Abstract
How do we fix our broken food system? How can we sustain small farmers and feed urban populations? In Growing Gardens, Building Power, Justin Sean Myers shows how food justice organizations are working to build a food system that provides healthy food and livable jobs to more people, emphasizing what the wider food movement should learn from food justice and offering suggestions for ways that the food justice movement itself can evolve to overcome structural headwinds.
Growing Gardens, Building Power is an ethnographic account of East New York Farms! (ENYF!), a food-oriented community organization located in a majority-Black and low-income neighborhood, where a history of racialized neighborhood disinvestment has produced conditions of food apartheid. Myers shows through the case of ENYF! how organizations in such neighborhoods are bringing about more local, sustainable, and just food systems, navigating a complex terrain of false solutions and systemic challenges. Throughout the book, Myers skillfully brings together stories and voices from East New York with a wide body of relevant scholarship.
I am always looking for succinct, accessibly written accounts of structural inequality for my undergraduate sociology courses. Growing Gardens, Building Power offers promising material in this regard, especially Chapter 1, which outlines race and class tensions within the food movement, and Chapter 2, which contextualizes ENYF! as an exemplary case for understanding the practice and politics of food justice. In Chapter 2, Myers addresses the interlocking systems of dispossession and devaluation that urban residents of color (and Black Americans in particular) have experienced across the 20th century, deftly weaving in the local history of East New York and ENYF!, providing concrete examples of the struggles against political, economic, and social institutions that have functioned in discriminatory ways under racial capitalism.
Chapter 3 is focused on Myers’ time working at one of ENYF!’s community gardens. For those who participate in or study urban agriculture, the stories here will seem familiar: people build community gardens and urban farms not just to feed themselves, but also to maintain their culture and connection to the earth and to resist the pressures of exploitation, alienation, and assimilation that urban life so frequently imposes. While covering this well-worn ground cogently, Myers applies a fresh theoretical lens, drawing on Vandana Shiva’s concept of the “monoculture of the mind” and J.K. Gibson-Graham’s “diverse economies” to show how many urban community gardeners are refusing to subsume their well-being to a system that is broadly harmful. Myers shows how gardeners with ENYF! are nurturing an alternative economy that is much more powerful than its dollars-and-cents “productivity” would imply, and pinpoints “capitalocentric” logic as the source of constraint on urban growers’ yields.
The analysis of potential for commercial food production extends into Chapter 4, which focuses on ENYF!’s farmers market. Once again, Myers elegantly connects the contours of his case to the broader political and economic conditions that structure food insecurity and the struggles for food justice and food sovereignty in the United States. The ENYF! farmers market is depicted as an exemplar of judicious attention to both affordability for low-income customers and profitability for small farmers, operating in conditions that led the organization to embrace food assistance as a strategy to balance these opposing needs. Someone looking for a detailed account of how the ENYF! farmers market is organized, or the history of how various stakeholders worked together to build out this alternative distribution channel, may be disappointed. Nevertheless, the chapter provides a valuable window into the changing politics of the food movement.
In Chapter 5, Myers addresses the funding landscape for nonprofits and how this landscape limits the effectiveness of food justice organizations. At first, Myers draws mostly from interview data to highlight the need for long-term funding models that stabilize organizations enough to build community ties and trust. The chapter then takes a theoretical turn, delving into the dynamics and contradictions of philanthropic funding for social justice programs. Ultimately, Myers argues that the food justice movement can move beyond its funding challenges by broadening its framing to engage the public in reconceptualizing “democracy, freedom, and taxes” (117). Here, Myers lays out an ambitious and theoretically supported argument for radical social transformation, one that promises to inform generative conversations among food justice activists. As the chapter shifts from challenges to solutions, the narrative makes more of a leap from the empirical to the theoretical than in other chapters, and Myers does not elaborate on how the food justice movement might work to expand its reach. Nevertheless, Chapter 5 offers one of the book’s major contributions, outlining ways that the food justice movement can strategically broaden its message and sidestep potential pitfalls from accepting status-quo arrangements.
Another major contribution comes in Chapter 6, which analyzes competing frameworks through which food and jobs are viewed by different actors in the food movement. With rich quotes from interviews and public events, Myers unpacks East New York’s resistance to Wal-Mart as a case study in the ways that food justice articulates with economic justice. Given the book’s title, I was surprised to read little about how ENYF! and related groups mobilized resident opposition to Wal-Mart, but the chapter gives an excellent analysis of the competing framing strategies of opponents and supporters. Chapter 7 then summarizes six key areas of tension in the existing food movement, through which Myers distills his thoughtful, impassioned call for strategic framing to build a wider and more powerful coalition to achieve durable change.
Growing Gardens, Building Power is less a how-to manual for the organizational work of building a more just, local food system than it is an emphatic call to advance the food justice movement. Myers’ insights will be valuable for those already involved in food policy and activism, the practice and study of food justice, and/or social justice activism not (yet) directly related to food. Understanding the connections among these efforts and potential power of strategic frame expansion, change agents in all of these arenas can form more effective coalitions. The book is also an excellent primer for those not as familiar with the food movement or urban sociology, and Myers’ accessible yet authoritative writing makes it a promising read for students, scholars, and nonacademics alike.