Abstract
Advocates of environmental sustainability and social justice increasingly pursue their goals through the promotion of so-called “green” products such as locally grown organic produce. While many scholars support this strategy, others criticize it harshly, arguing that environmental degradation and social injustice are inherent results of capitalism and that positive social change must be achieved through collective action. This study draws upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two farmers markets located in demographically different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area to examine how market managers, vendors, and regular customers negotiate tensions between their economic strategies and environmental sustainability and social justice goals. Managers, vendors, and customers emphasize the ethical rather than financial motivations of their markets through comparisons to capitalist, industrial agriculture and through attention to perceived economic sacrifices made by market vendors. They also portray economic strategies as a pragmatic choice, pointing to failed efforts to achieve justice and sustainability through policy change as well as difficulties funding and sustaining non-profit organizations. While market managers, vendors, and customers deny any difficulties pursuing justice and sustainability through local economics, the need for vendors to sustain their livelihoods does sometimes interfere with their social justice goals. This has consequences for the function of each market.
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Notes
I choose not to use the apostrophe in order to denote that farmers markets belong to all those who participate, rather than merely to the farmers.
These farmers use the term “chemical-free” to indicate that they use organic practices, but are not certified by the USDA or any other third party.
Some interviews were conducted during the market and tended to be quite short. Others were conducted outside the market and lasted much longer. I always attempted to procure time outside of the market to do interviews, but after failing to do so with several key North Berkeley vendors I conducted shorter ones instead.
Each survey was conducted through a sample of convenience. Through both open and closed-ended questions, respondents were asked why they shop at the farmers markets. In West Oakland, collective responses such as support for local farmers outnumbered personal interest responses such as procuring food. In North Berkeley, personal interest responses predominated, but by a very small margin.
While participants often refer to the market as a “black market,” and the most prominent farmers are black, Hmong and Mexican farmers have also been included.
Most market vendors travel less than 100 miles. The average food in a grocery store is estimated to have traveled 1300 miles (Halweil 2002).
I use the term farm employee to refer to the primarily white individuals hired to work at the North Berkeley market. I reserve the term farm labor for the primarily Latino/a workers who do the bulk of the cultivation. The farmers in West Oakland are too small to hire either non-family farm labor or employees to work at markets.
Klienman (1996) found that admiration for those whose contributions are perceived as based on altruism and economic sacrifice serves to reinscribe privilege.
Methyl bromide is widely considered to be one of the most noxious pesticides in US industrial agriculture. While it has been linked to both ozone depletion and farmworker health, it continues to be used on strawberries and other crops. The North Berkeley market’s requirement for exclusively organic produce would bar the use of methyl bromide or GMOs. However, this ban still affects prepared food vendors as well as the few non-organic produce vendors at the Ecology Center’s two other markets.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was funded in part by the UC Davis Department of Sociology, the UC Davis Small Farms Center, and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. Thanks to Tom Beamish, Dina Biscotti, Julie Collins-Dogrul, E. Melanie DuPuis, Jennifer Gregson, and Joan S. M. Meyers for their helpful comments. Most importantly, thanks to participants at the West Oakland and North Berkeley farmers markets for sharing their experiences and ideals.
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Alkon, A.H. From value to values: sustainable consumption at farmers markets. Agric Hum Values 25, 487–498 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9136-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9136-y