Food Justice Rhetorics and Literacies

Presents an argument for a food justice-oriented rhetoric and literacy that shifts the emphasis in the local food movement from individualized conscious eater literacies to addressing the broader social, political, and cultural implications, histories, and power relations embedded in the food system.

Food Justice Rhetorics and Literacies provides a critical examination of the dominant rhetorical tropes and arguments of local food discourse and their exclusions. The author addresses that through understanding complex patterns of discrimination and social action in relation to land ownership and food production, we can begin to imagine and enact a more just and sustainable food system. This book explores and assesses periods in history when the U.S. public took an active role in agriculture through publicly-promoted, often federal and state subsidized gardening projects and widescale grassroots gardening efforts in times of crisis, thus building alternative agrarian literacies among the U.S. publics and ensuring a stable food supply during times of crisis.

The shift to a food justice-oriented rhetoric centers food activists, BIPOC farmers, community gardeners and policy advocates who are seeking to change systems of food production and distribution so that all can eat well.

Eileen E. Schell is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition at Syracuse University.