Black, White, and Green aims to critically assess an emerging element of capitalist economic development—the green economy—and assertions that market-based exchanges can foster a triple dividend of profit making, environment benefits, and social justice. Not to be confused with companies guilty of “greenwashing” their brands and products to present themselves as more “green” and eco-friendly, the green economy and green growth embody the belief that environmentally minded capitalist innovation and green entrepreneurship are promising, if not critical, forces to drive positive environmental and social change. The book's author, Alison Hope Alkon, an assistant professor in the University of the Pacific's Department of Sociology, uses an in-depth comparative case study of two farmers' markets in the California Bay Area to evaluate several things, including how those involved in the green economy negotiate and rationalize the pursuit of social and environmental goals through economic exchange, and how the green economy measures up against more traditional forms of direct activism to produce change. This is a timely book, given the consistent momentum that multidisciplinary food studies has sustained in recent years.
By the author's own account, Black, White, and Green asserts that the green economy is deeply problematic as a means of addressing economic and racial inequality. The farmers' markets used to make this point are the North Berkeley and West Oakland Farmers Markets. The former is a thriving market, whose customer base is largely affluent and white. Applicants looking to become vendors at this market are assessed foremost for their environmental standards and achievements, including organic production as a compulsory element. The latter is located in a decidedly less affluent area in Oakland. Its managers aim to use the market as a way to support local black farmers and vendors, and to celebrate the black community, articulating primarily a social justice orientation. For a number of political and economic reasons, which Alkon describes, the West Oakland Farmers Market closed in 2009, and the North Berkeley Farmers Market remains active today.
This contrast sets the stage for a rich ethnographic study. Black, White, and Green is most successful in its retelling of the ongoing histories of food in the United States, and for its detailed interpretation of conversations and experiences amassed during the author's field work at the markets. On the first point, the book is unique in that it weaves together many food histories and movements that are seldom addressed so seamlessly in a single manuscript. Throughout Chapters 3 and 4, she contextualizes the modern-day case study markets by discussing many times and places when food has intersected with twentieth-century cultural, racial, and political change in California and the United States more broadly. Topics include the Black Panther Party and the fascinating role of food in the Party's anticapitalist campaigns, as well as the many facets of institutionalized racism that intersect with food and agriculture in the United States. She also reviews the counterculture and environmental movements of the same time period. Highlighting the significance of California in these movements, moreover, she notes influential institutions, symbols, and personalities such as Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, always remaining conscious of their role in perpetuating gender, race, or class inequalities alongside their achievements. In doing so, the author's work contributes to a growing canon of agri-food studies that takes history and geography seriously.
On the second strength of the book, Alkon provides a fascinating account of the farmers' markets as commercial and community food spaces that lay bare the ongoing tensions around difference in North America. These range from farmers' markets' noninclusivity because of their embodied class privilege and whiteness, to gender- and class-blindness among market managers whose work is so strongly attached to antiracism and antioppression. Further discussions reveal peoples' ambivalence toward traditional routes to social change such as the nonprofit sector, and the fascinating ways through which West Oakland market managers and vendors discursively align the market's focus on support for black farmers with leftist, counterculture politics. The book also confronts the unaffordability of many organic and locally grown foods for the poor. The unaffordability often results when vendors attempt to create the triple dividend by pricing these foods to reflect fair wages, sustainable production practices, or other costs that are typically externalized. The author recounts several disheartening conversations about this dilemma with North Berkeley market vendors, who see no dilemma at all but rather propound the rhetoric of individual choice and blame: that people who feel they cannot afford organic, sustainable, locally grown food need to be educated about these issues, or are simply failing to make conscientious consumption choices. The enthusiastic adherence to the green economy philosophy among farmers' market managers, vendors, and patrons is the same belief that Alkon concludes is insufficient and even counterproductive in the pursuits of environmental and social justice.
The book communicates this important insight well, but with a rather tenuous link to the green economy. From Chapters 3 through 6, the green economy receives very uneven, and often overly lean, treatment. From the outset, the book provides few, if any, concrete examples of other green enterprises. It is difficult, therefore, to evaluate the book's initial premise that farmers' markets are an apt case through which to interrogate the green economy. The fact that farmers' markets are not capitalist enterprises in themselves but rather a collection of very diverse businesses does not provide much clarity here. Moreover, Chapter 4 makes a powerful argument about the race-, class-, and gender-driven inclusivity and exclusivity of farmers' markets. The author, however, misses the opportunity to forge a strong link between case and theory, adding little more than short sentences at the end of subsections that lack much substance except to remind the reader that the insights about farmers' markets also extend to the green economy.
Chapters 6 and 7 go more deeply than this. Here, she makes important summative statements about the green economy's embodiment of neoliberal principles, and the problematic nature of market-based (i.e., the economic market, not the farming variety) approaches to creating genuine social and environmental change. Two main critiques—the nonparticipation of low-income people in the green economy and the green economy's limitations for creating social or environmental change—are an awkward pair. If green economic enterprise is deeply problematic from a social change perspective, why should readers be troubled by its noninclusive nature? These are two equally valid critiques of the food movement, yet their relationship needs to be reconciled.
Put another way, the case study of farmers' markets overwhelms the economic shift—the green economy—within which it is situated. The excellent critiques of the food movement are extended to the green economy, but without enough substantial discussion about neoliberalism, capitalism, several sociology traditions, or how exactly diverse farmers' market vendors and their enterprises qualify as capitalist (a point that is easy to take for granted but could benefit from some elaboration when it forms a premise for the entire book). It is very clear that the author's keen interest in the political and cultural economies of food and food movements drive this book, so much so that at times it reads like a case study in search of a timely framework, rather than the other way around. A more advanced reader should, then, read this book for its contribution to food studies and for a reminder of the vast penetration of neoliberal ideology and practice throughout the food system. Black, White, and Green's insights will be well received in fields including, but not limited to, food studies, critical race studies, urban studies, and cultural geography, and probably less so by those interested in sustainability studies, green business and innovation, or other aspects of the green economy.