Food for Justice was a Junior Research Group based at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies at Heidelberg University. It was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) from 2019 until 2025.

Food for Justice looks into social mobilization targeted at injustices in the food system and into social and political innovations that address inequalities undermining food security such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality. Food for Justice aims at providing a theoretical and conceptual framework – grounded on empirical research – to analyze social and political initiatives that address inequalities based on class, gender, race, ethinicity, rurality, citizenship, and categorical divisions between humans and more-than-humans, thus building ecological, just, and democratic food politics.

Context

Increasingly, citizens perceive the global food system as part of the historical causes of the ecological crisis and persisting hunger in the world. Reasons for these causal links have long been known, such as the use of food for profit, the gap between production and consumption, conflicts over land and water, exploitative labor relations, the energy matrix, and waste generation, among others. Nevertheless, research on food security and the bioeconomy tend to rely on the same solutions, i.e., searching for technological fixes toward a profit-oriented model that exploits living matter.

To complexify the debate and contribute to socio-environmental transformation, more knowledge about which food system citizens desire is needed. Further, it is important to explore which alternative knowledge and technologies already successfully handle such claims for Justice within food politics and how to redirect public policies towards a just, democratic, and ecological food system.