Food justice

The FoodPrint. website defines Food Justice as: "a holistic and structural view of the food system that sees healthy food as a human right and addresses structural barriers to that right. The movement draws in part on environmental justice, which emerged in the 1980s as a critique of how environmentalism became more mainstream as it became more elite, more white, and more focused on wilderness and scenery than on human communities vulnerable to pollution (the effects of which are at once disparate and racialized). Environmental justice is a movement primarily led by the people most impacted by environmental problems, connecting environmental health and preservation with the health of vulnerable communities.

In some cases, environmental and food justice intersect. For example, many factory farms and meatpacking plants, which pollute neighboring communities’ water and air through excess manure runoff, noxious dust and noisome smells, are situated in communities that are predominantly inhabited by people of color.

A food justice lens examines questions of access to healthy, nutritious, culturally appropriate food, as well as: ownership and control of land, credit, knowledge, technology and other resources; the constituent labor of food production; what kind of food traditions are valued; how colonialism has affected the food system’s development and more. "

A related concept is that of food sovereignty.