Sustaining Accessibility: Where Food and Disability Justice Converge

This year CANDOR is highlighting the Food Justice work that we do in the local community with CANDOR Farm, West End Free Market and Part & Parcel. You only need to look at the 10 Principles of Disability Justice created by Sins Invalid to understand why our Disability Justice organization is committed to integrating food justice into our mission.

 Through cross-movement solidarity we strive to engage with all justice movements and be intentionally intersectional.

The food justice movement considers access to healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant foods a human right and addresses the structural barriers that inhibit that access. So, food security, access, sovereignty - they should not be contingent on a certain level of productivity, transportation, income, physical ability, or capacity to benefit from the collective abundance that already exists. A just food system ensures that nourishment is available to everyone, not only to those who can navigate the barriers our current systems have built.

It seems that often food justice efforts discuss racial and economic disparity, or overlap with environmentalist movements aiming to eliminate unnecessary industrial food waste when growing food for community distribution. 

However, food justice literature rarely mentions its intersection with disability outside of the acknowledgement that chronic illness can be caused or exacerbated by lacking nutrition. There does not seem to be a uniform and consistent effort within the food justice sphere to directly bring awareness to the specific barriers many disabled people face to secure food.

Households with an adult unable to work due to disability experience food insecurity at rates around 28%, compared to about 7% of households without disabilities (USDA Economic Research Service). National survey data also shows that 24% of disabled adults report food insufficiency compared to 9% of nondisabled adults (Food Research & Action Center). 

Disability type further affects risk: studies find food insecurity rates of 16% among people with physical disabilities, 23% among those with cognitive or mental disabilities, and up to 32% for individuals with multiple disabilities (National Institutes of Health).

When we highlight Food Justice within CANDOR we are trying to model new frameworks that challenge systems that perpetuate , and instead create and maintain inclusivity and liberation for all. 

We are attempting for our food justice efforts to be shaped to consider accessibility factors that have gone unnoticed. Through food systems built with disabled people in mind we can combat systems of inequality that contribute to disparities in access.

At last year's conference, CANDOR's Farm and Market Manager, Abijah Gattis, said that his goal for the farm was to "grow enough to sustain the work and grow amply to support the community". 

We must ensure that what we build is creating and maintaining a sustainable food system. In practice, that means strengthening local networks of growers, distributors, and neighbors so that food moves through relationships rather than extraction. It also means designing systems that center access, dignity, and long-term resilience for Disabled and Elder community members who are too often excluded from traditional food systems.