Sociological Inquiry , Vol. 79, No. 3, August 2009, 289–305 © 2009 Alpha Kappa Delta DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.2009.00291.x Blackwell Publishing Inc Malden, USA SOIN Sociological Inquiry 0038-0245 1475-682X ©2009 Alpha Kappa Delta XXX Original Article BREAKING THE FOOD CHAINS ALISON HOPE ALKON AND KARI MARIE NORGAARD Breaking the Food Chains: An Investigation of Food Justice Activism* Alison Hope Alkon, University of the Pacific Kari Marie Norgaard, Whitman College This article develops the concept of food justice, which places access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food in the contexts of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies. Through comparative ethnographic case studies, we analyze the demands for food justice articulated by the Karuk Tribe of California and the West Oakland Food Collaborative. Activists in these communities use an environmental justice frame to address access to healthy food, advocating for a local food system in West Oakland, and for the demolition of Klamath River dams that prevent subsistence fishing. Food justice serves as a theoretical and political bridge between scholarship and activism on sustainable agriculture, food insecurity, and environmental justice. This concept brings the environmental justice emphasis on racially stratified access to environ- mental benefits to bear on the sustainable agriculture movement’s attention to the processes of food production and consumption. Furthermore, we argue that the concept of food justice can help the environmental justice movement move beyond several limitations of their frequent place-based approach and the sustainable agriculture movement to more meaningfully incorporate issues of equity and social justice. Additionally, food justice may help activists and policymakers working on food security to understand the institu- tionalized nature of denied access to healthy food. This article examines the concept of food justice through comparative case studies of two racially and spatially distinct Northern California communities. Food justice places the need for food security—access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food—in the contexts of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies. Our analysis highlights the ability of food justice to serve as a theoretical and political bridge between existing work on sustainable agriculture, food insecurity, and environmental justice. The West Oakland Food Collaborative 1 and the Karuk Tribe of California frame their food insecurity and high rates of diet-related diseases not as the result of poor individual food choices, but from institutionalized racism. We follow how each community highlights the political and economic histories through which their key food producers, African American farmers and Native American fishermen, were denied the land and water necessary for food production. In addition to poverty, the contemporary racialized geographies (Kobayashi and