Marginalizing Access to the Sustainable Food System: An Examination of Oakland's Minority Districts [Hardcover]

Marginalizing Access to the Sustainable Food System is a comprehensive analysis of the barriers and opportunities confronting minority communities ability to access healthy, fresh foods. It exposits the meaning of marginalization through several measurement indicators examined from the cross sections of history, space, and participation. These indicators include minority participation in agriculture, the delivery scope of CSA farms, the presence and location of farmers markets in the minority districts, the density of food stores, the availability of fresh produce in grocery stores in minority districts, the placement of urban food gardens in minority districts, and minority residents participation in the sustainable food system. Camille Tuason Mata applies this analysis to three minority districts in OaklandChinatown, Fruitvale, and West Oaklandand examines the patterns of marginalization in relation to the sustainable food system of the California Bay Area.Camille Tuason Mata is a Philippine-born American who has been studying food systems and sustainability since 2000, when she began her graduate studies in urban and regional planning at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She subsequently went on to complete a MA in social change and development at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, in 2002 and a MA in liberal arts with a concentration in environmental studies at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 2009.

This is a substantial contribution to food security literature. Her interdisciplinary approach does a fine job of placing her original research within a larger context. Ralph Lutts, coordinator of the MA Concentration in Environmental Studies, Goddard College

Camille Tuason Mata has provided a very comprehensive and extensive study of the ways minorities have been marginalized from the sustainable food system in California. . . . Her thesis is applicable to many places, including India, where farmers are pushing tl!