Sweet Enough Already: Food Systems, Environmental Justice, and Health Equity

Environmental justice (EJ) is becoming recognized as involving not only the governance of air, water, and land but also as a part of everyday life systems that create vulnerability to danger, such as food systems. The food regimes created by industry in the Global South are particularly implicated as an understudied intersection between environmental destruction, noncommunicable diseases, and social inequality; here, the focus will be on refined sugar within these food systems as a site of socially normalized environmental injustice. Building on stories centered around communities in India, this research examines how the cultivation of sugarcane and sugar production lead to environmental destruction through intensive monoculture farming practices, pollution, and exploitative working conditions, whereas the prevalence and marketing of sugar have negative health impacts. This article claims that the damage done to people’s health through their diets is inseparable from inadequate environmental, agricultural, and food policies. Marginalized groups, including rural areas and poor families, suffer more environmental and dietary consequences than other social groups, although having little say in decision-making procedures. Instead of perceiving the consumption of processed sugar to be purely an individual decision, this article offers an approach grounded in food systems that considers justice as the core principle guiding this effort. The connection made between the regulation of the environment, the policy concerning health, and social protection provides a platform for achieving food justice and health equity. In the context of the EJ 2076 framework, this article proposes that for the next several decades, the concept of EJ will necessarily involve addressing preventable harms that are perpetuated by everyday practices like food systems.