2 Paragraph Reflection

For this reading journal assignment, you will submit a brief reflection (approximately 2 substantial paragraphs, double-spaced; up to two pages) in response to or reflecting on some aspect(s) of this week’s reading:

For this reading journal assignment, you will submit a brief reflection (approximately
2 substantial paragraphs, double-spaced; up to two pages) in response to or
reflecting on some aspect(s) of this week’s reading: RSM Chapter 18, by Pezzullo,
Gordon, and Gabrieloff-Parish.
You may choose to write about:
● Personal or other real-world examples that help further illustrate concepts and
theories in the reading
● Critique or dissent of arguments made in text
● Discussion of a concept or argument you found particularly interesting
● Discussion of a relevant piece of media (news article, podcast episode,
documentary, etc.) you have encountered that reminds you of this text
(include a link or reference for the artifact)
● Comparison/contrast of this reading with other texts from the course
● Connections to broader course concepts, themes, and theories
● Questions for further consideration
● Other observations or commentary that demonstrate your understanding of
the material
Note that this reflection may include creative elements like drawings, charts, maps,
photographs, graphics, etc., but creative aspects must be elaborated upon in writing.
Your reflection should exhibit high-level, error-free writing and will be assessed
based on the level of insight and critical thinking you demonstrate. Do not simply
restate or summarize the reading; you are demonstrating not only your
understanding of the reading, but also your critical consideration of its ideas. Of
course, high quality, error-free writing is expected. In addition to your serious
contemplation of the assigned text, as needed, you should include quotes from
assigned texts to support your point as needed.
This assignment is worth 10 points, and grading is based on the following
criteria:
● Demonstrates critical thinking and self-reflection
● Exhibits comprehension of themes and concepts from the assigned texts for
the week
● When necessary, supports arguments with passages from the assigned
readings/artifacts (and APA in-text citations are properly employed and
formatted)
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logically organized
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Reading Next Page
The Rhetoric of Social Movements
Chapter 18
Food Justice Advocacy Tours
Constance Gordon, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, and Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish
If you do things in mission alignment more work can get done. Reciprocity is key.
Reciprocity… . Sometimes the loudest people don’t know their neighbors.
—Beverly Grant, Mo’ Betta Green Marketplace
Social movements, like farms or gardens, require planning based on lessons of the
past and adaptation informed by hopes for the future. In the present, the labor
required to sustain social movements is not always grandiose, romantic, or
foregrounded in public facing work (Choudry, 2015). Organizing takes care and
intention to cultivate worlds and reciprocal relationships (brown, 2017). As the
geographies where we live, work, play, and eat are being transformed by an
amalgamation of ecological and social inequity challenges—from climate crisis to
uneven development—frontline communities are increasingly reimagining their
relationships to remap regenerative possibilities. An increasing number of social
movement practitioners are returning to indigenous thought regarding regeneration,
or the “the art of starting over” (Simpson, 2011, p. 22). For example, the Movement
Generation Justice and Ecology Project (2016) has argued that shifting from a
politics of extraction to one of regeneration takes a willingness to not only “starve
and stop” centralized power but to begin again, to “feed and grow” alliances, both
human and nonhuman in form (p. 16–17). Regeneration and the social movements
informed by the concept are “reflexive, responsive, and reciprocal” requiring
rebalancing “relationships of interdependence between human communities and the
living world upon which we depend” (Movement Generation, 2016, p. 29).
Acknowledging interdependence in social movement studies ideally signals
mutuality, intersectionality, and heterogeneity. It also provides fertile grounds to
sustain social change.
Given these dynamic relations, when we study social movements, we face many
challenges of deciding what to focus on, how, and to what ends. As Griffin (1969)
eloquently wrote: “To study a movement is to study a progress, a rhetorical striving, a
becoming” (p. 461). Any analysis of a social movement, therefore, temporarily makes
static a fluid moment while accounting for how agency is constituted spatially
(Shome, 2003). One way to analyze “becoming” is through rhetorical field methods,
which recently has gained momentum in part through the study of social movements.
Rhetorical fieldwork can offer a means by which we amplify underheard voices, learn
from underrecognized tactics, and reflexively situate our bodies into the context from
which we are writing (Pezzullo, 2003; Pezzullo, 2007; Pezzullo & de Onís, 2018). As
Pezzullo (2016) writes, “drawing on critical ethnographic practices can offer the
potential to decentralize—decolonize, diversify, deanthropomorphize—and to
regenerate—rebuild, reimagine, rejuvenate—what rhetoric is becoming” (p. 188).
Fieldwork can help us trace these contingent spatiotemporal relationships alongside
organizers and community members as they build intersectional coalitions that are
meaningful and strategic (Nishime & Hester Williams, 2018; de Onís, 2012; Chávez,
2007).
In this chapter, we draw on our research, teaching, and advocacy with the dynamic
and growing movement for food justice. Born out of a critique of the industrial,
capitalist food system that contributes to unequal access to safe, culturally
appropriate, nutrient-dense, and affordable food, the food justice movement broadly
addresses uneven power across scales (Holt-Giménez, 2011; Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010;
Alkon & Agyeman, 2011). Contemporary food justice advocacy exists at the
intersection of patterns of economic and racial inequity that manifest through uneven
distribution of health outcomes, including access to wealth, clean air, water, and
land. These advocates, spanning a range of communities and spaces, remap power
within and beyond the food system, drawing intimate connections between settler
colonial and capitalist enclosures, racial segregation and redlining, and
contemporary instantiations of gentrification, all of which inform food access and
injustice (Holt-Giménez & Williams, 2017). Utilizing fieldwork, we aim not to
universalize the food justice movement, but to attend to its rooted particularities. We
illustrate how some food justice advocates respond to structural patterns of
oppression by cultivating relationships from and with(in) the geographies from which
they emerge.
This chapter focuses on an advocacy tour that took place in April 2018, entitled
“Planting Just Seeds: A Tour of Food Justice Projects in a Gentrifying Denver”
organized by the Environmental Center’s Eco-Social Justice Team at the University
of Colorado Boulder. The tour took us from the US city of Boulder, Colorado, to the
nearby city of Denver to remap food justice advocacy within the broader contexts of
dispossession in the region. This essay, authored by two participants of the tour
(Gordon and Pezzullo) as well as its organizer (Gabrieloff-Parish), places food
justice on our collective agenda of social movements to study and builds inroads for
analyzing rooted and regenerative relationships that constitute movements. First, we
elaborate on advocacy tours and remapping as tactics for social and environmental
justice movements. Then, we review interdisciplinary literature on food justice. Next,
illustrated by key moments throughout the tour, we highlight three themes we found
to be most salient: rooted cartography, relational food justice, and regeneration.
Ultimately, we argue that social movement analysis should take seriously not only
critiques of crises we face, but also the labor required for remapping rooted and
regenerative relationships among our human and nonhuman world.
Tours as Social Movement Tactics
When most of us think of tours, we conjure thoughts of the commercial tour industry,
which is one of the largest in the world. For social movements, however, advocacy
tours offer noncommercial or not-for-profit expeditions designed to promote the
hosts’ agenda “to attempt to explain the worth of a place and its
inhabitants—particularly when such places and inhabitants have appeared
threatened by human activities” (Pezzullo, 2007, p. 49). Historic exemplars of
environmental advocacy tours include rafting trips down the Colorado River to raise
awareness of its precarity, camping trips to mobilize support in what now are national
parks, and helicopter tours to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In the field of communication, engaging advocacy tours arose through studying the
environmental justice movement’s use of “toxic tours,” which are
noncommercial expeditions organized and facilitated by people who reside in areas
that are polluted by toxins. Residents of these areas guide outsiders, or tourists,
through where they live, work and play to witness their struggle. Like other
environmental advocacy tours, therefore, toxic tours provide an occasion for
community members to persuade people … to better appreciate the value and, thus,
the fate of their environment.
(Pezzullo, 2004, p. 236)
These tours bring together communities otherwise geographically isolated from each
other. They also offer opportunities to connect how toxic waste and frontline
communities are simultaneously mapped as disposable due to intersectional forms
of oppression, including racism, xenophobia, classism, sexism, ableism, etc.
(Pezzullo, 2003, 2007). Toxic tours are embodied, centering the bodies of those in
host communities and those witnessing the tours (in person or on screens), and an
effort to make these environmental injustices feel more present (Pezzullo, 2007). As
Pezzullo (2007) has argued: “It is this cultural and physical distance—between those
hosting the tours and those, often more privileged, tourists traveling to toxically
assaulted sites—that has led many activists to testify to the value of toxic tours” (p.
5).
Social movement scholars have expanded on this notion. Bowers (2013), for
example, studied the possibilities and limitations of creating a sense of presence on
virtual toxic tours of mountaintop removal, emphasizing generating community, a
sense of interconnected fates, and social change. MacDonald (2018) explored how
the advocacy role of tours might extend to heritage tourism, such as keepers in
lighthouse tourism, further expanding our understanding of how “tourist workers, like
tourists, are embodied performers who can think critically, be reflexive, learn new
things, and engage in resistance” (p. 23). Perhaps most relevant to this chapter is
Spurlock’s (2009) analysis of a farm tour, which emphasizes how advocacy tours
might not only visit sites of affirmation, but also locations to critique:
Like toxic tours (Pezzullo, “Toxic”), tourists participating in the Piedmont Farm Tour
are simultaneously positioned as witness to wounded places and as coperformers in
narratives of healing and sustaining… . In this case, food is tasked with the rhetorical
and performative labor of transcending and articulating both ritual and the everyday
to reconnect local places to local politics via local memory practices.
(pp. 7–8)
Spurlock proceeds to emphasize that in the case of farming in the United States,
sprawl threatens sustainability, as well as creates distance between diverse
communities. In response, she argues that organizations such as the Carolina Farm
Stewardship Association advocate for “progressive approaches to economic and
ecological interdependence” (p. 11).
The study of advocacy tours is also related to the practice of re/mapping. Tour
itineraries denaturalize, challenge, and, ideally, transform hegemonic mapping
practices that constitute dominant cartographies. In a sense, advocacy tours are an
attempt for organizers, guides, and hosts to articulate what Grossberg (1992) calls
“mattering maps” or “socially determined structure[s] of affect which define the things
that do and can matter to those living within the map” (p. 398). In rhetorical studies,
there has been a proliferation of work on rhetorical cartographies and place-based
rhetoric (including, but not limited to, Blair, 1999; Blair et al., 2010; Endres &
Senda-Cook, 2011; Greene & Kuswa, 2012; Senda-Cook et al., 2018; and Na’puti,
2018), as well as “delinking” colonial entanglements in particular communities
through embodied, geographically specific activism (Wanzer-Serrano, 2015; de Onís,
2018). Further, interdisciplinary scholarship includes analyses of how social
movements have created maps as advocacy tactics (e.g., Cobarrubias & Pickles,
2009; Maharawal & McElroy, 2018) or have toured as a remapping practice toward
decolonial ends (Mei-Singh & Gonzalez, 2017). From these ongoing conversations
and, hopefully, research to come, rhetorical studies can address new and pressing
reasons to pursue analyses of tours, maps, and geographies as significant for both
hegemonic and counterhegemonic cultural politics. In the next section, we define
food justice as a regenerative movement and then analyze how the movement
remaps power on an advocacy tour.
Remapping Food Justice
Typified in dominant displays of food advocacy, one might narrowly articulate or link
food justice as a politic of consumption, policymaking, and/or effort to support
charitable redistribution of food to the food insecure through food banks, farmers
markets, and grocery stores. Although some of these efforts may utilize the
discourse of “food justice,” research has highlighted the racist and classist
assumptions in many of these projects, composing what have been referred to as
“alternative food movements” (Guthman, 2008a, p. 431). For example, some have
written about tensions wherein organizational efforts to “bring good food to others”
romanticize market-based alternatives and reinscribe whiteness (Guthman, 2008a,
433; Slocum, 2006; Alkon, 2012). Thus, as food justice advocacy and related
scholarship have developed, some have investigated how food justice can act as a
rallying call to intervene across scales and build food systems that are not only
sustainable but also equitable and just (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011).
Like the related movements for environmental justice and climate justice, the food
justice movement seeks to center the voices, experiences, and advocacy of those
most marginalized in the food system—from unprotected farmworkers to low-paid
food service workers, and both working-class and poor producers and consumers,
who the food system frequently fails (Alkon & Guthman, 2017). A food justice
orientation can assist by providing an intersectional lens to map the racism,
classism, and colonial power imbalances by which food systems are constituted, as
well as how communities are organizing across space and time to resist these
patterns. Food advocacy takes many forms, addressing the politics of production,
distribution, consumption, and disposal, differently diagnosing food system problems,
and identifying where best to intervene (Williams-Forson & Counihan, 2012). The
trouble for food advocates in spatially contentious contexts, however, is how to
advance projects that resist, rather than reify, the power dynamics that they seek to
address (Polk, 2019; McClintock, 2018; Passidomo, 2014; Safransky, 2014).
Some participants within the food justice movement seek to address both settler
colonialism and anti-Blackness by mapping the historical legacies of “food
apartheid,” or the systems of segregation that dispossess indigenous peoples and
communities of color from their labor, land, health, and thus, structurally decrease
their life expectancies (Brones, 2018; Redmond, 2009). Struggles against
anti-Blackness respond to the structural loss of land in both urban and rural contexts
and aim to increase Black peoples’ access to economic autonomy, self-reliant food
systems, and collective agency (Penniman, 2018; Reese, 2019; White, 2019).
Different, though often aligned, efforts, such as indigenous peoples’ struggles for
self-determined foodways and territorial sovereignty, address how colonial projects
obstruct access to land, health, and culturally particular knowledge systems (Whyte,
2015; Mihesuah & Hoover, 2019). Exploring how food justice is articulated in relation
to terms like food security or food sovereignty is also critical to understanding the
possibilities and constraints of movement coalition building (Trauger, 2017; Cadieux
& Slocum, 2015; Brent et al., 2015; Holt-Giménez, 2011; Gordon & Hunt, 2019).
Communication scholarship has underscored frames of food justice organization and
expression. Broad (2015), for example, has traced how the grassroots organization
Community Services Unlimited draws on the historical legacies of the Black Panthers
Free Food Program to build critical consciousness and address health inequity in
Los Angeles. Enck-Wanzer (2011) has written about how South Central Farms
actively delinks from the modern-colonial rationality through the geo-body politics of
farming. Further, Gordon and Hunt (2019) have argued that orientations to food
systems change—like food system reform, food justice, and food sovereignty—are
also communicative, telling different stories about power, (in)equity, and how
interventions should take place. Others have identified the limits to institutionalized
food justice advocacy, for example, de Souza’s (2019) analysis of how stigmatizing
neoliberal narratives and white privilege shape the politics of food pantries,
particularly focusing on “discursive privilege” or “the power to tell a story about who
the Other is and who ‘We’ are” (p. 4).
We name food justice as a regenerative movement because it not only seeks to
diagnose and critique such uneven power relations but also to remap the ways food,
land, and communities are interdependent. Intersectional environmental justice
movements, of which food justice is a part, can provide visionary pathways to shift
from an extractive economy to a regenerative one. Grounded in a worldview of
mutuality, intersectionality, and heterogeneity, regeneration forwards thinking about
movement building through an ecological framework to “engage our labor towards
the preservation and promotion of bio-cultural diversity” and build community
resilience to “create the conditions for the maintenance of diversity in the face of
disruption” (Movement Generation, 2016, p. 15). While scholarship on food justice
has increased lately, it is important to note that these efforts are not without history,
but an expression of collective desire to “start over” and rebalance violent social and
ecological systems that entangle food and its politics (see Simpson, 2011).
Regenerative food movement building is rooted in, for example, centuries of
indigenous ecological knowledge, the agricultural pedagogy and advocacy of Black
farmers like George Washington Carver, Booker T. Whatley, and Fannie Lou Hamer,
and the organizing efforts of the United Farm Workers, the Black Panther Party, and
Via Campesina, among many others.
Analyzing radical food justice movements entails studying how food justice
advocates remap power across time and space—whether through collaboratives like
the Food Chain Workers Alliance, which builds solidarity between workers across the
food chain, or through national networks like the National Black Food and Justice
Alliance, which supports the cultivation of Black food security, land ownership, and
self-determination. Echoing the importance of geographic scales to food justice,
Holt-Giménez and Williams (2017) argue that “land justice” might offer additional
vocabulary to address consolidated land and centralized wealth. Because
colonialism, capitalism, and racism have limited food and land access for many
indigenous peoples, communities of color, and poor folks within the food system,
food justice movements not only seek to restructure food access but repair structural
alienation to land and labor. Thus, as we turn to focus on one tour, it is important to
contextualize displacement and the localized politics of extraction and gentrification
taking place in the region first.
Contextualizing the Planting Just Seeds Tour
The Planting Just Seeds Tour occurred during a period of expansive, and
controversial, development. Since 2000, the City and County of Denver have
experienced unprecedented growth. The city is frequently featured in the top ten
fastest growing cities in the United States, and it is estimated that average rent
prices have increased 48% since 2010 (Roberts, 2018). In 2015, just under half of
Denver’s nearly 80 neighborhood districts were designated as “vulnerable to
gentrification,” although data used to calculate this information can drastically
underestimate rates of poverty and displacement (American Community Survey,
2015; Bazuin & Fraser, 2013). In an eight-year period, Denver’s population gained
over 100,000 people and continues to rise (Miller, 2018). These impacts are
unevenly experienced, as both Black and Latin@ residents, including renters and
homeowners, face increasing pressure to leave due to financial constraints, eminent
domain, or predatory speculation. As a strategic urban expansion project,
gentrification is experienced not as a singular event, but as a series of processes
whereby depreciated property values that were organized along race and class lines
are sought after to be transformed into “productive” space for white capitalist
accumulation (Smith, 2002). For example, the abandonment of grocery stores from
cities in the 1960s was promoted by both federal and state governments as “white
flight” and suburbanization were taking off (Eisenhauer, 2001). Food apartheid is
reflected in Denver’s sites of disinvestment as well (Gordon, 2018). Even the influx of
new food amenities tends to cater to incoming residents and not those who have
lived in the area for decades.
Contemporary gentrification in Denver, however, is intimately connected to historical
processes, including settlement and resource extraction in the mid-1800s,
industrialization and railroad development in the late-1800s, urbanization and
redlining in the 1930s and 1940s, and patterns of dis- and reinvestment from the
1960s onward. Development in some regions brought on environmental
contamination in key industrial zones within the city that still exist today. For
example, a 2017 study revealed that northeast Denver’s Globeville and
Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods carried the highest environmental risk of any
populated area in the country (ATTOM Staff, 2018). Despite environmental
harms—from toxic waste to air pollution—neighborhoods like these have been
targeted for redevelopment, including increased highway expansion to facilitate
urban sprawl. Similarly, historic northeast neighborhoods also are gentrifying. Many
of these neighborhoods were and are home to primarily communities of color due to
federal redlining policies that historically segregated the city. The 1938 Residential
Securities Map of Denver reveals that many of the same districts redlined by the
Federal Housing Administration, which corralled communities of color into
depreciated places—some of which contain designated Superfund sites—are
currently vulnerable to gentrification (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, 1938). We
would visit many of these neighborhoods during the Planting Just Seeds Tour and
learn from organizers who were addressing these harms on their own terms, despite
being acutely aware of their precarious position given the layered historical contexts.
As noted previously, one of us (Gabrieloff-Parish) was the primary organizer of the
Planting Just Seeds Tour, which grew out of her long-standing relationships with the
advocates highlighted and her students’ interest in engaging regional frontline
environmental and food justice solutions to the crises they had been studying.1
Another one of us (Gordon) had been working with a range of food and farmworker
justice advocates in region for four years.2 The third (Pezzullo) has close
relationships with both of them, working as an advocate for a just transition and food
justice on and off the University of Colorado Boulder’s campus.3
The tour visited several solution-focused projects resisting injustices with ecological
wisdom and food justice that were led by women of color—namely, Beverly Grant of
Mo’ Betta Green MarketPlace, Faatma Be Oné of the Eastside Growers Collective,
and Fatuma Emmad of Sister Gardens—to highlight economically viable alternatives
to provide healthy food. Highlighting the incredible, but often underrepresented, or
misrepresented, leadership of women of color in sustainability has been important for
all students at the university, and especially for students of color and other minorities.
The tour was organized with the hope of (1) creating spaces where students might
further realize that they belong in sustainability conversations now and in their future
potential careers; (2) increasing recognition that women and people of color do lead
the food justice movement (not just White, cis men); and (3) showing how social
issues facing many communities of color and low-income communities are central to
food justice organizing beyond our own backyard. Twenty-six students and faculty
attended, using two vans, which provided opportunity for participants to interact with
each other in between stops.
It was important to explore not only regional food justice initiatives, but also the
signals of, impacts of, and resistance to gentrification. Denver has made national
headlines for environmental injustices, having what has been named the “most
polluted zip code in the US,” and the projects we visited are sensitive to the support
needed and the potential role of healthy food in supporting the community’s
exacerbated health needs (Svaldi, 2017). It was important to visit leaders who know
and have lived the history of the city to help students understand the differences
between the different movements and frameworks for good food, food access/food
security, food justice, food sovereignty, and land sovereignty. These differences are
highlighted in plethora of research and organizing (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011; Gordon
& Hunt, 2019; Holt-Giménez & Williams, 2017; Cadieux & Slocum, 2015; Alkon &
Guthman, 2017; Mihesuah & Hoover, 2019). For example, Holt-Giménez (2011)
demonstrates how different food discourses (e.g., “food enterprise,” “food security,”
“food justice,” and “food sovereignty”) correspond with varying political commitments
and forms of intervention. The former two often operate through a framework of
neoliberalism or reformism, while the latter two food movements might take a more
progressive or even radical stance. Altering individual consumption or redistributing
excess food, for example, are fundamentally different tactics than challenging
regimes of property or control over food production and land.
On the advocacy tour’s agenda were six different sites throughout Denver, all in
variously contested neighborhoods: (1) Seeds of Power Unity Farm in the Cole
neighborhood, (2) Growasis Community Garden in Whittier, (3) Metro Caring’s
Hunger Prevention Center and Beverly Grant’s greenhouse in City Park West, (4) the
Dahlia Campus for Health and Wellbeing in Northeast Park Hill, (5)
pay-what-you-can SAME (So All May Eat) Café along the busy Colfax Street, and (6)
Sister Gardens in Aria. Given time and snow, the tour could not trace all the projects
they had wanted, but adapted and continued to invoke these spaces throughout the
day as a way to make them feel more present to those on the tour. For example,
important sites like the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library (which
houses archival materials on development in the region) and the Woodbine Ecology
Center (an indigenous-centered ecological and educational project in Sedalia,
Colorado) were continuously referenced as critical sites of learning, though we could
not visit them that day.
In what follows, we outline three key themes that emerged on the advocacy tour:
rooted cartography, relational food justice, and regeneration. In outlining exemplary
moments, we do not provide an exhaustive account. However, the themes ideally will
provide fruitful heuristics for rhetoric of social movement scholars to utilize in future
studies on regenerative social movement organizing.
Rooted Cartography
The Planting Just Seeds Tour encouraged participants to encounter embodied,
intimate knowledge of gentrification and its implications for food systems change.
Given the ways north Denver has been remapped by city planners and developers
as a site of capitalist accumulation, the tour foregrounded voices of those laboring for
a Denver otherwise. By traveling to the spaces of food justice advocacy, situated
storytelling could also assist to remap spaces facing settler capitalist and ecological
violence (Na’puti, 2018). Each stop allowed participants to grapple with the ongoing
transformation of the city, while helping them remap what it would take to organize
more just outcomes. Thus, our first theme, rooted cartography, addresses the spatial
possibilities of tours as counter-mapping tactics, experiential learning opportunities,
and embodied encounters.
One of the ways touring helped to remap roots was by contextualizing environmental
harms and juxtaposing them against new development projects in the region. For
example, most travelers commuting from Boulder to Denver, like we were that day,
traverse the infamous I-25 and I-70 intersections. As our van of students and
teachers approached the area, our tour organizer (Gabrieloff-Parish), called our
attention: “Recognize the smell as we head through this area. People know this strip
of land for the smell.” Soon the overwhelming stench, an unidentifiable combination,
seeped into our vehicle. “This area is often known as one of the most contaminated
areas in the country,” she added with caution. We traveled down the I-70 corridor
and could see the Suncor oil refinery nearby, still in operation. Faded yet secure
signs declared “Ditch the Ditch!” greeted us as we exited the freeway, a display of
resistance to proposed highway expansion that risks the displacement of many
homeowners of color in the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods, across
which the highways cut.
We passed by breweries, restaurants, and public art that recently redesignated the
area as “RiNo,” or the newly branded “River North Arts District,” signifying both its
proximity to the South Platte River and its recently established status as a food and
art hub. As we entered some of the most contentious gentrifying spaces in northeast
Denver, Gabrieloff-Parish reminded us that we are on Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute
territory: “This area has seen legacies of settlement, but these are often left out of
the gentrification conversation.” Departing from contemporary accounts momentarily,
Gabrieloff-Parish told us of the ongoing violence that historically has saturated these
spaces. Together, we were reminded of the long history of designating “desirable”
and “undesirable” areas, rooted in settlement and dispossession that precede, and
actively support, contemporary waves of urban growth in the region. She tethered
Denver’s gentrification story to, for example, ongoing settler colonial expansion
within the traditional territories of indigenous peoples, situating the present within a
deeper history, one that is often omitted from a focus on contemporary neoliberal
development. This context altered our orientations to both food and land access as a
result.
The tour also provided space for participants to grapple with impacts of Denver’s
inequitable desirability. Desirability, as we would learn, is historically malleable.
Narrativized memories provided by advocates at each stop helped to root our
encounters within legacies of extraction that made the economic divestment from
these neighborhoods structurally possible. At one of our first stops, the Seeds of
Power Unity Farm, we learned about the systematic creation of Denver’s food
apartheid from Mo’ Betta Green MarketPlace founder Beverly Grant. “People call this
place a ‘food desert,’ ” she said, “It’s actually a food swamp. It’s the result of zoning
and 50-year urban climates, not about equity.” Known in Denver for over a decade of
food advocacy, Grant has provided food access and education as a form of
environmental stewardship and has helped communities access and preserve food
for self-reliance. The Seeds of Power Unity Farm, a side-yard lot donated by a
community member, allowed her to deepen her roots in the neighborhood and
support her farmers market and farm stands. Amidst the wandering chicken wire and
piles of dirt that would ensure the protection of new seedlings, Grant offered us a
history lesson of the neighborhoods that were being radically transformed. Her
descriptions exceeded anthropocentric histories as well. For example, she invited us
to learn about an ant colony she was fiercely protecting on that site, which had been
there over 100 years and was a part of the community’s stories about their
neighborhood.
Other tour sites like the Dahlia Campus for Health and Wellbeing highlighted
relatively new amenities that stood atop land that had seen waves of dis- and
reinvestment for decades. The Center, a large building with an adjacent garden and
greenhouse, offers fresh food to nearby residents in addition to being a cooking
demonstration site with a preschool, dental offices, mental health services,
horticultural therapy, aquaponics, composting, and many community spaces.
Surrounded by subsidized and affordable housing, Dahlia Square had once been the
site of the nation’s largest Black-owned shopping district, which featured a grocery
store, bowling and roller-skating amenities, restaurants and parlors, and more.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the square was a symbol of success and pride in the
community. At the Dahlia Campus of Health and Wellbeing, we learned from food
justice organizers Grant and Faatma Be Oné about just how contentious grocery
store removal was in the mid-1970s. “This ‘food desert’ was created,” notes Grant,
“You can’t tell us what was here. You would never know [the shopping center] was
ever here because there is no trace of it. All you see is the disparity in planning.” For
residents like Grant, who was born and raised in the nearby Whittier neighborhood,
emphasizing the cultural and economic power of Denver’s Black residents helped
remap the importance of asset-based and community-controlled development.
Throughout the tour, we encountered how food justice advocacy was not simply born
out of a desire to bring healthy food to the food insecure. Each effort had deep roots
within the community, whether built from struggles for cultural and economic power
or to help facilitate different stories about food, land, and ecological knowledge. The
rooted particularity of each space mattered to the broader story that the tour sought
to tell. These embodied encounters reoriented us to north Denver. Telling alternative
stories of home, while connecting them across time and space, remapped the city
while fostering alliances along the way. Remapping the city allowed
counter-discourses of history, development, and community to emerge. Moreover,
the tour offered a space for food justice organizers to reconnect, deepening already
established alliances they had cultivated together years prior. Participants were
invited to bring lessons learned back to their own advocacy work in Boulder and
elsewhere or plug into regional food justice networks.
After the tour, an online survey was conducted to gain a sense of reactions to the
experience. While only nine students provided responses, their feedback reflected a
sense of the importance of rooted cartographies and connections across ideas, time,
and space. On what they learned about food justice, for example, students wrote
about the role of systemic oppression and communication. One wrote: “It is not only
about helping others eat quality food, but it is also about helping others know that
they deserve quality food.” Another remarked: “It is systemic, not the fault of the
communities.” The longest answer further emphasized these connections:
Something that really struck me was the notion that the issue isn’t really food. I
mean, on the one hand, it is—food is vital to life, mental and physical and emotion[al]
well-being, and to community. But as many people touched on today, it is truly about
the systemic oppression of certain communities and their restricted access to good
food as a product of larger institutional actions and cultures—which impact
marginalized communities in nearly every aspect of life on top of food. This of course
ties into gentrification!
Helping participants feel these broader connections through a rooted cartography
became further deepened through the tour. This participant also demonstrated the
extent to which food justice exceeds a focus on food itself. On the tour, food became
one lens through which multiple systems of power could be analyzed in relation to,
for example, settler colonial and racial dynamics, land access, housing, labor
regimes, health disparities, and more.
Relational Food Justice
If a slogan were to capture the most critical lesson learned on the Planting Just
Seeds Tour, it would be, as Beverly Grant emphasized: “Relationships are
everything.” We would sense this sentiment and hear these words throughout the
day. Whether we were learning about growing food, communities resisting
development projects, or the guide’s interactions with different hosts and tour
participants, relationships were central to the advocacy tour.
The familiarity, intimacy, and even friendships between food justice organizers were
described as critical to the success of their projects. Women of color farmers and
organizers were at the forefront of the advocacy highlighted, which intentionally
helped to disarticulate from the prevalent whiteness of alternative food movements
(see Guthman, 2008a, 2008b). The tour provided space not only for dialogue
between growers and participants, but also between the growers themselves, as
they shared candid stories of their setbacks, struggles, and successes. We were
introduced to the history of the lots on which they grew food, the seedlings moved
from their greenhouses to their gardens, and the labor that helped them to grow. In
addition, we witnessed the new condominium complexes encroaching on their
projects and learned about their skepticism of outside institutions that seek to
capitalize on food development in the region. Thus, our second theme, relational
food justice, offers a way to rhetorically conceptualize the diffuse term “food justice”
as it is constituted through discursive articulations and interdependent human and
nonhuman networks.
The success of their many gardens and plots, in particular, were possible because of
ecological relationships. For example, the indigenous practice of growing a three
sisters garden—or creating a supportive loop by growing corn, beans, and squash
together—was used at the Growasis Community Garden in Whittier and by growers
with the Eastside Growers Collective in northeast Park Hill. “These are community
plots,” emphasized Grant at Growasis. Despite signs that discouraged people from
taking food, Grant acknowledged, “if people are stealing it, then they are hungry and
they need it. They can eat it. That’s great.” Just as food insecure folks may benefit
from an open community plot, relations between Grant and institutions like the Metro
Caring Greenhouse, which opened their doors to her so she could grow her
seedlings, also created supportive systems across the city. “If you do things in
mission alignment, more work can get done,” she asserted, “Reciprocity is key.
Reciprocity.”
Reciprocity was the result of meaningful connections within the community
established over time and with intentionality between each other, as well as between
themselves and all that goes into growing food. At the food bank garden, for
example, tour participants were encouraged to eat a bright orange vine flower,
nasturtium, which Grant explained were used traditionally as antibiotics, containing
high levels of vitamin C. As participants passed the plant, we tentatively picked and
ate the flowers, defying our assumptions of what health food looked like. At
subsequent stops, like Sisters Gardens’ greenhouse, we witnessed nasturtium
growing again, signaling connections between food justice projects as well as north
Denver’s broader ecology: the emphasis on growing plants that would help inspire
awe and appreciate beauty in communities that have been segregated from the land.
Given uneven development in the region, however, organizers also were intimately
aware of nonreciprocal development projects, no matter how well intentioned they
were framed to be. Both Grant and Be Oné, who had worked in alliance for years
before the tour, shared the floor when we visited the Dahlia Campus for Health and
Well-Being. They explained that the original plans for the campus were to provide
mental health services to the surrounding residents, many of whom were low-income
folks of color. “Why would they build and not ask us? There was no town hall
meeting,” Be Oné asserted. Both expressed how the desire to build mental health
services, although well-meaning, pathologized residents rather than providing
alternatives and resources that centralize their leadership. “I really inserted myself up
in here,” Grant recalled about the planning process, “I was like, why do you want to
come up here? Why do you think we need that?” Through sustained engagement
with Dahlia’s planners, after their initial public criticism, they were able to transform
the Dahlia campus plans to solutions that were more intentionally asset-based and
community-oriented. Through these efforts, tour hosts advocated for new amenities
and to hire people of color, including workers who were bilingual to cater effectively
to changing residents in the area. Although many food justice organizers in the
region work in alliance with each other, not all share the same welcoming attitude
toward outsider food movement politics. As we left the Dahlia Campus, Grant
emphasized once again: “We need to work with each other and stand in the gaps for
each other. Relationships are everything.”
Our last stop, Sister Gardens in Aria, led by Groundwork Denver’s Fatuma Emmad
and supported by Regis University professor Damien Thompson and students, also
aimed to contextualize a relational orientation to food systems change. Located in
the unincorporated Adams County, new developments were emerging rapidly around
the multi-acre garden as Denver’s sprawl grows outward. Emmad explained that the
garden used to be on 27 acres that were for a convent, which was turned into a
cooperative. As we were led around the space, Emmad emphasized the importance
of the language we use to name food access and lack:
Warren Village is a “food desert” they say, but you know, “food desert” is a kind of
hurtful term. We know this is not a natural thing; it’s an institutional thing. That term
“food desert” is an institutional term. It’s not a “food desert,” it’s food apartheid. We
have to pay attention to the terms that we use. Food desert might be a useful term
for you, but not for me. Food apartheid might not be a useful term for you, but it’s
important to me… . We have to speak the long way about these issues. We can’t just
speak academically, we have to say, this is a system and it’s happening.
Leveraging a critique of dominant food justice paradigms, Emmad made the case
that even the well-circulated language used to describe food inequity fails to account
for the many relations of power that constitute unjust food systems. Shifting to a
discourse of “food apartheid,” for Emmad, names the problem as not one of unequal
access to food but unequal access to power. This critique demonstrated how
language can either enable or constrain how we map food-related harms, and thus,
viable solutions to them. “Speaking the long way about issues” helped name a
strategically established and violent global food regime, while at the same time
fostered relations between organizers who have wished to dismantle it.
Emmad continued that there are two kinds of people doing this work: “good food
people” and “food justice people.” Despite Sister Gardens facing its own
constraints—as development has encouraged new food-secure residents to visit her
farm stands at an increasing rate—navigating neoliberal tensions has been part and
parcel of food justice (Alkon & Guthman, 2017; Broad, 2015). Neoliberal solutions
include those that focus on individualized consumption or altering some parts of the
market while leaving the broader unjust food systems intact. Food justice
movements improvise and adapt to these changing conditions, while at the same
time critiquing their limits. For them, maintaining relationships oriented toward
intersectional, “just sustainabilities” has remained both a process and a goal
(Agyeman et al., 2003). Approaching movements on their own terms—including how
they navigate insider/outsider status, maintain meaningful relationships across
locales, and incorporate those most vulnerable in the food system into their
advocacy—helps to situate food movements relationally. As one student wrote in a
survey at the end of the tour: “It is imperative to communicate with communities
when establishing a service so as to fill their needs and build lasting relationships
instead of what you perceive.”
Regeneration
Despite the many tensions navigated by organizers, conceptualizing their advocacy
through a regenerative lens provides a richer texture of their politics. Without a
historically grounded and geographically situated account of their oppositional and
reparative aims, then Jodi Dean’s well-cited quote “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if
you raise chickens”—on why behavioral shifts and prefiguration fail to organize
systemic change—may ring true (Naegler, 2018). Rather than positioning food as
liberatory in and of itself, the tour highlighted community responses to food system
harms as well as gentrification. Many of these advocates have created conditions to
organize frontline communities, relationally connect human and nonhuman
ecological systems, and manifest real wins locally. Thus, our third theme,
regeneration, describes how movements, like food justice, may disarticulate or delink
from extractive economies and remap rooted relationships through complicated but
meaningful stories.
North Denver has long been both a site of extraction and possibility, even before
tracked condominiums, upscale food amenities, or the legal marijuana industry took
over space in historic working-class neighborhoods. Enduring in the region are
vestiges of settlement, which continue to dispossess indigenous communities from
their ontological relationships to the land. The legal and labor regimes, which
segregated Denver through housing policy, have left lasting health effects on many
of Denver’s residents of color. The fossil fuel industry continues to pollute
working-class families (Finley, 2018). Highway expansion projects promise more
precarity for many living in key historic districts (Tracy, 2017). Yet it is because of
these oppressive conditions that frontline food justice organizing has regenerated,
reinventing the art of starting over, once again.
Through sites of learning like Sister Gardens or Woodbine Ecology Center, spaces
for healing and employment like the Dahlia Campus, or direct services wherein the
economic profit fuels community-controlled solutions like Mo’ Betta Green
Marketplace, food justice offers many regenerative possibilities. These efforts do not
simply “bring good food to others” (Guthman, 2008b) but help draw explicit
connections between growers of color and map their experiences of social and
environmental harms in the hopes of cultivating spaces of healing, advocacy, and
building collective power. This includes, as Leah Penniman and Blain Snipstal note
(2017), an understanding that “land is power” especially for those whose alienation
to land and labor is inseparable from a politic of extraction (p. 61).
Our lunch at SAME Café, the first nonprofit restaurant in Denver, reflected what a
shift from an extractive to a regenerative food economy might entail. There, tour
participants and guides broke bread together in a space where guests can eat local,
organic food in exchange for donating money, giving produce, or volunteering time
working at the restaurant. SAME Café’s “mission is to create community through
healthy food access. We believe in healthy food, community, and dignity for
everyone.”4 Sitting around communal tables, we ordered pizzas, salad, and soup,
based on our omnivore and vegan diets. We talked with each other, as well as
people who volunteered or worked at the café. Patrons and workers, some of whom
were food insecure, explained their preference for the café over other food initiatives
that they found to be more impersonal, like food banks. While scaling such projects
is challenging, the tour helped draw connections between seemingly isolated
endeavors.
“We really are what we eat,” Emmad told us, as we overlooked Sister Gardens
alongside developing Federal Avenue. “Food is so important because it tells us
stories. Food tells a lot of stories” she noted, including global stories, migration
stories, labor stories, and stories of violence. Touring these contentious spaces,
learning from their histories, and mapping the many power relations at work through
the lens of food helped highlight the importance of remapping our relationships with
ecological systems and each other in more meaningful ways. Their advocacy work
clearly did not end at the garden’s edge. Grant, Be Oné, and Emmad, among others,
we met that day, actively organize alongside community partners across diverse
sectors—from food policy and farmer support, to education, labor, and housing
justice advocacy. Not only do these localized efforts exist to regenerate the toxic soil
found in divested spaces, they also help to nourish an ethic of care to connect
frontline communities and reorient our disparate relationships to home.5
The post-tour survey revealed that some participants grappled with this call to action.
One student wrote, for example:
i’ve been thinking a lot tonight about how i operate as a gentrifier in the various
places i’ve lived, including in my childhood, and trying to think about ways i can
discuss this with my dad who has a well-intentioned but (i’m realizing, now) deeply
problematic take on urban planning and development.
Others felt engaged by the hope of the tour: “I loved getting to hear from all the
incredible women on today’s tour—and of course the other students. I was so
inspired.” Although advocacy tours cannot guarantee transformative experiences
(Pezzullo, 2007), they do intend to foster these types of reactions—not only orienting
tour participants toward new perspectives, but also hoping for action once the tour is
completed. To foster regenerative responses, we must unlearn our flawed
assumptions as well—whether about the language we should use to describe
food-related harms or the plans we hope will remedy them.
Conclusion
For rhetoric of social movement scholars, emerging contexts require not just an
engagement with a critique of power, but also attention to the ethics of care that
foster interventions to advance a more sustainable and just future. Movements
today, as this volume attests, tend to be more decentralized, organizing across
greater scales than ever before and more quickly through new media. The food
justice movement—as with related advocacy for food security, food sovereignty, land
justice, and a just transition—epitomizes many characteristics of contemporary social
movements, which makes it a fruitful area for further research. Tactics such as
advocacy tours enable movements to remap these fluid, complex interactions in a
way that does not erase the meaningful relationships required to regenerate our
social and ecological worlds.
Touring can help remap contentious spaces, highlighting alternative orientations to
history, power, and development within them. Tours can also provide opportunities to
cultivate connections, deepen alliances between tour guides and organizers, as well
as spark anew interdependent connections for participants. Tours that are shaped by
local knowledge and grounded in historical roots of oppression can compel
participants to intervene into inequitable and unsustainable relationship geographies
between people and the broader ecological elements on which we depend for our
lives. Whether by becoming even more involved in food and environmental justice
organizing or confronting their role as gentrifier or gentrified, participants on the
Planting Just Seeds Tour all felt compelled to engage locally, claiming in their
responses to be informed by principles they learned that day.
This advocacy tour was not the beginning or end of the dynamic, spatiotemporal
relationships featured, or strengthened, through this tactic. We all had relationships
prior to the tour and continue to afterward. Some of these efforts even blossomed
into more established advocacy coalitions, like the 2019 formation of Frontline
Farming, a food and farmers advocacy group, led by Emmad as an outgrowth of the
work featured on the tour, and with Gabrieloff-Parish and her husband serving on the
Board of Directors.6
Methodologically, rhetorical field methods allow us to amplify marginalized voices
and learn from bourgeoning transformations in geographically situated movements.
They also can help bridge resources between those who pay to tour and those
toured.7 When authors are advocates who also participate in social movements, field
methods may reveal how knowledge is produced on and off the page, as well as how
relationships may grow through practices outside of and inside of books. These
methodologies can also be a means to disrupt the researcher/researched divide,
thereby challenging the power distance that is all too common in scholarship on
social change. Instead, orienting to field methods relationally can inform our
theorizations of, and organizing with, community leaders in food justice and other
movements.
In addition to providing the possibility of educational learning and transformative
experiences, advocacy tours offer mobile opportunities to remap the relationships
that matter. The Planting Just Seeds Tour was intentionally informed by historical
and embodied knowledge to remap dynamics of settlement and extraction in the
region. Each stop elevated the particularities of neighborhood change. Each stop
also helped orient participants to alternative relationships with geography, food, and
each other, including helping plant seeds for regional advocacy work that has since
emerged. Future scholarship might further analyze how coalitional power lines and
trust are built—and tested—through social movements. Overall, we hope to have
shown some of the labor required, not just for growing good food but for remapping
rooted and regenerative relationships among our human and nonhuman world, as
well as for new studies of the rhetoric of social movements and food justice.
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