Beyond Policy Battles: Rethinking Food Activism for What Comes Next
Like so many of my colleagues and friends, I’ve spent years working to change food policy and advance food sovereignty. I’ve petitioned, taught, written, and organized alongside others who continue to fight for healthier food, fairer farm policies, dignified labor, and more just systems. I deeply admire and honor this ongoing advocacy. It matters, and it continues to hold the line.
Yet, in these times of unraveling, I’ve been asking myself: what does “activism” look like when the institutions we once turned to are neither legitimate nor effective, and when they never served many to begin with?
In that questioning, I’ve noticed my own impulses: to fight harder, to rage, to blame those whose decisions cause so much harm. And while those responses can be justified, I’m learning they don’t always metabolize into something regenerative. That realization has led me to look back at the playbook many of us inherited. For decades, activism relied on courts, government agencies, media, universities, and the machinery of democracy as terrain for struggle. We filed lawsuits, lobbied for regulatory change, wrote op-eds to sway opinion. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. But at least the rules felt legible.
Now, many of those institutions are unraveling, or captured by the very forces causing harm. Courts roll back protections. Agencies dismantle safeguards. Media ecosystems fragment into misinformation. Democracy feels hollowed out. Social cohesion frays.
In this context, I’m sitting with uncomfortable questions:
What does activism mean when the terrain itself is collapsing?
How do we resist harm without recycling the very logic of domination we seek to escape?
What does food sovereignty mean when food itself is weaponized in wars, in trade, in public health crises, in subsidy schemes that trap farmers and communities alike?
Of course, none of this is simple. Initiatives grounded in mutual care, whether co-ops, farm-to-school programs, or regional food networks, operate within the same landscape of concentrated power that created our crises. Even though those initiatives are rooted in very different logics of relationship and care, history shows us how quickly grassroots gains can be co-opted, commercialized, or stamped out when they threaten dominant interests. I’ve also received criticism that focusing on these kinds of efforts is naïve or passive.
But I don’t believe this work is naïve. I see it as a different kind of power. Not the power to dominate, but the power to endure. The power to regenerate trust, belonging, and food security in ways centralized systems cannot. Protecting these efforts doesn’t mean ignoring structural power; it means discerning when engagement is strategic and when withdrawal is wiser. It means building alliances across divides, rooting in relationships strong enough that co-optation becomes harder and erasure less likely.
So perhaps activism in these end times looks less like fighting institutions and more like withdrawing legitimacy from them. Building parallel structures of belonging, nourishment, and resilience. Re-rooting power in communities, bioregions, and relationships. Perhaps it is less about slogans and campaigns, and more about weaving: connecting across divides, telling the truth about harm without dehumanizing, cultivating practices of care that can endure beyond collapse.
I still believe in resistance. But maybe the resistance most needed now is not against a single “evil” corporation, industry, policy, or party. It is against hopelessness, against cynicism, against the lie that nothing else is possible.
Food is a powerful site of this resistance: material, cultural, daily, relational. The way we grow, share, and eat food can either reinforce the logics of control and extraction, or embody sovereignty, regeneration, and community.
None of us can carry these questions alone. The times we’re living through call for shared inquiry, not individual certainty. If the old tools of activism are cracking, then perhaps our task is to explore together what comes next. So I want to invite you into this conversation:
What does activism mean to you in these times of unraveling?
How do you stay in integrity, even when old forms of action feel hollow?
Where are you seeing glimpses of regenerative resistance?
