How changing our food practices can contribute to environmental justice, sustainability, and anti-racism

Aaron Gross, Ph.D. gives a powerful talk on the question of, “can university food become an anti-oppressive practice?” for the Care for our Common Home Series

Brittany Lang / Feature Editor / The USD Vista

The majority of students fill their plates at the dining hall or ask for their usual order at their favorite coffee shop without giving it much thought. Ethically engaging with our food choices is not something financially-struggling students do on a daily basis. 

The Care for our Common Home Series features speakers from the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences each week to give talks that reflect on pressing environmental concerns. The goal of the series is to examine the challenges civilization is currently facing and offer unique approaches to tackle the climate crisis. Each week the series focuses on a different theme — water, energy, food, or extinction. 

Aaron Gross, Ph.D., is a professor of theology and religious studies at USD. His area of expertise is in Jewish, animal, and food studies. He is the founder of the food and farming advocacy group, Farm Forward, and is co-leading the USD’s Food Studies Initiative alongside Christopher Carter, Ph.D., and Nick Riggle, Ph.D. 

Gross’ work is centered around an interdisciplinary approach to theorizing the nature of oppression, and resistance to it, by incorporating insights from animal studies, ecofeminism, and race theory. 

On Oct. 13, Gross’ talk for the Care for Our Common Home Series was titled, “Can university food become an anti-oppressive practice?” Gross discussed how humans usually do not think about food as something tied to oppression, but that he thinks using the term “oppression” is very helpful in understanding the profound ramifications of our eating choices.

“I think fundamentally what I am talking about is a challenge to our moral imagination — the way in which we conceptualize what food is,” Gross said. “Somehow when we look at our plates, we don’t see a great issue of injustice.”

The purpose of his talk was to encourage university students to understand how by changing the ways in which we eat, we can quite literally change the planet — this in and of itself is an ethical challenge. 

Gross discussed how even though industry shapes our world profoundly, a third of the land on the planet that is arable is actually occupied by livestock and the crops we use to feed that livestock. 

“We live on a planet that is a farm and how we farm shapes the planet,” Gross said. 

Animal agriculture has a disproportionate impact on the environment, and therefore has the potential to shape it for better or for worse.

The overwhelming majority of scientists and climate change experts see decarbonization and achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as an absolute necessity to combat climate change — essentially seeing the issue of pollution as being solely caused by factories. However, Gross claimed this is not the whole truth. 

“Even if all of the goals are achieved but dietary patterns see no shift, the world will fail to meet the Paris Agreement,” he said.

The Paris Climate Agreement does not address dietary trends specifically or the impact that the consumption of animal protein has on our environment. Even the countries who have taken drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have not done anything in terms of addressing diet and have let current dietary trends continue. Gross emphasized that this is not enough. 

He discussed how animal agriculture today is dominated by factory farming. These are corporations that have structures and demands that are put upon them that make them behave in ways that are morally abhorrent, he said.

“The essence of the factory farm system is an oppressive system,” Gross stated. “They have no interest in anything but following their own agenda and they have no interest in protecting the ecology of our planet.”

Gross asked the audience to consider who pays the largest price when we live in a world where the water and air is constantly being polluted, animals are constantly being poisoned, and our microbiome is being disrupted. According to Gross, it will always be the people in underprivileged positions.

“It is going to be whoever is vulnerable, whoever can’t get out of the way and in the U.S., that will end up being overwhelmingly people of color,” he stated.

To support this argument, Gross touched on the slaughterhouse deaths that came as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus spread, employees stopped showing up to work as it became too dangerous. It is important to note that the majority of slaughterhouse workers are people of color.

Slaughterhouse jobs already have the highest turnover and injury rate in the country, but the heads of these corporations knew they did not have the ability to stop the spread of COVID-19. However, Gross claimed they were much less concerned with the actual deaths of their workers if they made them return to work, but how it would hurt them financially as they would be liable for these deaths. Nevertheless, in April President Donald Trump leveraged the Defense Production Act (DPA) to order slaughterhouses and meat packing plants to remain open and demand their employees get back to work.

Gross stated how he knew people were ready to put humans in harm’s way to produce meat, but he didn’t think he would see a U.S. president ordering slaughterhouse workers back to work during a global pandemic.

“The system was broken long before COVID — the narrative about it breaking as a result of COVID is a little bit silly,” Gross said. “What we have is a fully oppressive system, operating in the way it has always operated.”

Gross emphasized that this does not have to be our reality and that by making changes to the ways in which we choose to eat is the first step to dismantling these oppressive practices and institutions. 

“Food can be creating aggressively positive change in the world,” Gross said. “We don’t have to settle for just a little bit less cruelty or a little bit less climate change.”

Gross discussed how although changing the food system is very hard to do as individuals, if we work together within the USD community, change can be achieved through collective action.

The USD Food Studies Initiative is just getting started this semester and will be open to students soon. It will involve a speaker series and discussion events about our common values and how we can then implement these values into the ways in which food on campus is produced. It also seeks to create a food studies minor at USD.

“We want to shape the USD campus into a model of how universities can leverage food scholarship and food services to build community on and off campus, and establish more engaged and ethical food ways,” Gross said. 

He argued that it is the rule rather than the exception that all of the sickness and cruelty that occurs in our environment tends to affect certain human beings. The USD Food Initiative has been created to invite us to ethically engage with the food choices we make as students. If we make necessary changes to our diets, we can then utilize food as a vehicle for addressing anti-Black and Indigenous racism, food sovereignty, climate change, violence toward animals, and the ways in which all of these issues intersect.