Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Community Development and Applied Economics
First Advisor
Daniel Tobin
Abstract
Food security exists when everyone has access to safe, nutritious and culturally acceptable food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences. BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) and low-income communities face outsized challenges to food security compared to their counterparts, especially in their ability to access culturally acceptable food. This paper works to address this issue by first conducting a systematic literature review to understand culturally acceptable food’s status in the food justice literature followed by an empirical study that focuses on how culturally acceptable food can be better embedded into U.S. seed systems.
Food justice focuses on addressing food system injustices that disproportionately impact people based on race and class. While culturally acceptable food has been increasingly invoked by academics and activists alike to be an integral element of food justice, U.S. consumers of racial and ethnic minorities often cannot access foods that are culturally acceptable to them. Given that efforts to develop the cultural acceptability of have food only recently emerged, what now must be determined is how the definition has been addressed in the empirical food justice literature and what still needs to be accounted for in future studies for the field to become more comprehensively developed. To respond to this need, the findings from a systematic literature review are presented, which explored and analyzed the empirical food justice literature that addresses the cultural acceptability of food. Based on these findings, recommendations for future food justice research are provided.
In response to gaps in the food justice literature identified through this review, this thesis then presents an empirical study focusing on the integration of culturally acceptable seed and food into the seed value chain to build a more culturally appropriate seed system in the United States. Introducing neglected and underutilized crop varieties into the seed value chain like culturally acceptable seed can be understood as an agricultural innovation, defined as a novel agricultural change. Previous research has found that access to resources and social connectivity are critical prerequisites for an agricultural innovation to succeed. Based on survey data from over 1,500 farmers and gardeners across the U.S., this study explores the degree to which growers’ demographics associate with the resources they can access and their connections along the seed value chain. Findings point to the particular difficulty BIPOC growers face in accessing key resources that would prime them to successfully innovate agriculturally generally and introduce culturally acceptable crops in the seed value chain specifically. There exists a pressing need to increase support services to make the seed system more culturally acceptable. Food justice efforts will fail in addressing the systemic issues within U.S. food systems if the field is not comprehensive in addressing all elements in the movement. In addition to filling gaps identified by the systematic literature review, this empirical study provides necessary information to policy makers, community practitioners, and future researchers looking to increase the supply and demand of culturally acceptable seed and food in the U.S.
Language
en
Number of Pages
138 p.
Recommended Citation
Burke, Sally, "Culturally Acceptable Food: Exploring Its Status In The Literature And Growers’ Capacities To Embed It In Seed Value Chains" (2024). Graduate College Dissertations and Theses. 1968.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/1968