Growing Hope
Narratives of Food Justice
Cambridge University Press 2025
Growing Hope takes a closer look at how nonfiction narratives of food justice can carry the promise of a better future in the face of grim realities. It brings together two kinds of narratives that are rarely considered in conjunction: stories about community gardening and stories about vegan food justice. Although certainly not all community gardeners are vegans, and not all vegans are gardeners, there is much common ground between these movements and the stories told by them are worth exploring as part of a larger narrative about creating a better and more equitable future.
In the US, which is the focal point of Growing Hope, this is especially true for the stories told by and about people of color and historically marginalized communities. Using an econarratological approach that is informed by food studies, vegan studies, environmental justice ecocriticism, and transmedia narratology, Growing Hope explores a selection of narratives about people who fight against structural injustice and the racist ideologies sustaining it: stories about defiant gardening and culinary self-empowerment across a variety of media ranging from personal reflections, critical essays, autobiographies, and cookbooks to blogs, videos, and documentary films.
PART I – “GROW: Visions of Defiant Gardening” – looks at community garden projects within and beyond the city through the lenses of documentaries such as Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden (2008), Todd Darling’s Occupy the Farm (2014), and Mark MacInnis’s Urban Roots (2011), along with the transmedia storytelling of farmer-activists such as Leah Penniman.
PART II “EAT: Narratives of Vegan Food Justice”– explores narratives that reject the notion that veganism as a diet or lifestyle is inherently white and elitist. Using frameworks of intersectionality and decolonization, films like Jasmine Leyva’s The Invisible Vegan (2019) and the transmedia worlds of Black vegan food bloggers and activist chefs such as Bryant Terry reimagine it as a hopeful way toward personal and community empowerment, and as a path toward food justice beyond the human.