In the United States, you can buy a cheeseburger on almost any corner in South Central Los Angeles. Finding a fresh tomato requires a forty-five-minute drive. That is not geography. That is food apartheid — a term coined by food justice advocate Karen Washington that names the agent rather than naturalising the condition.

This episode brings the food sovereignty argument into the cities of the Global North. Liz Christy and the Green Guerillas turning a rubble-filled lot in New York into the first community garden in 1973. Food Not Bombs — founded in 1980, over a thousand arrests in San Francisco for feeding people in public. Ron Finley planting vegetables outside his house in South Central and being cited by the city of Los Angeles for gardening without a permit.

The anarchist argument running through all of it: the problem is never scarcity. It is distribution. And the seed in the pavement is already the argument, made in soil.

Topics: food apartheid, guerrilla gardening, Food Not Bombs, Karen Washington, Liz Christy, Ron Finley, prefigurative politics, mutual aid, community gardens, direct action.

Further reading:

— Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020)

— Richard Reynolds, On Guerrilla Gardening (2008)

— Robert Gottlieb & Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (2010)

— Wendell Berry, Bringing It to the Table (2009)

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