Introducing the Food, Race, and Equity Initiative, Part II

by Heliya Izadpanah and Lavanya Sathyamurthy*

This is Part II of a two-part post.

Why Start Here?

by Lavanya Sathyamurthy

UCLA, home to the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy and the Critical Race Studies Program, is the perfect place to start a movement focused on infusing issues of equity into food law curricula. The Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy adopts a multi-faceted approach to legal research and scholarship, through courses, conferences, and academic collaboration. The Center offers various classes at the law school. Specifically, the ‘Food Law and Policy Seminar’ exposed me to a wide variety of approaches to food law. As my classmates presented on the right to food and food advertising to children, I realized that food law intersects with every area of law. Immediately, I wanted to connect food law with my background in critical race studies and, more specifically, my experiences as an Asian-American navigating the higher education food landscape. I wrote my paper about the importance of data disaggregation among racial groups within the Asian-American diaspora in crafting solutions to combat food insecurity at the University of California campuses.

I was able to further explore this intersection of race and food law with prominent law professors from across the country at the April 2024 Resnick Center conference, ‘Reflecting on the Past to Advance the Future: Celebrating a Decade of the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy.’ During one of the panels, ‘Teaching Food Law and Policy Panel and Discussion on Models, Innovations,’ the professors engaged in a fascinating conversation on how race plays a role in how they approach food law in their classrooms. Their excitement surrounding this topic and insistence that equity is an important part of this discipline demonstrate the necessity of incorporating these issues into the curriculum.

Luckily, faculty at the Center have already produced various white papers, journal articles, and reports that focus on the intersection between race and law. From Emilie K. Aguirre’s “The Importance of the Right to Food for Achieving Global Health” to Kim Kessler and Emily Chen’s “Food Equity, Social Justice, and the Role of Law Schools: A Call to Action,” scholars are already tackling the issue of how to make food production, access, and education more equitable. Critical race theory provides vocabulary for the impacts of structural racism on the food system, offering terms such as colorblindness, which refers to the flawed idea that policies should not take race into consideration. Applying critical race theory to food law is the key to interdisciplinary collaboration and will allow for a nuanced understanding of how racial inequities have pervaded every step of the food chain.

UCLA Law is the perfect home for this collaboration, given its Critical Race Studies program. The Critical Race Studies program is the first law school program of its kind in the United States and my main motivation for attending the law school. The program is home to many of the country’s foremost critical race theory legal scholars, such as Professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, famous for developing a theory to describe intersectional oppressions, which occur at the axes of multiple marginalized identities. The projects offered by the Critical Race Studies program highlight how race interacts with various aspects of the legal system. The Race and Re-entry Initiative provides legal services to those impacted by our destructive system of mass incarceration, which targets communities of color. The Race, Work and Economic Justice Clinic advances workplace-related rights for communities facing discrimination, based on race, sex, age, and various other identities. In the same vein, our project aims to promote legal scholarship that focuses on equity in the food system, so that students are aware of how structural discrimination affects our food system and are better equipped to advocate for marginalized communities.

*Heliya Izadpanah and Lavanya Sathyamurthy are students at UCLA Law.