Food Studies and Disability Justice

Robust scholarship at the intersection of disability studies and food studies is rare. Disability scholars who study and write about experiences of disabled people in relation to food rarely do so in conversation with food scholars. Conversely, the significant body of food scholarship that considers disability (for example farm-worker injury, pesticide exposure and toxicity, obesity and diet-related disease, food access and insecurity, government entitlements) rarely does so through an analysis of ableism as a structure of power that shapes the food systems and food access, cultures, and movements. Fat studies, with its critique of healthism, is an important exception. Disability studies distinguishes between the medical model of disability, which locates physical or cognitive impairment as the source of a person’s disability, and the social model of disability, which focuses on barriers due to the ways societies and built environments are structured. Disability is not understood as an essentialized state but as a political one, and a valuable epistemological vantage point that can offer crucial insights into the ways power organizes our worlds. Crip theory, drawing heavily from queer studies, provides robust critiques of the ways normativity operates to pathologize disabled lives. Disability is recognized as a category that has shifted with time in relation to white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and settler-colonialism, as these are dominant discourses that define “normality.” Disabled lives are understood as whole, worthy, and celebrated; while ableist norms that position disability as always in need of a cure are resisted. Disability studies emerged from the disability civil rights movement just as food studies traces its origins to food security and sovereignty movements. In the last few decades both have developed more radical subfields; the borders between their respective academic and activist branches are porous. Disability justice centers queer and BIPOC disabled people who critique the disability rights movement for its single issue, rights-based focus. While state-centered gains such as the American Disability Act are crucial, they are seen as insufficient and dangerous in that they curtail broader political mobilization and extend state control deeper into the realm of the personal. More radical branches of food justice scholarship and activism share a similar intersectional analysis of power and theory of change. The small number of scholars who work at the intersection of food and disability justice scholarship all recognize the potential synergies between these movements, and they call food scholars to take insights from critical disability studies to expand the praxis of food justice.