Beyond Inclusion: Toward an Anti-colonial Food Justice Praxis

Abstract

Activists and academics have increasingly drawn on the concept of "food justice" in recent years. While this trend is encouraging, we argue that a focus on "inclusion" by these actors may actually work to reproduce inequitable relationships. Food justice research and practice should thus move beyond inclusion to connect food system inequities to interlocking structures of oppression, such as capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism. In Canada, placing food justice in the context of ongoing processes of colonialism—and recognizing that no justice can happen on stolen land—is particularly important. While we make these suggestions, we do not claim to have all the answers; we struggle through the same tensions we raise here in our own work. Nonetheless, we feel that encouraging those interested in food activism to consider intersecting systems of domination, to challenge such structures and their complicity in them, and to build solidarity with other activists, perhaps using land as the basis for new conversations and alliances, may be key steps toward cultivating an anti-colonial food justice praxis.