Sustainable Food Systems

A Renewed Call for Social Sustainability: Putting Worker Justice at the Center of Sustainable Food Systems

 

In the early 1990’s, feminist food scholars Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs called our attention to the social dimensions of sustainability. Thirty years later, a three-pillar understanding of sustainability is now the norm, and yet, the rights and needs of food and farmworkers continue to be denied and dismissed.  In this talk, Dr. Mares will revisit the idea of social sustainability as she highlights the contributions of farm and food workers in building more sustainable food systems, both locally and nationally.

 

Teresa Mares is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont and the Director for the Food Systems Graduate Program. Her research has focused primarily on issues of food access and labor justice amongst immigrant communities in the United States. She is the author of Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont (UC Press: 2019). She is currently working on a second book, co-authored with Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern entitled Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food System.