By Eric Holt-Giménez, Yi Wang and Annie Shattuck

Introduction: Detroit, Michigan, the former Paris of the Midwest, is ground zero of the U.S. recession. Detroit is also a flashpoint for the northern food justice movement. There are over 300 community gardens in Detroit (Wahl 2010), an active food policy council, and a city food charter that explicitly addresses structural racism in the food system. Detroit’s food justice activists are also under threat from a large land grab. Detroit is not alone in this phenomenon. In Oakland, California—an historical seedbed of the food justice movement—food activists are also fighting an eminent domain ruling to give land to a large grocery chain, in the name of greening Oakland’s ‘food deserts’.