First Food Justice = Food Justice = Environmental Justice: A Call to Address Infant Feeding Disparities and the First Food System

Abstract

Abstract

American food and environmental justice agendas tend to overlook “the first food system,” including the actors, institutions, and cultures surrounding infant foods and feeding. These agendas also frequently fail to regard “first food justice,” the condition where all babies can exercise their full right to eat and caregivers their right to feed. These omissions are problematic because the first food system and its inequities effect all humans and the environment, including in ways that integrally intersect with issues already central to food and environmental justice—such as health, workers' rights, economic development, and notions of race, class, and gender. Moreover, it misses what I argue is a particularly courageous, innovative, and impactful modern collective effort to secure social and ecological equity for all: what I term the “first food justice movement.” In briefly discussing the first food system's injustices and the first food justice movement's efforts to address them, I provide evidence that incorporating the first food system into our scholarship will advance food and environmental justice in both theory and practice.