Beyond ‘food apartheid’: Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut
Mary P. Corcoran
Abstract
Abstract This article illuminates the extent of community‐based activism around food justice in New Haven, CT. Data was gathered through 28 in‐depth interviews with civil society actors and participant observation across the food policy and urban agriculture (UA) sectors in the Fall of 2018. The paper traces the challenges that the sector faces in advancing a more democratic food agenda even when the municipality is relatively open to activist claims. Three key findings are identified. (a) Following in the American communitarian tradition, civil society groups working at grassroots level largely set the agenda for tackling food hunger in New Haven. That agenda, however, is broad‐based and contradictory, incorporating initiatives aimed at addressing food insecurity and radical advocacy for food justice. (b) The efforts of civil society actors are structurally constrained by their dependence on philanthropic or grant‐based funding, on the one hand, and the symbolic rather than substantive support afforded by a fiscally weak, resource‐poor municipality, on the other. (c) There is an inherent tension within the civil society sector arising from the disjuncture between strategies that have the effect of depoliticizing hunger and those that increasingly demand a repoliticization of hunger. These issues have been brought into sharper relief in light of the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis and the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) mobilization, which, in concert, expose deep fissures in American society.