CHHSM Anti-Racism Center

Food Justice is a holistic and structural view of the food system that sees healthy food as a human right and addresses structural barriers to that right. The movement draws in part on environmental justice, which emerged in the 1980s as a critique of how environmentalism became more mainstream as it became more elite, more white, and more focused on wilderness and scenery than on human communities vulnerable to pollution (the effects of which are at once disparate and racialized). Food Justice, which was founded by Indigenous Peoples and People of Color, works not only for access to healthy food, but for an end to the structural inequities that lead to unequal health outcomes, like racist policies.