Digitizing Food Justice: How Community-Powered Tech Tools Are Being Used to Redesign Neighborhoods and Reimagine Food Justice

In March 2020, when schools, restaurants, and businesses of all kinds shut down and forced the world indoors, food access became a central concern.Both rural and urban US communities experienced shortages of food and house hold items (like sanitizing wipes and toilet paper) as fearful patrons panic-bought and hoarded supplies.In low-income urban communities and neighborhoods of color, where grocery stores are already scarce and overcrowded, lines stretched around city blocks, and shoppers waited hours, often leaving empty-handed.Food banks and mutual aid efforts were incredibly helpful but fell short of completely meeting community needs.Local and national groups that have historically organized around issues of food justice decried the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated food insecurity and highlighted the structural inequalities that underpin access to healthy food.As we continue to adapt to the "new normal" wrought by the pandemic, new, power ful forms of activism are emerging that are shifting the food justice narrative, demo cratizing data and design, and digitizing the food justice landscape.This chapter is about how food justice advocates are using digital maps and Black and Brown cartographies (a component of the power ful field of Black geographies) as power ful tools to fight against racism and food inequality and advance food justice.To illuminate this process and its potential, we focus on a digital mapping tool called Streetwyze.Streetwyze has been recognized nationally as a platform that successfully engages and empowers lowincome and communities of color to affect positive neighborhood change (Akom et al. 2017; Akom et al. 2018).Developed originally for communities to share their experiences of the social and structural determinants of health locally, to date, the Streetwyze real-time community-driven data platform and process have been successfully implemented in at least thirty-five 12