Food Justice Summary

The written piece from Food Justice by Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi goes over the issues surrounding access to fresh food, communities of color, dominance of corporations and defines key environmental terms. It is overwhelming to acknowledge the seriousness and desperation that is displayed in the writing of this book. One aspect of the reading that stood out to me is the defining of terms such as food desert and how this term describes the realities of the living conditions of communities of color and my community in particular. The lack of access to fresh food, full-service markets and the congestion of communities of color with fast food chains and liquor stores are information that I am recently being exposed to and knowledgeable about;
“The absence of full-service markets and the even more limited food choices available in low-income communities have emerged as crucial food justice issues” (Gottlieb, Joshi). Thus, it is not by accident that communities of color and low-income communities lack the access to full-services markets. There is a beneficiary motivation by corporations and the government who plan to extract and benefit from communities of color at the cost of their health and human rights. I have hard the term environmental racism before; though I don’t know the academic word for word definition of it, I sure understand the concept of the term and what it stands for. One example I would like to use to explain environmental racism is the recent example of the Flint Michigan water pollution. The predominantly minority populated city was not only supplied with polluted water, but ignored as if this phenomenon was not of anyone’s business. The city was left devastated from this occurrence and thousands of citizens had health issues because of the ignorant and racist governance of the city and state. This is where environmental racism comes into play, because if Flint was a city with a majority white population would the same exercise of power and ignorance would have