Why Food?
Our food system is a mirror for society—and a lever for transforming it.
Food reflects how we treat the planet and each other.
Food fuels our bodies daily, and nourishes our spirit and community. Food rekindles memories, deepens our relations, and connects us to the Earth, our ancestral history, and cultural and racial identities.
Because food is essential, it is also political—it can be manipulated into a tool for oppression, or cultivated into a vehicle for liberation. In the U.S., the way food is grown, moved, and shared—who performs this labor, how we view and compensate the work, what food gets produced, which seeds and species are sustained generation after generation, what methods are used as we borrow from the Earth’s resources, and which communities are given a choice in their food sources and supply—are all heavily influenced by who holds power in our government, economy, and culture.
The U.S. food system is due for change.
The mainstream, U.S. food system has been industrialized and consolidated. Today, food produced through this system harms both people and planet. Dominated by a small group of corporations, this system values profit above all else. It creates distance between producers and consumers, erases biological and cultural diversity essential for resilience, extracts both land and labor, widens the wealth gap, and dispossesses communities of their food sovereignty.
Food-related impacts during the pandemic, recent climate disasters, and changes in federal power reflect the fragility of this system. These moments reinforce that investing in our community-driven, local food economy is urgent and critical.
When we divest from the industrialized and consolidated food system—and instead, invest in our region’s community-driven, local food economy, we can:
Cultivate Justice
Reimagining food—and access to resources for producing food—as a right, not a commodity beholden to generating profits, nor a tool for division or oppression, lifts up all communities in San Diego County.
Dispelling narratives and practices that treat work in the food system as unskilled, replaceable, or transactional, helps us seed prosperity and fulfilling career pathways for our entire region.
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is nutrition insecure (~822,000 people). Food insecurity is concentrated in low income and BIPOC communities, including in southeastern neighborhoods in the City of San Diego, an area that was redlined nearly 90 years ago.
State of Hunger in San Diego County, San Diego Hunger Coalition
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grew their wage income by only 24% over the past 40 years, while the top 1% of earners saw a 158% increase and the top 0.1% experienced a 341% increase (i.e., wages for the top 0.1% grew 15 times faster than the wages of the majority of wage earners).
In the same time, corporate profits have soared (even during a traumatic period like the COVID-19 pandemic) while marginal tax rates, regulation, and corporate governance oversight have diminished. Wages have stagnated for the majority of working Americans, and food system workers—particularly food preparation and service workers—typically earn some of the lowest wages in the country, including in San Diego County. Union membership has seriously declined, including in food system industries.
State of Working America Wages 2019, Economic Policy Institute.
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owned by black farmers was lost from 1910 to 1997 and the number of black farmers declined by 98%. Over the same time period, white farmers only lost about 2% of farmland. In recent years, the USDA and federal farm policy has continued discriminatory practices against black farmers, including systematically denying loans that could be obtained by white farmers.
How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against Black farmers, Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki
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in San Diego County had sales of less than $50,000 in 2017 and these farms generated only 4.3% of total sales. Farms with sales above $500,000 accounted for 4.8% of farms but 86.5% of sales. In other words, the largest farms account for the overwhelming majority of sales while smaller farms have access to only a small fraction of the sales. Nationally, USDA maps show that small farms with low sales are disproportionately concentrated in regions with Indigenous, Black, and Hispanic/Latinx producers.
Census of Agriculture, USDA
Fight Climate Change
Investing in our region’s mosaic of small- to midsize farms and fisheries reduces greenhouse gas emissions, enhances carbon sequestration, builds soil health, protects biodiversity and ecosystems, minimizes food miles, prevents waste, transforms our relations with planet and each other, and reduces our dependence on imported seafood from unregulated fisheries.
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from the cultivation of crops and livestock, land use changes, energy use along supply chains, and waste. Our mainstream food system is the planet’s largest contributor of methane and nitrous oxide emissions since it relies on fossil fuels, synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, monoculture farming, and produces a significant amount of waste.
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can be sequestered annually in California*, through improved conservation and agricultural practices, such as cover cropping, reforestation, and sustaining perennial crops.
* That’s the equivalent of removing 215,000 cars from the road each year.
The Path to a Carbon Neutral California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Build Resilience
Diversifying and building shorter, fairer, and cleaner food supply chains makes our region more resilient to shocks, including natural disasters, public health crises, economic hardship, and consolidation of power—all of which we have experienced in recent years.
Seeding a culture where we value a diverse and resilient local food system that belongs to all ensures a livable, thriving future.
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control nearly 70% of US farmland, four meatpackers slaughter 85% of beef, and four companies control 63% of the retail market. This consolidation of power has always compromised the health and sustainability of people and the planet.
Now, in the face of increasing natural disasters, public health crises, and growing inequalities, the highly concentrated industrial food system is exposing deep vulnerabilities and threatening the resiliency of people, cultures, livelihoods, and ecosystems.
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in 2023 can be tied back to San Diego County’s food system. This accounts for about 20% of all employment in our county.
Most of these jobs (~230,000) were tied to direct employment in the food system. 95,000 of this total number were created through indirect and induced effects. This means that for every 100 jobs added in the food system, another 41 jobs are created elsewhere in the economy.
Our community and Alliance have long been preparing to meet this moment.
The Alliance is working with farmers, fishermen, food business owners, community organizers, government agencies, funders, our peer organizations, and residents to provide holistic support for our region through this essential transition—using our unique, holistic approach that includes Community & Coalition Building, Community Wealth Building, and Community Storytelling.
Transforming the food system is about transforming how we live, not just how or what we eat.
