New Clear Vision

Walmart stores are predominantly located in suburban or rural areas and, according to my own estimates, their current revenue from sales of fresh fruits and vegetables relies on national or globalized commodity chains for at least 80 percent of all perishable fresh foods on their shelves. Over the past 2 to 3 years, Walmart has featured ‘local foods’ as seasonal niche products in some stores including one in Alamosa, Colorado that I have personally visited. The past two summers (in 2009 and 2010), that store was selling English peas produced and supplied by organic acequia farmers from the San Luis, Colorado area located about 45 miles away. Locally-sourced corn, potatoes, Mexican calabacitas, and other seasonal vegetables are also sold at the Alamosa store.

Walmart executives clearly want us to see their plan as an honest and thoughtful effort to address the geography of environmental racism in the agrifood system while turning as much as possible to local sources and suppliers. They claim to recognize the disparate nature of the conditions in food deserts and thus aim for policies tempered by the fact that food deserts are predominantly located in low-income and/or people of color communities.

Several critical issues are at stake in making sense of the Walmart plan to reformulate processed foods and transform its supply chain toward more local sourcing of fruits and vegetables as well as meat and fish. One issue is differential access to fresh food and commodity prices. Marion Nestle noted in a recent NPR interview that the price of processed food has decreased by 40 percent since 1980 while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent during the same period.

How Walmart goes about cutting prices for fruits and vegetables, reversing the trends of the past thirty years of marketing and sourcing, is also a puzzle. What will this mean for small farmers? What is local? What about social justice? None of the proposals in the plan addressed the continued exploitation and suffering of marginalized farm worker communities or the survival of small family farmers. Moreover, no matter how serious and honest Walmart may be in pursuit of this initiative, the sort of change required will have to occur in other organizations that shape, constrain, and control the agrifood system. First and foremost is the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which must expand its commitment to shifting from global to local food systems. This would require radical restructuring of the subsidy, research, rural development, resource conservation, credit market, and other facilities in its purview that will be reauthorized in the 2012 Farm Bill.

Yet even this is not the end of the story. Food and nutrition are important, but eating and dietary practices are constrained and shaped by cultural practice and social class position. We need, in short, a paradigm shift — one that recognizes that having access to fresh fruits and vegetables will not mean much if no one is around to prepare, serve, and share the food. We may do well to recall that so-called ‘convenience’, ‘processed’, and ‘fast’ foods were developed because capitalism intensified and expanded the labor time it demands from workers and consumers. ‘Power’ lunches are not a proletarian perk. Like a black hole, capital bends and warps the gravity of our living time, converting as much of it into working time that produces profit. Capital seeks to trap all our time inside the singularity of work time.  Escaping that singularity must be a principle of a well-grounded movement for food sovereignty.

There are many reasons to remain constructively engaged yet skeptical of these efforts. Walmart’s plan in the long term must eliminate processed foods altogether and it must downsize individual store footprints. My strongest objection, frankly, is that the last thing the democratic and grassroots food sovereignty movement needs is for Walmart to become the centralized Local Food Commissariat. Local sourcing of food is a good principle, but it matters who controls the process. It also matters how the process is organized, namely whether it is top-down or bottom-up. Increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables in food deserts and low-income communities is also a good principle, but many of these are working-poor families in which parents have to work two or three jobs just to avoid homelessness.

Lacking living-wage jobs and affordable transit options, when are working poor parents to find time and resources to shop for fresh ingredients when they still can’t afford to prepare wholesome meals for their families on a daily basis? Too many of these are single-parent families, mostly headed by women in such circumstances with multiple jobs and marginal earnings. The demands of the local food movement are insufficient as the basis for any sort of deeply transforming and wider reorganization of the nation’s political economy of food and agriculture. We need to be asking ourselves: How do we create an economy where people do not live to work but work to live? In other words, how do we create an economy where people have the option to work less and play, pray, learn, cook, and share the table to eat together more?

Living-wage and 35-hour work week laws may help to resolve this problem by making it possible for people to work at single well-paid jobs instead of wasting their lives trapped in 60+ hours a week spread over three menial part-time and low-paying jobs that still keep families at bare subsistence. If people can earn a just, living wage, this may reduce the length of the work day and week, creating more free time and opportunities for people, including those families trapped in food deserts, to enjoy local shopping, cooking, and conviviality. Is not freedom from work the necessary precondition for people to enjoy sharing wholesome food at the dinner table with their loved ones and friends?

The path away from food deserts must also run along the road toward economic justice and workplace democracy. The goal of food sovereignty is ultimately not possible without these other values. Walmart’s plans to moderately improve their food quality and become the Local Food Commissariat may yield some benefits, but they do not appear poised to achieve genuine food sovereignty.

Devon G. Peña, Ph.D., is a lifelong activist in the environmental justice and resilient agriculture movements, and is Professor of American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His influential books include Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida (University of Arizona Press, 2005) and the edited volume Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin (University of Arizona Press, 1998). Dr. Peña is the founding editor of the Environmental & Food Justice blog, and is a Contributing Author for New Clear Vision.