Group items tagged

One problem is the price of the produce. Many of us have had the experience of turning up at our local farmers' market, armed with tote bags, only to slink back to the supermarket after seeing the prices of the vegetables on offer. This is hardly the fault of the individual farmers. Still, as Pilgeram points out in a paper that she published in 2011, the costs involved with running such an operation mean that the benefits are inevitably affordable only to a small (generally white and middle-class) portion of society.

But it's a limited victory, Pilgeram writes in her most recent paper, published in November of 2018, and empowers only a certain class of women "while leaving [the capitalist] system basically entirely unaffected"—and which also risks gentrifying the towns to which these farmers move, further entrenching the country's class divide.

"The economic system that we have in place makes it impossible, really, to create a socially just food system. It's not possible under capitalism," Pilgeram says. Without a drastic change to this system, sustainable agriculture risks becoming an "esoteric side note" to conventional agriculture, she adds—or simply another way for those with money to live healthier lives than those without.