Kyle Whyte has posted his paper, “Food Justice and Collective Food Relations,” on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Food justice is commonly understood as the norm that everyone should have access to safe, healthy and culturally-appropriate foods no matter one’s national origin, economic statuses, social identities, cultural membership, or disability. A second dimension of food justice, as commonly understood, is the norm that everyone who works within a food system, from restaurant servers to farm workers, should be paid livable and fair wages and work in safe conditions no matter one’s national origin, economic statuses, social identities, cultural membership, or disability. Another dimension of food justice, which is found in the words and writing of advocates but is perhaps less commonly appreciated, is that food justice should account for the value of food in relation to the self-determination of human groups such as urban communities of color, Indigenous peoples and migrant farmworkers, among many other groups. Reflecting on the claims of food justice advocates, my goal in this essay is to outline a norm of food justice that is based on the value of food in relation to the self-determination of human groups. In the essay, I begin by describing the first two dimensions of food justice; I then discuss the role of food in collective self-determination and introduce the idea of collective food relations, discussing in particular the role of manoomin (wild rice) in the collective self-determination of the Anishinaabek in the Great Lakes region; I then explain how disrupting collective food relations can be a form of food injustice; lastly, I discuss some specific further examples that illustrate these ideas.