R11 Introduction lunches? To the extent that people are trying to In the face of an increasingly globalized political solve problems of tastelessness, processed foods economy, contemporary social movements have and the numbing sameness of the food-procurement turned to discourses and strategies of localization experience, local food systems can provide solu- as a solution to a host of problems. Among the tions. For other food-system issues, particularly social movements promoting localization are the those involving social justice, the role of food- alternative agrifood social movements, such as system localization is less clear.