By Kendrick Brown

The environmental club 17 for Peace and Justice uses its student body membership to leverage the University of Maryland’s privilege and resources to benefit communities struggling with environmental issues such as food justice.

The club is built around the 17 Principles of Peace and Justice and was originally established at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. It is part of UMD’s student body. The issue of food justice was discussed during Tuesday’s meeting.

A Boston University article describes Food justice as focusing on ensuring universal access to nutritious, affordable and culturally appropriate food. The club’s volunteer director, Sophie Bose, pointed out that this is an important topic in the fight for environmental justice. Many of the issues that hinder universal access to food are things that actively damage the environment.

“Food justice specifically relates to our club’s mission, because agriculture and food is a facet of the environment and has to do with access and rights of people who both produce food and people who consume it or have a lack of access,” said the senior environmental science and Spanish major.

There are four core injustices that lead to the issue of food justice: a lack of access to food, farmworker rights, land ownership and the rights certain people have to the land they work on and the environmental impacts of our food system.

Junior environmental policy and social data science major and club co-president Michelle Wang pointed towards a lack of access to food as the most important of these four injustices.

Wang cited her experience growing up around Baltimore and seeing many families leaving their own community to get the simplest of fresh produce.

This phenomenon is called a food desert, but the club would rather use the term food apartheid instead, as it more directly signifies the intentionality in the creation of this issue and the fact that it affects mostly people of color.

“So many communities don’t have access to transportation to take them to grocery stores,” Wang said. “Even if there are healthy places for them to obtain food, like grocery stores or farmers’ markets, they might not be economically viable because they’re so expensive.”

Kemisola Benson, a sophomore chemical engineering major and club secretary, also brought up the issue of food access.

Benson, a Prince George’s County resident, mentioned that in College Park alone, there are only a few major grocery stores outside of places like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, with a few smaller independent stores trying to fill the gap.

“The further out you move from College Park, the less you see those big-name food suppliers,” Benson said. “They do have those cultural stores, you can go to the mart and find African and Hispanic ingredients, but nothing up to the scale and production of a Whole Foods.”

Food justice is an ongoing issue, so across-the-board solutions haven’t really been brought to the table. However, the main solution Bose mentions is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the process of communities coming together to grow food for their own communities. That way, the community’s production and access to food are not reliant on corporations.

Bose specifically mentioned Community Farm Share in Montgomery County, a group that buys produce from local farmers and sets up mini markets at public schools in the area so that people who are food insecure can easily buy fresh produce for their families.

“I think that’s a step in the right direction for around here, like a local example of how we can start to change the way we think about food and food production,” Bose said.

Featured Image: UMD’s Community Learning Garden on April 1, 2026. Photo by Kendrick Brown.