Creating food commons: successes and barriers to creating just sustainable food systems in ecological intentional communities

This article examines ecological intentional communities (EICs) as models of just sustainable food systems. Drawing on ethnographic research at three EICs and 80 in-depth interviews across 24 EICs, I investigate how these communities attempt to create a “food commons” through collective production, local consumption, and communal meals. I find that while EICs demonstrate the transformative potential of food commoning, they also reproduce racial inequality through obscured racial hierarchies in decision-making, cultural whiteness, and individualist moralism. Addressing these inequities is essential for EICs, and society, to realize just sustainable food systems. This article contributes to environmental sociology by 1) exploring the successes and challenges of EICs in modeling just sustainabilities in the food system; and 2) extending racialized organization theory to non-hierarchical agri-food organizations.