In the spring of while waiting in line at Starbucks Coffeehouse in a Greenhaven, Sacramento strip mall, I picked up an issue of Sacramento Magazine to pass the time. However, these images serve not as markers of how broad-based the work of the farm-to-fork campaign is but rather the degree to which there are fissures that resist containment. In the Juneteenth Black Chefs Collective ad IMAGE 1 , what we see are a group of chefs whose foodwork is not connected with the spaces where they cook nor are there any relationships to farmer s who supply their raw food and bespoke artisanal products.
The background appears urban and residential. The barred screen door and the wooden stairs and porch indicate a roughened neighborhood. Is this a home or is it a restaurant? The chefs themselves are looking in all sorts of directions, some directly at the camera and two Pannell and E. Hayles are looking in the distance.
Similarly, when we see the members of the Yisrael Family Urban Farm IMAGE 2 they are photographed in what appears to be a residential yard, holding farm implements, and dressed in earth toned t-shirts with the name of the farm. Again, how their food work resonates with the farm-to-fork campaign is not clear. Are they the farm side of the equation to the Black chefs from the Juneteenth Collaborative? Where do they grow?
What is an urban farm? None of this is clear in the advertisement. The answers it provides are all oriented to the marketplace, through the purchase of goods or services. In this essay, I consider some of the images associated with the Farm-to-Fork Capital campaign to think about the power of this work to shape public discourse surrounding issues of food, place, and social change in the Sacramento area. My feminist methodology contains both auto-ethnographic and critical media studies within its toolkit β using juxtaposition as my space of inquiry.
I also explore the ways that the experiences of folks whose work should be at the center of any endeavor to create a just food system are pushed to the margins of the high-end farm-to-fork marketplace. I begin with describing the origins of the campaign in the next section with a focus on the representations of it in local publications. I end the essay with a description of a local urban farmer whose work provides a corrective to the myopic representations of farm-to-fork in the local media.
