On a sunny Saturday morning, sociologist and alternative food enthusiast Alison Hope Alkon hopped a train to West Oakland, California to begin a study on farmers’ markets in low-income communities of color. To Alkon, farmers’ markets represented an important tool in the pursuit of more sustainable food systems – but one she could not fully understand without reaching outside her native scene of predominantly White, and often middle class, environmental spaces. She would have no trouble fitting in with the crowd at the stereotypically “alternative” North Berkeley Farmers’ Market – but West Oakland, where 37% of residents live below the poverty rate and a mere 5% are White, was another story. Trying not to think about the fate of her academic career if this plan fell through, Alkon approached the manager of the West Oakland Farmers’ Market to ask for the market’s cooperation. Even her wealth of experiences with student cooperatives and organic farming could not have fully prepared Alkon for his response: “What are we going to get out of it?”

An intersection in West Oakland, where Alkon conducted much of her research; image courtesy Wikimedia commons

North Berkeley produce is priced at luxury levels, while the West Oakland Farmers Market traces its philosophical roots to the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program of the 1960s and 70s. Yet despite these differences, both markets are living examples of a green economy, inviting customers to change the world by changing what they buy. This paradox – starkly different circumstances, but deeply shared goals – is at the heart of Alkon’s 2012 book, Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy. The book is as much a record of Alkon’s personal journey trying to situate herself within academia and environmentalism as it is a comparison between the two farmers’ markets.

Through the histories of each market, Alkon traces a common shift from an anti-capitalist framework to one that prioritizes creating a green economy within capitalist structures. Historically, White counterculture and national movements for Black liberation have shared certain touchstones for environmental and social justice. This common rhetoric is often built on critiques of capitalism as exploitative, violent, and precarious in the long term, but Alkon highlights a new, more flexible perspective emerging in both farmers’ markets. Many participants view business as key to environmental and social good, rather than identifying it as a root evil; in many ways, capitalism is the very medium of their activism. It would be a mistake, Alkon posits, to confuse present-day farmers’ markets with their ideological predecessors. These contemporary ventures build on previous social movements, to be sure, but present a more transitional worldview that is in many ways more palatable to the broader public. Her argument offers a refreshing realism, but many of the big-picture implications she alludes to are drowned out by the details of her place-specific comparison. At times, her argument feels like a sentence unfinished.

Still, Black, White, and Green treads on rare and important ground, offering careful analysis of practices and beliefs that are otherwise taken for granted. Alkon, a veteran food activist, turned her attention to questions of race and environment after spending years in a predominantly White sustainable food scene. She tracks the evolution of her questions and methods, pinpointing her realization that any study she conducted around people of color’s participation in local, organic food systems would be incomplete without also examining the movement that shaped her own life. Alkon attempts to explain and contextualize the West Oakland communities’ use of farmers markets, including its celebration of Black heritage holidays and the ubiquity of collards and natural hair products. She also brings this analysis to her own community, considering everything from environmental imagery to the unwritten uniform of long hair and Birkenstocks. To this end, Alkon’s work sheds as much light on the origins of Berkeley’s iconic counterculture as it does on the perennial significance of food within the Black freedom struggle.

With vivid prose that speaks to the sensory experience of each farmers market, Alkon brings her (admittedly complex) queries to life. Each locale has its own cast of characters, whose distinct personalities reveal – but never flatten – the messy sociological landscape Alkon strives to interpret. Readers not only get a humanizing glimpse into the people who create these spaces, but into Alkon, as well: as she “makes the familiar strange,” she casts an inquisitive eye on herself, interrogating her role as a researcher and activist. Perhaps the most important piece of Black, White, and Green is the thread of Alkon’s internal struggle that winds its way through each chapter, and the humility with which she revisits her work, four years later, in the epilogue.

On the surface, Alkon writes about the way local food systems have been raced, classed, and gendered, but she does not forget that she, too, is being shaped by these identities. Alkon’s experiences as a white woman heavily affects how she interacts with these people and spaces, which in turn dictates the data she collects, as much as it does her analysis. As she observes in the epilogue, “the building of relationships is inextricable from the gathering of data.” The book ends not with solutions, but a reflection on Alkon’s own contribution, which she openly admits feels inadequate to her now. Yet this lack of resolution is perhaps Alkon’s greatest gift to readers: through her ambivalence, she reminds us that the pursuit of just sustainability is a process of constant adaptation and courageous imperfection.