Securing Food Futures

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This session grapples with food security, food sovereignty, and current events in food politics in a way that acknowledges capitalist structures of production and consumption. Panelists draw on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and policy analysis to critique historical injustices in the food system.

Belinda Ramírez discusses the role of seed libraries in fostering food sovereignty in the wake of pandemic-induced food shortages. Using ethnographic research on seed libraries located in the Greater Binghamton area in the Southern Tier of New York State, Ramírez argues that these spaces act as sites of resistance against industrialized agriculture, circulating locally viable seeds while cultivating knowledge-sharing networks that challenge corporate food dependency.

Michelle Phan examines the rise of community fridges as mutual aid projects addressing food insecurity outside of traditional nonprofit frameworks. Focusing on two community fridge shutdowns in Canada—Toronto’s Chinatown and East Vancouver—Phan analyzes how these spaces disrupt neoliberal models of food charity, reimagining food access through solidarity rather than surveillance-based aid. As sites that intermingle ideas of what private and public are, community fridge projects open up the concepts of who can and cannot take food, and who gives and how they can give.

Vanessa Castañeda’s research with the farmworker-led advocacy group El Futuro Es Nuestro investigates food and water accessibility among farmworkers in North Carolina, particularly those subjected to forced meal plans. Her work highlights the structural injustices shaping agricultural labor and the ways workers organize to reclaim autonomy over their diets and working conditions.

These papers show how communities resist top-down food regimes and, instead, envision and implement decolonized, self-sustaining alternatives.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Planting the Seeds of Sovereignty: The Democratizing and Liberatory Potential of Seed Libraries - Belinda C Ramírez, Binghamton University, SUNY; Tiffany Chen, SUNY at Binghamton; Neko A Collins, SUNY at Binghamton

• Community Fridges: The Question of Race, Power, and Mutual Aid in Context - Michelle Phan, Simon Fraser University

• A Farmworker’s Plate: Conducting Community-Engaged Research about Forced Meal Plans Among Farmworkers in NC - Vanessa Castaneda, Davidson College

Chair

• Sarah Fouts, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Comment

• Hanna Garth, Princeton University

Biographical Information

Hanna Garth

Hanna Garth is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist who studies food access and the global food system. Her recent work is focused on the connections between distribution systems, structural inequalities, health, and wellbeing. Specifically, she studies the ways in which changes in the global food system, and shifts in local food distribution systems impact communities, families, and individuals. She studies these questions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. She published the book Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal and co-edited the volume Black Food Matters: Food Justice in the Wake of Racial Justice.

Belinda Ramírez

Belinda Ramírez (they/them) is a first-generation Colombian-American queer farmer-scholar. They are an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Public Health at Binghamton University (SUNY). Their engaged research interests center around the social, racial/ethnic, political, environmental/ecological and economic dimensions of urban agriculture and food justice/sovereignty movements within the modern industrialized and corporatized global food system. Ramírez’s scholarship uses ethnographic and mixed methods to investigate on-the-ground practices of local food production, procurement and advocacy, especially among BIPOC and low-income communities in the United States and Latin America. In this work, they demonstrate how people living in underserved urban spaces—who resiliently struggle with the myriad effects of food apartheid on diet, health and wellbeing—push for both individual and community autonomy and self-sufficiency through producing their own food and creating alternative food networks.

Ramírez’s upcoming project centers food justice/sovereignty and racial justice narratives in their family’s home country of Colombia. Ramírez considers themselves a farmer-scholar, having received agricultural training through local farms and community gardens across Tijuana-San Diego, Northern California’s Bay Area and beyond. They have also engaged in statewide political advocacy for young farmers through the National Young Farmers Coalition, served as both Board and Food Justice Co-Chair for Slow Food Urban San Diego, and currently serve as a member of Food Tank's Academic Working Group.

Michelle Phan

Michelle Phan is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University's School of Communication. Her current explores carceral technologies and logics through the lens of feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) and media studies. Her research specifically examines how community fridges, bicycle cops, and transit cards function as forms of soft surveillance, as well as the resistance to these surveillance practices. In the past, she has focused on topics such as abolitionist approaches to archives, solidarity across difference in times of crises, and digital and creative labour studies.

Vanessa Castañeda

Vanessa Castañeda earned her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University in 2021. As an interdisciplinary ethnographer, her work emphasizes gender, labor, race, and foodways in Latin America. Her first book examines the baianas de acarajé, predominantly older, working-class Black women who work as street vendors in Salvador, Brazil, selling traditional regional foods with culinary roots in West Africa. These women are central icons of African heritage tourism and cultural figures of both regional and national Brazilian identity. Castañeda’s research reconceptualizes the baianas as political agents of Black feminism, advocating for self and collective liberation. She is also engaged in collaborative research with the farmworker-led advocacy group El Futuro Es Nuestro (EFEN), investigating food and water accessibility among farmworkers subject to forced meal plans. Her teaching focuses on the histories and cultures of Afro-Latin America, food and identity across Latin America, and the intersections of gender, labor, and food.