By, Chelsea Eickert
My obsession with the politics of food sprouted one night over a holiday meal with my extended family surrounding the dinner table. I was 12 years old and wondering why some of the plates in front of the members of my family were without meat. This opened up a very enlightening, and ultimately significant discussion for me about how our food in the United States is produced and distributed, and the socio-economic, ecological, and political problems that result from this food system. I returned to my sixth grade class in rural Montana, announcing my decision to abstain from meat. As it turns out, growing up as a vegetarian in Montana makes you an exotic and popular glutton for punishment. I spent my teen years constantly defending why I thought that I could help change the world with my eating choices. My childhood was essentially training me for a lifetime of challenging dominant beliefs.
In college, my focus on food politics moved beyond vegetarianism and informally grew to be my discipline. I attended the University of Washington in Seattle where I adamantly studied the political economy of the food system within their Geography Department. I began to understand how governments and corporations do not address the structural forces that aggravate poverty. The more I learned about the corporate domination of our food system, the angrier and more defiant I became. I graduated college knowing that our current food system is broken, but didn’t know what to do about it.
I then began volunteering with the grassroots community organization, Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ) in 2010. CAGJ is committed to anti-oppressive organizing, food sovereignty, and trade justice. Working as their membership co-chair, I encouraged people to join the food movement. I learned how to community organize and democratize our food system from the bottom-up. I gained the ability to communicate a strategy for advancing social justice, including analyzing how structural racism and other systems of privilege and oppression create inequities in the food system. CAGJ introduced me to leaders in the food movement and to small, organic farmers from Brazil, Kenya, Mexico, and many in the US, demanding food sovereignty as a human right. Learning how smallholders are enacting food sovereignty has inspired me to challenge the neoliberal assault of our food and farming systems.
Because I was so motivated by the work of CAGJ, I decided to go back to school and get my masters in Community Development and City Planning. At Clark’s IDCE Department, I wish to increase my understanding of how to organize around issues of poverty, hunger, and social justice. Specifically, I am curious about the process of how to build coalitions in order to strengthen the food movement and harness its power. I am interested in building intentional partnerships between existing food justice, climate justice, economic justice, community control of land and water, and others allies in Worcester (and beyond) that are interested in ending poverty and rebuilding the local food economies. I’ve started with Nuestro Huerto, the volunteer run urban farm, to see if it can be used as an organizing tool to do the same in Worcester. Whether or not this works, or whether or not I actually survive the trials of being a grad student, I will always be committed to dismantling oppression in the food system and believe in people’s right to define their own food and agriculture systems—locally and globally. I will work tirelessly to break barriers to social and economic justice so that communities can move beyond oppression to a place where all people have opportunities to thrive.
