Meets: Thursday, May 31, 6:30-7:30pm
Civic Media Center, Gainesville
Florida Organic Growers (FOG) continues with its Food Justice Study Group for local residents in Gainesville and its surrounding communities.
Every other month, we discuss a book or documentary that has been selected to generate a conversation about how our contemporary food system can help us better understand the complex issues of race, class, gender, both our collective and individual histories, and how we might envision and achieve a more sustainable, socially-just society.
The Food Justice Study Group will next meet Thursday, May 31 from 6:30 to 7:30 pm at the Civic Media Center in Gainesville (address: 433 S Main St, Gainesville, FL 32601). All are welcome.
For the May meeting, we will discuss food sovereignty and compare decentralized, localized food systems with those designed from a more top-down, centralized structure.
The key text we will look at is Peter Kropotkin’s “Field, Factories and Workshops: or Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work.” A classic anarchist text, the book advocates food production on a cooperative, local level.
Supplementing Kropotkin’s work will be discussions on the Green Revolution, the post-World War II kibbutzim movement in Israel, the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas (Mexico), the international Via Campesina movement, and here in the U.S., the history and ideas behind collective Black land ownership in the 1960s and 1970s.
Online versions of other readings will be uploaded to Florida Organic Growers web site (www.foginfo.org) and FOG’s Facebook event page for the May 31 meeting.
As always, FOG welcomes all points of view in our discussions and also encourages attendees to share their own experiences as producers, consumers, citizens, students, and educators.
Questions? Suggestions? Please contact David Vaina, FOG’s Education and Outreach Director, at david@foginfo.org or at 352.377.6345 (ext. 130). D