Perspectives and Strategies of Alternative Food Initiatives in California
Final Report - April 28, 2003
Principal Investigator:
Dr. Patricia Allen
Associate Director, Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems
UC Santa Cruz CA 95064
Telephone: (831) 459-4342, Fax: (831) 459-2799
Email: rats@cats.ucsc.edu
Co-principal investigator:
Dr. Margaret FitzSimmons
Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Studies
UC Santa Cruz CA 95064
Telephone: (831) 425-4988
Email: fitzsim@cats.ucsc.edu
Funding Received from UC SAREP:
FY 2001-2002: $19,360
Location of Project:
Santa Cruz, Alameda, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Benito, and Placer counties.
This project would not have been possible without the generosity of the leaders and participants in California’s alternative food initiatives. Their interest, support, and enthusiasm made this research project possible. We thank the representatives of the organizations we interviewed for their time, thought, and commitment.
Objectives
- Elicit the strategic insights and perspectives of both leaders of and participants in alternative food initiatives on the broader food system.
- Assess the arenas in which food-system change is most and least robust among agrifood initiatives in California by discovering areas of strong and weak congruence in goals and methods.
- Contribute to the development of networking and knowledge transfer among alternative agrifood initiatives.
Summary
This project examined the remarkable range of California organizations that address alternative food systems issues and practices. These organizations complement on-farm efforts to promote sustainable agriculture by connecting these issues with economic, social and policy aspects of the food system beyond the farm. We undertook this study both to focus attention on the contribution these groups are making to change the food system, and to offer constructive feedback with the goal of enhancing their effectiveness. Our central question was: How are alternative food initiatives conceptualizing and creating change in the agrifood system? In order to answer this question we conducted 37 interviews with organization leaders of nine different types of AFIs and nine focus groups with AFI participants.
Our findings show that there are many Californians concerned about the food system, and that they share a perception that the problems with the food system have systemic and structural, rather than individual, causes. Despite this analysis, California AFIs are much more focused on local issues and activities than on broad issues and large-scale actions. Similarly, while AFIs share general beliefs about problems and solutions in the agrifood system, they tend to work in isolation from each other. Participants in California AFIs are deeply engaged where they feel they can make a significant difference on a local level.
Although many of the organizations are institutionally fragile, and highly dependent on extramural funding sources, California AFIs engage highly committed and motivated people. AFI participants are positioned to work together to move the agrifood system in the direction of greater ecological soundness and social justice. In order to bring this about, we have three primary recommendations. First, California AFIs could benefit from a deeper understanding of the dimensions and scope of issues in the agrifood system. For example, while respondents were very concerned about economic opportunities for family farmers, they were essentially silent about opportunities for workers either on the farm or in other sectors of the agrifood system. Second, California AFIs would be stronger if they worked from a shared problem statement and agenda so each could play a role in a larger effort. Third, even absent a shared agenda, we would advise California AFIs to develop expanded networks of related organizations to share ideas, information, and resources. Ideally, this network would include consumer, farmer, environmental, animal rights, and worker organizations. The ability of AFIs to move in these directions is limited by the scarcity of sufficient funding to support such efforts.
California AFIs work to increase participation in the food system and to develop alternative social relationships that affirm the values of ecological soundness, reciprocity, trust, and social justice. For many people who have otherwise been subordinate within or uninterested in the agrifood system, California AFIs offer people a chance to participate in the food system in ways and at levels that they may have never been involved before. Through their participation in food-based activities, people engage with many social, political, and economic issues that have to do with everyday life—every day. This is potentially a strong and enduring path to agricultural sustainability.
Specific Results
Objective 1: Elicit the strategic insights and perspectives of both leaders of and participants in alternative food initiatives on the broader food system.
We identified 80 California organizations that could be characterized as AFIs, and categorized them according to the primary program that they run. These included organizations focused on: alternative agrifood education, therapeutic horticulture, local and regional food labeling, food-based microenterprise, urban agriculture and community gardening, food policy advocacy, farm-to-school provisioning, community supported agriculture, and farmers’ markets (see Table 1). Many AFIs operate more than one kind of program or their organization’s work spans more than one type of activity. We conducted semi-structured interviews with leaders of 37 of the organizations. Through this process we learned about the organization’s history, programmatic activities, views on social justice and ecological soundness in the food system. We then conducted nine focus groups with participants in selected AFIs. By participants, we mean volunteers, residents, students, apprentices, customers, or farmers attached to these organizations. The focus groups provided us with the opportunity to systematically listen to the motivations, stories, and visions of over 50 alternative food activists that participate in AFIs in California.
Respondents’ perspectives on key problems in the food system were organized into three major categories, as shown in Table 2. Half of the total number of food system problems cited by organization leaders were those of alienation and concentration, what we term “populist” issues (Table 3). Issues of this type were mentioned by over two-thirds of the organization leaders. Populist issues included people’s concern that the food system is controlled by others (primarily corporations), and that ordinary people have little decision making power in the food system. Related to this was the perception that people have become disconnected both practically and socially from food production and consumption processes. Some leaders suggested that this missing knowledge about food, along with the lack of relationships between consumers and farmers, causes consumers to undervalue food and therefore be unwilling to pay its “true price.” They saw this as reducing the viability of small farmers, who cannot survive in a cheap food system.
Environmental issues were cited somewhat less frequently than populist issues, though nearly a third of the responses were in this category. We classified concerns about pesticide use, water quality, loss of agricultural land, and the proliferation of genetically modified organisms as environmental issues. Forty-one percent of organization leaders listed environmental issues as key problems in the food system, indicating that these kinds of problems are very much on the minds of those working in alternative food initiatives in California.
The kinds of problems least-frequently cited by organization leaders are those that we categorized as class or political-economic issues. Here we included inequitable distribution of wealth and income or lack of access by low-income people to fresh, healthy food. While class issues represented only 21 percent of all the specific problems listed, we should note that almost half of those interviewed did cite these issues as pressing food-system problems, slightly more than those mentioning environmental problems. However, no AFI leaders brought up labor issues as problematic in response to this question. Many respondents indicated their respect, compassion, and support for small farmers, expressing sympathy for their struggles with concentrated markets, threats to tenure, and low farm gate prices. US society in general has shifted its attention from social justice in production (such as unionization and health benefits) and toward increased consumer choice. This may explain in part why the issue of social justice was not framed in terms of worker issues by our respondents. We are concerned that alternative agrifood initiatives may, through their silence about labor relationships in production, inadvertently assume or represent that rural communities and family farmers embody social justice, rather than requiring that they do so.
What do the leaders of these efforts hold as their visions of a better agrifood system? In this study we were interested in both in overall visions of an ideal food system and in specific views on the roles of ecological soundness and social justice in this ideal food system.
There was strong support for moving toward a more ecologically sustainable agrifood system, even where the organizations were not themselves directly focused on ecological sustainability. A few organizations said they supported ecological sustainability, but not if it meant making food less affordable or reducing farmers’ ability to earn a living. For these organizations, ecological sustainability is a priority, but it is subordinate to the priorities of social or economic justice. This position was held by organizations working primarily with a low-income or small-farm clientele. Only 10 percent of leaders said their organization did not have a position on ecological soundness, or that there was a “diversity of perspectives” in their organization. The majority of organizations that responded in this way were those oriented toward marketing agricultural products. None of the organizations in the sample were hostile to the vision of an ecologically sound food system.
While the vast majority of the organizations had a position on ecological soundness, only about half had a position on social justice. Of the organizations that had no position on social justice, many responded that they did not think in terms of social justice and injustice. However, some responses carried a tone of exasperation with the subject. Responses included comments such as, “We don’t have time to get into that,” or, “No, we’re here for farmers.” Some stated that the issue of social justice was too contentious for their organization to deal with. In addition, what people meant by the term social justice varied significantly. Responses on the meaning of social justice in the food system were fairly evenly distributed among five categories: economically equitable, relational or proximate, farmer-centered, healthy or environmentally sound, and accessible. Almost a quarter of the respondents described a socially just food system as one that was economically equitable. Criteria they used included the fair compensation of labor, common ownership of land, and a food system in which everyone’s basic needs were met regardless of ability to pay. More than half of the AFI leaders defined a socially just food system as one which was local, based on family farms and small businesses, or environmentally sound.
Objective 2: Assess the arenas in which food-system change is most and least
robust among agrifood initiatives in California by discovering areas of strong
and weak congruence in goals and methods.
In addition to their visions of a better food system, we wanted to get a sense of what California AFI leaders considered to be promising solutions to food system problems. Respondents were encouraged to not confine their answers to the activities in which their organization was engaged, but to think about the broader issues.
The majority of solutions proposed were local entrepreneurial initiatives, advocacy for alternative food policies, and education (Table 4). Specific activities promoted included: developing local food systems, getting people to value fresh food and pay the true cost of food, protecting farmland from development and urban sprawl, educating people about nutrition, providing more outlets for people to get fresh produce, increasing the numbers of small-scale and/or organic farms, building more community gardens, and providing people with job skills. Few leaders mentioned solutions that focused on fundamental issues such as ownership and compensation.
Most California AFIs are developing alternative economic relationships that allow people to acquire fresher, more local food or helping farmers to become or remain economically viable. Looking at these activities in a framework comparing the relative emphasis on entitlement and entrepreneurial approaches to increasing food security (see Allen 1999), it is apparent that market-based and entrepreneurial activities are predominant in California AFI programs and projects. Three-quarters of the organizations engaged exclusively in entrepreneurial activities such as creating niche products or expanding markets, and nearly all organizations engaged in entrepreneurial activities of part of what they did.
In general, California AFI organizations are focused more on the day-to-day operations of the business or technical aspects of their work than on formal or informal political activities or broader food-system change. While California AFI participants believe that changes in agrifood policies are needed at all scales of governance, they are rarely directly involved in this work. Ten of the fourteen groups claiming policy advocacy as a positive effect of their organization act at the school board, city, or county level. Very few of the respondents suggesting policy initiatives as general solutions to food system problems referred to national-scale policy reform, even though the omnibus U.S. Farm Bill was being debated in Congress at the time of the interviews.
Faced with the choice between advocating policy change in distant legislatures and establishing and maintaining tangible programs in their locality, California AFIs are choosing the latter. Even though they are aware that political economic change is a critical part of solving food system problems, AFI leaders express greater enthusiasm for the personal, relational, and entrepreneurial. They have more confidence in their ability to effect change by creating opportunities for local participation in the food system than through any large-scale policy initiatives.
Still, while Kloppenburg et al. (1996) claim that “neither people nor institutions are generally willing or prepared to embrace radical change,” this is not the sense we got from California AFI leaders. While the solutions to agrifood system problems articulated by AFI leaders were partial, most organization leaders were very aware of this partiality and not particularly satisfied with it. For example, one interviewee said that the their version of an ideal food system would be one in which land were owned in common, but they quickly pointed out that they did not believe that we would ever achieve that situation in the U.S.
Many leaders felt that the scope and depth of food system problems were beyond what their organization could address. Instead they sought out spaces where they could do something that would contribute to a better food system, however they defined it. What the leaders expressed to us was more of a sense of being overwhelmed rather than an unwillingness to confront core problems and instigate deep, systemic changes. For many of the respondents, there was a general sense that people were doing what they could, where they could, within a context of overwhelming structural impediments to a sustainable and just food system. One focus-group participant said:
For me, the problems and the solutions are just overwhelming. I mean, they’re so huge that, as an individual, I feel a little bit powerless, but where I feel like I do have power is just working on a very local … It’s not maybe the fastest, on the large-scale policy level, but it’s the level I feel comfortable with and that I feel I can be the most effective.
AFI leaders cited numerous positive effects of their organizations’ work, including education political advocacy, and increasing access to food (Table 5). Many leaders and participants expressed pride, or at least satisfaction, in being able to offer some food to some people from alternative sources, along with the hope that these admittedly small actions would leverage greater change by provoking greater popular awareness about the need to reform the food system. Global trade agreements and national or state policy seem distant and inaccessible; promoting direct connections with farms, farmers and gardens is tangible and can bring immediate rewards.
This preference for creating local alternatives instead of advocating directly for structural changes in the food system has an organizational logic as well. As a practical matter, most California AFI organizations cannot risk being too oppositional, especially given their relatively fragile positions. Many organization leaders said that they were almost always confronted with an uncertainty of funding. Related to this, particularly for organizations that had gardening or production components, was the lack of security in being able to use the land. Organizations in these situations often depend upon the cooperation and resources of more established and powerful organizations. AFI organizations are quite vulnerable economically, with over half of the AFIs reporting that funding is a major obstacle. Many AFIs are engaged in entrepreneurial initiatives because that is what they can find funding to do. In the current neoliberal political climate, organizations working in the food system find funding for community gardens and CSAs much easier than for policy initiatives.
Objective 3: Contribute to the development of networking and knowledge
transfer among alternative agrifood initiatives.
One of the objectives of this project was to better understand the role of community and networking in the work of alternative food initiatives. We are interested both in the initiatives themselves and their potential for creating networks that go beyond their individual scopes and actions.
California alternative agrifood initiatives tend to be both diverse and ecumenical. Participation in California AFIs is also quite diverse, engaging people of very different class backgrounds, occupations, educational levels, and cultural circumstances. This is certainly true when looking at the AFIs as a group, but it was also often the case within individual organization. Several respondents marveled at the degree of class, cultural, ethnic, and religious cooperation that has emerged out of a number of AFI projects. The same range and diversity was found in the subjects addressed by the AFIs, ranging from farming to gardening, from globalization to local food systems, and including business practices, as well as basic ecology and agroecology.
Some AFIs embodied a kind of privatized redistributive system. For example, one organization sells expensive, natural foods in health food stores to predominantly affluent consumers. While little of the food is consumed in the low-income community that produces it, the money from its sale is used to support scholarships for people who would otherwise have little chance of going to college. Similarly, another organization produces and sells high-priced organic foods to an elite market, but the purpose of these sales is to generate revenue to support programs for homeless people. Thus, even if they are not actively working toward basic structural changes that to overcome poverty, AFIs are making a difference, day in and day out to many people who have been marginalized in the current agrifood system.
Community plays an important role in nurturing the participants’ efforts to effect change. One focus group participant believed that their organization had been able to accomplish so much because they, “created first of all a community around food issues”. AFI participants’ encounters with other people promoting alternative food initiatives persuaded them to make personal changes such as shifts in food purchasing and consumption patterns, seeking out local, high-quality foods, reaching out to neighbors and friends to raise their awareness of food and agricultural issues, and re-thinking their work so that it is framed by food, agriculture, social justice, and environmental sustainability. The emotionally rich, personally supportive experience in AFI communities helped participants effect and sustain changes in their lifestyle and their social activism, and helps them manage the threat of being discouraged by problems with the food system. Participating in their AFI allowed them to match components of their concern for social justice and environmental issues with the needs of a local group of like-minded people.
There is evidence that AFIs are also forming new relationships and increased levels of cooperation with more traditional institutions. One respondent remarked: “the city officials changed the designation of our zoning from a soccer field to a sustainable agriculture education park, demonstrating their support of this project.” Another said that the city in which they were working had “turned its attitude 180 degrees from being against community gardens to now actively finding land for us to use, and encouraging us to apply for grant money that is out there to get gardens started.” It appears that government institutions at the city, county, and state levels are engaging the work and vision of California AFIs. Seventy-five percent of the California AFI organizations in this study were connected government institutions. This intersection may work toward the long-term integration of the priorities and programs of the alternative agrifood initiatives into public programs.
Still, working with traditional institutions can pose challenges. For example, in describing the difficulties in creating a farm-to-school lunch program, one respondent stated that their major obstacles were bureaucratic. Another person involved in farm-to-school programs described the situation of presenting themselves as the providers of a healthy lunch, which, by default, characterized the current school lunch program as unhealthy. As the interviewee put it, "This is really not a great way to approach school food-service directors." Trying to work within the system to change the system poses a real Gordian knot for many of the California AFIs.
At the same time, few AFIs appear to work together on a regular basis; these organizations are much better connected to local government, social service, and agricultural organizations than to each other. Three institutions are the exception to this: the Community Food Security Coalition, the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, and the Community Alliance with Family Farms (see Table 6). These three groups distinguish themselves by providing extensive technical support, knowledge, and personal contacts that serve as resources for AFIs. The CFSC is the only national organization named by the AFIs. Even though the CFSC does advocacy in Washington DC, the informants made it clear that they drew on that organization’s expertise for help with programs, not advocacy. AFIs in general are not well networked with each other or with national organizations that could advance their political views.
Potential Benefits
The purpose of this project was to document the variety of alternative food initiative organizations in California, learn more about their origins and connections, and increase understanding about their potential as agents of change in the agrifood system. Committed people are working in many different areas in the food system to effect change, yet community-based organizations rarely have the opportunity to perform in-depth studies of their institutional efforts, much less to conduct comparative analysis of like organizations. This kind of analysis is crucial for helping groups to accomplish their goals and to minimize potentially contradictory outcomes (Allen 1999).
This research demonstrates the importance of California AFIs. Alternative agrifood initiatives seek to build often-local and accountable social relationships that allow consumers to choose in their purchases to support social relations and environmental practices that they value. AFIs also have effects that go beyond their practical programs, particularly through increasing participants’ interest and engagement in food system problems and solutions. AFI participation helps people and communities to think about issues they may never have confronted or considered before. For example, in one interview, a young, “typical” environmentalist who said he had no position on social justice began to talk later about the problem of putting profits before feeding hungry people. AFI participation also provides people with a vehicle for upholding their values and working together toward an improved agrifood system. One respondent said that through participating in their AFI:
I can connect with people that I know that I can see face-to-face. To be that small seed, to germinate and to let those values actually come out into real-world practices, not just to be something I talk about.
While this research affirms the importance of California AFIs, it also highlights the need for further education and collaboration among AFIs. In order to strengthen the effectiveness of California AFIs in working toward ecological sustainability and social justice in the agrifood system, we suggest the following recommendations.
- Undertake educational programs to deepen AFI leaders’ and participants’ understandings and knowledge of scope of food-system and its issues, especially those involving labor.
- Develop a collective problem statement with which AFIs could align and a common agenda through which they could organize their efforts.
- Continue efforts to diversify the participants in alternative agrifood organizations and develop relationships with other organizations such as those focused on workers, health, animal rights, environment, and children.
- Participate in statewide network of alternative agrifood organizations to share ideas, information, and resources. The Community Food Security Coalition recently launched an initiative in California that may serve as or assist in building such a network.
- Work collectively to increase funding available for broad-based alternative food efforts. This may include developing a membership organization to lessen dependence on extramural funding. It will also necessarily involve working with private and public funders to establish funding streams that focus on systemic issues in the agrifood system.
Dissemination of findings
Findings of this project have been disseminated through conference presentations and publications. The research team participated in a workshop, "Movement building: Strategies for transforming the food system" at the California Food Security Summit in June 2002 sponsored by the Community Food Security Coalition and the California Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. This workshop included presentation of results and an invitation to evaluate the process and results of the research. In addition, the results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers in New Orleans in March of 2003 and at the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society Conference in Chicago in June of 2002. Preliminary findings were presented at a 2001 conference held at UC Santa Cruz, “International perspectives on alternative agro-food networks: Quality, embeddedness, bio-politics.”
Project results have been published in the Journal of Rural Studies (P. Allen, M. FitzSimmons, M. Goodman, and K. Warner. 2003. Shifting plates in the agrifood landscape: The tectonics of alternative agrifood initiatives in California. Journal of Rural Studies 19: 61-75). We are working on additional articles based on the project findings. A report to be disseminated to study participants is being finalized. This report will be available free of charge on the CASFS website.
Literature cited
Allen, P. 1999. Reweaving the food security safety net: Mediating entitlement and entrepreneurship. Agriculture and Human Values 16 (2): 117-129.
Kloppenburg, J., Jr., J. Hendrickson, and G. W. Stevenson. 1996. Coming into the foodshed. Agriculture and Human Values 13: 33-42.
Tables
Distribution of AFI organization types in study
AFI Type |
Number interviewed |
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6 |
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2 |
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3 |
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5 |
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7 |
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3 |
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4 |
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3 |
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6 |
Components of problem categories
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Types of problems cited by organization leaders (N=37)
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Solutions cited by organization leaders (N=37;84 total responses)
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37 |
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29 |
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27 |
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Positive effects cited by organization leaders (N=37; 93 total responses)
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Organizations with which AFIs most frequently network (N = 37; 201 total responses)
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