Julie Guthman - Doing Justice to Bodies? Reflections on Food Justice, Race and Biology

Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of environmental racism, food justice scholarship and activism assert an analogous connection between poor spatial access to good food (e.g., food deserts) and ill health, with obese and/or diseased bodies are taken as evidence of injustice. Without discounting the role of institutional and cultural racism in creating spaces with less amenity and more toxins, such accounts neglect that non-normative bodies can be a source of social injustice as well as a consequence of it. Beneath the surface of this dilemma is justifiable reluctance to discuss questions of material bodily difference as it relates to race, yet without such a discussion, white embodiment becomes the standard by which others are measured. Drawing from both Foucault and the new science of epigenetics, Julie Guthman, Professor of Social Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, will argue for an approach to food justice that recognizes the multiple socio-natural pathways by which bodies are made different, and more or less vulnerable (or resilient) to environmental influences.