Food Justice Louisville

If there’s a happenin’ spot for food justice it’s Louisville, Kentucky. Couched between the plains of the central Midwest and the hills of the Appalachian east, Louisville lies at the crossroads of and on the cutting edge of the new, sustainable food movement.

Emissions from agriculture and deforestation account for 14% and 17% of global warming emissions respectively. With our industrial food chain mining the soil for calories, clear-cutting native forest, and burning fossil fuels to produce and ship over ever longer distances, our food economy is a leading root cause of climate change.

We got to catch up with several key food activists who are active at the national level who happen to reside in Louisville – folks who are flipping the food system on its head by localizing instead of globalizing, ditching the chemicals and going organic, and creating a culture of food and eating in harmony with the planet and its people.

The Louisville crew had several inspiring and often overlapping projects that provide great examples of how to sustainablize a local food system while keeping your eyes on the prize of taking down the big guys in Agribiz. (We’ll post interview footage soon!)

Our first stop was a community garden where we met up with Stephen Bartlett. Stephen works with Sustainable Agriculture Louisville, Agricultural Missions and the Refugee Agricultural Promotion Project, promoting local food and community gardens, but also staying looped into the national and international campaigns for sustainable and against corporate control of agriculture.

We were impressed with his breadth of understanding and ability to easily explain complex connections between neoliberal globalization of food, urban food desserts, the struggle for food workers’ rights, the ecological imperative a new way of feeding ourselves.

When we spoke, (check back later for video) Stephen called on food activists to go beyond alternative community projects to organize, and build power to confront corporate control of food. “Get involved in a local organization, try to build that organization up”, he says. “But as you’re doing that”, he continues, “keep the eye on the prize, turning back the whole neoliberal system. We’ve gotta get land back to the people who work the land, and we’ve gotta get healthy food to everyone no matter what their income is.”

The next day we visited a food dessert farmer’s market and caught up with Rae and Adam Barr–Strobel the Community Farm Alliance and Stone Soup Community Kitchen. We talked with Rae and Adam about the role of local food movements in the climate justice movement and the necessity of affected people deciding their own futures, in agriculture as in climate mitigation alike.
We got invited to the Stone Soup dinner, a wonderful monthly group cooking experiment, and headed out to a church at the edge of town. A group of food activists all come together to share gleaned food from local farmer’s markets. They share an enormous kitchen and, as Rae, one of the cofounders says, “chaos ensues” before a meal of many dishes is prepared and shared collectively. A great model for community that we’d love to see recreated in some of our DC Community/Movement Potluckers activities when we return.

On site at the church was one of the many refugee gardens in Louisville, where land is donated to recently immigrated communities who traditionally work the land. There were lots of folks recently settled from Somalia, Congo, Cambodia and Burma working this particular garden, so the variety of crops was impressive, despite the lateness of the season. It was inspiring to see how this federally supported program (!) called the Refugee Agricultural Promotions Project succeeded in not severing the ties with ‘the land’ for folks who’d been pushed off or forced to flee their own lands. It reminds us there are many examples among us of how to live in balance with our ecology, even in a within the post-industrial cityscape. A great example of anti-warming urban living.

Louisville showed us that food activists in many places are connecting the dots between local food and larger movements, and I’ll be curious to see how their work evolves. It seems there’s a still a lot of room to see local food activist building the sort of political power necessary to wrest control of our global foods system from corporate industrialist agribusiness. But I suppose that’s on us as global justice and climate activists to go out and do the organizing: to educate about the neoliberal food system and the it’s brutal global footprint, to hit up those farmer’s markets with our flyers and calls to action, to build community and trust such that we can act collectively and win.

Author’s addition (11/12/10): I’m unsure how I could have written this post without emphasizing the JOBS potential inherent in taking back our food economy. This is crucial, especially given the fears of working people that environmental justice  climate protection will cost many livelihoods. If we get the land back to the people, and the people back working the land –  as opposed huge profit maximizing gas-guzzling high-emitting machines, we’ll be well on our way to taking back the food system, and reclaiming our climate for the people. Thoughts?