Accessing the Alternative Food Movement: Considerations towards Disability Justice

Abstract

The alternative food movement makes claims to seek a more just food system, andinterdisciplinary scholarship has investigated the consequences of different facets of the movement to its transformative potential. In this work, scholars and activists have studied the impacts of race and class. Few have addressed disability in any way, let alone produced research—or activism—that comprehensively examines ableism as an oppressive structure or seriously considers (dis)ability as a category of difference. The purpose of my research is to ask how critical disability studies deepens intersectional analyses of oppression within the food movement, and specifically within urban food provisioning. Empirically, I examined three case studies in Seattle, Washington, each of which represented a different alternative food organization governance model, each of which tells a story about access, both to food and to resources that improve food access. These case studies included a healthy corner store project run by a public health department, a democratically run food cooperative, and an anarchist free market. In each case, I reflect on a particular concept key to critical disability studies: interrogating health, crip time, and interdependence, respectively. Collectively, these cases provide evidence for the relevance of a critical disability studies perspective for the alternative food movement as a whole. I conclude that critical disability studies provides both methodological and theoretical frameworks to highlight ableism and center (dis)ability. It encourages relationship-based methods such as participatory action research and provides tools to identify ableist biases. It enables recognition of normative ideologies and their impacts within the food movement, and seeks a nuanced understanding of access for different bodies. In fact, in this dissertation, I used critical disability studies as a tool to understand what is happening in the alternative food movement. Interrogating health opens a new window into the goals and the achievements of of public health. Crip time offers a way to understand inclusion from a temporal perspective. Interdependence shows up where every body is deemed equally important because we recognize different levels of need and different capacities to participate. Ultimately, this research not only offers a critique, through the lens of ableism, of oppression and marginalization within the food movement, but also demonstrates what can be gained from thoughtful engagement with (dis)ability and ableism within food studies more broadly.