Food Justice has developed an impressive body of work demonstrating how the (re)production of consumerist subjectivity in short food chains under a neoliberal policy regime tends to lead subaltern inequality in alternative agri-food networks. This “vote with your fork” model of connecting producers to consumers relies upon purchasing power, which in a capitalist society means exclusion of the majority from participation. This occurs because producers seek price premiums to sustain their businesses in competition with heavily subsidized, economies of scale in the industrial agri-food sector. In addition, white consumers reproduce alternative agri-food networks as exclusionary white spaces by adopting a color-blind orientation toward the effects of racial injustice on food system inequalities. Importantly, what has worked to reduce inequality and rectify these injustices has been concerted collective action. Thus, food justice scholars demonstrate the underlying dynamics leading to these outcomes in the food system, as well as ways to remedy them. Utilizing qualitative case studies based on participant-observation and semi-structured interviews, food justice scholars have supplied ample evidence to support these theoretical conjectures.
Yet, there remains an important gap in food justice scholarship’s structural understanding of how a neoliberal policy regime comes into being and how that impacts the ability of subalterns to act. We argue for a macro-historical food justice integrating the role of capital, state, and subalterns to elucidate how concrete formal institutional sets (i.e., a policy regime) are crystallized that parametrize agents. While the capitalist class seeks formal institutions most conducive to accumulation and the appropriation of labor, the state occupies a relatively autonomous position and makes policy based upon the power of subalterns to force redistribution in their favor. While the state pursues policy conducive to capital accumulation, how it does so is determined by the level of subaltern power in relation to the power of the capitalist class before, during, and after a given policy regime. Food justice scholars miss the role a critical mass of subaltern power plays in bringing about structural alterations that fundamentally change the policy regime within which agents are subjects. As such, we argue for a Marxist-Food Justice research agenda to investigate whether macro-level trends in subaltern power support food justice’s micro-level and case-based findings.
To illustrate our argument, we look at the shifting form of alternative agri-food networks in the United States over the 20th Century, from public markets to short food chains. We bring in data demonstrating levels of subaltern power, such as national union and work stoppage rates, frequency of identity-based protest, and other descriptive data. We analyze that data qualitatively in relation to municipal policies that built public market systems, set price controls on food products, and redistributed surplus through the state to subalterns. The decline of subaltern power and the public market system occurs in relation to the rise of the short food chain model and neoliberal policy regime. This example illustrates a course for an institutional Marxist-Food Justice research agenda.
