Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice(Justice, Power, and Politics)

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the Depression. In response, New Yorkers set the stage for a nationwide food justice movement. Whether organizing school lunch campaigns, establishing food co-ops, or lobbying city officials, citizen-activists made food a political issue, uniting communities across lines of difference. The charismatic, usually female leaders of these efforts were often products of earlier movements: American communism, civil rights activism, feminism, even Eastern mysticism. Situating food justice within these rich lineages, Lana Dee Povitz demonstrates how grassroots activism continued to thrive, even as it was transformed by unrelenting erosion of the country's already fragile social safety net. Using dozens of new oral histories and archives, Povitz reveals the colorful characters who worked behind the scenes to build and sustain the movement, and illuminates how people worked together to overturn hierarchies rooted in class and race, reorienting the history of food activism as a community-based response to austerity. The first book-length history of food activism in a major American city, Stirrings highlights the emotional, intimate, and interpersonal aspects of social movement culture.

About the Author :
Lana Dee Povitz is visiting assistant professor of history at Middlebury College.

Review :
"Stirrings is important because it . . . [shows] how service provision and activism co-existed in the organizations examined. . . . They advanced social justice even as they were not explicitly about social and political change. At a moment when political strategies are often reduced to caricatures in the media, Stirrings makes an important contribution; illuminating these dimensions of social justice work."--Gotham Center for New York City History "Povitz traces the rise of the food justice movement as it was incubated in mutual aid networks that brought women of differing races, ages, religions, and sexual orientations in concert. Her four main case studies . . . highlight the importance of multimodality in a cause so deceptively complex as solving hunger in a city starkly divided into the haves and the hungry."--Journal of Urban History "An engaging oral history of New York food activism. . . . Povitz provides a unique historical perspective on the successes and shortfalls of food activism that scholars and professionals can gain insight from today."--Mobilization: An International Quarterly