The Importance Of Food Justice

Humans are biologically programmed to do whatever it takes to survive, and from the beginning of time this goal of survival has been predominantly based on food security. Possessing access to a sustainable and reliable food source is so important is has been has been the driver of much of human evolution and migration over the centuries. Alkon and Agyman argue in their paper Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability that humans are inherently driven to obtain food security for their community. This can even include the extraction of food resources from another community to obtain a perceived balance or “justice” in food distribution. In the Second World War it is apparent that many of the actions taken were motivated by
For the German community, the right to control food commerce was linked very much with the racial policy in place. But this trend of racially based food commerce was echoed throughout the world at this time and not only in Germany. The roles within the economic cycle food production was very much segregated, in that certain roles were reserved for the racially inferior and other roles for the superior. This can be seen in the Bengal Famine which saw the starvation of the very people who worked to provide food for the British war effort. Those of the inferior race were seen as the food producers and rarely as the consumers. This trend is echoed once again with the displacement of Slavs from their farmland for the use of ethnic Germans. Along with the food production itself are efforts and strategies were very often centered on wartime food commerce. An example of this is the Battle of the Atlantic where the issue of greatest importance to the Allies was keeping a supply line open from the United States to Europe. Britain’s war effort was “entirely dependent” on the imports as more than half its calories were coming from overseas. This empathizes the great importance food had over both sides of the conflict as it had a whole theatre of whole dedicated to it and heightened the racial aspect the economic cycle of
It is important to look at what truly drove these ideologies and actions to happen during this conflict. The Nazi ideology for example, was based on the idea of racial superiority of the German Volk, to achieve this superiority they needed to first achieve food autonomy to grow and strengthen the population. A way to gain an autonomous food market for Germany was to expand and secure agriculturally rich lands from those who were of ‘inferior’ stalk. Just as the Germans needed land to fuel their ideological motives, the Japanese also felt the need to expand its reach. The violence of the IJM throughout the Pacific was in pursuit of an empire, an empire that could sustain the needs of the growing Japanese population. This war saw the death of millions of people, with more than half due to food related causes. If wars are won by the number of people killed on the other side, food would have to be nominated as the most brutal