In life, few things connect us more than food. From the comforting scent of your mother’s homemade soup after a long day, to breaking bread with friends amidst the twilight hum of cicadas and laughter, food scarcely fails to nourish us and our relationships.

If we choose to recognize it, food also presents us with a myriad of choices that impact the environmental, social, and economic realities we inhabit. For, to be human, we must eat. And we don’t get out of this life without consuming other lives—be it a salmon or a potato or a leek.

Aligning our food choices to better reflect our values can deepen our sense of meaning, connection, and joy in daily life. Crucially, this nourishment can help us be more effective and resilient activists in tumultuous times.

In a destabilizing and distracted society, food holds the power to connect us to our bodies, other humans, and the Earth. Choosing our food with intention can return us to humans’ original economy of reciprocity, awareness, and balance. While this topic could constitute multiple dissertations, this article will provide an overview of the ways our food choices affect our society and environment, as an antidote to the over-simplified narratives that often circulate around food and diet.

While this topic could constitute multiple dissertations, this article will provide an overview of the ways our food choices affect our society and environment, as an antidote to the over-simplified narratives that often circulate around food and diet. Because the environmental movement is ultimately inseparable from the social, racial, and economic systems that influence it, choosing food with intention doesn’t just mean scanning for sustainability labels. It also means understanding the ways in which our food choices affect other human beings, communities, and lifestyles.

If you feel overwhelmed about this topic, you’re not alone. Yet, as everyday people, we hold more influence over our food system than corporations or agencies would have us believe. 

The Food Ethics Council recommends a simple but profound shift to challenge entrenched power in the food system: instead of considering of yourself as a “consumer,” recognize yourself as a ”food citizen”—an active participant shaping the food system instead of a passive shopper. This perspective transforms our relationship from transactional to collaborative, acknowledging ourselves as part of a collective fully capable of shaping our food system (which we are).

In the end, this “food citizen” journey isn’t about making perfect choices and being 100% ethical in all food consumption. Such a thing is scarcely possible, and your opinions on the topic may differ from mine. Put simply, the journey centers on being intentional about your food choices when you can and where you can, without judging others because their choices look different than yours. So let’s dig in, shall we?

From Food Deserts to Environmental Racism: How Our Food Choices Affect Others

The food we purchase actively shapes our modern agricultural system, with lasting impacts on the humans who grow, nurture, and harvest our food. More specifically, Americans’ demand for affordable, out-of-season produce in our current agricultural system deeply impacts immigrants, family farmers, and marginalized communities.

This modern appetite for inexpensive produce creates a system of low profit margins and high labor costs for producers, helping to cement the sub-minimum wages and grueling working conditions for the over two million immigrants who keep the U.S. agricultural supply chain running.

As Americans buy ultra-processed, homogenized food from the grocery store, agricultural giants operating at scale are allowed to keep dominating the market and pushing out family farmers. 

Take store-bought chicken nuggets, for example. You’re chattering your teeth at the frozen aisle, scanning dozens of nugget brands across the shelves. Under the misleading branding, nearly all the bags in front of you are controlled by one of the main few food giants (shoutout to Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Perdue Farms!). Most family farmer chicken producers are actually tied to these conglomerates through production contracts, in which corporations own the birds, own the feed, and ultimately trap farmers in high-debt, low-margin cycles.

Unsurprisingly, our current agricultural system is embedded in environmental racism, witnessed in the disproportionate exposure of communities of color to health and environmental hazards. 

To offer context from previous centuries, 19th-century American criminal trespass laws stripped Black communities of their right to forage for wild foods, which they’d relied on for decades to nourish their families and make a living. By the 1880s, the emerging “conservation movement” in New York state originated from elites who prioritized personal gain over foraging rights and public land access.

As the climate crisis worsens in our modern times, rural farmers are projected to experience more extreme weather events, lower income certainty, and deteriorated mental health compared to their urban counterparts. In the grueling occupation of farmwork, immigrant farmworkers face high levels of pesticide exposure and will face higher rates of heat-related health ailments like kidney disease as climate change intensifies.

Communities of color are more likely to live in food deserts, or areas where access to healthy, affordable food options is restricted or nonexistent. The high-calorie, low-nutrient quality of food found in these areas can lead to older adults of color to incur higher rates of diabetes and other health issues.

So how can we make change?

How We Shift the Power Dynamic of Our Food System

Our food system crisis asks us to move from a corporate-led model to one focused on environmental health, fair pay, dignity, and equity.

For everyday people, this means calling on our representatives to reform federal policy accordingly, shifting our buying habits to support brands that truly uphold sustainable standards, and restructuring the supply chain by supporting more socially responsible food sources (think regional food hubs, urban farms, and grocery co-ops).

This shift can take place in a million small actions, but the list below is a good starting point.

How to Make Food Choices That Support Family Farmers and Communities of Color

• Buy produce directly from local family growers by subscribing to a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program that delivers to you
• Source your food from underrepresented farmers. Take advantage of the U.S. directory of Black-owned farms at Black Food Justice and Shoppe Black, Indigenous food producers from American Indian Foods here, and AAPI-owned farms from Common Good City Farm and Food Corps
• Push your city government or local school boards to sign on to the Good Food Purchasing Program, which positions public institutions to purchase food that nurtures local economies, valued workforces, and sustainability
• Purchase goods with a Fair Trade or Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) Certified label
• If your grocery store offers a “Buy Local” section of produce, buy produce there to support local family farms over agricultural corporations
• Support food justice leaders with lived experience who are working to change the system and need support. If you haven’t been personally impacted by food injustice, it’s crucial to follow the lead of those who are, evading the “savior complex” of organizing from the outside instead of supporting the work of those who know food injustice firsthand

Until we take action to remedy it, our food system will remain exploitative. Any changes to our agricultural system must center the rights of immigrants, farming communities, and the Earth itself.

Our Food Choices Can Support Struggling Communities and Rural Lifestyles

If we eat meat, choosing products from independent family farmers and regenerative ranchers over agricultural corporations not only offers us a higher quality product.

It also supports a way of life for rural communities who feel called to provide ethically sourced food and meat, allowing them to continue a way of life that has sustained their community over generations and a vocation that, if lost, would take crucial generational knowledge with it.

Bridging the Rural-Urban Social Divide with Food

Over the decades, the U.S. government has left behind rural communities through its exploitative shifts in federal economic and agricultural policy.

Connecting with rural family farmers and buying their products is a way we can help sustain these vital communities, helping to mend the urban-rural divide that helps fuel modern polarization and uphold those in power.

Let’s consider the example of citydwellers denouncing rural ranchers for branding cows. Many people condemn branding cattle because of perceived lack of humaneness. Those same people may buy mainstream beef products at the grocery store, thereby supporting large-scale, high-confinement feedlot operations with grueling conditions for workers and low quality of life conditions for the cows. However, if they attended a low-stress handling branding operation and then walked around a cattle feedlot, they may be less likely to criticize independent ranchers who are doing what they can to give their cattle the best lives they can. There is no perfect answer here—it’s about increasing awareness, sidestepping immediate judgement, and reducing harm one step at a time.

From Organic Berries to Cow Farts: How Our Food Choices Affect The Earth

For many of us in the U.S., the main way we get food is the grocery store. Understandably, grocery stores’ selecting power and influence on Americans’ buying habits cannot be understated.

In 2016, approximately 90% of food consumed in America was produced in-country, as opposed to imported from other countries. However, we can always find produce imported from other regions (hello, avocados from Mexico in the dead of winter!). 

New research from Nature Food reveals that food miles—the distance between your plate and the origin of your food—releases more emissions than previously understood. Study co-author and nutritional ecologist David Raubenheimer stated that prior to this research, “Most of the attention in sustainable food research [was] on the high emissions associated with animal-derived foods, compared with plants.” While plant-based diets make an impact on the environment, new studies such as this one illustrate the additional benefit of buying local, as global food-miles amount to 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (accounting for 19% of total food-system emissions).

Many of us encounter organic sections of the grocery store: areas where produce offered was grown free of pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides. Organic operations have been associated with lower water pollution and biodiversity loss as conventional operations, while also requiring more land (and often, more intensive tilling practices to balance out the absence of insecticides). Although organic produce operations don’t solve all the environmental problems found in agriculture, they can serve as a valuable component of a broader strategy towards sustainability.

While not all organic brands participate in greenwashing, the practice of making products more “sustainable” than they actually are is an established phenomenon in the food industry. Unfortunately, countless companies promote their products under the guise of sustainability claims that fall apart upon any level of scrutiny (think McDonald’s non-recycleable “paper” straws, Nestlé’s “carbon neutral” product claims that rely on future offsets instead of addressing their own high-emission operations, etc.).

The Plant-Based Diet vs. Meat Quandry

While there’s merit to high emissions being associated with meat and animal products, meat’s “carbon footprint” often derives from the impact of mainstream agricultural practices in the U.S.. But cow farts aren’t the only factor driving climate change, and more importantly, there are other ways ranchers manage livestock. Across the U.S., you’ll find ranchers managing livestock while improving soil health, and thus, carbon capture through what is known as regenerative ranching.

In the regenerative approach of adaptive multi-paddock grazing, ranchers graze livestock in smaller paddocks that are moved often instead of allowing livestock unimpeded access to space. In this way, more land is able to rest with reduced livestock pressure, allowing for increased carbon sequestration, better water infiltration, denser root systems, and improved soil microbial life. Adaptive multi-paddock grazing can also restore declining populations of grassland birds. While regenerative operations improve quality of forage, conventional beef ranching relies on monoculture corn and soy production for cattle feed. Conventional beef operations often require heavy water withdrawals and fossil fuel usage, leading to degraded topsoil and waterway pollution.

Some studies show regenerative ranching can require more land than traditional feedlot operations. With the variables involved in carbon sequestration, more quantitative studies need to be conducted to confirm regenerative ranching’s longterm impacts with precision. “People want it to be really straightforward and it’s just not,” stated World Wildlife Fund program manager Alexis Bonogofsky. “We’re working on a timescale that’s decades, especially in the arid and semi-arid West.”

Plant-based food is not a perfect environmental solution either. Some meat substitutes based on soy, wheat, gluten, and vegetable oils require extraction of “protein isolates,” necessitating high energy and water use. Many soy-based burgers demand surprisingly high amounts of water (sometimes 100 liters per burger kilogram) due to intense manufacturing processes.

Local vs. Imported Produce

Understandably, we humans often seek simple solutions to complex problems. But there’s more than what meets the eye. And when it comes to environmentally friendly food, the solution does not come in the form of eating meat vs. eating plants. What matters more is the origin, proximity, and agricultural practices involved in the food we purchase.

If we’re able to source our food from farmer’s markets, regional CSAs, or other local operations, we diminish the emissions that come with intensive food transportation. If we source meat from regenerative ranches closest to our region, we’re helping reduce emissions and divest from mainstream feedlot operations that degrade topsoil and pollute waterways.

Ultimately, we’re better equipped to support the Earth and our communities when we source our food outside of mainstream grocery stores as much as possible. Whether this means growing some produce for yourself, participating in a community garden, engaging with an urban farm, or subscribing to a CSA, every food item you source outside of a mainstream grocery store is one step closer to a resilient food system.

How Aligning Your Choices with Food Justice Changes Your Life

Before settlers forced them out of their homes on Turtle Island, Native communities knew how to eat seasonally and locally, how to forage and hunt in ways that balanced their surrounding ecosystem. None of this is new—it’s simply a return to a way of life humans have understood for millennia. 

When we source our food in accordance with our values, the instincts that sink in can nourish our minds and bodies for the long haul.

When we have a garden of our own to nurture throughout the year, it puts us closer in touch with the rhythm of the seasons in our highly disconnected, distracted world. The produce we grow tastes fresher and more flavorful than imported grocery store goods, and the nourishment it offers can be as emotional as physical. Some studies show that gardening can improve our sleep, increase our sense of hope, and reduce symptoms of depression.

But we don’t always need science to confirm what we already feel. There is delight to the practice of making your own bread and relishing the light sour notes in a fresh loaf; there is delight to seeing your first cabbage seedling sprout strong and tall; there is delight to sharing those funky-looking purple tomatoes you grew with your friends, as they burst in the mouth with a flavor too full to encapsulate in words.

From sharing conversation at the farmer’s market with the producers who grew your vegetables to picking up wholesale beef from the rancher who deeply cares for the cows she caretakes, there is also a unique joy to knowing the people who produce your food.

Those relationships can add another layer of meaning to your meals, offer context for the challenges producers face, and grant a fuller understanding of the web of life where your food originates.

This sense of value alignment, self-accomplishment, and simple joy that comes from intentional food choices can become a vital source of resilience for us.

If we think about it, taking action to support a more vibrant, equitable food system also doesn’t have to be institutionalized. Change doesn’t always have to go through a 501c3. Our acts of food justice can be as simple as leaving a loaf of bread with a neighbor in need, joining a potluck circle, or sharing an overflow of produce from our garden with friends in unprompted ways.

If we catalog all the delights we experience with food, they soon become innumerable. This joyful relationship we forge with food and a more ethical food system can sustain us for the long haul—which we need especially as modern activists.

How to Buy Wisely and Support Food Justice:

As opposed to being helpless consumers, we can choose to actively shape our food system as “food citizens” in ways that benefit our communities and the Earth. Take your first step today through one of the following action steps:

• Donate to support food sovereignty organizations led by communities of color, such as the National Black Food & Justice Alliance
• Learn about what current farm labor bills are moving through Congress and call your representatives to share your support of bills that prioritize family farmers, greater food security, and oversight of agricultural corporations
• Start a monthly subscription with a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) near you by searching with your zip code here!
• Host a watch party to learn more about regenerative ranching through docu-series “Roots So Deep (You Can See the Devil Down There),” produced by the Carbon Cowboys
• Subscribe and listen to the PROJECT: Good Food podcast, which explores “community liberation through food access, food sovereignty, and the relationship we have with the environment”
• Learn about food apartheid and take one of Regeneration’s action steps to create a more equitable and environmentally friendly food system
• If you are not directly impacted by food injustice, connect with folks in your community to broaden awareness of the connection between food sovereignty and racial justice (especially with those unaware of these issues)
• Read The Color of Food to learn about stories of race and resilience from farmers in the U.S. (The Resilient Activist community read this book as part of our JEDI Bookclub!)

The Resilient Activist is a nonprofit dedicated to nourishing the environmental movement from the inside out by teaching people how to self-tend, set boundaries, prioritize joy, and find a style of activism that invigorates them. 

Explore our native gardening resources to better understand how to garden for both humans and wildlife. To join a wider community of activists working to create a more healthy, diverse, and regenerative world, sign up for our newsletter or attend an upcoming event.

To summarize, thank you for joining us in this journey towards food justice and environmental flourishing. No matter what your dinner looks like, choosing food that reflects our values can allow us to experience joy and interconnection daily, making every meal a delight. ✨