Giving Compass' Take:

• The Rockefeller Foundation launched the Food System Vision Prize in October 2019 to call for future visions of what food system justice should look like. Here is a list of semi-finalists. 

• How can donors support food system justice? 

• Learn how the food justice movement looks to create equity. 

The launch of the Food System Vision Prize in October 2019 was a call for visionaries to imagine “regenerative and nourishing” food systems. The Prize subsequently spurred the creation of more than 1300 community-led visions that seek to equitably and resiliently address many historic and current challenges—including the Covid-19 pandemic and the most recent reckoning with racial injustices in the United States.

Indeed, some Semi-Finalists for the Prize have highlighted a deeper need for healing of the racial and economic injustices linked to food systems across the U.S. Many of the visions describe food system revolutions that rely on commitments to restorative justice. It has been said that a movement for food justice must explicitly recognize the current food system as “a racial project [that] problematizes the influence of race and class on the production, distribution and consumption of food.”

Several visions emphasize how building diverse, interconnected communities is critical to revolutionizing food systems at all levels, and that food justice is a fundamental platform for supporting sustainable, nourishing, equitable, and resilient food systems. Many proposals go further to describe how racial and class inequities influence the ways communities consume, produce, and distribute food. For example, while Covid-19 has strained supply chains around the world, the effects have been felt particularly hard by the most marginalized. Even before the pandemic there were enormous racial disparities present in American food systems, with Black and Hispanic families significantly more likely to experience food insecurity. i.

The Semi-Finalists for the Food System Vision Prize highlighted below are working every day toward food justice in the U.S. Each of the visions focuses on advancing equity, whether by working to right historical injustice; taking back the means of food production; creating food systems to benefit local health and economies; aiming to make small-scale farming more profitable and accessible; or developing new food distribution models that increase demand while also cutting waste.

Read the full article about food system justice by John de la Parra and Daniel McKenna at The Rockefeller Foundation.