Food System Literacy

Abstract

This article examines the informational exchanges between consumers, food activists and small-scale food producers and vendors through the lenses of justice and literacy. Employing participant observations and interviews at food-related events in South Florida, the article offers two contributions to the growing research on food systems: (1) small-scale food producers, farmworkers, vendors and activists are working an additional shift as citizen educators; and (2) farmworker justice and climate change remain neglected and disconnected from food-related concerns. This article argues that consumers, producers and vendors share an interest and a passion for good-tasting, healthy food that starts a conversation. Yet together they minimize or avoid the politicized nature of climate change and the moral problem of farmworker exploitation. Furthermore, the scientifically complex subject of genetic engineering emerged as a concern and point of activism during the course of this research. Together, climate change, labor and genetic engineering remain difficult topics to bring into conversations and into the food community's educational efforts due to the political, moral and scientifically challenging nature of each concern respectively. This work suggests that citizens as consumers would be empowered by a more complete understanding of the food system, including (1) molecular-level changes due to biotechnology; (2) workplace injustices in the fields; and (3) the links between agriculture and climate change—what this article refers to as food system literacy. The absence of food system literacy is a social problem that masks structural inequities and long-term risks, and that discourages or disables identification and discussion of some of the more complicated issues related to the food chain.