This Element Growing Hope takes a closer look at how such narratives can carry the promise of a better future in the face of grim realities. It explores narratives about people who fight against food injustice and the ideologies sustaining it: stories about defiant gardening and culinary self-empowerment.

Growing Hope takes a closer look at how such narratives can carry the promise of a better future in the face of grim realities. It brings together two kinds of narratives that are rarely considered in conjunction: stories about urban community gardening and stories about vegan food justice. It shows that there is much common ground between these movements and that the stories told by them are worth exploring as part of a larger narrative about creating a better and more equitable future. In the United States, this is especially true for the stories told by and about people of color and their historically marginalized communities. Employing an econarratological approach informed by critical food studies, environmental justice ecocriticism, and transmedia studies, Growing Hope explores a selection of narratives about people who fight against food injustice and the ideologies sustaining it: stories about defiant gardening and culinary self-empowerment.