Meet Me at a Farm or Gas Station: Cooperative Volunteering as Feminist Resistance to Neoliberalism in Critical Food Systems Activism and Education

• In Event: Critical Community-Based Research in Environmental Education

Abstract

Critical food studies scholars have highlighted the significant ways in which local food initiatives are infused with neoliberal ideologies through an emphasis on consumer choice, localism, enterpreneurialism, and self-improvement (e.g., Guthman, 2008; Herman, Goodman, & Sage, 2019). However as Alison Hope Alkon and Julie Guthman illustrate, activist organizations are beginning to shift away from a strict focus on the politics of consumption to “change not only the way we eat, but the ways we live, work, and govern ourselves” (2016, p. 2). Framed by theories of feminist food activism (e.g., Steager, 2013), feminist food justice (e.g., Sachs & Patel-Campillo, 2014), and urban political ecology (Heynen Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006; Heynen, Kurtz, Trauger, 2012) this paper draws on 18 months of feminst activist ethnographic fieldwork in California within an urban food justice collective (Pomona Community Farmer Alliance, PCFA) and at an urban farmers market and its associated “chemical-free” farms. In this research project I occupy overlapping positionalities as activist, professor/teacher, and researcher as I collaborate with diverse stakeholders working to ameliorate injustices in the local community.

Focusing specifically on the PCFA, I explore how discourses and practices of a politics of consumption continue to frame some work and yet also highlight when moments of resistance to neoliberalism emerge. The collective, comprised primarily of culturally and ethnically diverse womxn, for example, has embraced a “gathering space” model at the farmers market, making care, reciprocity, and critical food systems education (e.g., Luna, Dávila, & Reynoso-Morris, 2018; Meek et al., 2017; Swan & Flowers, 2015) central to its success. By picking up produce at chemical-free farms and sometimes even gas stations, which can serve as convenient places to meet growers traveling to other markets, activists support farmers who wish to employ practices gentle to people and the environment, but cannot afford or wish to resist USDA organic certification (Guthman, 2014). By mobilizing a cadre of volunteers to sell these goods on behalf of chemical-free farmers at the market, the disproportionately toxic waste burdened urban community benefits from greater access to high-quality, chemical-free food. Since farmers incur no transportation or labor expenses associated with the market, they therefore willingly set lower prices. To conclude, I briefly discuss some of the tensions of this cooperative volunteer structure, including how it employs the unpaid labor of womxn to thrive. I also explore how cooperative volunteerism can abdicate state responsibility for providing critical food education in schools and beyond (e.g., Lupinacci & Happel-Parkins, 2018), as well as access to fresh, high quality, chemical-free food.

Author

• Teresa Lloro, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona