Green consumer choice is a class privilege unavailable in food deserts
Evidence
I don’t have much patience with food proselytizers who refuse all but organic, free-range, fair-trade gerbil milk. We each do what we can; the Honorable Harvest is as much about the relationships as about the materials. A friend of mine says she buys just one green item a week— that’s all she can do, so she does it. “I want to vote with my dollar,” she says. I can make choices because I have the disposable income to choose “green” over less-expensive goods, and I hope that will drive the market in the right direction. In the food deserts of the South Side there is no such choice, and the dishonor in that inequity runs far deeper than the food supply. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 717
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to environmental racism and food justice threads across Eco-Justice and settler-colonial critique courses. — connects to: Consumers pay premiums for certified environmentally friendly goods. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 1011; Consumer environmentalism failed because both rich and poor buyers chose energy waste — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 292; Stewarding green spaces requires wealth and property privilege — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 663 (+3 more)
- ADDENDUM: Expands the commodity-vs-gift tension in the trees infrastructure article into the food system.
Broader Connections
- Stewarding green spaces requires wealth and property privilege
#expands(0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 663 - Residential segregation is the primary driver of American food deserts
#qualifies(0.80) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 311 - Willful white ignorance of opportunity deserts is enabled by societal indifference to the poor
#expands(0.75) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 64 - Basic food scarcity makes refined gastronomic etiquette irrelevant to most people
#exemplifies(0.72) — David, Elizabeth, Book of Mediterranean Food, 50