Hanna Garth, "Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement" (U California Press, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Hanna Garth, "Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement"

New Books Network – Public Policy Channel
Host: Stephen Pimpair
Guest: Hanna Garth
Date: January 23, 2026

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode features anthropologist Hanna Garth discussing her book, Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement. The conversation critically examines the food justice movement in South Central Los Angeles, questioning the assumptions and practices of mostly white, well-intentioned outsiders who seek to bring “justice” to communities they misunderstand. Garth shares her fieldwork and personal background, reflects on the disconnect between interventionists and local knowledge, and explores how true food justice requires deeper structural and abolitionist thinking.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Hanna Garth’s Background and Path to the Project

• Personal & Professional Influences (02:03)
  • Garth grew up surrounded by farm culture in rural Wisconsin, with deep family traditions in food growing and preparation.
  • Professionally, she is an anthropologist studying everyday food practices and their intersection with broader systems and inequalities.

“I was kind of steeped in a family culture of caring about food and growing food and caring about where our food comes from.”
— Hanna Garth (04:29)

2. Research Methods and Fieldwork Experience

• Emergence of the Project (06:13)
  • Initially intended to study Cuba’s food system but turned to Los Angeles after visa issues.
  • Conducted research predominantly through participant observation and interviews—often while volunteering, attending meetings, and carpooling with food justice organizations.
  • Study timeframe spanned from 2008 to 2020.

“I have a maybe an affliction where I naturally start studying things even if I want them to just be for pleasure.”
— Hanna Garth (08:19)

3. The Outsider-Led Food Justice Movement

• Who is Doing the Work? (10:51)
  • Most active organizers in South Central were white, upper or middle-class individuals from outside the community rather than grassroots local residents.
  • Garth questioned why these outsiders were so committed and what their underlying assumptions were.

“Where are the grassroots people? Where are the people from the community that are getting into food justice?”
— Hanna Garth (11:02)

4. False Assumptions and Misguided Interventions

• Common Stereotypes (12:36)
  • Activists operate on media-driven and academic narratives, such as the characterization of South Central as a "food desert" lacking grocery stores and healthy food.
  • This leads to interventions based on correcting presumed deficits: teaching cooking or “healthifying” local diets.

“They would often make what I think is also a logical leap ... that people must be eating fast food ... if people are eating a lot of fast food, we should teach them how to cook and we should teach them how to eat.”
— Hanna Garth (13:07)

• Reality in South Central (14:21)
  • Contrary to assumptions, South Central has abundant food options, including supermarkets, street vendors, and markets.
  • Residents often cook at home and possess culinary expertise surpassing that of interventionists.

“South Central is actually ... there's a lot of grocery stores ... People all over South Central are cooking wide varieties of food and eating well. And they know how to cook, probably across the board ... better than the food justice interventionists.”
— Hanna Garth (14:21, 15:00)

5. An Illustrative Anecdote—The Awkward Food Demo

• Cooking Demonstration Example (15:20–19:13)
  • A typical intervention involved outsiders hosting cooking demos on “healthy” alternatives to stereotyped local foods.
  • Attendees, often experienced home cooks, found these events patronizing and poorly organized (e.g., unfamiliar ingredients, missing protein, and cultural disconnect).
  • The efforts were seen as disrespectful and a waste of time.

“Not only did they not learn anything because they know how to cook chicken and ... have experience with kale ... But they also didn’t get the protein, which was the main thing that drew them to the workshop.”
— Hanna Garth (18:55)

6. Structural Problems and Racism in Food Justice

• Understanding the Failures (20:09)
  • Garth examines how lack of structural analysis and discomfort around topics like race, poverty, and historical inequities undermine genuine justice work.
  • Nonprofit structures exacerbate the issue, pushing workers towards measurable interventions and funding cycles (the “nonprofit industrial complex”).
  • The United States’ reliance on underfunded nonprofits, instead of public entitlements, compounds the problem.

“There’s a lack of capacity and a lack of capability to understand the relationship between structures and everyday life... Even people with ... master’s degrees.”
— Hanna Garth (21:15)

“These jobs ... are hard and they get a lot of work out of each person. A lot of people just didn’t have the energy ... to do anything additional on top of all of the tasks that they had to do.”
— Hanna Garth (23:55)

7. Abolitionist Perspectives and Building Better Movements

• Abolition in Food Justice (25:55)
  • Garth describes finding grassroots organizations deeply embedded in their communities, using food justice as a path toward broader liberation.
  • These activists invoke abolitionist frameworks: not simply reforming but reimagining or rebuilding systems (food, education, policing) that were never designed for marginalized groups.
  • The focus shifts from incremental change within the status quo to envisioning entirely new, just systems—no matter how far off.

“Their work was about bigger, longer-term struggles for what many people called liberation ... Abolitionist practice was about envisioning a just system—even if it seems impossible.”
— Hanna Garth (26:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On outsider misunderstanding:
  “If they imagined people were eating fried chicken and collard greens ... they would say, well, let’s make that a culturally appropriate, healthy meal and let’s teach them how to bake chicken and make a kale salad ... [But] everyone in the room was like, what the heck is nutritional yeast?”
  — Hanna Garth (16:39, 17:38)

• On structural failings:
  “People not understanding how long-term structural problems create this problem ... not individual failings.”
  — Hanna Garth (20:27)

• On abolitionist vision:
  “It was about not settling for what can function in the status quo, but instead saying, no, like, this is what we deserve and this is what we’re going to keep working toward, even if it takes our whole lifetime.”
  — Hanna Garth (28:20)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:03] — Hanna Garth’s personal and professional background
• [06:13] — How the project started and research methods
• [10:51] — Outsider orientation and initial observations of the field
• [12:36] — Misguided assumptions about local food culture
• [15:20] — Cooking demo anecdote: disconnect and patronization
• [20:09] — Structural causes, nonprofit limitations, and systemic racism
• [25:55] — Abolitionist thinking and vision for food justice

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Conclusion

This episode provides a candid, ground-level perspective on the pitfalls of outsider-driven food justice movements and the necessity for structurally informed, community-centered, and abolitionist approaches. Garth’s critique not only unmasks the flaws in well-meaning intervention but also lifts up the radical imagination and resilience of grassroots efforts in re-envisioning food justice.

Transcript

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[Stephen Pimpair]

Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimpair, host of the Public Policy Channel and we are joined today by Hannah Garth, who is the author of Food Justice Lessons for Building a Better Movement from the University of California Press. Hannah, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

[Hannah Garth]

Thank you for having me.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So I wonder if we might begin by asking you to tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and what brought you to project.

[Hannah Garth]

Great, thanks for that question. That's a really open ended question, right. And I could come at it a whole bunch of different ways. I think what's important to know are kind of a little bit about my personal background and a little bit about my professional background. But I'll start with maybe the professional stuff. So I'm an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist. I study living people and their everyday lives and habits and how those sort of micro practices of everyday life relate to or butt up against macro factors like structures, politics, the state. And I'm interested in food. So a lot of that is related to how people's everyday lives are implicated in or affected by the global industrial food system. And I've done. My first research project was in Cuba, and I studied Cuba's food rationing system, which has been in place since just after the socialist revolution and has slowly been kind of falling apart. So I looked at how families piece together meals and how they struggled to be able to put together what had long been the standard of good food, or what I call a decent meal in that book. And then I've also been doing research in South Central Los Angeles on the food justice movement and also on families in South Central and how they kind of struggle to get food as well. But my interest in this work comes out of my personal background, which is. So I come from a family that on both sides of my family, historically, we were farmers. Both sides of my family lost their farms for various reasons, financial reasons, and stopped farming and had a lot of narratives around both what it meant to be an agrarian and what it meant to lose a farm. But my. My grandmothers especially were growers. They had gardens. They like extensive gardens. And they canned food and they taught me about things like baking bread and baking other things. And so I was kind of steeped in a famil culture of caring about food and growing food and caring about where our food comes from. I'm also from a small town in Wisconsin, a relatively small town in Wisconsin, which is surrounded by farms. Even though I didn't grow up on a farm, I grew up like my preschool teacher was also a hog farmer and all kinds of friends. Parents were farmers mostly, who grew corn or other feed for animals. That was what was common around me. So thinking about food and thinking about agriculture and being aware of how those things are connected to broader political systems at county, state, federal and national levels is something that I've been kind of steeped in since I was really young. And that really definitely has informed my research and has informed my interest in studying food systems and food access.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about what you were trying to understand in this book and maybe while doing that, tell us just a little bit about methods. Who did you talk to, what kind of organizations, over what period of Time, those kinds of things. So we get a sense of where you were and who you were surrounded by and what you were trying to make sense of.

[Hannah Garth]

Yeah, yeah. So this project did not start out as a typical research project. I have to give a little bit of background in order to understand how I fell into this. So I had started graduate school at ucla, planning to work in Cuba and do the research for my first book called Food in Cuba, the Pursuit of a Decent Meal, that came out in 2020. And I was going through all the stages of graduate school with the idea that that would be my project. And then when it was time to go to the field, my visa was initially denied. The Cuban government denied my long term visa. So my doctoral committee members were like, okay, you better get a new project and you better get a new project fast if you're going to finish this program on time. And I had been volunteering in community gardens and had started just kind of naturally working with food justice organizations. Part of that's because I was just so. I was used to gardening and used to eating fresh produce, and so I was drawn to working in these places personally. And then as I was working with the food justice organizations, they were also interested in me sharing more information about Cuba and its widely known organic agriculture programs. So there started to be kind of a mutualism where I might be doing a workshop or talking to people about Cuba, and I was like, getting fresh produce from these places. And so as soon as I was told that I needed to have a project and a new project fast, I was like, okay, I'm gonna study the food justice movement because I'm already hanging out with these people. I'm already kind of studying it because I have a, maybe an affliction where I naturally start studying things even if I want them to just be for pleasure. So I, yeah, I quickly got IRB approval and did the things one does when you have to turn something into a formalized study, like came up with hypotheses and all that kind of stuff. But basically my methods for this involved very typical anthropological methods. Participant observation and interviewing were like the heart of the methods. So that meant for me that I started spending as much time as I could with these organizations. So in addition to the volunteering I was already doing, I started going to board meetings and staff meetings and traveling with them when they went to meet with another organization and being on a lot of phone call meetings and a lot of kind of moving around the city. So many of these organizations had sister projects in east la and so Groups of people would drive from South Central to East la, or a lot of the people that ran these organizations lived in Silver Lake, which is kind of the, like hipstery. Well, it was like a hipstery, newly gentrifying area at the time. Now people call it a yuppie area. And I lived there too, so I'm not trying to like throw shade on Silver Lake. But yeah, we would kind of like move from Silver Lake in carpools to these different spaces. And so a lot of my research took place actually in cars. You know, I would be driving to, I don't know, maybe like a. A middle school cooking workshop with the executive director of an organization. And I would say, like, hey, why don't you tell me, like, how did you get started and what's your vision? And I'd have my tape recorder out in the car. So those were like my style of interviewing for this was a lot of that kind of talking while on the move, in large part because these people are busy and, you know, I didn't want to kind of waste their time. But yeah, that's how it got started. And it's one of the things that happened was as I was moving into this and kind of thinking about, like, what are the research questions? Was that I kind of was able to take a step back. And what I noticed was that.

[Stephen Pimpair]

We.

[Hannah Garth]

Were going into South Central Los Angeles, which is historically a majority black area, but is increasingly a majority Latino area. And almost all the people that were working in the organizations that I was seeing were white folks from upper class or upper middle class or hipster areas coming into South Central to do this work. And I was like, where are the grassroots people? Where are the people from the community that are getting into food justice? And so I started trying to both look for those people and ask myself the question, why are these well meaning outsiders so interested in coming into South Central to increase access to healthy food to enact food justice? Or some of them would say, to bring justice to South Central. What did that mean to them and why did they want to do it? And these people are dedicating their lives to this. And so that's kind of how it got started. And it drove me. These were hard questions to answer. So I worked on this project from 2008 until 2020, which is even long for an anthropologist.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So one of the things that you found, I think, fair to say, over and over and over again is that these outsiders coming in to bring justice were not particularly interested in learning about the people who they were purportedly Meant to help. Is that fair to say?

[Hannah Garth]

Yeah, yeah, it's fair to say. Although I might say it wasn't a question of interest so much as the ways that they were used to or had been taught to orient to this kind of work and this kind of space. So most people approached their food justice work based on real information that they had received from the media, from academics, from social media, from friends. So this cohort of people had heard a couple of things about South Central. One, that it was a quote unquote food desert. There was a very common understanding that there was a lack of full service grocery stores in South Central and a lot of fast food restaurants and a lot of corner stores and liquor stores. And a lot of that was produced by scholars using GIS data that was reinforced by the usda. So that, you know, they're coming in with what would logically be smart information. And then they would often make what I think is also a logical leap to assume that in an area where there's not a lot of grocery stores and where there is a lot of fast food, that people must be eating fast food. And then they would make the leap that like, if people are. Don't have grocery stores and don't have, they're eating a lot of fast food, we should teach them how to cook and we should teach them how to eat. And so when you, When I put it this way, it probably sounds very logical and benign, but it's, it's totally wrong.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So that's what's like pretty much across the board, right? All of those assumptions turn out to be incorrect.

[Hannah Garth]

Yeah, totally wrong. South Central is actually. There's a lot of grocery stores in South Central.

[Stephen Pimpair]

There's lots of food, right?

[Hannah Garth]

Yeah, there's tons of food. There's food everywhere. There's street vendors, there's restaurants, there's various kinds of markets. You know, whether it's a full service supermarket or a small independent market or just a place that sells like one type of thing. Like there's fish markets and people all over South Central are cooking wide varieties of food and eating well. And they know how to cook, Right? They probably across the board, the families I worked with in South Central know how to cook better than the food justice interventionists.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So I, I wonder, Hannah, if I could ask you at this point to, to tell us about the food demonstration that you went to. I think it was Melissa is the person who led that food demo, because I think that's a lovely example of this, this disconnect, if we can call it that.

[Hannah Garth]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I went to several food demos. And so I don't, I, I want to make sure that Melissa, which is a pseudonym, is contextualized as like, it's not an individual failing on the part of one person that did a food demo, but that there were lots of these. And so what would happen is behind the scenes, like usually on phone calls or maybe in a meeting, a food justice organization would come up with the idea to do a cooking demo in with a group of people in South Central. So the particular one that I was thinking of was in a middle school. And they invited the parents of the students at the middle school to attend a cooking demo. And it was advertised to include a free bag of food. And so a lot of people showed up and the cooking demo was run by, and again, a well meaning person who was fresh out of a master's program as many people were single younger woman who did not actually cook for herself. Right. And if she did, she was, she was cooking like for one person. Right. So she ended up in front of a room full of middle aged women and grandmas and some, some dads as well who have been cooking all of their lives. And they, they, you know, they cook for families. They've, they're cooking every day. So she. So the organization wanted her to create a healthified version of the kind of stereotypical food that they imagined people in South Central eating. So if they imagined people were eating fried chicken and collard greens and, I don't know, maybe biscuits and gravy or these foods that are high in sugar, high in fat, they would say, well, let's make that a culturally appropriate, healthy meal and let's teach them how to bake chicken and make a kale salad. And so that's what Melissa ended up doing. But the workshop wasn't set up with the right infrastructure. She had a hot plate and a pan. So she ended up sauteing some chicken, showing people how to make a kale salad with it had also some weird ingredients. She was encouraging them to add nutritional yeast to their kale salad. And everyone in the room was like, what the heck is nutritional yeast? Also an avocado mashed in there. So the other thing that was like disappointing about this workshop and was also very common was that the produce bag that they gave away in the workshop did not include the protein. So it only included kale and avocado and a little bag of nutritional yeast. But people didn't learn this until after they sat through the whole cooking workshop. And as I was Walking out of it. I'm talking with some of the participants who had assumed I was there as a participant and I didn't take a produce bag. And they were like, oh yeah, it was that bad. Like you didn't even want to bother taking the kale. And you know, they were like basically telling me that they felt like the workshop was a waste of their time. Not only did they not learn anything because they know how to cook chicken and they're probably, they probably have experiences with kale and if they're not using it, it's because they don't want to. But they also didn't get the, the protein, which was the main thing that drew them to the workshop. And I saw several things that were very similar to this in nature.

[Stephen Pimpair]

So how should we understand that? Right. It's folks who you are describing as well, meaning who arrive at a place with layers of stereotypes about the place and the people who live in it. Don't seem terribly interesting, at least in my reading of your book. Don't seem terribly interested in actually engaging in deep learning. Don't seem particularly respectful of many of the folks who they are engaged. I mean, I think that cooking demo is an excellent example. Incredibly disrespectful of people's time, of people's knowledge of people's histories. A lot of, I mean, some of it, I mean, I'm thinking of the person you describe as Josh. Some of it seems explicitly racist and a fair bit of it is, I think, fair to say, implicitly racist. How do we un. How do we understand it? How, how do do purportedly well meaning people behave so badly?

[Hannah Garth]

Yeah. Yes. I mean, that question again, that was like kind of at the heart of what drove me to keep doing this research and continued to perplex me. And it took a very long time for me to kind of figure out. I think there's, there's a lot of layers to what's going on. And, and it starts early on in life. So part of what's the key, the sort of fundamental problem behind this is people not understanding how long term structural problems create this problem, create the problem of people having unequal food access, an incapacity to engage with histories of racism, histories of redlining, histories of uneven distribution of all kinds of capital and how that has created these very structural problems that are not individual failings. It was like I watched people know these things. I watched people learn about retail redlining and residential redlining and then still think, oh, we need to get people to stop eating fried chicken. And so there's, there's a lack of capacity and a lack of capability to understand the relationship between structures and everyday life that I think happen beginning at the K12 level. Like, we people just don't have the capacity to think about the historical and ongoing repercussions of these things. Even people with, you know, they have bachelor's degrees, a lot of them have master's degrees. But also a lot of what's going on is, is very structured by the nonprofit world, or some people call it the nonprofit industrial complex, which is like the, the goal is to have outcomes. The goal is to create interventions that make a change and for you to be the individual that creates that change. And that's how you get more money for your nonprofit, and that's how you get accolades in your career. And so even people who could see, like, like, I know that the structural problem is that there's not enough full service supermarkets or that this person doesn't have enough money, but I can't solve those problems. So I'm going to just bracket those problems off and I'm going to figure out something that's discreet that I can do so that I can tell my boss or my funder or whoever that I have fulfilled the outcome that I'm supposed to be fulfilling and then I can continue to thrive in this organization. Um, and, and so there was some then. And then there were also people who were just fundamentally unaware and sort of had no capacity to think about race, racialized difference, no understanding of like what it's like to live in poverty. And they were, they were very food oriented, so they were very interested in food and healthy food. And so they would say things like, what does this have to do with race? Eating healthy food has nothing to do with race. Like, why are we talking about race? And it was fascinating to me to over and over again see how potential conversations where we could start thinking about structures and thinking about racial inequality would get shut down by the one person in the room who was uncomfortable or who just was like refusing to talk about the more difficult topics. And the other thing I'll say is that these jobs, nonprofit jobs, especially when you're like a lower ranking staff member, are hard and they get a lot of work out of each person. And so a lot of people just didn't have the energy or the capacity to do anything additional on top of all of the tasks that they had to do. So this is kind of all to say that part of the big problem is like how the nonprofit world is structured, but then also that we increasingly, in the United States, we no longer rely on the state to care for people and provide entitlements, and we actually rely heavily on nonprofits to take care of everyone. But then we don't finance them adequately. And that's obviously a problem that's not going away, but just getting more and.

[Stephen Pimpair]

More complicated and creates a world of almost forced hierarchies. Right. People. People with access to things that you might need or want, and people who need and want those things and have to behave in the appropriate manner in order to curry the favor of the charity official who has the resources in order to be deemed sufficiently deserving to receive. Yeah, very old story in some ways in the United States. But so as we work our way toward concluding, one of the many things that I think is interesting toward the end of the book is that you start to think through what it means to take some of the thinking and the language that we use around abolition, either of policing or family policing systems, and think about what that means in this context. I wonder if you can do some of that thinking for us here.

[Hannah Garth]

Yeah, yeah. So towards the end of my research process and towards the end of the book, I started to find the organizations that I had been looking for in the beginning, like the ones that I had imagined to be the more grassroots organizations that were community members who were inspired by the needs of their community and driven to do this kind of work. And what. But what I found was that those teams of people had a really, really different approach from the other sets of people that I studied in the book. And part of it was that they weren't just focused on food. Food was like, they knew that obviously food is fundamentally important to human survival and it was a part of the focus. But. But their work was about bigger, longer term struggles for what many people called liberation. And, and they understood that the systems that had helped white Americans thrive were not systems that were designed to work for black and brown Americans. So when they would talk about abolition, sometimes they were talking about, like, literally abolish everything, burn it all down. And that that was an ethos that guided them. Like, none of these systems work for us. Not the education system, not the policing system, not the prison system, not the food system. They're not made for us. We need to go back to what we know ancestrally or what we know from five, six hundred years ago. Like deep in our quote, they would say is in our DNA. I don't believe it's like a heritable trait, but that's the kind of language that people would use. And so they would call that, like, liberation from all of these systems in that sense. And a lot of the work that they were doing was connected to abolition in the sense that it was about dreaming of a reality that has never existed, or at least that none of us have lived through and can remember. So abolitionist practice for many of the organizations I worked with was about envisioning a just system, envisioning the system we want and the system we need, even if it seems impossible, even if it's like we know structurally we'll never get this. Holding that vision and working toward it was a critical part of their praxis. So they would. It was about not so settling, not settling for what can function in the status quo, but instead saying, no, like, this is what we deserve and this is what we're going to keep working toward, even if it takes our whole lifetime or another 500 years to work towards this. And so that's kind of what I'm framing as, like, abolitionist kinds of thinking.

[Stephen Pimpair]

You're listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network, and we have been speaking with Hannah Garth about her new book, Food Justice Undone Lessons for Building a Better Movement, from the University of California Press. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us today. Much appreciated.

[Hannah Garth]

Thank you for having.