UC Davis

AbstractWinter 2022 Community Development Natasha L. Simpson - 998566180 “Worthy of Sustenance”: Disability and Food Justice Encouraged by the work of food justice organizations in addressing structural inequities, this thesis names how ableism is also a structural factor in the lives of disabled people when it comes to accessing food, questioning the assumption that these challenges are primarily due to bodily impairment. First locating the connections between the food justice and disability justice movements, this thesis articulates the need for disability, and the impacts of ableism in the lives of disabled people, to be considered as it relates to food justice. This thesis asks the questions: 1) How are food justice organizations both subverting and/or fulfilling dominant discourse, specifically when it comes to health and illness/disability? 2) How might a larger context of indigenous West African cosmologies and legacies of Black healing activism inform food justice activism, especially the food activism of the Black Panthers, and how does this continuing vein of food justice offer a uniquely powerful basis for furthering disability justice? And 3) What might a liberatory discourse and practice be, if disability justice informs food justice, and what might this look like in everyday practice? The aim of this work is to illuminate that the nature of ableism is so insidious in our language and culture that it can be challenging to see and articulate, and certainly to challenge, especially when it comes to something as charged as “health” and food, survival-based concerns. How can we both see and enact more liberatory ways of being with disability?