For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Politics and Democracy page, Fair Trade & Social Justice page, and our All About Organics page.

“Whose food? Our food!” This was the rallying cry at the first Occupy Big Food event on Saturday in Zuccotti Park. The rally, which I led with Erika Lade, a graduate student in NYU’s Food Studies program, gathered about 100 people with the goal of connecting the larger Occupy Wall Street effort to the food justice movement.

NYU professor of Nutrition and Food Studies Marion Nestle was the event’s featured speaker. Although Nestle was intimidated at the prospect of using the human microphone for the first time, she picked up the unusual speaking technique quickly. “I’m an academic who studies social movements,” she told the crowd. “Occupy Wall Street is a social movement. Occupy Big Food is a social movement.”

Occupy Big Food has three main goals: To raise public consciousness, to put pressure on food corporations to change their destructive practices, and to organize and unify Americans in an alternative food system. As I told the audience that day: We have two choices. We can create our own food system now, or we can watch as corporations continue their destruction of our food, our environment, our health, and our economy.

As we have seen at Occupy Wall Street, collective action is crucial. We were there with the hope that the food movement can follow Occupy Wall Street’s model to unify individual voices into one collective roar. 

For social and political movements to make real change they must reach across social boundaries, especially race or class-based ones. Bill Granfield, president of the Unite Here Local 100 food service workers union, came to the rally with local 100 members who work in the cafeterias and executive dining rooms of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and JP Morgan Chase. These companies are under contract with some of the largest food distributors in the world, such as Sodexo, Compass, and Aramark. Granfield describes the workers as “New York’s working people of Wall Street.”