Creating a More Equitable and Environmentally Friendly Food System in the U.S.
Alex Korsunsky is a 2022-23 “Mending and Transforming” Graduate Student Fellow.
Most Americans are at least broadly aware of the problems with our food system: it is environmentally unsustainable, economically unviable for small farmers, and built on a system of racialized labor exploitation, with most of the hardest and most poorly paid work performed by (often undocumented) Mexican and Central American migrants.
My research explores the possibilities for alternatives to this system by focusing on immigrant farmers in Oregon – specifically, Mexican immigrants who generally began their career as hired farmworkers and who now operate their own farm businesses. These are farmers who often grew up in a very different agricultural system in rural Mexico; who have experienced the bottom rungs of the agricultural labor hierarchy firsthand; and who now operate their own small businesses. So I look to them to see what sorts of farming they aspire to practice based on those experiences, what they are able to achieve, and what barriers stand in their way.
My research is rooted in the concepts of food justice and food sovereignty, which basically boil down to the idea that everyone should have access not just to enough food, but also to good food, to the food they like and is familiar to them, and that they should also be able to grow that food in ways that are ecologically and economically sustainable and socially just. It is the idea that farming shouldn’t just be a business focused on maximizing profit, but a social good, answerable to the needs of some wider community. A lot of the scholarship on food justice focuses on farmers of color and suggests that they are the ideal food system protagonists and that their experiences lead them to be more open to alternative farming styles. Yet a great deal of this research is based in studies of outspoken activists.
My research looks to those food justice potential protagonists and asks: how do they want to farm, what are they able to achieve, and what influences those outcomes?
Some of the first farmers I found were those with links to food justice nonprofit organizations. This isn’t surprising, since, unlike farmers, nonprofits tend to have working websites, answer emails, and be open to nosy researchers. I have worked closely with some of these farmers for 5+ years now, witnessing their commitment to organic growing, to selling in the community, and in some cases to growing traditional food and medicinal crops as a form of cultural pride and rejuvenation. These are the farmers you will hear about in most of the food justice literature. Many of them are genuinely inspiring people.
However these are not the only farmers. Others, often from very similar communities in Mexico and with similar work experiences in the U.S., follow a different path. Not linked to nonprofits, these farmers generally had long careers as hired farmworkers in the US, often working for decades at a single farm, and they generally replicated these practices once they established their own businesses. So, people with long experience farming organic veggies set up organic veggie farms; those with experience growing Japanese maples for the nursery industry grew Japanese maples.
Many see little connection between their work and the sorts of farming practiced in their hometowns – or if they do, the connection is a general ethic of hard work, autonomy, and love of nature. It may sound unsurprising, but it contradicts – or at least significantly complicates – a food justice narrative that is often reductive and essentializing.
In sum, my work is an argument that culture and tradition do matter, but that their effects are more flexible and unpredictable than some might like to think. Some farmers express their culture by growing heirloom seeds and returning to old organic practices; others do it by working hard and enjoying a barbecue in the shade after a hard day’s work. This is not an argument against food justice – quite the contrary! – but for a vision that doesn’t reduce demographics to destiny. Tradition can offer a resource for building a new food system, but without the organizational work to build alternatives and provide farmers with the resources and connections they need, culture alone won’t save us.
Alex Korsunsky is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology finishing a dissertation on Mexican immigrant farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where he grew up. His ethnographic research focuses on food justice, labor, and the complex factors that lead farmers to embrace conventional or alternative environmental practices. He is also a grant writer with CAPACES Leadership Institute’s Anahuac Farm, an indigenous migrant food sovereignty program based in Turner, Oregon. Follow him on Twitter @alexkorsunsky