As exciting as it is to plant seedlings in my own backyard garden, I admittedly always look forward more to the beginning of the summer farmers’ market season. It is refreshing to see an incredibly wide array of local food grown by my community.
Farmers’ markets are one facet of an alternative food movement that seeks to bring clarity to social and ecological aspects of food production. The goal of an alternative food movement is to craft consumers who are passionate about enacting a more just and sustainable food system. This contrasts the current food system marked by capitalist globalization and a drive towards industrialization and commercialization of food. In most cases, profit is emphasized over human well-being at the stages of food production, distribution, and consumption.
Farmers’ markets are touted as being in the interest of combating food deserts in communities with large proportions of people of color or low socio-economic statuses. However, upon examination of how privilege, race, and socioeconomic status shape how people are excluded, it has been suggested that farmers’ markets might instead have a hidden cost of environmental gentrification.
Here I examine if the effectiveness of farmers’ markets in bringing about a more just and sustainable food system outweighs their often convoluted costs.
What is the Impact of Farmers’ Markets on the Food System?
It is estimated that between 30 and 40 percent of all food in the U.S. is wasted, and there is a 31 percent food loss at the retail and consumer level. This demonstrates not an issue of food production but an issue of food distribution.
Food cost often corresponds to food accessibility. Food loss can be caused by factors such as processing equipment malfunction, spoilage during transportation, or consumer over-purchasing. When food is wasted, money is also wasted through the loss of inputs such as land, water, labor, and energy. Prices are raised to cover these costs.
When food is bought locally, cutting down on transportation, and there are no regulations on cosmetic aspects of food to be sold, much of the waste of supermarkets is avoided. Farmers’ markets make a sustainable environmental impact in this regard.
Food and Privilege
When we accept that privilege plays a large role in structuring our society, we can see how it permeates into smaller institutions. For example, farmers’ markets tend to be dominated by people who have the privilege of whiteness. A large-scale survey of American farmers’ markets found that even when located in food deserts, which already disproportionately impact people of color, farmers’ markets establish themselves in deserts that are whiter.
There is also privilege that accompanies knowledge of healthy eating and habits. Many low-income families have the desire to utilize farmers’ markets and improve their nutrition but need assistance in learning to prepare food or establish behavioral changes. This constrains the ability to promote well-being through food.
The Consequence of Farmers’ Markets: Environmental Gentrification
Grace defined gentrification as urban planning projects that displace working class families of color to open up residential and retail space for younger, wealthier, and whiter residents. As urban neighborhoods begin to change, food can actually be one of the first indicators that gentrification is taking place.
Arrival of upscale and trendy grocery stores like Whole Foods or farmers’ markets and community gardens make an area seem more environmentally cognizant, so neighborhoods become more appealing to investors— especially ones looking to gentrify areas to suit the taste of the culture with privilege to buy into them.
Diminishing affordable housing aggregated with years of discriminatory practices, including racial segregation, redlining, and urban renewal policies, can reinforce geographical, economic and racial patterns of disparities. People of color are more likely to be low-income renters, so increasing housing costs makes an area more suited for white people with a higher socioeconomic status, driving long-time residents out.
When investors bring new, green amenities like farmers’ markets, residents who previously advocated for food justice or environmental justice are not able to continue to pay increasing rents nor enjoy increased livability in their community.
In addition to an increasing cost of living, this type of gentrification when viewed through the lens of a farmers’ market increases residents’ feelings of exclusion. A study of the Memphis, Tennessee farmers’ market landscape found that an increasingly gentrified neighborhood caused long-time residents to experience exclusion and a loss of culture and place. This reinforces the notion that those with a lower socioeconomic status and people of color are only allowed in less healthy and livable neighborhoods.
Towards an Alternative Food Movement for All
In several states, farmers’ markets allow government food assistance benefits typically only redeemable at grocery stores to be used to pay for produce. This aims to make food assistance more easily transferable to the alternative food system, theoretically giving low-income community members similar access to the privilege of eating local, nutritious food. However, this fails to address tangible barriers to accessing farmers’ markets like transportation or intangible constraints such as perception of space and belonging. Exclusion can continue to be reproduced.
Organizations with a specific focus on addressing disparities are better suited to fill food access gaps. The Farmlink Project is a nonprofit that manages logistics of connecting potential food waste from farmers unable to sell surpluses with food banks in under-resourced communities. By rerouting nutritious, local food in this way, the potential for exploiting an area through an amenity like a farmers’ market using an externality like gentrification is bypassed.
There should not be barriers or hidden costs to putting fresh, healthy food straight into the hands of those who particularly need help accessing it. While farmers’ markets are one way to partake in the alternative food movement, equitability must be maintained in their establishment and operation so that their original intent is expressed.
