Featuring Dr. Amie “Breeze" Harper, Lauren Shweder Biel, Anupama Joshi, Raj Patel, and Eve Andrews

With its roots in the civil rights era, the modern food justice movement emerged in the mid-90s in response to regional food insecurity. Its aim was deceptively simple: to provide affordable, nutritious food to all Americans. The current pandemic and social uprisings of recent years have reignited the movement and exposed – if not accelerated – the extraordinary fragility of our food systems and revealed the vast interconnectedness of food justice with racial justice and climate justice. While the impact of climate change will touch us all, affecting food production and availability, access, quality, and stability of food systems, the degree of this impact will be, and is already, dispersed disproportionately along racial and economic lines. The work to ensure equitable access for all to fresh, nutritious, and affordable food, to support communities to source their own food, to protect the health and safety of farm and food service workers, and to address legacies of harm, particularly to underserved communities of color are but a small fraction of what is encompassed in this broad, sweeping movement. While the pandemic has revealed its weaknesses, it has also created an opportunity to reimagine what food systems could be like if they were to be justly transformed. This panel will situate the food justice movement in this current moment, shine a light on the important work being done by activists today, and point us in the direction of the movement’s future.