Food Justice

Artwork by justseeds

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Table of Contents

What is Food Justice
The History of the US Food System
The Real Farm to Table: Farm and Food Worker Rights
Environmental Racism in Our Food System
Food Apartheid
Food Sovereignty
Urban Ag: Intentional vs Non Intentional
Decolonizing of the Diet
Food Justice Resources

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What is Food Justice

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Source: Our Kitchen Table Justice Ok

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“Food Justice is communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat healthy food. Healthy food is fresh, nutritious, affordable, culturally-appropriate, and grown locally with care for the well-being of the land, workers, and animals. People practicing food justice leads to a strong local food system, self-reliant communities, and a healthy environment.” Just Food

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Food + Justice = Democracy: LaDonna Redmond at TEDxManhattan 2013

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The History of the US Food System

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“The industrial food system as we know it today is the child of the plantation system of agriculture. They are both built upon exploited labor, dispossession and exploitation of land from indigenous peoples, the destruction of rural culture and land, consolidation of power and land in the ruling classes, and the forced migration of peoples. The plantation system was the first major system used by the colonial forces in their violent transformation of the Earth into land, people into property, and nature into a commodity – all to be sold on the “fair” market.” Blain Snipstal, Why Hunger

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Creation of US Food System

• Settler Colonialism – 1600s-1800s
  • Colonial plantation system
    • Agricultural mass production of commodity crops grown on large farms called plantations
    • Based on ethnic cleansing & exploitation of people/resources for maximum profit
  • Catholic 1493 Doctrine of Discovery
    • Allowed land inhabited by non-Christians to be “discovered”
      • Legally conquered, enslaved and exploited by Christian rulers
    • Became the basis of all European claims
      • Jefferson later used for westward expansion
      • US Supreme Court upheld in 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh denying Natives and right to their land
      • Still law of the land that prevents any land returned to Natives
• Dispossession of Indigenous Land – 1600-present
  • 1776-present, US seized 1.5 billion acres of Native land
  • Ethnic Cleansing, genocide, broken treaties, removal acts, gold rushes, Westward expansion, manifest destiny
• Exploitation of workers
  • Indentured Servants – 1600s
  • Slavery – 1619-1865
    • Created enormous wealth for American Economy, Industrial Rev, Western Europe
      • Majority cotton in world industrial production pre-1861, grown by US slaves
      • Estimated $97 trillion to pay hours of uncompensated work
  • Share Cropping – 1865-1950s
    • Black families rent land (often from former slave owners) to farm in exchange for a portion of yearly crop
    • Most sharecroppers were in constant debt (debt peonage)
    • Many workers were forced into share cropping due to vagrancy laws, apprenticeship programs, lynching
  • Convict Leasing – 1865-1927 (roots of present day prison slave labor)
    • System that criminalized black life then leased black prisoners out as slaves to plantations and other industries

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Restricting Land Ownership for People of Color

Source: Josh Tucker

• Slave Codes (1639-1865)
  • Series of codes solidifying racial slavery in the colonies
    • Prevented free black people from owning farmland
    • South Carolina Negro Act of 1740 – Outlawed slaves growing food for themselves
• Failure of 40 Acres & a Mule (1865)
  • Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, Freedmen’s Bureau
  • 40,000 former freed slaves got land
  • President Johnson overturned
    • 38,000 had their land confiscated back to confederates
    • Worth $6.4 Trillion today
  • Last time US gov talked about reparations
• Black Codes, Vagrancy laws, Jim Crow (1865-1965)
  • Post Civil War laws in South restricting black freedom
    • Forcing them into sharecropping or prison labor
  • Restricted black people from renting or leasing farm land

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME | Prologue | PBS

• Failure of Freedman Bank (1865-1874)
  • Loss $3 million of free black people’s money
    • $63 million in today’s standard
• California Alien Land Law of 1913 and 1920
  • Prevented non citizens from owning land
  • Targeted mainly Asian immigrants
    • 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to white people only
    • 1868 14^th Amendment allowed black people to become citizens
    • 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended naturalization restrictions

“Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” —Malcolm X

Further Readings

• Smithsonian: The Massacre of Black Sharecroppers That Led the Supreme Court to Curb the Racial Disparities of the Justice System

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Black Farm Land Theft

• 1910 (45 years after Civil War)
  • Freed slaves & descendants accumulated 15 million acres
    • Mostly in South and mostly used for farming
    • 925,000 black farmers (14% of all farms in the US)
• 20^th Century Black land loss (1910 – present)
  • African Americans lost about 90% of their farmland
    • 600,000 black farmers were pushed off there land
• Today
  • 45,000 black farmers remained (less than 2% of all farmers)
    • Around 2 million acres left of black farms

“The two critical pieces within the development of the industrial food system have been – and will continue to be – land and labor. And within the context of land and labor within US agrarian history we can say that, the particular dispossession and colonization of indigenous peoples’ land and then the subsequent dispossession of Black-owned land in the 20th century, consistent discrimination and violence towards people of color and migrants in the food system, the dwindling population of small-to-medium scale farms, and the historically persistent exploitative use of people of color as farmworkers is important to name.” Blain Sniptal – Why hunger

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HuffPost: Forgotten Farmers: African-American Land Loss | This New World

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PBS: How southern black farmers were forced from their land, and their heritage

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What Happened to All the Black Farmers? | NBC Left Field

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Types of Land Theft

• Deceit
  • “When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping. This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars.” Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
• White terrorism
  • “There is this idea that most blacks were lynched because they did something untoward to a young woman. That’s not true. Most black men were lynched between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.” Ray Winbush, Institute for Urban Research, at Morgan State U.
• USDA racial discrimination
  • For loans, benefits, credit, subsidies, insurance, disaster funds through 20^th century
    • Pigford (1999) and Pigford II (2008) settlement cases
  • “Soon after defeating Carter in the 1980 presidential election, the newly-elected Reagan abolished the USDA’s Civil Rights Division, leaving Black farmers open to blatant, sustained, state-sanctioned and state-protected discrimination for over 15 years. In 1997, Black farmers brought a class-action lawsuit against the USDA, and a judge decided in their favor in 1999. The average settlement was approximately $50k. “That wasn’t enough,” Cooper tells ESSENCE. “There has to be some kind of repair of the harm done systematically. That $50k doesn’t pull Black farmers out of the debt they incurred trying just to stay afloat. It is no where near what they lost financially, nor is it near how much land Black people lost on a personal and community level.” Kirsten West Savali, She, The People: Dara Cooper On Food Redlining, Reparations, And Freeing The Land
    
  • “Black farmers tell stories of USDA officials—especially local loan authorities in all-white county committees in the South—spitting on them, throwing their loan applications in the trash and illegally denying them loans. This happened for decades, through at least the 1990s. When the USDA’s local offices did approve loans to Black farmers, they were often supervised (farmers couldn’t spend the borrowed money without receiving item-by-item authorization from the USDA) or late (and in farming, timing is everything). Meanwhile, white farmers were receiving unsupervised, on-time loans. Many say egregious discrimination by local loan officials persists today.” Chris Kromm, The Real Story of Racism at the USDA
• Heir’s Property and Partition sales
  • Most black landowners in 1910 couldn’t create wills (Jim Crow)
    • Land was inherited as Heir’s Property, split up among all surviving heirs
    • Very limited with what you can do without a clear deed (mortgages, home improvement loads, relief aid, etc.)
  • Developers will buy an heir’s portion of property then force a partition sale forcing everyone to sell their land
    • Developers outbid all the heirs while still getting the land at a fraction of the market value
  • Half of all land loss in the South (worth billions of dollars) was stolen through Partition sales
  • “The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized it as “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss.” Heirs’ property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land — 3.5 million acres, worth more than $28 billion. These landowners are vulnerable to laws and loopholes that allow speculators and developers to acquire their property. Black families watch as their land is auctioned on courthouse steps or forced into a sale against their will.” Lizzie Presser, Propublica
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Queen Quet at USDA Heirs Property Listening Session

• Property Tax Delinquency
  • Over valuing/overtaxing black land was a common practice to force black farmers into foreclosure by not affording their property tax
  • Being a black business in a white supremacy world
    • Excluding black farmers from markets and business loans, devaluing their products, intimidating customers, business loans, depriving of labor, etc.
    • Corporate Giants (Koch Brothers, etc) discrimination against black farmers
  • “The manipulation of tax-delinquency laws by white officials in the South as a practice and custom of “depriving Negroes of their property through subterfuge.” N.A.A.C.P. special counsel Thurgood Marshall (1940)

Propublica: How a Top Chicken Company Cut Off Black Farmers, One by One

“…The shadow of slavery, sharecropping and Jim Crow has left black farmers in an especially precarious position. Their farms tend to be smaller and their sales lower than the national average, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While white farmers benefited from government assistance such as the Homestead Act and land-grant universities, black farmers were largely excluded from owning land and accumulating wealth. In recent decades, black farmers accused the USDA of discriminating against them by denying them loans or forcing them to wait longer, resulting in a class-action lawsuit that settled for more than $1 billion.

Along with these historical disadvantages, black farmers say they have also encountered bias in dealing with some of the corporate giants that control their livelihood. In complaints filed with the USDA between 2010 and 2015, Ingrum and another black farmer in Mississippi said Koch Foods discriminated against them and used its market control to drive them out of business.

After the complaints by the farmers, an investigator for the USDA, which is responsible for regulating the industry, looked into Koch Foods’ dealings with those farmers and found “evidence of unjust discrimination,” according to a 700-page case file obtained by ProPublica. The investigator concluded that Koch Foods violated a law governing meat companies’ business practices.

The Trump administration has cut back on enforcing this law, with the USDA now conducting fewer investigations and imposing fewer fines, as ProPublica has reported. Koch Foods hasn’t faced any penalty…”

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Esquire: So Much of Our National History Is Lost to Guilty Amnesia

Most times, the word “magisterial” gets tossed around as a loose synonym for, “that book I’ve been meaning to read but, at the moment, I’m using it to flatten out that old Moby Grape album.” But Vann R. Newkirk’s opus in The Atlantic about the decades of fraud and deceit perpetrated on African-American farmers in Mississippi is a job of work that more than qualifies.

Unlike their counterparts even two or three generations ago, black people living and working in the Delta today have been almost completely uprooted from the soil—as property owners, if not as laborers. In Washington County, Mississippi, where last February TIAA reportedly bought 50,000 acres for more than $200 million, black people make up 72 percent of the population but own only 11 percent of the farmland, in part or in full. In Tunica County, where TIAA has acquired plantations from some of the oldest farm-owning white families in the state, black people make up 77 percent of the population but own only 6 percent of the farmland. In Holmes County, the third-blackest county in the nation, black people make up about 80 percent of the population but own only 19 percent of the farmland. TIAA owns plantations there, too. In just a few years, a single company has accumulated a portfolio in the Delta almost equal to the remaining holdings of the African Americans who have lived on and shaped this land for centuries.

This is not a story about TIAA—at least not primarily. The company’s newfound dominance in the region is merely the topsoil covering a history of loss and legally sanctioned theft in which TIAA played no part.

The historical statistics are staggering, and appalling.

Owners of small farms everywhere, black and white alike, have long been buffeted by larger economic forces. But what happened to black landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta, is distinct, and was propelled not only by economic change but also by white racism and local white power. A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.

And, while the legacy of slavery played a role in this intergenerational theft, and while Jim Crow and institutional racism were as destructive to these lives as they were to so many others, as Newkirk writes, the major heist happened more recently—and, with a painful irony, during the height of the civil rights movement.

As the historian Pete Daniel recounts, half a million black-owned farms across the country failed in the 25 years after 1950. Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund, a group founded in 1972 to fight the problem of dispossession, has estimated that something on the order of 6 million acres was lost by black farmers from 1950 to 1969. That’s an average of 820 acres a day—an area the size of New York’s Central Park erased with each sunset. Black-owned cotton farms in the South almost completely disappeared, diminishing from 87,000 to just over 3,000 in the 1960s alone. According to the Census of Agriculture, the racial disparity in farm acreage increased in Mississippi from 1950 to 1964, when black farmers lost almost 800,000 acres of land. An analysis for The Atlantic by a research team that included Dania Francis, at the University of Massachusetts, and Darrick Hamilton, at Ohio State, translates this land loss into a financial loss—including both property and income—of $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in today’s dollars.

There are so many parts of our national history that are lost to guilty amnesia because we don’t ever want to reckon with them. I happened on Newkirk’s piece while scouring around for details on the “Red Summer” of 1919, which is an unjustly obscure event all on its own. But I knew nothing of the events described in this story. Eugene O’Neill was right—there is no present or future, only the past, over and over again.

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Further Readings

• New Food Economy: How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against black farmers
• Modern Farmer: How Did African-American Farmers Lose 90 percent of Their Land?
• Propublica: How a Top Chicken Company Cut Off Black Farmers, One by One

• Atlantic: The Great Land Robbery

• The Nation: The Real Story of Racism at the USDA

• The Nation: African Americans Have Lost Untold Acres of Land Over the Last Century
• Propublica: Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It.
• NY Times: Black People’s Land Was Stolen
• Detroit Metro Times: Study finds Detroit’s foreclosure crisis fueled by illegal tax assessments
• End Unconstitutional Tax Foreclosures
• The Atlantic Black Star: From 15 Million Acres to 1 Million: How Black People Lost Their Land
• NY Times: Tourism Enriches an Island Resort, But Hilton Head Blacks Feel Left Out
• Atlanta Black Star: 8 Heartbreaking Cases Where Land Was Stolen From Black Americans Through Racism, Violence and Murder
• WUNC: Land Speculators Are Legally Forcing Black Southerners Off Family Land

• The New Food Economy: USDA gave almost 100 percent of Trump’s trade war bailout to white farmers

• Propublica: Elizabeth Warren Announces Plans to Help Heirs’ Property Owners

  • Washington Post: Black farmers say Warren’s plan wouldn’t solve their biggest problem

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Land Giveaways for White Settlers

• The Indian Removal Act (1830)
  • Military enforced ethnic cleansing of Cherokee, Creek and other eastern Native American tribes to relocate west of the Mississippi River to give white settlers 25 million acres
• The Homestead Act (1862)
  • Gave away Native American land to white settlers out west
    • Nearly 270 million acres of Indian Territory was converted to private property for white settlers
• Dawes Allotment Act (1884)
  • Stole 90 million acres from Native Americans to sell to mainly white settlers
    • While forcing Natives on small individual allotments

“While millions of acres of land in the Midwest and Great Plains were being given away through the 1862 Homestead Act, the rolling back of Reconstruction-era reforms barred Black farmers in the South from accessing the land and capital needed to become farm owner-operators. While these farmers had indisputable expertise in the cultivation of both commodity crops, small grains, vegetables, and livestock, they faced formal legal discrimination on state, county, and local levels; farmers also dealt with routine threats violence and even death. One of the toughest barriers for Black farmers was county government control over the Farmers Home Administration (now the Farm Service Agency) boards. Lack of representation on these boards effectively locked out Black farmers from accessing USDA funds for almost an entire century” NSAC: Racial Equity in the Farm Bill: Context and Foundations

Left: American Progress is an 1872 painting by John Gast
Right: Yes! Magazine: A Nation Built on the Back of Slavery and Racism

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MLK Jr. on Reparations before the Poor People’s Campaign

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” Martin Luther King Jr

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Evolution of Enslaved Agriculture

• Slavery
  • 4 million slaves during emancipation
• Convict Leasing (Slavery by Another Name)
  • “After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of black people were forced into what authors have termed “slavery by another name” until the 1930s.” Equal Justice Initiative
• Early 20^th Century reformers banned convict leasing from private markets
  • The last state to banned was Alabama in 1927
• Prison “slave” labor continued on public land outside of private market
  • Texas: segregated prisoners picking cotton for free
  • Mississippi, Louisiana, other Southern States had forced agriculture programs
  • Lobby Firm “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC) passes Prison-Industries Acts (1979)
  • State laws allowing for prison labor to participate in private markets again
• For profit prison lobbyists push “Tough on Crime” policies over next decades
  • Pushing mass incarceration to maximize profits
  • “ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws.” The Nation The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor
• Under Federal Bureau of Prisons and many state prison requires all able-bodied inmates to work
  • 61% of 2.3 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons
  • Wages can range from $0 to $2 an hour
    • “Inmates, however, keep only a fraction of their wages, as approximately 80% is withheld for restitution, to offset incarceration costs, and to support their families, among other things. Thus, the average “take home” wage of a federal prisoner is around $.18 per hour. State prisoners’ wages range from $.23 per hour to $7.00 per hour, depending upon the state and the company for which they work; they also only take home only 20% of their wages.” EPI Bringing the jobs back home to prisons
  • 5 States don’t pay for their labor
    • Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas
    • Texas slave/inmate labor system was valued at $88.9 million in 2014
  • Due to recent immigrant farm worker crackdowns
    • States are leasing prisoners to farms
      • Arizona, Idaho, and Washington

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Historical Trauma with Farming

Source: New York Public Library

• Historic Trauma
  • The cumulative emotional and psychological wounding of an individual or generation caused by a traumatic experience or event
  • Trauma is inherited in our epigenetics, the proteins that control DNA expression
• Historic Trauma around farming
  • Stigma of relating farming to slavery, share cropping, convict leasing,white supremacy, etc.

“There is a danger in confusing the oppression that our people experienced on land with the spirit of the Land itself.” Leah Penniman’s new book, Farming While Black

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Rise of Industrial Agriculture

• Developed after WW2
  • To increase food production to profitably feed growing population
• Large-scale mono-culture farms that rely on bad practices like:
  • Toxic pesticides and inorganic fertilizers
  • Overuse of antibiotics increasing pathogen resistance
  • Destruction of healthy soils and waterways
  • Mass commercialization of unhealthy cheap processed foods
  • Poisoning of animals, workers, local communities and consumers

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Consolidation by Big Ag

• Monopoly of farm production
  • 4% of farms are large farms with over $1 million in sales
  • 66% of all sales are from larger farms
    • 5 companies control 71% of the pork market
      • Tyson Foods (17%), Smithfield (26%), JBS (11%), Cargill (9%), Hormel Foods Corp (8%)
    • 4 companies produce 85% of all the beef in the United States
      • Tyson Foods (24%), JBS (22%), Cargill (19%) and National Beef  (10%)
    • 3 companies control over 60% of the chicken market in the US
      • Tyson Foods (28%), Pilgrim Pride (25%), Perdue (22%)
    • 97% of the chicken grown by a farmer under contract with a big chicken company

Under Contract – 10 minute promo (2017)

• Monopoly of Seed Production
  • 6 companies control over 60% of the seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers market
    • Bayer/Monsanto, BASF, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta

• Supermarket and Processed Food Consolidation
  • Supermarkets begun in the 1930s
    • In opposition to smaller community grocery stores and local markets
  • By 1950 supermarket chains brought in about 35% of the food-retailing dollar
    • By 1960 market share jumped to 70% of the food retail business
  • Brought low prices
    • By large scale consolidation of procurement
    • And promoting cheap processed food
  • Supermarkets replaced many local community stores and markets
    • Industrial Ag and cheap processed foods replaced healthy local food
  • Communities lost self-reliance

Further Readings on Rise of Industrial Agriculture

• Guardian: How America’s food giants swallowed the family farms
• Food First: Food Security, Food Justice or Food Sovereignty?
• Living History Farm: Supermarkets Dominate

• Green Peace: Life in the shadow of a factory farm

• Ny Times: A Shadowy Industry Group Shapes Food Policy Around the World

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Farm Bills

• Based upon the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933
  • Helped farmers through the Dust Bowl and Great Depression
  • Renewed every 5 years
• Comprehensive legislation that covers everything from:
  • crop insurance
  • training support for beginning farmers
  • funding for sustainable agriculture research
  • healthy food access for low-income families
• About 80% of the bill’s total spending is SNAP
  • Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
  • Making it a target for conservative politicians looking to cut federal spending while scoring political points with base
• Food assistance work requirements often disproportionately effect minorities:
  • Exemptions for high unemployment areas that tend to advantage poor rural white areas
    • Urban environments unemployment “overall” rates are often lower due to population density
  • Ignores racial discrimination in job markets
  • Ignores systemic racism

“Policies that exempt high-unemployment places, but not people who face other obstacles to work, selectively acknowledge barriers for only some of the poor. In effect, they suggest that unemployment is a systemic problem in struggling rural communities — but that in poor urban neighborhoods, it’s a matter of individual decisions.” Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz

Further Readings on the Farm Bill

• Food Tank, “The Republican Farm Bill is as Broken as our Food System“
• NY Times: “Which Poor People Shouldn’t Have to Work for Aid?”
• The Atlantic: The Farm Bill’s Threat to Food Security

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Back to Top

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The Real Farm to Table: Farm and Food Worker Rights

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EMERYVILLE, CA – FEBRUARY 03: Denny’s waitresses prepare to deliver sfree Grand Slam breakfasts to customers February 3, 2009 in Emeryville, California. People lined up at Denny’s across North America today for a free Grand Slam breakfast given away between 6am and 2pm at over 1,500 Denny’s restaurants in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada. The promotion was announced during a Super Bowl commercial. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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Table of Contents

Exploitative History of US Farm Workers
Overview of Farm Workers Today
Current Farmworker Rights Campaigns
Food Worker Rights

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Exploitative History of US Farm Workers

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Farm Workers Excluded from 1930s Fed Labor laws

• 1935: National Labor Relations acts
  • Protects workers right to form unions
• 1938: The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
  • Protections for minimum wage, overtime pay, workers comp, and against child labor.
    • Was amended in 1978 to mandate minimum wage for workers on large farms only.
• Farmers were excluded from these protections
  • Mainly because farmers were majority people of color

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Anti-immigrant Wave Patterns

• US recruits cheap immigrant labor
  • To create or maintain industries
    • Railroads, mines, agriculture, meat processing
  • Often used to maximize profits
    • By replacing current worker rights
      • Decrease wages, safety, unions, etc.
      • Builds racial resentment from white workers
• An economic or populist crisis occurs afterwards
  • Great Depression, Recessions, Trump, etc
  • Nativist politicians create xenophobic campaigns
    • To scapegoat and dehumanize immigrant workers for crisis
      • To distract from the real cause of crisis
        • Which is often the neoliberal exploitation of labor for profit
• Mass deportations and immigration restrictions
  • Chinese Exclusion Act, Immigration Act of 1924, Mexican Repatriations, Operation Wetback, Zero Tolerance
• Labor shortages
  • Causing corporations to legally/illegally recruit more immigrant labor, again

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Exploitation and Racism of Immigrant Farm Workers

• Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino) Farm Workers– 1860s-1930s
  • Chinese immigrants worked in large California wheat farms
  • Faced enormous racism (Yellow Peril)
    • Excluded from owning land, denied civil rights protections and experienced a lot of violence
  • Politically scapegoated
    • 1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese workers
      • Banned immigration and denied citizenship for Chinese already settled
    • 1917: Asiatic Barred Zone Act: Banned Asia-Pacific immigrants
      • Barred immigration from the Asia-Pacific zone
• Mexican Farm Workers – 1930s-1970s
  • 1930s: Filipino farm workers start organizing causing growers to recruit Mexican workers
  • 
  • 
  • Denied civil rights protections and were political scapegoated
    • 1929-1936: Mexican Repatriation
      • Due to Dust Bowl and Great Depression 500,000 to 2 million Mexican workers, 60% were US-born citizens, were deported.  This was considered ethnic cleansing
    • 1942-1964:
      • The Bracero Program
        • Mexico/US farm worker program to help meet US labor needs with cheap labor
      • Operation Wetback
        • Mass deportation of over a million Mexican migrant workers
        • Human rights abuse, xenophobia propaganda, 100s US citizens deported, 100s died
• Southeast Asian Refugees Fishery Workers– 1990s
  • Refugees from war torn countries came to farm California and fish in the Mississippi Gulf Coast
  • Created conflicts between Vietnamese fishermen and the KKK protecting local white fisheries
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• Latin American (Primarily Mexico/Central American) Farm Workers – 1970s-present
  • Majority are undocumented workers, migrant workers and H-2a guest/temporary workers
  • Experience high levels of exploitation, abuse, racism and poverty with little options for help

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Exploitation of Undocumented Workforces

“What Trump has described as an immigrant “invasion” was actually a corporate recruitment drive for poor, vulnerable, undocumented, often desperate workers.” Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation

• Eastern European and Latinx Immigrant workers were used in meat farm processing plants for last century
  • 1906 Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle exposing horrible conditions
    • Causing reforms over several decades
  • By `1970s meat packer jobs were good jobs
• By 1980s most gains were lost
  • Large corporations began to dominate the market
    • 5 companies control 71% of the pork market
    • 4 companies produce 85% of all the beef in the United States
    • 3 companies control over 60% of the chicken market in the US
• Largest companies in the beef industry
  • Began to recruit immigrants in Mexico during the Ronald Reagan era to break unions and decrease worker’s rights and benefits
  • Brought them to the meatpacking communities of the American West and Midwest
  • Wages were soon cut by as much as 50%
    • To maximize profit processing line speeds were increased
      • While government oversight, worker protections, and safety was reduced
• C. Rogers, a Mississippi Poultry company now owned by Koch Foods
  • 1994 Launched a hiring drive that year called “The Hispanic Project.”
    • Goal was to replace African American workers, who were seeking a union, with immigrant workers who’d be more compliant
  • Placed ads in Miami newspapers, arranged transportation for immigrants, and charged them for housing in dilapidated trailers.
    • Within four years, it had moved roughly 5,000 mainly Latino workers to Mississippi
  • The poultry industry expanded throughout the rural South during the 1990s, drawn by absence of labor unions
    • Tens of thousands of immigrant workers soon arrived to cut meat
  • Since 2016 Trump Admin has eliminated farmers protections, EPA air pollution regulations, and line speed regs for poultry processing facilities
• August 2019 Mississippi immigrant raid at poultry processing plants, including Koch Foods Plants
  • Less than a year after Koch Foods settle a massive EEOC case for sexual harassment and wage theft against its workers
  • 680 Latinx immigrants arrested
    • Mostly women and mothers
  • The immigrant workers arrested in Mississippi the other day were earning about $12.50 an hour.
    • Adjusted for inflation, during the late 1970s, the wages of meatpacking workers in Iowa and Colorado were about $50 an hour.

“The industrial produce and animal production and processing systems in the U.S. would collapse without the immigrant and migratory workforce.” Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University

Futher Readings

• Washington Post: The poultry industry recruited them. Now ICE raids are devastating their communities.

• Atlantic: Why It’s Immigrants Who Pack Your Meat

• New Yorker: Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant
• NBC: Trump administration allows pork slaughterhouses to have fewer USDA inspectors

• Propublica: How a Top Chicken Company Cut Off Black Farmers, One by One

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Overview of Farm Workers Today

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• 2-3 million farmworkers in the US
  • 53% undocumented (without legal authorization)
  • 25% are United States citizens
  • 21% are lawful immigrants
    • H-2a guest/temporary workers who cannot leave their job regardless of abuse
• Income: The average income of a farm worker: $15-17,499
• Dangerous work: one of the three most dangerous occupations in the United States.
• Abuse: farmworkers face a lot of harassment, sexual abuse and rape
• Pesticide risks:highest rate of toxic chemical injuries and skin disorders of any workers
• Health concerns:high incidences of heat stress, dermatitis, infestions, and tuberculosis
• Life Expectancy: average for migrant worker 49 years (national average is 75 years)
• Poor health of children: high rates of pesticide exposure, malnutrition and dental disease
• Housing effects: housing conditions lead to increased prevalence of lead poisoning, respiratory illnesses, ear infections and diarrhea
• Limited insurance:Only 10% of farmworkers have employer-provided health insurance
• Barriers to Healthcare: Lack of transportation, limited hours of clinic service, cost of health care, limited or no interpreter service, fear of deportation, no sick leave
• Federal Labor Laws: excluded from right to unions, minimum wage, overtime pay, workers comp, child labor laws
• Racism: Racism and attacks have increased with Trump rhetoric
• Live in constant fear: being deported/separated from their families and children
  • Causes many families to avoid hospitals, schools, health services, etc

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Further Readings on Farm Worker Stats

• SAF: United States Farmworker Factsheet
• US Department of Labor: The National Agricultural Workers Survey
• Farmworker Justice: Selected Statistics on Farmworkers
• Nation: ‘It’s Not Shameful to Work in the Fields. But It’s Hard.’

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Invisible America: The Migrant Story

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Contributions of Undocumented Farmers

2014 Reuters poll, 63% of people surveyed believed undocumented immigrants burdened the economy

• Bring in 10s of billions of dollars to our agriculture economy
  • Revenue from all the crops harvested in California is $47 billion a year
    • More than double that of Iowa, the next-biggest agricultural state
    • Undocumented workers do the majority of farm work in California
• Taxes paid by undocumented workers
  • 2015, IRS received 4.4 million income tax returns from workers without Social Security #
    • People without a SS# can file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN)
    • Includes a large number of undocumented immigrants
    • That year, they paid $6 billion in income taxes
  • 2010, undocumented workers paid about $12 billion in Social Security taxes
    • SSA estimates they paid $100 billion into the fund over the past decade
    • Benefits those workers will likely never receive
  • Sales, property taxes, payroll taxes
    • IRS estimates that unauthorized workers pay about $9 billion in payroll taxes annually
    • Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimate they pay about $11.7 billion a year in state and local taxes
• Filling jobs Americans don’t want but need to happen
  • “In response to the argument that immigrants steal jobs from Americans by undercutting their wages, the UFW set up a website offering citizens and legal residents agricultural jobs anywhere in the country through state employment services. This was in 2010, during the Great Recession. The website received about four million hits, out of which around 12,000 people filled out employment forms. Of these, a total of twelve citizens or legal residents actually showed up for work. Not one of them lasted longer than a day.” Michael Greenberg, NY Books

“When Cesar Chavez started organizing farmworkers in the 1950s (in California’s San Joaquin Valley), 12 to 14% of field hands were still Okies and Arkies, the Steinbeck people and 8 to 10% were African-Americans brought in by cotton planters during the boll weevil infestation in the 1920s. About 12% were Filipino, and 55% were Mexican, “half of them Mexican nationals, the other half first-generation Americans like my father.” “Today, at least 80% of farmworkers are undocumented Mexicans, the majority of them Mixteco and Trique, indigenous people from the states of Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Guerrero—the poorest regions in Mexico—who speak no or very little Spanish, much less English. Most of them have been working the fields for at least a decade, have established families here, and live in terror of la migra, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is called, and instant deportation or imprisonment that would wrench them from their children.” Paul Chavez, the son of Cesar Chavez

Further Readings

Vox: Undocumented immigrants pay millions of dollars in state taxes — even in the reddest states

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Living in Constant Fear

“Everywhere I went in the San Joaquin Valley fear of la migra (ICE) was palpable. Some farmworkers were afraid to leave their homes for the fields or even to go grocery shopping because of the pervasive presence of ICE, in both marked and unmarked cars. On Radio Campesina, a network of Spanish-language stations in the Valley owned by the Cesar Chavez Foundation, people called in to advise listeners of where ICE agents had been spotted—at a supermarket, at a school, at a pop-up road checkpoint…

… The federal policy appears to be to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible and to make life so untenable for the rest that they leave the country on their own…Hernandez (UFW immigrant legal advisor in Fresno) coached parents to prepare their children for the worst. One topic of conversation was: What Happens If Your Parents Don’t Come Home Today. People were insecure before, but they more or less had the sense that their labor was needed, that they were valued for, if nothing else, their willingness to do work no one else wanted. Their kids could go to school and live, for the most part, without the fear of their parents disappearing, even under Obama’s aggressive deportation policies.

Now, even people with temporary legal status won’t apply for food stamps, unemployment benefits, Head Start, and child development services. The Trump administration recently announced a rules change that would make immigrants and green card holders ineligible for naturalization if they have received or applied for social assistance. People out of work, as farmworkers invariably are for part of the year, go hungry rather than run the risk of being put on a government blacklist.” Michael Greenberg, In the Valley of Fear

Farm workers in California nov 2018 continue working while the fires blaze

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AJ+ Video on Undocumented Farm Workers

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Food Chain (Full Documentary)

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Current Farmworker Rights Campaigns

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CIW Fair Food Program

• The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)
  • Florida migrant tomato pickers organized around poverty wages, human rights abuses, child labor, wage theft, sexual assault, slavery, human trafficking
• CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP)
  • Partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that ensures humane wages and working conditions for the farm
• 2001-15 National boycott campaign got major retailers to sign on such as:
  • Ahold, The Fresh Market, Walmart, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Trader Joe’s, Sodexo, Aramark, Compass Group, Bon Appétit Management Company, Subway, Whole Foods Market, Burger King, McDonalds, Yum! Brands (Taco Bell)
• Wendy’s and Publix has refused to sign

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Campaigns to Follow

Local – dcfairfood.org

National – http://www.ciw-online.org

Further Readings

Responsible Consumer: Wendy’s

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Ben & Jerry’s

• Since 2010 Migrant Justice documents worker abuses
  • Among 1500 migrant workers on Vermont Dairy Farms
  • Abuses range from low wages, wage theft, no worker protections, and unsafe work environments.
  • Many of these dairies supply milk for Ben & Jerry’s
• 2014 Milk with Dignity Code of Conduct campaign
  • For Vermont Dairy Farms to commit to the following:
    • Farmworker-Authored Code of Conduct
    • Farmworker Education:
    • Third Party Monitoring Body
    • Economic relief
    • Legally-binding Agreements
• Updates
  • June 2015:
    • Ben and Jerry’s agreed to Milk with Dignity Program in supply chain
      • But dragged their feet causing more Migrant Justice Campaigns
    • October 2017:
      • Finally signed Milk with Dignity agreement

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Driscoll/Sakuma Brothers Farms Boycott

• Sakuma Brothers Farms
  • Producer for Driscoll Berries
  • Refused to give 450 berry pickers a wage increase & improve labor camps conditions
• Updates
  • 2013, National boycott against Sakuma
    • Later against Driscoll
  • 2016, Sakuma gave in & allowed a union
    • Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), an independent/ indigenous farm worker union became their union
  • 2017, FUJ negotiated better wages ($15 an hour) and better living conditions
• Present
  • Driscoll berry pickers in San Quintin Valley of Baja California are continuing the boycott in Mexico to improve worker conditions

Further Readings

Responsible Consumer: Driscolls Berries

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International Campaigns

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Thailand Shrimp (Prawns)

• Thailand largest shrimp exporting country in world
  • The AP Press and the Guardian have both done recent investigations into the Thailand shrimping industry
    • Found regular use of slaves
  • Shrimp and fish caught from slaves from Thailand and other fish markets from Myanmar to Hawaii
    • Found in supply chains of American groceries, restaurants, pet food
  • Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Slavery Risk Tool
    • seafoodslaveryrisk.org

Ethical Alternatives

• Avoid Shrimp from Thailand
  • Ask and if retailer doesn’t know assume it is
• Look for Aquaculture Stewardship CouncilCertified
  • Which has developed standards that take into account and social conditions
• Green Peace “Grocery Store Scorecard”
  • Evaluates retailers for sustainability and human rights
    • greenpeaceusa.org/grocery-store-scorecard/
• Domestic shrimp
  • Alaska, Texas, Louisiana, Florida and North Carolina

Further Readings

Responsible Consumer: Thailand Shrimp

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Slave Labor in Brazil Coffee

 

Left: Child and forced labor— The Human Cost of Coffee (Photo: The Weather Channel‏)
Right:An example of farmworker housing in Central America coffee farms, where families live during harvest season (Photo: Miguel Zamora/Daily Coffee News)

• Brazilian Coffee
  • Nescafé, Nespresso, Dolce Gusto, Coffee-mate, Senseo
• Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of coffee
  • 1/3 of the global market.
• Brazilian coffee workers often face
  • debt bondage
  • exposure to deadly pesticides
  • lack of protective equipment
  • horrible accommodations

Ethical Coffee Options

• Good Trade: 14 Fair Trade Coffee Brands Worth Waking Up For
  • thegoodtrade.com/features/fair-trade-coffee-brands
• Direct Trade

Further Readings

Responsible Consumer: Brazilian Coffee

Medium: Coffee: Slavery, Destruction and Shortage

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Industries with Child Labor

Left: Chocolate
Right: Vanilla

Men and young boys working on a small cocoa farming commune near Abengourou, Côte d’Ivoire

• Ivory Coast and Ghana Cocoa/Chocolate
  • More than 70% of the world’s cocoa is grown in the region
  • 2013–14 report found that 2.1 million children are working as child labor
    • Documentary: Darkside of Chocolate
  • Nestle, Hershey, Mars, Kraft, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Godiva, Fowler’s
• Madagascar Vanilla
  • 80% of vanilla sold on global market

Ethical Chocolate Options

• Slave Free Chocolate: List of Ethical Chocolate Companies
• Food Empowerment Project: Chocolate List
• The Good Trade: Your Guide To Fair Trade Chocolate

Ethical Vanilla Options

• Online – Vanilla Company, Nielsen-Massey Vanilla
• Ben & Jerry’s Icecream
• Whole Foods – Look for “Fair Trade Logos”

Further Readings

• Responsible Consumer: Madagascar Vanilla
• Responsible Consumer: Ivory Coast and Ghana Cocoa/Chocolate

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Palm Oil

Palm Fruit

• Derived from the palm fruit
  • Stays solid at room temps
  • Used in packaged food, cosmetics, bath and house products, bio diesel, etc.
  • 85% of all palm oil globally produced in Indonesia and Malaysia
• Majority of production causes:
  • Massive deforestation/habitat degradation
    • 300 football fields cleared every hour for production
    • Kills about 6,000 orangutans a year
  • Slave and Child Labor abuse
    • US Depart. Of Labor listed palm oil as being one of the leaders in slave and child labor
  • Indigenous community land destroyed

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Sustainable Palm Oil

Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

RSPO principles stipulate:

• No forests can be cleared containing:
  • significant concentrations of biodiversity (e.g. endangered species)
  • fragile ecosystems
  • or areas which are fundamental to meeting basic or traditional cultural needs of local communities significantly
• Reduced use of pesticides and fires
• Fair treatment of workers according to local and international standards
• The need to inform and consult with local communities before the development of new plantations on their land

Palm Oil Scorecards

• World Wildlife Fund (WWF) sustainable palm oil yearly scorecard
• Union of Concern Scientist: Fries, Face Wash, Forests: Scoring America’s Top Brands on Their Palm Oil Commitments
• Act for Wild Life: Sustainable Palm Oil Shopping List

Further Readings

Responsible Consumer: Palm Oil

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Free Trade Bananas

• Five free trade companies
  • control about 80% of the conventional banana trade
  • Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, Fyffes, Bonita
• These companies often:
  • Abuse banana plantation workers
  • Pay workers very poorly
  • Violently repress any attempt to unionize
  • Accused of child labor and sexual harassment
  • Using large volumes of chemicals harmful to the environment, workers and consumers
  • History of Banana Republics
• Dole fair trade and Chiquita Organic
  • Has mixed reviews

Further Readings

Responsible Consumer: Free Trade vs Fair Trade Bananas

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Fair Trade Bananas

• Family own banana plantations and cooperatives working together to create a new type of banana market where:
  • Banana workers get paid fair wages
  • Have worker protections
  • Workers not exposed to harsh chemicals
  • Nearly half of all fair trade is organic
  • Must dispose of waste properly
  • Often work in cooperatives that give workers more control over prices and their lives.
  • “Fair Trade Premium” in price to funds things like schools, health clinics and farm improvements.

Further Readings

Responsible Consumer: Free Trade vs Fair Trade Bananas

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Look for Other Fair Trade Products

Fair Trade Products
(Order these products online or look for them at your local grocery)

• Free Trade vs Fair Trade Bananas
• Fair Trade Chocolate
• Fair Trade Coffee
• Fair Trade Fruits and Vegetables
• Fair Trade Herbs and Spices
• Fair Trade Honey
• Fair Trade Nuts and Oilseeds
• Fair Trade Packaged Food
• Fair Trade Rice
• Fair Trade Sugar
• Fair Trade Tea
• Fair Trade Vanilla
• Fair Trade Wine

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Fair is Life

• In response to limited certification options for fair trade
  • Independent certification program created in 2005 to assess fair trade producers and operators
• Uses a criteria that includes
  • No forced labour, freedom of association, no illegal form of child labour (ILO conventions), equal opportunities and treatment, adequate health and safety systems, fair salaries and working conditions, activities which observe environmental protection (water conservation, management of ecosystems, energy and waste materials), fair trade-compliant relations throughout the production chain

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Direct Trade

• When coffee roasters buy straight from the growers cutting out both
  • Traditional middleman buyers and sellers
  • The organizations that control certifications such as Fair Trade
• Direct trade proponents claim this model
  • Builds mutually beneficial and respectful relationships with individual producers or cooperatives
  • More control over aspects ranging from the quality of the coffee, to social issues, or environmental concerns.
  • Improvement over dissatisfactions with the third-party certification programs
• Downside
  • Must research and trust each coffee roaster and their own standards
  • No outside enforcement

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Good Food Purchasing Program

• Good Food Purchasing Program
  • Connects public institutions with many food certification programs to create a transparent and equitable food system
• Built on five core values
  • Local economies
  • Health
  • Valued workforce
  • Animal welfare
  • Environmental sustainability
• The Center for Good Food Purchasing
  • Provides a comprehensive set of tools, technical support, and verification system to assist institutions in meeting their program goals and commitments

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Other Certifications to Look For

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Food Worker Rights

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Artwork Source:  Asheville Sustainable Restaurant Workforce

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Saru Jayaraman Ted Talk, “Behind the Kitchen Door”

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Restaurant Workers Stats

• Restaurant Industry
  • 11 million food workers
  • One of the largest and fastest growing industry in the US
    • 2017, grew faster than health care, construction, manufacturing
  • Employees nearly 1 in 10 Americans
• Poverty Wages
  • Every year restaurant workers occupy
    • 7 out of 10 of the lowest-paid occupations reported by the Bureau of Labor
      • Farmworkers are also in the 10 lowest paid list
    • 3x more likely to fall below poverty line than any other worker
    • Restaurant workers use food stamps at 2x rate of US workforce
• Lack of Benefits
  • Almost 9 out of 10 restaurant workers lack paid sick days (87.7%)
    • and health insurance from their employer (89.7%)
  • “More than 63% of all restaurant workers reported cooking and serving food while sick” ROC – Serving While Sick

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Restaurant Workers Stats

• Discrimination
  • People of color are paid 56% less than white workers
    • Across front-of-the-house jobs, white male workers are paid more on average
      • In California
        • White males make $15.06 per hour on average, compared to $12.85 for non-white males
        • $11.56 for white women and $10.21 for non-white women
• Women and workers of color often pushed into lowest-paying jobs
  • While white male food industry workers are often channeled toward the highest-pay bartender and server jobs in fine-dining establishments
    • 53% of those who work in back-of-the-house positions are people of color
      • Compared to 22% in front-of-the-house fine-dining jobs.
    • In fine dining restaurants, 81% of management is white, often male
• Harassment
  • 80% of female servers have experienced some form of sexual harassment
    • Higher rates of harassment at tipped sub-minimum wage restaurants
    • Must relay on customer, not employer, for their income

Ending Jim Crow in America’s Restaurants: Racial and Gender Occupational Segregation in the Restaurant Industry”

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Splinter: Racist History of Tipping

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Tipped Sub-Minimum Wage

• 43 states use a tipped sub-minimum wage
  • First used for newly freed slaves
    • Hired without pay for restaurants and Pullman rail operators
  • Ban for awhile until first minimum-wage law in 1938
    • Allowed states to set a lower wage for tipped workers
  • 1966, Congress adopts a federal tipped minimum wage
    • Increased in tandem at 50% with the regular minimum wage
  • 1996, Herman Cain, head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA)
    • Convinced Congress to decouple two wages
    • The tipped minimum has been stuck at $2.13 ever since
• 20 states use the federal tipped sub-minimum wage of $2.13
  • 22 states are between $2.13-$5.00, including DC ($3.33)
  • Median wage including tips is $9 an hour
• 7 states guarantee the full state minimum wage to all workers
  • Eliminated sub-minimum wage for tipped workers
    • Still can collect tips
    • Don’t have to worry about tip credit and many claim there is less wage theft
  • Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington
  • Minimum wage ranges from $8.50 to $12.50 an hour

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Saru Jayaraman – We the People: Workers Rising for Fair Wages | Bioneers 2017

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The Other NRA
(National Restaurant Association)

• Issues NRA fights
  • Minimum wage increases
  • Sick day benefits
  • Public health policy measures like
    • nutritional menu labeling requirements
    • limitations on the marketing of junk food to children
    • regulation of sodium, sugar, and trans-fats in processed foods
  • Wage theft protections
• Use Astrofurf strategies to oppose ballet issues
  • “Berman & Co. and the Business Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC)
    • Develops astroturf websites for NRA targeted at restaurant employees
• 1996: Got Congress to separate food worker wage from min. wage
  • The tipped minimum has been stuck at $2.13 ever since
• 2017: Unsuccessfully worked w/ Trump’s DOL to legalize tip theft
  • by undoing an Obama-era regulation that stopped employers from collecting and redistributing workers’ tips however they wanted

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Further Readings

Civil Eats: The Past Decade Has Brought a Sea Change in Food and Farm Labor

Fortune: The Real Cost of Cheap Groceries

Politico: The Racist History of Tipping

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Back to Top

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Environmental Injustice

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Source: Global Justice Now

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“Environmental Racism is any environmental policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color. Low income persons and people of color are exposed to greater environmental risks than white or affluent communities”  DR. Robert Bullard, Father of Environment Justice

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Blavity: Environmental Racism

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North Carolina Pig Farming Industry

• 10 million pigs in farming industry
  • Creating waste equivalent to 100 Million humans
• No septic systems for these farms
  • Stored in giant lagoons that are periodically emptied by spraying the sewage over fields
  • Lagoons often pollute groundwater and sprays often drift to nearby poor minority communities
  • Nearby residents complain that it’s literally raining hog waste when the sprays hit the wind
• People living near these lagoons experience
  • Horrible smells daily
  • Dropping property values
  • Increased health problems such as:
    • Asthma, diarrhea, eye irritation, depression, blood pressure increases, neurological issues, lung issues, cancer, etc
• Local residents are left with little recourse

North Carolina Industrial Pig Farms

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Spy Drones Expose Smithfield Foods Factory Farms

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Huffington Post: 4 Environmental Activists Are Killed Every Week So We Can Have Snacks, Meat And Coffee

• 2017, Paramilitaries, government troops
  • Hired gangsters and smugglers killed 207 people trying to protect the environment
  • From the spread of businesses like cattle ranches and sugarcane, palm oil, and coffee plantations
  • Approximately 4 activists killed every week of year
• For the first time, agribusinesses that produce commodities such as beef, palm oil and coffee
  • Overtook mining and natural resource extraction
  • As the most deadly sector for activists
• The Global Witness Reports
  • Brazil remains the most deadly country for environmental activists, with 57 murders in 2017
    • Highest ever recorded by any country
  • Female environmental defenders were now facing “specific and heightened threats” of sexual violence, abuse and harassment, sometimes from within their community

Further Reading

Huff Post: Disturbing Report Shows How Many Environmental Activists Are Killed Each Week

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White Veganism vs Decolonization

• Area size of US East Coast on fire in Amazon
  • 91% intentional blazes in Amazon is clearing the jungle for animal agriculture
  • White vegan activists took to social media to promote veganism
  • Provoked strong social backlash from black activists
• Decolonization
  • Important to stop eating meat
  • But veganism won’t stop systems from continuing
    • Must also dismantle colonization, capitalism, white supremacy, wealth inequality, etc.
    • Take an intersectional approach
      • Not everyone has equal access to vegan options
    • White Comfort
  • Same white comfort that prevents white people from acknowledging white supremacy, racism, white privilege, etc.
    • Is often used by white people to promote veganism
  • Causing bad reactions from people of color
    • Need more white people to understand white fragility

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” Audre Lorde

 

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Why I’m No Longer Vegan™

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Aja barber

“If you are telling people that they have to stop eating meat right now because the Amazon is burning and you are not openly and loudly doing your #antiracism work, save it. Yes I’m as freaked the fuck out about the Amazon as you are and while I didn’t wish to visit this topic of meat so soon, I’m already seeing classist, racist posts missing racial nuance about how people eating meat are the cause. ⁣⁣
⁣⁣
I could actually think of a few causes mostly #whitesupremacy, rich people, crap elected officials and #capitalism which of course is tied to meat and dairy. I don’t eat beef. I do wear leather. If you pick a fight I will block you immediately. This post is about food racism.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
All your food movements are racists to their very core if they don’t address racial inequality. If you cannot acknowledge that the roots of American agriculture (most agriculture) is violence and slavery and today modern day slave labor conditions (who picks your veg … I think we both know) than you shouting at people eating meat right now warrants a block from me. Most of your food is farmed on indigenous land that was seized by force and colonization. And it is NOT just the meat.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Black and low income communities in America routinely lose access to farm land and fresh food DUE TO RACIST LAWS (hey redlining what’s up). Race and injustice are so steeply woven into these issues that it shocks me how hard many don’t see it. You think poor health among certain ethnic groups isn’t due to access and inequality, then you need to wake the fuck up. There is much to be done with equity in America (and worldwide) and the food system is just another system which needs a massive overhaul. The system of where your food (yes your veggies too) comes from is built on #whitesupremacy, theft and exploitation. Your colonialist mindset allows you to enjoy quinoa while those who harvest it cannot. What are you doing about that besides screaming that meat eaters are killing the Amazon?⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Your organic food market isn’t going to help all people to stop eating meat until you address structural inequality and racism. Dismantling #racism isn’t optional here.” Aja barber

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Aja Barber

“I’m going to go ahead and just say this is of course the fine work of unregulated capitalism. But somehow we’ve allowed brands to divide the two terms from each other as if having a product which claims to not harm the earth should be a balm to satisfy us while we do grievous harm to our fellow human. As if looking the other way on worker treatment should be something we’re all okay with because these kind and gracious brands who politely take our money have deigned to throw us a bone and make a product that will eventually decompose.⁣ Oh I doth my cap to thee kind Sir! These gracious and merciful brands 😒
⁣
As if the two things #sustainability and #ethics are not intrinsically linked. Guess what? They are. So next time you see some #greenwashing with a graphic of a smiling earth or some garbage, demand to know where fair wages fit in on that happy earth. The two terms should sit side by side but somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to be placated by organic cotton or “hey we used a vegetable dye, give us props, give us props”. ⁣
⁣
If people are mistreated from our shopping habits than that is not good for the earth. If we are robbing resources from countries overseas so we can have cheap “sustainable” goods, it’s not good for the earth. ⁣Sustainability without ethics isn’t even sustainable. All of these systems work hand in hand and we are depleting the earth.
⁣
If we are looking the other way on child labor, how is that good for anyone? We don’t have to have one or the other. We can have all the things. We should want all the things. Demand better. Sustainability without ethics is horseshit. Hold brands to a higher standard. No one should be able to sell you on sustainability as a one size fits all.” Aja Barber

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Juliana Yazbeck: The Problem with White Veganism

White veganism is dangerous.

It disregards the fact that the meat and dairy industries are inherently colonial legacies. It comes charging in on its moral high horse, enforcing its beliefs that veganism is the only way forward, overlooking the truth: that the white popularisation of plant-based consumption is only shifting unethical food production from meat to plants.

White veganism fights the meat industry — a colonial legacy, and I will explain why — with the industrialisation of plants instead. As Erin White writes for Afropunk, “[W]hat’s so frustrating about too many animal-free platforms is the bizarre prioritization of animal welfare over that of the humans who produce the food.”

Only, it is more than bizarre. It is outright racist. In fact, at this point, being a white vegan is practically intrinsically racist. White vegans blatantly care very little about the working conditions of farmers from the global south, or immigrant farmers working in the global north (a problematic term in and of itself). While some white vegans put in the effort to purchase only locally produced goods from independent farmers, there is no general conversation regarding race and the colonial nature of plant-based mass production surrounding white eco-warriors’ campaigns en masse.

Indigenous farms and farmers the world over are now being exploited for foods they once produced and consumed moderately, as per their sacred agreements with their lands. Plants like chickpeas, quinoa, avocado, cashews, and coconut are suddenly being mass produced to meet the demands of corporate supermarkets supplying foods such as hummus, cashew butter, and coconut milk to modern-day northern hemisphere consumerists. This has a devastating effect on the price of said plants, the welfare of the farmers and inhabitants of the land, and the land itself.

Another crucial matter that is overlooked surrounding the war on animal consumption is that, as mentioned, the phenomenon of industrialising meat — and food in general — is a deeply colonial story. In fact, industrial farming as we know it today did not begin to emerge until the 1960s in — where else? — the US. That is also when farms began to “increase in size and decrease in number.” (Shawn MacKenzie, A Brief History of Agriculture and Food Production: The Rise of “Industrial Agriculture”, 2007) Settler-colonialism and the colonizer’s establishment of corporate capitalism was — and is — the precursor of unethical farming methods.

Fast food corporations frequently give the argument of ‘overpopulation’, and ‘the need to feed masses quickly and cheaply’ (hugely problematic take on human life but a story for another day). Overpopulation is but a symptom of an underlying problem. Overpopulation was and is not a natural phenomenon, despite what history books and mainstream media would have us believe. Mass migration, urbanisation, and the supposed need for ‘fast food’ came as an immediate result of capitalism, and the colonisation of places such as South Asia and the American and African continents. It is worth examining the root of the problem; rather than solely treating the symptoms (if at all).

One imposed ‘solution’ to this eco-crisis is hunting bans. The problem here is that this often includes banning hunting for indigenous peoples on indigenous land. Hunting bans are necessary in certain places and in certain practices. But to ban indigenous people from practicing their way of life — especially when their way of life is centered around a sacred agreement to take no more than they need or than the land can give, and to always give back to the land themselves — is equally colonial. For a colonizer to occupy a land, murder its people, replace them with more colonizers, impose colonial laws, and create an irreversible eco-crisis, then to turn around and point a finger at indigenous ways of hunting, gathering, eating, and living, is no more than a 21st century manifestation of white people’s colonial mindsets.

As an Arab, eating meat is part of my traditional way of life. I remember, growing up, going to the local butcher with my mother, and asking him for his kill of the day. The butcher worked with local shepherds whose goats roamed the hills, day in day out, and who occasionally slaughtered a few for sale. Our connection with animals was very close: We did not buy packets of frozen meat from the supermarket. We bought pieces of a carcass from the butcher; pieces we chose ourselves. We saw the animal. We knew what had been sacrificed for our meal. Things have since changed, and my people turn to the consumption of imported beef (not native to our land) sold to supermarkets by multinational food corporations. Local farmers are out of work. The cycle repeats — and worsens.

And so my message to white vegans is this:

If you do not care as much about the welfare of non-white peoples around the world as you do about ‘the environment’ (one would assume the environment includes humans, but I guess it only includes white humans), your veganism is performative.

If you continue to consume mass-produced vegan products sourced in the global south, your veganism is not only performative, but evil.

If you continue to impose your personal choice, however well-intentioned and admirable it may be, on indigenous people and people of colour, your veganism is cultural colonialism.

And most importantly, if you continue to push for ecological reform, but completely ignore the fact that there can be no reform without decolonisation, that realistically the only way forward is to return indigenous lands to indigenous peoples, that your fight would be better suited if it were directed at supporting indigenous calls for indigenous rights, and that any level of ecological healing fundamentally requires dismantling the system on which your soy milk pocket money is built, your veganism is a lie.

I invite you to examine the root of the problem, rather than solely treating the symptoms… if at all.

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The Mirror

My fellow vegan/ vegetarian When we talk about veganism it is also important to understand And talk about where our fruits and veggies are coming from. Just because it’s vegan does not mean it’s 100% cruelty free. In mainstream veganism there a lot of factors that are left out. For example the exploitations of farm workers. Not only they are are underpaid but they often work in harsh conditions. Their voices are often forgotten/ deliberately silenced as we enjoy our comfortable lifestyle.
Indigenous farms and farmers the world over are also being exploited for foods they once produced and consumed moderately, as they had sacred agreements with their lands. Plants like chickpeas, quinoa, avocado, cashews, and coconut are suddenly being mass produced to meet the demands of corporate supermarkets supplying foods such as hummus, cashew butter, and coconut milk to modern-day northern hemisphere consumerists. This has a devastating effect on the price, the welfare of the farmers and inhabitants of the land, and the land itself.
***Important note*** : No one is blaming vegans or vegeterians for mistreatment/ underpaid workers. Calling for intersectionality just means that we have to broaden the conversation about Veganism. Veganism is not as straight forward because it does not affect animals only. Please read my other posts for more information.

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The Mirror

Mainstream veganism is undeniably white, capitalist, and focussed on the single-issue of ending the oppression of other animals while ignoring other forms of oppressions. Radical veganism challenges this narrative by engaging in an intersectional analysis of the root causes of oppression. In this way, it is true to the original meaning of the Latin word ‘radical’ as it addresses ‘the fundamental root or base of something’. If activists truly want to challenge the status quo and further progress society, they should dare to be more radical. Special Thank You to @radicalempath for your contribution and your thoughts on making this possible.

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Read more about Environmental Racism

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Further Readings

• Observer: Feces From Hog Farming Is Poisoning Black Communities in North Carolina
• NY Times: North Carolina’s Noxious Pig Farm
• Mercy for Animals: Jury Decides World’s Largest Pork Producer Should Pay $473.5 Million to North Carolina Residents
• HuffPost: 4 Environmental Activists Are Killed Every Week So We Can Have Snacks, Meat And Coffee
• Camille DeAngelis: Essential Reading for White Vegans

 

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Back to Top

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Food Apartheid

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Food Desert Definition

Urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food

A food desert is typically defined as an area where:

• Walking distance to full service grocery over 0.5 miles
• More than 40% of households have no vehicle available
• The median household income is well below the federal poverty level for a family of four

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Impacts of Racial Discrimination in Food Access

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DC Food Access East of River

• Food Insecurity
  • 1 in 7 DC households struggle w/ food insecurity
• Grocery store Access
  • 49 full-service grocery stores in DC
  • 3 grocery stores East of the river (EOR)
  • 2 in Ward 7 and 1 in ward 8
    • Serving 150,000 residents
• Transportation
  • 47% of residents EOR have no access to personal vehicle
  • 17% have a disability that effects mobility
• Health Disparity
  • Ward 2 residents live 16 years longer
    • Than Ward 8 residents
  • Ward 8 residents 5xmore likely to die from diabetes
    • Than Ward 3 residents

Supermarket Redlining

“Supermarket redlining resists framing disparities in access to healthy foods as just a side effect of an otherwise functional market or some “natural” urban ecology, as a bug in the system so to speak. Rather it highlights how the locational decisions of food retailers are evidence of intentional disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.” Jerry Shannon via Atlanta Studies

“a term used to describe a phenomenon when major chain supermarkets are disinclined to locate their stores in inner cities or low-income neighborhoods and usually pull their existing stores out and relocate them to suburbs” Elizabeth Eisenhauer, In Poor Health: Supermarket Redlining and Urban Nutrition

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Kelly Vandersluis Morgan, Ph.D: Food Insecurity and its Effects in Washington, D.C.

Food insecurity is a “lack of access, at times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members” (Feeding America, 2015). Food insecurity exists in every county in America, and in Washington, D.C., food-insecure areas make up about 11 percent of the total area. When residents do not have easy access to grocery stores, obtaining healthy food requires an unreasonable amount of time and money. People living in food-insecure areas may turn to quick marts, gas stations, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants for their primary nutrition (Santucci, 2017). These sources of food are typically less healthy than fresh produce and what they could purchase at a grocery store.

Food insecurity can be viewed not only as significant a public health concern, but also as a human rights issue (Chilton & Rose, 2009). A lack of healthy, nutritious food is linked to numerous health problems, high incidence of early death, and poor educational outcomes. This is particularly true for vulnerable populations like children and seniors. This has a cascading effect on people’s ability to both survive and thrive, putting them at an even greater disadvantage.

Defining the Problem

USDA defines food insecurity as the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food or the limited or uncertain ability to acquire such food for a household. Further, very low food security occurs when one or more people in a household were hungry over the previous year because they could not afford enough food, according to USDA’s monitoring of the extent and severity of food insecurity in US households (DC Hunger Solutions, n.d.).

Often used in conjunction with describing a food insecure population, a food desert refers to geographic areas where people have limited access to healthy food (Smith, 2017). Specifically, Smith defines a food desert in DC as an area where:

• The walking distance to a supermarket or grocery store is more than 0.5 miles,
• Over 40% of households have no vehicle available, and
• The median household income is less than 185% of the federal poverty level for a family of four.

Poverty is a significant factor in food insecurity and in the creation and maintenance of food deserts. For the D.C. area, the Capital Area Food Bank has defined poverty based on 185% of the federal poverty guidelines. Poverty rates are determined by the number of members in a household and their annual income, but the federal standard does not include cost-of-living factors such as rent, gas prices, and other incidentals that are higher in the DC area than other parts of the US. This population represents the working poor (Capital Area Food Bank, 2015).

According to Feeding America (2015), as poverty and unemployment increase and home ownership decreases, food insecurity increases. Across the US, food insecure people report needing an additional food budget of $16.28 per person per week, which, annualized across all food insecure people in the US, equals a $24.2B food budget shortfall (Feeding America, 2015). Certainly, this is a national crisis, but the food insecure in DC feel the effects even more.

The Size of the Problem in D.C.

One in seven D.C. households is struggling against hunger, with 14.5% of the residents being food insecure (DC Hunger Solutions, n.d.; Capital Area Food Bank, 2015). DC Hunger Solutions (n.d.) estimates that 4.9% of that population suffers from very low food insecurity.

D.C.’s long history of racial and economic divisions and disparities has contributed to the creation of food deserts in the city’s poorest wards (Smith, 2017; Hayes, 2017). Beverley Wheeler, director of DC Hunger Solutions stated, “It’s a fact that hunger and poverty go hand in hand. With any increase in poverty, we can expect more hunger, higher rates of diabetes, obesity, and behavior problems” (Milloy, 2017). Further, census findings show that the poverty rate for African Americans in DC is 27.9% – almost four times higher than the 7.9% of whites (Milloy, 2017). Though the District’s median income is one of the highest in the US, there is a greater than $100,000 discrepancy between median income for white families and for African American families. Grocery stores and other businesses providing fresh, healthy food go where the money is, magnifying the creation of food deserts.

Of the 49 full-service grocery stores in D.C., only three are located in Wards 7 and 8, both poor, predominantly black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, and few of the 40 farmers’ markets are located in these areas (Milloy, 2017; DC Hunger Solutions, n.d.). Milloy (2017) compares this to wealthy Ward 6 where there are at least 10 full-service grocery stores and counting. By area, the majority of food deserts are located in Ward 8, while Ward 7 contains the second largest portion of food deserts; yet Ward 3 has no food deserts and Ward 2 has one that is only 0.13 square miles (Smith, 2017).

In addition to being home to the city’s largest food deserts, Wards 7 and 8 have the District’s highest poverty rates and highest obesity rates (DC Hunger Solutions, n.d.). The food security gaps remain despite efforts like the FEED Act, DC’s Food Policy Council, the Capital Area Food Bank, and multiple nonprofits (Sturdivant, 2017a).

Why are People Food Insecure?

Smith (2017) conducted an analysis of food deserts in D.C. to update old data and account for what he found to be important factors in food access. Smith’s methods used three defining elements of a food desert:

• It is located more than .5 miles from a grocery store or supermarket
• It has low rates of car access, and
• It has a high poverty rate.

Because of Smith (2017)’s factors, Sturdivant (2017b) found that residents in Wards 7 and 8 have to pay increased transit costs to get to supermarkets, and DC residents who get government assistance, like food stamps, often shop in Maryland and Virginia because the food costs are lower. This compromises the District’s economy by moving SNAP redemptions to other areas (Sturdivant, n.d.). More people, however, “rely on nearby corner stores, which tend to carry less healthy food options—likely a factor in the high rates of diabetes and obesity” (Sturdivant, 2017b).

According to a member of the Ward 7 economic council, Ward 7 and 8 neighborhoods “struggle to secure grocery stores and retail options because the areas don’t have large concentrations of office buildings and many residents leave the wards to work in other parts of the city. The decisions are driven by the numbers. Groceries will go where they think they can make a profit” (Sturdivant, 2017b). This leads to a growing need for stores that cannot justify coming to these parts of the city.

Stereotyping and Food Insecurity

Hayes (2017) paints a grim picture of common backwards stereotypes that suggest the poor are not interested in fresh food. DC Greens executive director, Lauren Shweder Biel, stated that “politicians across the country and citizens have been perniciously stereotyping, allowing cities to take no action because they’ve vilified low-income folks. We’ve seen lines a hundred deep of people waiting in 100-degree weather to get $10 to spend on fruits and veggies. There’s lots of interest in healthy food, but healthy food does not exist in these neighborhoods” (Hayes, 2017).

Residents in food deserts are not food insecure by choice. They are not eating a poor diet by desire. Sturdivant (2017a) found that residents are highly interested in healthier food and even healthy food delivery options. They are unable to access the food they would prefer because of transportation costs, economic costs, convenience, and the business make-up of their neighborhoods. The dominant food providers are corner stores and carryouts because they are cheap to operate.

THE EFFECTS OF INADEQUATE NUTRITION

Food as a human right

Food insecurity is a serious public health problem as well as a human rights issue. The U.S. spends over $50B per year on nutrition assistance programs, yet, there was no advancement toward the Healthy People 2010 goal of reducing food insecurity by half and we are, once again, targeting this goal for Healthy People 2020. Sadly, there has been little change in overall rates since the annual measurement of household food insecurity began in 1995 (Chilton & Rose, 2009).

The high percentage of D.C.’s population living in food insecure households, with no imminent change to the food desert environment, is near crisis level. The persistence of food insecurity rates puts adults, children, and seniors at risk for major and minor health issues, poor performance at work and in school, and continued poverty. The long-term outcomes of a population suffering from these effects is diminished productivity, a damaged economy, an increasing burden on the emergency food system, and rising healthcare costs (Chilton & Rose, 2009). Viewing food security as a human right, as Chilton and Rose (2009) suggest, “reposition[s] our understanding of food insecurity to acknowledge and actively address its social and economic determinants.”

Beverley Wheeler, director of DC Hunger Solutions, said, “We know that when there is not enough food, parents will not eat so they can feed their children. That affects the parents’ job performance and makes the children anxious knowing that Mom and Dad are not eating. Teenagers will not eat so that their younger siblings can. That affects the way teens perform at school. Senior citizens will go hungry and suffer in silence” (Milloy, 2017).

One’s reliable access to enough food to fuel a healthy lifestyle is the most basic of human needs. Without this access, hunger turns to undernourishment, which leads to poor health and high rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other nutrition-related health problems as well as cognitive and behavioral problems (DC Hunger Solutions, n.d.; Hayes, 2017)

Children

Schlanger (2013) states that D.C. has a higher rate of food insecurity among children than any state, and around 31,000 children in the District do not know how they will get their next meal. Many at-risk children are provided free or subsidized meals at school, both breakfast and lunch, but the problem still exists over weekends and school breaks. Studies of low-income and poor D.C. students found that they go home over the weekend to households with little or nothing to eat and return to school on Monday hungry and unable to concentrate and learn, often resulting in behavioral issues (WUSA, 2017).

The detrimental effects of hunger on children begin during pregnancy. For a growing fetus, a mother’s lack of nutrition can lead to low birth weight and sensory problems. As babies and children grow, hunger causes them to be more vulnerable to illness and infection, and they are more prone to developmental, emotional, and educational problems. The Capital Area Food Bank (2015) found that children malnourished from womb to age 2 appears later in low IQ scores when compared to their more nourished counterparts. Hungry children are often unable to fully engage in normal daily activities with their peers, like school work, social interaction, and play. Compounding the effect, these students are twice as likely to be placed in special education and kept back a year in school (WUSA, 2017).

At home, the stress facing parents in food insecure households often affects their children. The stressful environment, due to lack of food, has been proven to lead to serious behavioral and emotional issues that can affect mental health and make it difficult for children navigate social situations (WUSA, 2017).

Seniors

Many seniors are on a fixed income and are limited in their ability to travel to buy healthy food. Along with the decreased appetite that many seniors experience, food insecure seniors are further challenged when it comes to gaining proper nutrition. These food insecure seniors are at increased risk for chronic health conditions. Specifically, they are:

• 60% more likely to experience depression
• 53% more likely to report a heart attack
• 52% more likely to develop asthma, and
• 40% more likely to report an experience of congestive heart failure (Capital Area Food Bank, 2015).

RECOMMENDATIONS

We recommend the following actions be taken in an effort to make nutritious, healthy, and fresh food more accessible to all residents of D.C.:

• Work with local government, business leaders, and members of the community to make food insecure areas more attractive to grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and supercenters that include groceries, like Walmart and Target.
• Encourage SNAP program users to patronize their local markets and, in turn, incentivize the markets to provide more nutritious products that meet the federal program standards.
• Work with government, local, business, and nonprofit parties to fund rolling grocery baskets for community members to use to carry groceries more easily for those who do not live within .5 miles of a grocery store. This will ease the burden of carrying a week’s worth of groceries and encourage shopping in stores for fresh food.
• Prioritize access to year-round nutritious meals for children and seniors, the most vulnerable populations.
• Dedicate governmental, local, and non-profit resources to educate and empower communities to thrive by connecting individuals, currently in food insecure areas, to locally grown fruit and vegetables, educating on their nutritional value, and empowering a healthy change their lives.

Roots for Life is dedicated to the final recommendation and has designed a program series to strategically incorporate ways to empower participants and encourage them to incorporate fresh produce into their day-to-day regimen. In our programs, participants learn how to: make healthy food choices, cook nutritious meals, and grow foods through fun hands-on activities. Roots for Life teaches people how to be the change in their own communities.

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Food Apartheid

“Apartheid is a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race” Oxford Dictionary

Food Apartheid Explanations

“What I would rather say instead of “food desert” is “food apartheid” because “food apartheid” looks at the whole food system, along with race, geography, faith, and economics. You say “food apartheid” and you get to the root cause of some of the problems around the food system. It brings us to the more important question: What are some of the social inequalities that you see and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices?” Karen Washington, Rise & Root Farm

“Food apartheid is a human-created system of segregations, which relegates some people to food opulence and other people to food scarcity. It results in the epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and other diet-related illnesses that are plaguing communities of color.”Leah Penniman, the director of Soul Fire Farm

“Now we’re calling it (food deserts) what it is — it’s food apartheid. It’s something that’s planned. A desert is natural. It’s manufactured by the planet. This is planned, and it’s obvious.” Toni Lawson, DC Ward 8 resident

“Food apartheid is a relentless social construct that devalues human beings and assumes that people are unworthy of having access to nutritious food. Food apartheid affects people of all races, including poor white people, although Black and brown people are affected disproportionately. Under these conditions — which are overtly abusive — whole communities are geographically and economically isolated from healthy food options” Jacqueline Bediako – Atlanta Black Star

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Factors to the Decline of Grocery Assess

“The grocery gap reflects how city policies and business practices have chronically under-invested in poor communities and communities of color” Mary Alice Reilly, Greater Greater Washington

• De Jure and De Facto segregation
  • Jim Crow in the South
  • FHA and housing discrimination in the North and West
    • The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• Industrialization of food systems and the loss of self-sufficiencies
  • National supermarkets replacing community groceries
  • Industrial Ag and processed foods replaced healthy local food
  • Communities lost self-reliance
    • Black Food Geographies, Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.
• White flight and housing discrimination
  • White people moved to suburbs
  • Redlining prevented black people from leaving many urban areas
• Deindustrialization and disinvestment
  • Industries left urban areas for suburbs
  • Massive disinvestment and concentration of poverty in urban areas
• Racial wealth disparities, supermarket redlining and gentrification
  • Typical White household has 16x the wealth of a Black household
  • Housing discrimination by afffrodabiliyt

“As the nation’s food system become more industrialized and usurped by the market economy, residents become more dependent on supermarkets, unknowingly contributing to the destabilization of Deanwood’s local foodscape. Without the local food practices upon which Deanwood’s food security was partially based, the neighborhood’s food access was at the mercy of the increasingly transnational food corporations that systemically left black neighborhoods in favor of the suburbs. All these changes in food access were embedded in, not separate from, national trends in racial segregation and inequalities that shaped access to resources and opportunities.” Ashante Reese, Black Food Geographies

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Anacostia residents demand good food: 1979

Anacostia residents protest the planned closing of a neighborhood Safeway Store at 14th and Good Hope Road SE in the heart of historic Anacostia July 28, 1979.

They chanted, “Sour milk, stale bread; if we don’t get good food, we’ll soon be dead!”

Safeway ultimately postponed the closure of the store until an independent buyer could be found. District government and neighborhood efforts to find a black buyer foundered and two Korean nationals ultimately purchased the store and opened it as Anacostia Warehouse Grocery.

The large chain stores began a long series of closures of small stores without replacing them with large format stores that led to food deserts in many areas of the city.

Independent stores that opened in their place employed fewer neighborhood residents at lower wages than the unionized Safeway and Giant, which dominated the market. Further, the economics of operating an independent meant higher prices for fewer goods.

Overall this meant lower incomes to purchase the few available goods at higher prices.

Tensions between Korean merchants and the black residents of Anacostia at that time burst into the open in 1986 when the Korean owner of the Good Hope Carryout, located across the street from the former Safeway, pulled a gun on a 58-year-old black woman.

Picketing of the small carry-out began and continued for more than a year as black residents accused Koreans of racist and discriminatory practices while Koreans felt picked-on over the actions of a single store owner.

A 7-11 store ultimately took over the Korean-owned grocery store at 14th and Good Hope Rd.

The District’s solution to food and retail deserts in these lower-income areas in recent years has been to gentrify the neighborhoods, using economic pressures to force out low-income black families and replacing them with higher income single people or couples who are mostly white.

The area around Good Hope Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. now has a Bus Boys and Poets, a Walgreens and a number of renovated housing units.

A mixed use development has been built up the street and the $45 million 11th Street Bridge Park will include a public plaza, amphitheater, environmental education center and other attractions traversing the Anacostia River.

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmxA1Ajm

Photo by Dan Biegel. The image is courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.

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Food Deserts in D.C. | Let’s Talk | NPR

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Essence: She, The People: Dara Cooper On Food Redlining, Reparations, And Freeing The Land

Reparations in the United States for descendants of enslaved Africans must include repairing the structural devastation that food redlining has caused in Black communities. 

For Black people, Black southerners in particular, land is sacred and our relationship to it is complicated. The land swaddles the bones of our elders. Our histories are rooted deep beneath surfaces (made) rich with Black blood.

And that Black blood marks the spot where Afro-futuristic possibilities are waiting to be unburied and rediscovered.

For some people, forty acres and a mule has become a mere cultural reference far removed from socio-political and economic implications. For Dara Cooper, 41, national organizer with the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), the graveness of the injustice, which encapsulates the inherent dishonesty and structural white supremacy of a nation that mythologizes its own character, is incalculable.

Farming While Black

“Do you remember Pigford vs. Glickman,” Cooper asks, before recounting details of the 1999 “Black farmers lawsuit” against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for racial discrimination.

During the height of the Civil Rights era, the USDA openly discriminated against Black farmers, with those radical enough to attempt registering Black voters being targeted by the state. In the food justice context, this occurred primarily through the denial of farm loans, financial assistance and resources, as well as limited access to land.

Though President Jimmy Carter, beloved by the majority of the agriculture community, positioned himself as a progressive ally, things like structural racism were of no concern to his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, who, as governor of California, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Soon after defeating Carter in the 1980 presidential election, the newly-elected Reagan abolished the USDA’s Civil Rights Division, leaving Black farmers open to blatant, sustained, state-sanctioned and state-protected discrimination for over 15 years. In 1997, Black farmers brought a class-action lawsuit against the USDA, and a judge decided in their favor in 1999. The average settlement was approximately $50k.

“That wasn’t enough,” Cooper tells ESSENCE. “There has to be some kind of repair of the harm done systematically. That $50k doesn’t pull Black farmers out of the debt they incurred trying just to stay afloat. It is no where near what they lost financially, nor is it near how much land Black people lost on a personal and community level.

“We never got any of the forty acres that were promised to us, and we lost 98% of Black farmers,” Cooper continues. “The little bit of land we managed to save and scrape up for, we lost all of that to and from white terror. And that’s really important to name because there has to be reckoning with that. There has to be.”

For Cooper, no conversation about reparations is complete without creating an agenda around the recovery of the land.

“We need the ability to feed and nourish our communities, and the repair of the systematic harm that has and continues to be done to Black people,” Cooper says emphatically. To that end, “[NBFJA] is working on a broad campaign in coalition and community with Black-led “Free the Land” focused organizations. We need to shift away from the ways in which capitalism teaches us to have private control over land. We have to move away from extraction of land for a very few, and shift toward land reform that addresses indigenous right to sovereignty and Black people’s right to self-determination in our communities in a collective way.”

According to the Census of Agriculture, between 1920 and 1992 the number of Black American farmers declined from 925,000 to only 18,000. The devastating impact on Black communities can be seen in everything from maternal morbidity to chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and hypertension, in so-called “food deserts,” a term that the food justice community rejects wholesale.

Getting the Language Right

Movement for Black Lives

From Houston, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, to Birmingham, Alabama; Baltimore, Maryland; Nashville, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, the long, treacherous history of redlining in this country aligns with where food redlining (or food apartheid) is prevalent today—and that is unambiguously state violence.

“Just looking at food alone, hunger, the inability to feed ourselves,” Cooper tells ESSENCE. “That’s violent. To be hungry and malnourished is a very violent phenomenon.

“Bank redlining specifically happened to Black communities and folks in proximity to Black communities,” Cooper continued. “When you look at all we’ve had to endure—from banking and housing discrimination, to food insecurity, displacement, theft of land, and our ability to feed ourselves—everything had to do with race, even though so-called remedies, like the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, didn’t name that and still don’t.

“We’re talking about the dismantling of Black and Brown communities, and massive displacement of Indigenous people,” she added. “It is absolutely state violence, and it’s systematic terrorism.”

While Cooper is clear that “there’s never been any course correction, reckoning with, or repairing of any of this violence,” she also makes it a point to make it plain:

We all we got.

“We have to think about how we, Black people, are investing our energy, resources, brilliance into building our own systems to care for our people,” Cooper says with determination evident in your voice. “So, a lot of the work we’re doing is around a collective land trust where we’re able to help communities return back to regenerative practices that are in better harmony with the earth and with each other.”

Black Women On The Frontlines

Time does not, and cannot, erase the scars of white, state-sanctioned terror. It’s necessary to sit with the magnitude of what was lost, what was stolen, what was promised, and what is owed formerly enslaved Africans, and, by right, their descendants: repair, reparations, and a rightful redistribution of land and resources. The multi-generational efforts to ensure a sustainable food infrastructure for Black communities is something that gives Cooper hope when progress appears to be at a standstill.

“There’s an urban gardeners conference every year, and you get to see hundreds and hundreds of intergenerational folks, Black people who are deeply invested in a sustainable food system and a sustainable way forward together in collective ways—and so much of that leadership is Black women,” Cooper says with a smile. “When we look at the literature and scholarship coming out, so much of that comes from Black women, too.

“There’s Monica White, author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement; Leah Penniman [Co-Director and Program Manager of Soul Fire Farm], and author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land; Ashante Reese, author of Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington D.C.; and Naa Oyo Kwate, who has a book coming out called Burgers in Blackface, which shows a direct correlation between fast food industries and anti-Blackness.”

Shirley Sherrod, the former Georgia State Director of Rural Development, is also still doing her part to free the land.

For Cooper, freeing the land is foundational to Black liberation, which is why she dedicates so much time, energy, and heart to imagining, envisioning, and creating a world in which it is so.

“Free the land indicates Black people’s right to self-determination,” Cooper teaches. “So, that means freeing the land from corporate control, freeing the land from white supremacy, freeing the land from extractive capitalism, and freeing our people.”

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The Atlantic Black Star: Food Apartheid: The Silent Killer in the Black Community

“Fast food franchises appear suddenly in Black communities like a jack-out-of-a-box, occupying corners close to houses, schools and malls. These franchises function as pimps, pasting seductive images of fast food on windows to grab the attention of those passing by and ignite hunger pangs in residents who are too weak or defeated to demand anything better.

Franchises function as money-making machines, growing exponentially within Black communities, serving junk disguised as food. This junk triggers chronic, irreversible diseases such as diabetes and heart disease; these diseases are left to run through Black bodies like electricity at night.

It seems fast food has become the “McMighty” killer of Black people, but their deaths are insignificant because driving up profits is more important than Black lives. Generating cash to fund holidays, cars and lavish homes happens at the expense of Black life. And Black life has always been used to maximize profit. Essentially, it was the labor of Black slaves that enabled America to accumulate an unprecedented amount of wealth, and today building wealth just sings a different tune…

…Food apartheid is a relentless social construct that devalues human beings and assumes that people are unworthy of having access to nutritious food. Food apartheid affects people of all races, including poor white people, although Black and brown people are affected disproportionately. Under these conditions — which are overtly abusive — whole communities are geographically and economically isolated from healthy food options…

…The body is linked to the mind, and a healthy, functioning mind is also dependent on a nourished body. With a foggy mind, one cannot be productive, develop intellectually and challenge the status quo. Bad food helps to keep hearts and minds weak, and people in a malleable state of submissiveness.

The Black Panthers understood the connection between nutrition and academic performance, or the mind-body connection, and it was this understanding, among other things, that drove them to create The Free Breakfast Program, a revolutionary program that provided breakfast for poor Black children. Today, we see Black children are targeted by fast food franchises, whose logic lies in the belief that if you “get them while they’re young” they will be lifelong consumers of bad food.

Just like drugs destroyed Black communities and Black minds to eradicate the intellectuals orchestrating the civil rights movement, bad food also functions as a killer and an intellectual sap. And let’s not forget that some of these foods are addictive, thereby serving the same debilitating function as drugs.

The inhumanity of food apartheid is lodged in the acceptance of capitalism. So perhaps it’s not “our” food that’s killing us, but the food transplanted into our communities by capitalist crusaders.

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Food First: Dismantling Racism in the Food System series

Food—Systems—Racism: From Mistreatment to Transformation

Racism—the systemic mistreatment of people based on their ethnicity or skin color—affects all aspects of our society, including our food system. While racism has no biological foundation, the socio-economic and political structures that dis-possess and exploit people of color, coupled with widespread misinformation about race, cultures and ethnic groups, make racism one of the more intractable injustices causing poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Racism is not simply attitudinal preju-dice or individual acts, but an historical legacy that privileges one group of people over others. Racism—individual, institutional and structural (see Box 3)—also impedes good faith efforts to build a fair, sustainable food system.

Despite its pervasiveness, racism is almost never mentioned in international programs for food aid and agricultural development. While anti-hunger and food security programs frequently cite the shocking statistics, racism is rarely identified as the cause of inordinately high rates of hunger, food insecurity, pesticide poisoning and diet-related disease among people of color. Even the wide-ly-hailed “good food” movement—with its plethora of projects for organic agriculture, permaculture, healthy food, community supported agriculture, farmers markets and corner store conversions—tends to address the issue of racism unevenly.1Some organizations are committed to dismantling racism in the food system and center this work in their activities

Others are sympathetic but are not active on the issue. Many organizations, however, see racism as too difficult, tangential to their work, or a divisive issue to be avoided. The hurt, anger, fear, guilt, grief and hopelessness of racism are un-easily addressed in the food movement—if they are addressed at all.This Backgrounder is first in a series about how racism and our food system have co-evolved, how present-day racism operates within the food sys-tem, and what we can do to dismantle racism and build a fair, just and sustainable food system that works for everyone.

Caste, Food and Capitalism

The term racial caste describes a “stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.”2 Racial caste is one consequence of a hierarchical imbalance in economic, political and social power (sexism and classism are others). In North America and much of Europe, this racial caste system privileges light-complexioned people of Northern European ancestry.

Any country that has been subjected to Northern colonialism has been structured by a racial caste sys-tem in which ‘whiteness’ concedes social privileges. This system was originally developed to justify European colonialism and enable the eco-nomic exploitation of vast lands in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Outright dispossession through genocidal military conquest and government trea-ties affected 15 million indigenous people—most of whom were farmers and lived in towns—through-out the period of US “westward expansion.” Col-onization was largely carried out by white planters and aspiring white smallholder-settlers.3

In the Americas, Europeans and people of Europe-an descent murdered and dispossessed indigenous populations for their natural resources, sometimes enslaving them (e.g., the Spanish Catholic missions and encomiendas). People from West African re-gions were enslaved, forcibly shipped across the Atlantic Ocean and sold as chattel to do backbreak-ing labor, primarily on sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations. While slaves acquired through war and trade had been part of many societies for thousands of years, widespread commerce in human beings did not appear until the advent of capitalism and the European conquest.

The super-exploitation of enslaved human beings on plantations allowed slave systems to out-com-pete agrarian wage labor for over two hundred years. Under slavery, human beings were bought, sold and mortgaged as property. The tremendous wealth generated from slavery was sent to northern banks where it was used to finance military con-quest, more plantations and ultimately, the industri-al revolution.4 The centrality of slavery and dispos-session in the emergence of 19th century capitalism flies in the face of many myths about our food system (and capitalism). As Bekert 5points out,

“[It] was not the small farmers of the rough New England countryside who established the United States’ economic position. It was the backbreaking labor of unremunerated American slaves in places like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama… After the Civil War [and Abolition], a new kind of capitalism arose, in the United States and elsewhere. Yet that new capitalism—characterized first and fore-most by states with unprecedented bureaucrat-ic, infrastructural, and military capacities, and by wage labor—had been enabled by the profits, institutions, networks, technologies, and inno-vations that emerged from slavery, colonialism, and land expropriation.”

The social justification for the commoditization of human beings was the alleged biological inferiority of the people who were used as property, and the divinely-determined superiority of their owners. This division of power, ownership, and labor was held in place through violence and terrorism. It also required constant religious and scientific justi-fication constructed on the relatively new concept of “race.” Although enslaved peoples came from ethnically and culturally different regions of West Africa, they were classified as Black. Though slave owners came from different areas of Europe where they had been known by vague tribal names like Scythians, Celts, Gauls and Germani, they were clas-sified as White.

Slavery and colonization produced over a century of “scientific” misinformation that attempted to classify human beings on the basis of their physical traits. Eventually, people were racialized into three major categories: Mongoloid, Negroid, and Cauca-soid, with Caucasians awarded superior intelligence, physical beauty and moral character. Scientists argued over how to classify the many peoples that didn’t fit into these categories (such as the Finns, Malays and most of the indigenous people in the Americas). The messiness of the categories was un-important to the political and economic objectives of racism. Systematically erasing the unique ethnic, tribal, and cultural backgrounds of the world’s peo-ple while elevating a mythical Caucasian race was a shameful exercise in egregiously bad science, but it endured because it supported the control of the world’s land, labor and capital by a powerful elite.6

Box 1: The birth and mutations of whitenessFrom the beginning, the concept of race has been fluid, constantly accommodating to the changing needs of capital and the ruling class while under-mining struggles for equality and liberation. For example, in the colonial Americas, there was little social difference between African slaves and Eu-ropean indentured servants. But when they began organizing together against their colonial rulers, the Virginia House of Burgesses introduced the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705. These laws estab-lished new property rights for slave owners; allowed for the legal, free trade of slaves; estab-lished separate trial courts for whites and Blacks; prohibited Black people from owning weapons and from striking a white person; prohibited free Black people from employing whites and allowed for the apprehension of suspected runaways. Much later, during the early 20th century, poor, light-skinned Irish Catholic immigrants living in the US were initially treated as an inferior race and experienced discrimination as non-white. As the Irish began to organize for their rights—often across racial barriers—they were steadily catego-rized as white, setting them apart politically—if not economically—from Black and indigenous people.7 Mediterranean people, some eastern Eu-ropeans and light-complexioned Latin Americans have had similar experiences.

Slavery had a tremendous influence on food and labor systems around the world and was the cen-tral pillar of capitalism’s racial caste system until it was widely abolished in the late 19th century. In the US, after nearly three years of bloody civil war, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 released African-Americans living in Confederate states from slavery (though it took nearly two more years of war before ex-slaves could freely leave their plan-tations).8 The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution finally put a legal end to slavery in the US in 1865. But after a “moment in the sun” African Americans living in the former Confederacy were quickly segregated and disenfranchised through “Jim Crow” laws designed to maintain the racial caste system in the absence of slavery. Racial caste has systematically shaped the food system, particularly during periods of labor shortage. During WWII for example, when much of the US’s labor force was fighting in Europe and the Pacific, the Mexican Farm Labor Program Agreementof 1942 imported Mexican peasants to keep the US food system running. Without them, the US could not have fought the war. After the war, the BraceroProgram brought in over 4 million Mexican farmworkers. Mexican labor was cheap and legally exploitable. The “immigrant labor subsidy” transferred billions of dollars in value to the sector, turned WWII into a decades-long agricultural boon and transformed labor relations in agriculture.9

But just as African-Americans are not recognized for their role in establishing the US as a nation (or capitalism as its economic system), racial caste invisiblizes the contribution of Mexican farmwork-ers to the US’s survival during WWII and stigmatizes Mexican-Americans as citizens. Similar scenarios have played out with Asian, Filipino and Caribbean immigrants. To this day, important sectors of the food systems in the US and Europe continue to be defined by dispossessed and exploited immigrant labor from the Global South. Their systematic mistreatment is justified by the centuries-old racial caste system.

Racism in the Food System

Calls to “fix a broken food system” assume that the capitalist food system used to work well. This assumption ignores the food system’s long, racial-ized history of mistreatment of people of color. The food system is unjust and unsustainable but it is not broken—it functions precisely as the capitalist food system has always worked; concentrating power in the hands of a privileged minority and passing off the social and environmental “externalities” dispro-portionately on to racially stigmatized groups.

Statistics from the US confirm the persistence of racial caste in the food system:African-Americans once owned 16 million acres of farmland.

But by 1997, after many decades of Jim Crow, several national farm busts and a generally inattentive (or obstructionist) Department of Agriculture (USDA), less than 20,000 Black farmers owned just 2 million acres of land.10

The rate of Black land loss has been twice that of white land loss and today less than 1 million acres are farmed.11, 12 According to the USDA 2012 Census of Agriculture, of the country’s 2.1 million farmers, only 8 % are farmers of color and only half of those are owners of land. Though their farm share is growing (particularly among Latinos, who now number over 67,000 farmers), people of color tend to earn less than $10,000 in annual sales, produce only 3% of agricultural value, and farm just 2.8% of farm acreage.13

While white farmers dominate as operator-owners, farmworkers and food workers—from field to fork—are overwhelmingly people of color. Most are paid poverty wages, have inordinately high levels of food insecurity and experience nearly twice the level of wage theft than white workers.While white food workers’ average incomes are $25,024 a year, workers of color make only $19,349 a year. White workers hold nearly 75% of the managerial positions in the food system. Latinos hold 13% and Black and Asian workers 6.5%.14

The resulting poverty from poorly paid jobs is racialized: Of the 47 million people living below the poverty line in the United States, less than 10% are white. African-Americans make up 27% of the poor, Native Americans 26%, Latinos 25.6% and Asian-Americans 11.7%.15

Poverty results in high levels of food insecurity for people of color. Of the 50 million food insecure peo-ple in the US 10.6% are white, 26.1% are Black, 23.7% are Latino and 23% are Native American.16Even restaurant workers—an occupation dominated by people of color (who should have access to all the food they need)—are twice as food insecure as the national average.

Race, poverty and food insecurity correlate closely with obesity and diet-related disease; nearly half of African-Americans and over 42% of Latinos suffer from obesity. While less than 8% of non-Hispanic whites suffer from diabetes, 9% of Asian -Americans, 12.8% of Hispanics, 13.2 % of non-Hispanic African-Americans and 15.9 % of Indigenous people have diabetes. At $245 billion a year, the national expense in medical costs and reduced productivity resulting from diabetes are staggering.17 The human and economic burdens of diabetes and diet-rela-ted disease on low-income families of color are devastating.

Trauma, Resistance and Transformation: An equitable food system is possible

Recognizing racism as foundational in today’s capitalist food system helps explain why people of color suffer disproportionately from its environmen-tal externalities, labor abuses, resource inequities and diet related diseases. It also helps explain why many of the promising alternatives such as land trusts, farmers’ markets, and community supported agriculture tend to be dominated by people who are privileged by whiteness.18 Making these alterna-tives readily accessible to people of color requires a social commitment to racial equity and a fearless commitment to social justice. Ensuring equity of ac-cess to healthy food, resources and dignified, living wage jobs, would go a long way towards “fixing” the food system.

Box 2 Pedagogy of the Oppressed:“[The] great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed [is] to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.”19

The trauma of racism is inescapable. In addition to the pain and indignity of racialized mistreatment, people of color can internalize racial misinforma-tion, reinforcing racial stereotypes. While white privilege benefits white communities, it can also

5immobilize them with guilt, fear and hopelessness. Both internalized racism and white guilt are socially and emotionally paralyzing, and make racism diffi-cult to confront and interrupt.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Since before the Abolition movement and the Underground Railroad of the mid-1800s, people have found ways to build alliances across racial divides. The history of the US food system is replete with examples of resistance and liberation: from the early struggles of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to the Black Panther’s food programs and the boycotts and strikes by the United Farm Workers. More recently, the Food Chain Workers Alliance have fought for better wages and decent working conditions. The increase of local food policy councils run by people of color and the spread of Growing Power’s urban farming groups reflect a rise in leadership by those communities with the most at stake in changing a system that some have referred to as “food apartheid.” Oppressed communities have developed ways of healing historical trauma and there are peer counseling groups with skills for working through the immobilizing feelings of internalized oppression, fear, hopelessness and guilt. All of these resources and historical lessons can be brought into the food movement.

Racism still stands in the way of a “good food revolution.” If the food movement can begin dis-mantling racism in the food system—and within the food movement itself—it will have opened a path not only for food system transformation, but for ending the system of racial caste.

Box 3 : Definitions

• Interpersonal Racism: This refers to prejudices and discriminatory behaviors where one group makes assumptions about the abilities, motives, and intents of other groups based on race. This set of prejudices leads to cruel intentional or uninten-tional actions towards other groups.

• Internalized Racism: In a society where one group is politically, socially and economically dominant, members of stigmatized groups, who are bombarded with negative messages about their own abilities and intrinsic worth, may internalize those negative messages. It holds people back from achieving their fullest potential and reinforces the negative messages which, in turn, reinforces the oppressive systems.

• Institutional Racism: Where assumptions about race are structured into the social and economic in-stitutions in our society. Institutional racism occurs when organizations, businesses, or institutions like schools and police departments discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly against certain groups of people to limit their rights. This type of racism reflects the cultural assumptions of the dominant group.

• Structural Racism: While most of the legally based forms of racial discrimination have been outlawed, many of the racial disparities originating in various institutions and practices continue and accumulate as major forces in economic and political structures and cultural traditions. Structural racism refers to the ways in which social structures and institutions, over time, perpetuate and produce cumulative, durable, race-based inequalities. This can occur even in the absence of racist intent on the part of individuals.

• Racialization: This refers to the process through which ‘race’ (and its associated meanings) is at-tributed to something – an individual, community, status, practice, or institution. Institutions that appear to be neutral can be racialized, shaped by previous racial practices and outcomes so that the institution perpetuates racial disparities, or makes them worse. This is true of the criminal justice system, the education and health systems in our country, and so on.20

• “Reverse” Racism: Sometimes used to characterize ‘affirmative action’ programs, but this is inaccurate. Affirmative action programs are attempts to repair the results of institutionalized racism by setting guidelines and establishing procedures for finding qualified applicants from all segments of the population. The term ‘reverse racism’ is also sometimes used to characterize the mistreatment that individual whites may have experienced at the hands of individuals of color. This too is inaccurate. While any form of humans harming other humans is wrong, because no one is entitled to mistreat anyone, we should not confuse the occasional mistreatment experienced by whites at the hands of people of color with the systematic Useful linksHaas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society: http://haasinstitute.berkeley.eduGrassroots Policy Project: http://www.strategicpractice.orgBlack Lives Matter: http://blacklivesmatter.com/and institutionalized mistreatment experienced by people of color at the hands of whites.

• Racial Justice: Racial justice refers to a wide range of ways in which groups and individuals struggle to change laws, policies, practices and ideas that rein-force and perpetuate racial disparities. Proactively, it is first and foremost the struggle for equitable outcomes for people of color.Unlearning Racism: http://www.unlearningracism.org/Center for Social Inclusion: http://www.centerforso-cialinclusion.org/Growing Power:http://growingfoodandjustice.org/race-and-the-food-system/dismantling-racism-resources/Endnotes1. Alis

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Further Readings

• The Atlantic Black Star: Food Apartheid: The Silent Killer in the Black Community
• Invisible Vegan

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Back to Top

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Food Sovereignty

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Food Sovereignty

“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”  La Vía Campesina

“given the unequal distribution of power in the food system (towards corporations) and how institutionalized racism, colonialism and oppression have built the food system (and society) as it is, these historically marginalized groups should be supported as they take leadership in guiding society in a different direction, and in particular when it comes to agriculture and food.” Blain Sniptal – Why hunger

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Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” —Malcolm X

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7 Pillars of Food Sovereignty

By Soilful City

1.Eating Healthy Food is a Human Right.

2.The current global food system must be resisted and dismantled.

3.Food Justice recognizes that the causes of food disparity are the result of multiple systems of oppression (White Supremacy, Capitalism, Patriarchy, Ableism, Hetero-sexism, Anthropocentrism),which means that to practice food justice we must do the work through an intersectional lens.

4.Food Justice advocates must focus on working with the most marginalized and vulnerable populations, which are communities of color, communities in poverty, immigrants, children, our elders, women, people who identify as LGBTQ, those with disabilities and people experiencing homelessness.

5.Food Justice require us to work towards the elimination of exploitation in our food system, both exploitation of humans and animals.

6.Food Justice demands that we grow food in such a way that preserves ecological biodiversity and promotes sustainability in all aspects.

7.Provide resources and skill sharing so that people can be collectively more food self-sufficient.

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Soul Fire Farm: Feeding the Soul, Growing Community

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Leah Penniman (Soulfire Farm) speaks at the Holyoke Food Justice Conference

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Soul Fire Farm – Ending Racism and Injustice in the Food System

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Good Food Jobs:What Food Justice Really Means: Asha Carter & DC Greens

From an early age, Asha Carter was told that she had a special purpose on this earth. “I was told not to mess up my destiny for myself, and not to mess it up for the rest of us.” As a child in Atlanta, she became well versed in issues of justice. Her grandmother worked with the Black Panthers, and her parents had been attacked by Klansmen at racial justice demonstrations in the eighties. They were frank with her about the responsibility of her race. “You are a black girl, so when you walk into a room, you don’t represent just yourself. You take all of us with you. Whether you want to or not. It’s just the way it works here.”

At nine years old, Asha would come home from school and watch Oprah on TV, followed by the news. Then she’d dissolve into tears, full of questions about the current state of the world. “Who’s doing something about this?” she’d ask her parents. “I don’t understand how you can have a job that isn’t doing something about how screwed up everything is.” She already felt compelled to do justice work, “some sort of work for the people, with the people, somehow.”

One of the greatest opportunities in the food justice space is to value the lived experience of the people who are most impacted by the issues.

Now 27, Asha has developed that early sense of injustice into a focused purpose. She works in Washington, DC, as the Food Justice Strategist at DC Greens, a well-respected nonprofit doing community engagement work around food justice. At the heart of Asha’s work is her desire to see people have sovereignty over their own lives, rather than having decisions made for them, and for them to have the tools and resources to fight for that sovereignty. In her opinion, one of the greatest opportunities in the food justice space is to value the lived experience of the people who are most impacted by the issues. “If you’ve figured out how to survive under this system, you probably know a lot about it.”

By the time she joined DC Greens, she had already had a long and seemingly magical career. While studying Peace and Justice at Wellesley College, she served as a speechwriter and legislative advisor to Georgia State Representative Keisha Waites, and as an intern at Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE), an environmental justice community organizing nonprofit in Boston. At ACE, she supported the youth organizers of the Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Project (REEP) and their campaigns for food and transit justice. The group created a guerilla gardening campaign called Grow or Die, and their message was “We have the right to be healthy. The food system we currently have here gives us death and sickness, and we deserve health and life.”  Asha found its place-based community organizing invigorating, and she learned a lot about her own place in the work. “Many of the group’s members came from similar socio-economic and racial backgrounds as I did and were the same age. But I wasn’t from Roxbury or Dorchester, and I was attending an elite women’s college outside the city – their space wasn’t for me to lead in. In connecting with, and learning from the REEPers, it became evident to me that these young people had an incredible amount of knowledge and expertise that people should be learning from.”

A year out of college, in 2014, Asha was working as a temp at a staffing agency in Boston when she received a dream email. Her name was on the shortlist for a position in the Obama administration. Her family scrambled to pull together enough money to buy her a bus ticket to Washington, DC. “You know, baby,” her father told her on the morning of her interview, “that $100 wasn’t a little money, so make it count!” Which she did: at 22 years old, she was hired as Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

After her time at EPA, Asha yearned to be closer to the ground again, in a local organization. That yearning led her to DC Greens in 2016. At the time, DC Greens identified itself as a food access organization. (Asha later co-facilitated the organization’s first strategic planning process, where it came to define itself as a food justice organization for the first time.) DC Greens manages the city’s Produce Plus program, an income-based farmers-market nutrition incentive program for DC residents. Participants may receive up to $10 twice a week to spend on produce at a farmers market. People often wait as much as two hours in line for those ten dollars, with no guarantee that the checks will outlast the line. On average, if they visit two markets a week to get the full $20, they spend three to three and a half hours waiting in line. In 2018, the Produce Plus program, funded by the DC Department of Health, helped to feed 19,000 District residents.

If you’re talking about people having access to food, what you’re really talking about is structural poverty and structural racism.

Washington, DC, once a predominantly black city (it was once known as Chocolate City), has been undergoing dramatic gentrification and is now majority white. In 2016, median white family income grew to more than $120,000 per year, while black income fell to below $40,000. The average white family’s net worth was $284,000, and the average black family had assets worth just $3,500. Homeownership is a primary driver of wealth creation, and in DC a white family is nearly twice as likely to own a home as a black family. The list of racial disparities goes on and on – in education, employment, health, the criminal justice system, and food access.

“If you’re talking about people having access to food,” explains Asha, “what you’re really talking about is structural poverty and structural racism. If you don’t understand those things, you’re only going to create programs that are Band-Aids. You’re not going to create something that actually shifts the relations of power for folks and make it so people are actually able to sustain themselves.”

Asha wanted to hear directly from the people being served by DC Greens, so she created a Story Gathering project. “We mostly focused on talking with people with a lived experience of food insecurity in the city. When we asked them, ‘What is your vision of food in your community and  how would you want people to access food?’, they had difficulty answering the question and would mostly talk about housing. Because if your housing is unstable, your ability to cook food and maintain food for yourself is also going to be unstable. If you’re living in housing that isn’t maintained well by the owner, and your stove or refrigerator doesn’t work, and if you’re paying two-thirds of your income for housing (like I was when I worked in Boston), you have substantially less money for food.

“People are not leading single issue lives. When people are experiencing a lack of access to healthy food, they’re also experiencing a ton of other things at the same time. And so part of what food justice acknowledges is the layered histories of exploitation that our food system is built on, and that any solutions we build have to arise out of that understanding. There is a deep interconnectedness between us, the environment, and the histories we live in together, and that interconnectedness requires us to create multifaceted solutions.”

People are not leading single issue lives.

She realized she had to change the questions she was asking in the project. When she posed the question about an ideal food system with the opening, “If you could wave a magic wand…,” respondents felt freer to think outside of what they already knew. They painted a picture of gardens on every roof and an intergenerational food system built around everything residents needed in community. Their ideal was not having a big box grocery store.

With the rapid gentrification in the city, people will ask, “If you put a grocery store in my neighborhood, am I going to be able to afford to live here anymore? I would love a grocery store…I don’t have one, and I need food, but…” Most residents buy their food from corner markets or gas stations. Hunger is not the overriding concern; the poor quality of available food is.

Out of the Story Gathering project, Asha created a Community Advocates program, which trains people with a lived experience of food insecurity to advocate for themselves, and pays them for their time. Advocates receive training on the industrial food system, food justice as a framework and how it interacts with other parts of the system, history, economics, and culture. “We talk about everything. Community organizing, advocacy. How to be a spokesperson for an issue, how to testify at City Council meetings. We offer lots of training and practice support.

“So many of the spaces in the city where decisions are being made about people’s lives-the City Council, for example-are spaces where those decisions are being made by people who do not have a lived experience of the issues they are trying to solve. So what you get are these programs that have low participation rates, and the problems persist. The programs are not actually working for the folks most impacted. In DC at least, there are people in those decision-making bodies that want to hear from people who have direct experience. At the same time, there are people who want to be able to do the work of self-determination and improving their communities, but don’t even know where those decisions about their communities are being made. People already have so many assets-not only their lived experience, but their social capital and existing networks as well. It’s important to invest in them, and their leadership. Paying people for their expertise, just as all the decision-makers in a room are paid for theirs, is an opportunity to really value what people can offer.”

If you believe that this system we have now is either going to collapse or needs to collapse, then it changes the context that you are doing your work in. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity.

A graduate of the Community Advocates training now runs that program, and Asha has been promoted to Food Justice Strategist. She works internally at DC Greens to help create a truly equitable organization. Asha is helping the staff better understand what “food justice” means and move the organization from a food access lens to a food justice one, with a deeper understanding of the structural foundation of racism in the food system and a strategic plan to develop programs that actually have sustainable impact. She has close relationships with her coworkers, but admits that it isn’t always comfortable to be in the role of challenging people’s understanding of the world. “People are well meaning, but they may not understand. But you’re in a relationship and you are working over time, holding each other as you move through this process together.”

Asha goes on to say, “If you believe that this system we have now is either going to collapse or needs to collapse, then it changes the context that you are doing your work in. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity. I have this deep belief that there is something beyond this. I have to believe that we were born to this generation to do something. I think a lot about my relationship with and my responsibility to my ancestors given the things that they went through. I think of the phrase ‘You are your ancestors’ wildest dreams.’ I know I had somebody dreaming for me to be free, to travel at my leisure, when there was no way they could do that. I think very critically about my time and where I put my life force. I want to put it into work that will allow people who have been stomped on to be free. To be healthy. For those things to be possible. We can do better.”

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The Root: Welcome to Libertad Urban Farm

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Yes: 4 Not-So-Easy Ways to Dismantle Racism in the Food System

“Racism is built into the DNA of the United States’ food system. It began with the genocidal theft of land from First Nations people, and continued with the kidnapping of my ancestors from the shores of West Africa. Under the brutality of the whip and the devastation of broken families, enslaved Africans cultivated the tobacco and cotton that made America wealthy.

But the story doesn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Later came convict leasing, a form of legalized slavery that kept many Southern black people on plantations—in some places until the late 1920s. Just a few decades later, Congress created the migrant guest-worker program, which imported agriculturalists from Mexico and other countries to labor in the fields for low wages.

All of this history combines to produce the racism I see today in my work as a farmer and activist for food justice. Farm management is among the whitest professions, while farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited. Meanwhile, people of color tend to suffer from diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and obesity, and to live in “food apartheid” neighborhoods—high-poverty areas flooded with fast food and corner stores, but lacking healthy food options. While some writers refer to these areas as “food deserts,” I prefer the term “food apartheid” because this is a human-created system of segregation, not a natural ecosystem.

Our food system needs a redesign if it’s to feed us without perpetuating racism and oppression.

With this new administration, that’s even truer today than before. After the election of a presidential candidate who ran on a racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic platform, the power of white supremacy in the United States is laid bare. Just as our ancestral mothers braided seeds of rice and okra into their hair before boarding slave ships, believing in a future of harvest in the face of brutality, so must we maintain courage and hope in these terrifying times.

As we work toward a racially just food system, abandoning the “colonizer” mentality that first created the problems is crucial. The communities at the frontlines of food justice are composed of black, Latino, and indigenous people, refugees and immigrants, and people criminalized by the penal system. We need to listen before we speak and follow the lead of those directly affected by the issues.

This article offers four infographics that explain different aspects of the problem. It also contains two solutions for each of them—some of the systemic changes we’d need to fully address it, and a way for individuals to take action. I hope these can be practical seeds of hope toward a racially just food system.

1. Uphold everyone’s right to land

After decades of discrimination by the federal government, Black farmers have lost almost all of our land. Reparations for past harm are the first step to justice.

 

System Shift: Where possible, land and wealth must be redistributed to the descendants of those from whom it was stolen. Some first steps would be to pass the bill H.R. 40, which would establish a commission to study reparations proposals for African Americans, and to create debt forgiveness programs for farmers affected by discrimination. We must also halt and reverse the grabbing of land from tribal nations, such as we’ve seen at Standing Rock and Bears Ears.

As Ralph Paige of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives has put it, “Land is the only real wealth in this country, and if we don’t own any we’ll be out of the picture.”

Since land loss in the black community is ongoing, we need to intervene by supporting land trusts, which are community organizations that hold property for the common good. Land trusts can purchase and temporarily hold black-owned land after foreclosure, the death of the owner, or amid a legal dispute. Organizations such as the Land Loss Prevention Project, which provides legal support to black landowners trying to keep their farms alive, need our backing.

Plant Your Seed: Read the HEAL Food Alliance and Movement for Black Lives Policy Platforms, which offer pathways for land reparations and a just food system. Take a moment to appreciate the brilliance of the text and then host a discussion group at your congregation or workplace with the goal of having these organizations endorse and implement these platforms.

2. Honor the people who grow our food

The U.S. does not provide a living wage, health care, or labor protections to the farmworkers who feed us. It’s time to update the law and stop exploiting agricultural workers.

 

System Shift: The people who feed our families deserve full protection under the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act, which should both be amended to remove exclusions for farmworkers. All workers deserve the same rights, including minimum wage, collective bargaining rights, and protections from child labor.

Since many are not citizens, immigration reform is needed to create pathways to full citizenship for farmworkers and their families. Let’s join Movimiento Cosecha—one of the organizers of the “Day Without Immigrants ” event planned for May 1—in calling for permanent protection, dignity, and respect for the 11 million undocumented people in this country.

Beyond that, farmworkers need pathways that allow them to advance to management and ownership of farms. Programs like the National Black Farmers Association “Let’s Get Growing” program and Soul Fire Farm’s Black and Latino Farmers Immersion, which focus on training farmers of color, need support so they can equip farmworkers to become managers. (Full disclosure: I co-direct Soul Fire Farm).

Plant Your Seed: Encourage your local farmers, supermarkets, and cafeterias to join the Domestic Fair Trade Association and to seek Food Justice Certification through the Agricultural Justice Project. Both groups uphold high standards for fair treatment of workers and care of the environment.

3. Eliminate Food Apartheid

Communities of color have less access to life-giving, healthy food, resulting in high rates of obesity and diabetes. Policies and actions that boost community control are part of the answer.

System Shift: Healthy food is a basic human right, not a privilege for the wealthy. To honor this right, we need to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and make it easier to use by allowing online purchasing and providing higher allowances. The Affordable Care Act—currently threatened by Republican elected officials—should be updated to allow doctors to prescribe vegetables and fruits, not just pills, as some organizations in New York state are already doing. Insurance companies need to cover this “medicine” as well.

Ultimately, we are working toward food sovereignty, where all people exercise the right to control our own food systems—including in cities. Passage of the Urban Agriculture Act of 2016, introduced by U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, would allow urban farmers to be counted in the Census of Agriculture and receive government support for the programs they run, such as community composting and school gardens. Further, food sovereignty can be aided by requiring that community food projects hire locally and have local residents on their decision-making boards.

Plant Your Seed: Catalyze your community to raise funds to help your local farmer provide affordable produce to the most vulnerable—refugees, incarcerated people, and those living in food deserts. Organizations such as the Corbin Hill Food Project and D-Town Farm have models for doing this, using sliding scale pay systems, doorstep delivery, and farmers markets near neighborhood schools.

4. Support Farmers of Color

Access to education and start-up funding remain barriers for aspiring farmers of color. Some federal programs have made progress, but need more funding to meet the scale of the challenge.

System Shift: To make small-scale sustainable farming a viable career, we need to pay farmers for stewarding the public trust.

In Costa Rica, the government pays responsible farmers for “ecosystem services” like protecting pollinators, sequestering carbon in the soil, and preserving waterways. The United States could create a similar program, perhaps funded through a tax on the large-scale farms that are driving climate change, extinction, and soil erosion. The USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which provides technical and financial support for farmers to implement conservation plans, is a start. The program has been getting better at reaching farmers of color, but it needs investment and expansion.

The USDA’s Socially Disadvantaged Farmers Grant (also known as the 2501 program) is another key program that’s designed to help farmers of color. But it needs to be made more accessible by increasing funding, easing the onerous application process and reporting requirements, and offering technical assistance to access the funds.

Education is another piece of the solution. To support aspiring farmers of color, we need to provide full scholarships to land grant universities and other agricultural degree programs. Currently, many of these programs are geographically inaccessible to people of color. To address this barrier, satellite “campuses” on urban and rural farms owned by black, Latino, and indigenous people can be developed. These training programs must explicitly address racism in the food system and provide support for healing from land-based trauma.

Plant Your Seed: Put your skills to work supporting a farmer or food business owner of color. Farmers often don’t have enough time to attend to the administrative aspects of their operation, like grant writing, web design, social media, marketing, legal research, and blogging. A partial directory of black-operated farms can be found at this Google doc maintained by the staff at Blavity.com. Reach out to see if you can help.”

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Edge Effects: Food Justice Requires Land Justice: A Conversation with Savi Horne

“The food justice movement is one of the most promising political developments of the last generation. It has broadened and deepened environmentalism by knitting together concerns about economic inequality, labor rights, environmental health, and sustainable agriculture. But what often goes unmentioned in our discussions of food justice is that it all begins with land—who owns it, how they own it, and how it gets passed down from one generation to the next. This is something Savi Horne never forgets: food justice requires land justice.

As Executive Director of the Land Loss Prevention Project, Savi Horne helps use the power of the law to keep African Americans farmers in North Carolina from losing their land to indebtedness, legal challenges, and gentrification, while offering technical support for farmers to make their enterprises economically viable and environmentally sustainable…

…The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which just celebrated its 50^th anniversary. Imagine: an African American institution devoted to community economic development and built in its very beginning more than 120 co-ops has survived for 50 years and continue to grow. It’s astounding.

This model is still important to keeping rural communities vital. And communities everywhere. Look at Detroit where the 2008 recession stripped African Americans of wealth. It allowed the city to get to a place where it has become ripe for the picking for anyone with a little (or a lot) of money. People who are not black are acquiring what was the foundation of the leading black middle class in the country.

African Americans cannot afford to participate in the reclaimed “new Detroit” because our economics are still jacked up from 2008. Yet still, organizing around land, community sustainability, and food justice came to the fore and is allowing the black community to reinvision themselves in the city, to grow food, to sustain themselves. There is now a collectively owned grocery co-op as well as the Detroit Food Justice Network.

We have to all benefit from the land. Maybe the form of ownership we have won’t work for future generations. Maybe the simple, absolute ownership is not the way forward…

…Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice shows how, historically, cooperatives and mutual aid societies have built wealth within our communities. I have a real, live example from North Carolina of a group of 30-somethings coming together over a period of six to ten years, saving their money collectively, and planning a collective farm. They named it Earthseed. (I’m thinking Octavia Butler is smiling down on them.) It’s a totally integrated, holistic plan aimed at growing food but also nurturing our souls. Today they are close to about 60 acres, a stone’s throw away from the center of Durham.”

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Food, Race and Justice – Malik Yankini

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Free The Land: Shirley Sherrod and Black Land Struggles in the South

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Strategies of Food Sovereignty

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Community Ownership

• The most impacted people having capacity and agency to influence decision-making at multiple stages
• Requires accountability mechanisms
• Results in redistribution of power and assets

DC Greens

• Community first approach
  • Inclusive outreach, community design meetings, community ownership
  • Fair access to resources, jobs, funding, opportunities, (no gatekeeping)

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Community Self Sufficiency

Black Panther Free Breakfast For School Children Program

• Providing free youth breakfast
  • 1969-1970s, Panthers set up kitchens in cities across the US, feeding over 10,000 children every day before school
    • Inspired the federal free breakfast programs in 1975 that feeds over 14.57 million children before school

Brad Jones, member of the Philadelphia Black Panthers Organization, helping serve breakfast to youngsters. (Credit: Bill Ingraham/AP Photo)

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Rural Land Reform Efforts

“Food Justice requires Land Justice” Savi Horne

• Supporting Farmers of Color
  • Threaten by indebtedness, legal challenges, and gentrification,
    • Land Loss Prevention Project
    • National Black Food & Justice Alliance
    • Reparations for Black-Indigenous Farmers Map
      • 
• Cooperative Farm Projects
  • Federation of Southern Cooperatives
  • Rural Coalition
  • National Family Farm Coalition

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Urban Land Reform Efforts

• Urban Land Trends
  • Gentrification
  • Community Displacement
  • Affordable Housing cisis
  • Systemic Racism
• DC Affordable Housing Crisis
  • Comp Plan
  • Barry Farms Redevelopment
  • Empower DC, One DC, DC Grassroots Planning Coalition

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Intersectional Lens

The causes of food disparity are the result of multiple systems of oppression that all must be addressed including but not limited to:

• White supremacy
• Systemic Racism
• Neoliberal and neo-colonial capitalism
• Patriarchy
• Ableism
• Hetero-sexism
• Xenophobia
• Anthropocentrism
• Poverty

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Historical Trauma and Healing

• Historic Trauma
  • The cumulative emotional and psychological wounding of an individual or generation caused by a traumatic experience or event
  • Trauma is inherited in our epigenetics, the proteins that control DNA expression
• Historic Trauma around farming
  • Stigma of relating farming to slavery, share cropping, convict leasing, etc.
  • “There is a danger in confusing the oppression that our people experienced on land with the spirit of the Land itself.” Leah Penniman’s new book, Farming While Black

Soilful City’s Mission

To bring justice to communities and heal the sacred relationship between communities of African decent and Mother earth.   Soilful views farming not only as a way to cultivate food and sovereignty for communities, but as a way to heal and rebuild our souls. We utilize the agricultural and the political principals of Agroecology to work in solidarity with under resourced communities to develop a collective consciousness about restoring bodies, families, communities, and the land in which they live and to create a harmony amongst individuals, communities, and the natural world.

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DC Food Sovereignty Efforts

• Creating Local Food Economies
  • Farms, distribution, value-add processing, affordable markets and training for each step
  • Dreaming Out Loud, THEARC Farm, DC Urban Greens
• Community Kitchens
  • Takoma Park Silver Spring Community Kitchen, Kenilworth Rec Center, Martha’s Table
• Cooperative Markets
  • Community Grocery Co-op (CGC), Mt. Pleasant Buyers Club, DPR Rec Food Coop Pilot
• Targeted Funding
  • DSLBD 2018 Ward 8 Equitable Food Incubator Grant
• Community ownership and anti-racism training
  • DC Greens – Community Advocate Programs
• Advocacy
  • DC Grocery Walk
  • DC Food Justice Youth Summit
  • DC Food Policy Council

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Further Readings

• Civil Eats: A Political Movement for Food Systems Change Takes Hold in the Midwest
• New York Times: The Hidden Radicalism of Southern Food
• Vox: The most radical thing the Black Panthers did was give kids free breakfast

• Yes Magazine: Radical Farmers Use Fresh Food to Fight Racial Injustice and the New Jim Crow

•  Next city: Why Community-Owned Grocery Stores Are the Best Recipe for Revitalizing Food Deserts
• Lunch Agenda: Institutional Food, Episode 3: Prison Food (Nutrition Justice)

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Back to Top

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Urban Ag: Intentional vs Non Intentional

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Benefits of Urban Ag

When done intentionally urban Ag benefits can include

• community development
• creating new community connections
• community cooperatives
• increasing nutrition and access to healthy food
• empowering a community
• recreation and therapy
• youth development

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To Be Intentional

Community first model

• Inclusive with the community in all aspects of the project
  • Outreach
  • Planning/ Design
  • Leadership
  • Benefits
  • And if you should have the project in the first place
• Research and address social trends affecting communities
  • Current projects, gentrification, re-segregation, affordable housing crisis, eviction crisis, systemic racism, racial disparities, food apartheids, shady re-development, etc
  • Research history of community
    • Understand how you fit in the context of the community
• Design community checks and balances
  • Accountability, transparency, community veto

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When to Be Concerned

• When “food security” mixes w/ urban agriculture
• Pop up/temporary agriculture
• Organizations that don’t put the community first
• Mixing with unregulated development

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Problems with Unintentional Urban Ag

• Divide a community
• Contribute to gentrification, systemic racism and exclusion
• Increased vandalism
• Low morale/low community investment
• Divert attention from more serious issues

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Ways Urban Ag Can Hurt Communities

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Distraction

• Local governments can use urban Ag to look like they care about food insecurity without addressing real causes of hunger like:
  • like lack of affordable housing
  • systematic gentrification due to unregulated development.
  • Lack of grocery store access
• For example 2015 Sustainable DC plan has a goal to increase food security by ensuring that 75% of residents live within ¼ mile of a
  • community garden
  • farmers’ market
  • healthy corner store.
• No mention of grocery stores or affordable housing.  Never mind if
  • You can’t get a garden plot
  • You have to work during farmers market hours
  • Your healthy corner stores are poorly stocked

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Justifications for Negative Impacts of Gentrifying Developments

• Often developers use gardens to offset neg. gentrification effects
  • As they build residential units that are significantly higher in property value than the average property value in the community
• No garden can offset the negative impact
  • Of high end residential units in communities that can’t afford these units or can’t afford the surrounding rents that may increase in the long term!!!

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Increase Property Value Before Developing

• Developers sitting on land in poor communities
  • May wait years until the property value is increased through gentrification before they develop.

• One way to increase this process while making it look like the developers care about the community
  • Install temporary gardens until the property value has increased

• A big part of the new DC Urban Farm and Food Security Bill
  • Tax breaks for private property owners to do temporary gardens.

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To Fund Non Profits No One Asked For

• A lot of nonprofits will use the statistics of poor communities
  • To get grants to pay themselves to build urban Ag projects that the community never asked for
• Often the non profits walk away from projects
  • Before it is ever functional to the community
• Or non profits act as gatekeepers
  • Controlling and/or filtering any positive benefits for the community
  • Unfair power structure

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Mixing Food Insecurity with For Profit Farming Incentives

• The DC Urban Farm and Food Security Act of 2014
  • Gives tax breaks to for-profit farms in the name of food security with no community requirement
    • For example micro green farms that sell to high end restaurants will get tax breaks in the name of food security

• In a capitalistic system its often not profitable to sell food to poor
  • If we give our public land in poor neighborhoods to for-profit farms with no obligation to give back to the community
    • These farms are may do what’s best to keep their business financially viable
    • Which is to use this public resource (land in poor communities) to grow food to sell in the markets with the highest return (not the poor community).

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Lessons on Community Inclusion from Wangari Gardens

1. Outreaching is an ongoing process
2. Outreach inside and outside social media
3. Consistent open houses
4. Find local garden advocates
5. Find preexisting networks
6. Involve community in design process
7. While recruiting help, give help
8. Give local/long-term residents priority on garden waiting list
9. Free plots for low income
10. Don’t rush the process
11. Public communal plots maintained as a requirement for personal plots
12. Glean surplus crops for free CSA for immobile residents
13. Youth programming
14. Adult education
15. Community checks and balances
16. Train the trainer program

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Further Readings

• Detroit Metro Times: On urban farming and ‘colonialism’ in Detroit’s North End neighborhood 
• Yes Magazine: What White People Can Do for Food Justice

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Decolonizing of the Diet

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Drawing by Luna Enriquez

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Post Colonial Theory

• Study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands
  • Emerged in second half of 20^th century as as colonies struggled for and gained their political independence
  • Seeks to understand the effects centuries of colonial rule and exploitation have had on colonial subjects and their cultures
    • To combat harmful consequences and legacy of colonial oppression
  • Shows that race and racism are intricate parts of social history and the larger social order
    • Even when individual prejudices wane, racial inequality can perpetuate itself through larger social systems like education, housing, healthcare, and wealth/income

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Decolonization

• Decolonization
  • Process of deconstructing colonial ideologies of the superiority and privilege of Western thought and approaches. Involves:
    • Dismantling structures that perpetuate status quo/unbalanced power dynamics
    • Valuing and revitalizing Indigenous/African knowledge, culture and approaches
      • Weeding out settler biases or assumptions that impacted Indigenous ways of being
    • Creating spaces that are inclusive, respectful, and honor Indigenous Peoples and African Americans.
• For non-Indigenous people and allies
  • Decolonization is the process of examining your beliefs about Indigenous/African people and culture by learning about yourself in relationship to the communities where you live and the people with whom you interact
    • Learn about colonialism, settler colonialism, white Supremacy, systemic racism, racial bias, truth behind white washed histories, bad allyship

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Food Empowerment Project: Colonization, Food, and the Practice of Eating

“The violence that accompanied the European colonization of the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica is a well-known fact. Historians have elaborated on the devastating effects such colonization had on Indigenous societies, cultures, and mortality. While the study of the conquest has generally focused on the social, political, and economic changes forced upon Indigenous populations, the matter of food—the very source of survival—is rarely considered. Yet, food was a principal tool of colonization. Arguably, one cannot properly understand colonization without taking into account the issue of food and eating.

Imagine that you are a Spaniard, newly arrived on the coasts of a foreign land. Your survival depends on two things: security (protecting yourself from danger) and nourishment (food and other substances that are necessary for survival). In terms of the former, Europeans arrived on the coast of what is now referred to as “the Americas” fully equipped with the means to protect themselves. Atop horses, armed with advanced weaponry and a slew of European diseases, Spaniards engaged Indigenous populations in the most violent of ways. Nourishment, however, was another matter.

When Spaniards arrived in Mesoamerica, they encountered the Maya, Aztecs and other prominent Indigenous groups. The land was rich, fertile, and filled with crops such as beans, pumpkins, chilies, avocados, elderberries, guavas, papayas, tomatoes, cocoa, cotton, tobacco, henequen, indigo, maguey, corn, and cassava.^[1] Europeans encountered similar agricultural plantations throughout the region. However, to the colonists this food was substandard and unacceptable for the proper nourishment of European bodies. At the time of conquest, the European diet was principally composed of bread, olive oil, olives, “meat,” and wine. While this diet was somewhat sustained on the actual voyage from Europe to the Americas, upon arrival, Europeans found themselves devoid of the foods they considered necessary for survival. As Europeans began dying off in these “new” lands, the focus of concern shifted to food. In fact, Columbus himself was convinced that Spaniards were dying because they lacked “healthful European foods.”^[2] Herein began the colonial discourse of “right foods” (superior European foods) vs. “wrong foods” (inferior Indigenous foods). The Spaniards considered that without the “right foods,” they would die or, even worse, in their minds, they would become like Indigenous people.

The “Right Foods” vs. the “Wrong Foods”

Europeans believed that food shaped the colonial body. In other words, the European constitution differed from that of Indigenous people because the Spanish diet differed from the Indigenous diet. Further, bodies could be altered by diets—thus the fear that by consuming “inferior” Indigenous foods, Spaniards would eventually become “like them.” Only proper European foods would maintain the superior nature of European bodies, and only these “right foods” would be able to protect colonizers from the challenges posed by the “new world” and its unfamiliar environments.

In the minds of Europeans, food not only functioned to maintain the bodily superiority of Spaniards, it also played a role in the formation of social identity. For example, in Spain, elites generally consumed bread, “meat,” and wine. The poor in Spain, however, could not afford such luxuries and instead ate such things as barley, oats, rye, and vegetable stew. Even vegetables were classified based on social status; for example, in some cases rooted vegetables were not considered suitable for elite consumption because they grew underground. Elites preferred to consume food that came from trees, elevated from the filth of the common world. Thus, food served as an indicator of class.

In addition, at the time of conquest, Spain was facing internal divisions of its own. In an effort to expel Spanish Muslims, as well as Jewish people, from Spain, King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I relaunched what was known as the Reconquista, the re-conquest of Spain. As a strong Spanish identity formed around the idea of the Reconquista, food became a powerful symbol of Spanish culture. For instance, consider “pork”: Among Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic people, only Catholics could eat “pork,” since for Muslim and Jewish people, the consumption of “pork” was forbidden. During the re-conquest, as individuals were being forced to prove that they were pureblooded Spaniards, they would often be offered “pork” to eat. Any refusal to consume “pork” would be taken as a sign that such people were not true Catholic Spaniards and would subsequently be expelled from Spain, persecuted, or even killed.

As the Spanish arrived in the “new world” and initiated the European colonization of the Americas, they also brought with them the notion of cultural and class based distinctions that were founded on the types of food people ate. For example, upon their arrival, the Spaniards determined that guinea pig “meat” was a fundamentally “Indian” food, thus anyone who consumed guinea pig was considered “Indian.” The same was true for other staple Indigenous foods, such as maize and beans. The Spanish considered such Indigenous fare “famine foods,”^[3] fit for consumption only if all other “right foods” had been thoroughly exhausted.

The symbolic nature of food was also seen in the imposition of religion, another destructive aspect of the conquest. The Eucharist, the holiest rite among Catholics, was composed of a wafer made of wheat, which signified the body of Christ, and wine, which signified the blood of Christ. Initially, before wheat was harvested in the Americas, it was difficult to obtain wheat from abroad, since much of it spoiled in transit. The wafers that were necessary for this rite could easily have been made from the native maize, but Spaniards believed that this inferior Indigenous plant could not be transformed into the literal body of Christ, as could European wheat. Similarly, only wine made from grapes was acceptable for the sacrament. Any potential substitute was considered blasphemy.

If Spaniards and their culture were to survive in these foreign lands, they would need to have readily available sources of the “right food.” Often, as Spanish officials reported back to the crown on the suitability of newly conquered lands, the “lack of Spanish food” was mentioned. Frustrated with what the “new world” had to offer, Tomas Lopez Medel, a Spanish official, reported that, “…there was neither wheat, nor grapevines, nor any proper animal…” present in the new colonies.^[4] Hearing this, the Crown commissioned a number of reports that were to elaborate on which European plants grew well in the colonized lands, as well as details as to where they grew best. It was soon determined that the most suitable arrangement would be for colonists to grow their own foods, and it was not long before Spaniards began to rearrange agriculture to meet their own needs. Although wheat, wine, and olives only thrived in certain regions of Latin America, the Spaniards considered this a success. Colonists were elated that their own foods were successfully growing in foreign lands, and while crops were important, the Europeans’ most significant success was with farmed animals, which thrived in ways that were unparalleled.

The Arrival of Cows, Pigs, Goats, and Sheep

A number of domesticated animals were present when Europeans arrived in what is now known as Latin America. Among them were dogs, llamas and alpacas, guinea pigs, turkeys, Muscovy ducks, and a type of chicken. In Mesoamerica, any “meat” and leather that was consumed or utilized usually came from wild game, and generally, there were no animals exploited for labor, with the exception of dogs, who were at times used for hauling.. Europeans considered this lack of proper animals for work and consumption unacceptable. Thus, the first contingent of horses, dogs, pigs, cows, sheep, and goats arrived with Columbus’ second voyage in 1493.^[5] The arrival of these hoofed immigrants would fundamentally alter Indigenous ways of life forever.

To begin, considering the domesticated animals who existed in Latin America prior to the conquest, these imported animals had little to no predators to deal with. These animals did not succumb to any new diseases, and food sources for these animals were vast. The Spanish literally left the animals to feed on any of the rich grasses, fruits, and other food they could find in these new lands. With a plethora of food and no real threats to their existence, these animals reproduced at astonishingly rapid rates. By the 17th century, herds of cows, pigs, sheep, and goats numbered in the hundreds of thousands and roamed throughout the entire continent. As a result, “meat” prices plummeted and the consumption of “meat” exponentially increased. In Spain, the consumption of “meat” was a luxury, but in the “new world,” the sheer availability of these animals made this luxury accessible to all. This point in time marked the commodification of these animals in the Americas, a natural consequence of which was an ever-expanding “meat” industry. In fact, at this time, “livestock” ranches were so well established and were producing such large quantities of domesticated-animal “meat” that almost everyone was consuming substantial amounts of animal protein. Eating “meat” was considered an economic benefit of keeping animals, but it wasn’t the only one. Records also show an increase in dairy consumption, as well as lard as a replacement for the traditional use of olive oil in colonial cooking. In addition, the demand for “hides” and “tallow” (often used for candles) was even greater than the demand for “meat.”

The most devastating consequence of this new “meat” industry was that its extraordinary proliferation was accompanied by an equally extraordinary decline in Indigenous populations. Spaniards anxious to establish the “right foods” to ensure their own survival delineated large sections of lands for grazing, with no regard for the way the land was being used prior to their arrival. These vast herds often wandered onto Indigenous croplands, destroying their primary means of subsistence. The situation became so severe that in a letter to the Crown, a Spanish official wrote, “May your lordship realize that if cattle are allowed, the Indians will be destroyed…”^[6] Initially, many Indigenous people in this region became malnourished, which consequently weakened their resistance to European diseases. Others literally starved to death as their agricultural plots were trampled, consumed by animals or appropriated for Spanish crops. In time, many Indigenous people, left with limited options, began to consume European foods.

As devastating as this was, it is important to note that Indigenous populations in the “Americas” did not passively deal with this change. There are a number of clearly documented instances in which Indigenous people, during the process of colonization, specifically resisted European foods. For instance, in North America, the Pueblo people launched a revolt against the Spaniards in which Spanish food was a primary target. During this rebellion a Pueblo leader was said to have ordered the people to “…burn the seeds which the Spaniards sowed and to plant only maize and beans, which were the crops of their ancestors.”^[7] Although resistance to European culture was not uncommon, in time, Indigenous people went on to adopt many European foods into their diet. Similarly, many colonists eventually went on to incorporate Indigenous foods into their daily eating.

Food Acculturation in the “New World”

Several factors contributed to the acculturation of food of both Indigenous people and Europeans in the “new world.”

First, in the process of colonization, Europeanization was rewarded. Initially, conversion to Catholicism and the adoption of Spanish culture, customs, and beliefs was a forced matter. In time, the Spanish attempted other methods for converting Indigenous people to their way of life. For example, priests attempting to convert young Indigenous men to Catholicism would offer them “livestock” in return for their conversion.^[8] Owning “livestock” was attractive: animals were a source of income, and consuming such animals was a sign of elevated status, by Spanish standards. Since food was an indicator of status and Indigenous people could enhance their status with colonists by taking on Spanish culture, many Indigenous people adopted Spanish practices, cuisine included, as a way of securing a higher status in colonial society.^[9]

Another important factor that shaped the adoption of European foods into Indigenous diets was related to the role of women in colonial society. An integral part of colonization was carried out through Iberian women who arrived shortly after their men settled in the “new world.” As Spanish settlers began the task of establishing structured colonies, the Crown was made aware of wanton behavior taking root in their new lands. Spanish men were said to be out at all hours of the night, frolicking with different women, displaying drunkenness and disorder in the streets of new Spain. The Crown determined that logically, this behavior was the consequence of men left to their own devices without their wives to maintain the structure of family and civility. Thus, the Crown demanded that Iberian women be sent to join their husbands in order to civilize society in the “new world.” As these women arrived, Spanish households were reunified and Iberian women began to solidify the role of the Spanish family in the colonies. This reunification of Spanish families paralleled the destruction of the Indigenous household, as many Indigenous women were forced into working as domestic workers, cooks, nannies, and wet-nurses in Spanish homes. Part of the role of these Indigenous women was to learn to cook European foods and reproduce colonial practices in the home; Iberian women were present to make sure it was done properly. The presence of Spanish women was meant to provide an example of how a “civilized” woman looked and behaved, and much of this “civilization” took place in the kitchen. If Indigenous women were to reproduce Spanish cooking—the source of superior Spanish bodies—they would need to be instructed by a Spanish woman who could teach them how to make “civilized” food. Thus, many Indigenous women began reproducing Spanish cuisine as a result of their new role in the European household. However, there is also documentation of the introduction of Indigenous foods and cooking practices into European diets. This was a consequence not only of Indigenous women working in Spanish households, but also a result of mestizas who married Spanish men and began integrating aspects of their mixed heritage into these mixed households. For example, the use of the comal is markedly Indigenous, yet archeological records indicate that it was used in most Spanish households. Also, we see Indigenous variations in cooking with, for instance, the use of chili. Europeans accepted the use of chili in their food since it was similar to pepper. This similarity allowed for its widespread acceptance among Europeans. Alterations to Spanish diets were most common during times of famine, where famine meant a lack of Spanish foods. During these times, Indigenous cooks would prepare indigenous foods, which Spaniards would be forced to consume. For Indigenous people, Spanish cuisine was a principal reason that colonists were intent on acquiring the lands on which they produced their own food. Thus, for Indigenous people, the struggle was in maintaining their own cuisine while understanding that, for pragmatic reasons, they had to adopt new foods.

Lastly, as noted above, the mere availability of food for consumption began to alter eating practices. The land that previously served to nourish indigenous communities was now organized to meet the need for raw materials necessary for export.  Yet the Spanish crown was careful to control local Spanish authority so as to not allow any conquistador to acquire a disproportionate amount of power. In order to control this, the crown allowed some land to be preserved for subsistence cultivation of indigenous communities. On this land communities were allowed to collectively grow what they needed for their daily subsistence. However, this was not an altruistic move on behalf of the crown; it was a calculated attempt to maintain their grasp on local power. As time went on, the crown suffered a series of economic shortages, and when such shortages economically affected the crown, they set their eyes on communal lands, which they then deemed should be used to meet the needs of international trade rather than those of the indigenous community.  As European needs expanded, indigenous communal lands turned into large plantations, or haciendas, and their production was now directly tied to the demands of European markets. Slowly but surely these haciendas came under the private control of those profiting off international trade.

Food, the Legacy of Colonization, and Resistance

Although currently we can recognize many Indigenous foods that are staples of Latin American diets, we must also acknowledge the legacy of colonization in this diet. The large-scale consumption of “meat,” which makes up such a significant part of modern Latin American diets, is entirely traceable to the conquest and the process of colonization, as is the cultural, social, and even gendered significance attached to such consumption. The expansion of the commodification of animals as an industry in Latin America is also rooted in the legacy of colonization. Through this commodification, dairy also became a huge industry in colonial Spain. Interestingly, the consumption of milk and other dairy products serve as a unique lens through which to consider the links between food and colonization.

The practice of dairying was a product of the domestication of sheep, goats, cows, and pigs somewhere between 11,000-8,000 BCE. ^[10] People whose society was structured by a pastoral tradition were the first to practice dairying. These people were primarily Indo-European and are said to have pushed out to Northern Europe and as well as Pakistan, Scandinavia, and Spain. The practice of the consumption of milk—and to a large extent cheese, yogurt, and butter—has long been the tradition among these European people. In groups that were traditionally hunters and gatherers, however, there is little evidence for any type of dairying, given that they had no animals suitable for dairying, and that this practice required a more sedentary lifestyle. As Europeans colonized “the Americas,” they also brought with them the practice of dairying, a huge industry to this day. Yet Indigenous societies were based on the hunter-gatherer model. It is here that we see the most interesting piece of biological resistance to the process of food colonization: the bodily rejection of lactose among Indigenous populations. All data indicate high levels of lactose malabsorption^[11] (LM) among groups that were traditionally hunter-gatherers. Populations from traditional zones of non-milking—namely, the Americas, Africa, Southeast and East Asia, and the Pacific—have a very high prevalence of LM. Among these groups, approximately 63-98% of all adults are not able to consume milk or lactose-rich dairy products without experiencing at least some level of physical discomfort. ^[12] Individuals of European decent, however, have a very low prevalence of lactose malabsorption. ^[13] Thus, there is a clear and well-established link between geography and the prevalence of LM. Descendants of zones of non-milking continue to have high prevalence of LM, especially among those who remain relatively unmixed or who have only interbred with other LM populations. Low prevalence of LM remains constant among those of northern European descent. Among individuals who are mixed between these populations, the level of mixture determines the prevalence of either low or high LM; that is, the more European a person is, the lower the prevalence of LM. Although colonial diets and eating practices were integrated into traditional Indigenous consumption practices, dairy is a product that to this day remains physically intolerable for many.

Food Is Power

Colonization is a violent process that fundamentally alters the ways of life of the colonized. Food has always been a fundamental tool in the process of colonization. Through food, social and cultural norms are conveyed, and also violated. The Indigenous people of the Americas encountered a radically different food system with the arrival of the Spanish. The legacy of this system is very present in the food practices of modern Latin American people. Yet, we must never forget that the practice of colonization has always been a contested matter as groups have negotiated spaces within this process. Indigenous foods remain as present in contemporary Latin American diets as do European foods. Understanding the history of food and eating practices in different contexts can help us understand that the practice of eating is inherently complex. Food choices are influenced and constrained by cultural values and are an important part of the construction and maintenance of social identity. In that sense, food has never merely been about the simple act of pleasurable consumption—food is history, it is culturally transmitted, it is identity. Food is power.”

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Atlantic: How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope

Before its subversion in the Jim Crow era, the fruit symbolized black self-sufficiency.

It seems as if every few weeks there’s another watermelon controversy. The Boston Herald got in trouble for publishing a cartoon of the White House fence-jumper, having made his way into Obama’s bathroom, recommending watermelon-flavored toothpaste to the president. A high-school football coach in Charleston, South Carolina, was briefly fired for a bizarre post-game celebration ritual in which his team smashed a watermelon while making ape-like noises. While hosting the National Book Awards, author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) joked about how his friend Jacqueline Woodson, who had won the young people’s literature award for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, was allergic to watermelon. And most recently, activists protesting the killing of Michael Brown were greeted with an ugly display while marching through Rosebud, Missouri, on their way from Ferguson to Jefferson City: malt liquor, fried chicken, a Confederate flag, and, of course, a watermelon.

While mainstream-media figures deride these instances of racism, or at least racial insensitivity, another conversation takes place on Twitter feeds and comment boards: What, many ask, does a watermelon have to do with race? What’s so offensive about liking watermelon? Don’t white people like watermelon too? Since these conversations tend to focus on the individual intent of the cartoonist, coach, or emcee, it’s all too easy to exculpate them from blame, since the racial meaning of the watermelon is so ambiguous.

But the stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.

Not that the raw material for the racist watermelon trope didn’t exist before emancipation. In the early modern European imagination, the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant. The watermelon, noted a British officer stationed in Egypt in 1801, was “a poor Arab’s feast,” a meager substitute for a proper meal. In the port city of Rosetta he saw the locals eating watermelons “ravenously … as if afraid the passer-by was going to snatch them away,” and watermelon rinds littered the streets. There, the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in post-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is so messy. Laziness, because growing watermelons is so easy, and it’s hard to eat watermelon and keep working—it’s a fruit you have to sit down and eat. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. And unwanted public presence, because it’s hard to eat a watermelon by yourself.  These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not yet have a racial meaning. Americans were just as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels as with black South Carolina slaves.

Soon after winning their emancipation, many African Americans sold watermelons in order to make a living outside the plantation system. (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)

This may be surprising given how prominent watermelons were in enslaved African Americans’ lives. Slave owners often let their slaves grow and sell their own watermelons, or even let them take a day off during the summer to eat the first watermelon harvest. The slave Israel Campbell would slip a watermelon into the bottom of his cotton basket when he fell short of his daily quota, and then retrieve the melon at the end of the day and eat it. Campbell taught the trick to another slave who was often whipped for not reaching his quota, and soon the trick was widespread. When the year’s cotton fell a few bales short of what the master had figured, it simply remained “a mystery.”

But Southern whites saw their slaves’ enjoyment of watermelon as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. Slaves were usually careful to enjoy watermelon according to the code of behavior established by whites. When an Alabama overseer cut open watermelons for the slaves under his watch, he expected the children to run to get their slice. One boy, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did get his piece he would run off to the slave quarters to eat out of the white people’s sight. His mother would then whip him, he remembered, “fo’ being so stubborn.” The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous relationship between master and slave.

Emancipation, of course, destroyed that relationship. Black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons during slavery, but now when they did so it was a threat to the racial order. To whites, it seemed now as if blacks were flaunting their newfound freedom, living off their own land, selling watermelons in the market, and—worst of all—enjoying watermelon together in the public square. One white family in Houston was devastated when their nanny Clara left their household shortly after her emancipation in 1865. Henry Evans, a young white boy to whom Clara had likely been a second mother, cried for days after she left. But when he bumped into her on the street one day, he rejected her attempt to make peace. When Clara offered him some watermelon, Henry told her that “he would not eat what free negroes ate.”

Newspapers amplified this association between the watermelon and the free black person. In 1869, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published perhaps the first caricature of blacks reveling in watermelon. The adjoining article explained, “The Southern negro in no particular more palpably exhibits his epicurean tastes than in his excessive fondness for watermelons. The juvenile freedman is especially intense in his partiality for that refreshing fruit.”

Perhaps the first printed illustration of the racist watermelon trope, c. 1869. (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)

Two years later, a Georgia newspaper reported that a black man had been arrested for poisoning a watermelon with the intent of killing a neighbor. The story was headlined “Negro Kuklux” and equated black-on-black violence with the Ku Klux Klan, asking facetiously whether the Radical Republican congressional subcommittee investigating the Klan would investigate this freedman’s actions. The article began with a scornful depiction of the man on his way to the courthouse: “On Sabbath afternoon we encountered a strapping 15th Amendment bearing an enormous watermelon in his arms en route for the Court-house.” It was as if the freedman’s worst crime was not attempted murder but walking around in public with that ridiculous fruit.

The primary message of the watermelon stereotype was that black people were not ready for freedom. During the 1880 election season, Democrats accused the South Carolina state legislature, which had been majority-black during Reconstruction, of having wasted taxpayers’ money on watermelons for their own refreshment; this fiction even found its way into history textbooks. D. W. Griffith’s white-supremacist epic film The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, included a watermelon feast in its depiction of emancipation, as corrupt northern whites encouraged the former slaves to stop working and enjoy some watermelon instead. In these racist fictions, blacks were no more deserving of freedom than were children.

As mass-produced pianos and sheet music became popular in the late nineteenth century, so did “coon songs,” popular tunes that mocked African Americans for their lazy, shiftless, childish ways. (Courtesy Brown University Library)

By the early twentieth century, the watermelon stereotype was everywhere—potholders, paperweights, sheet music, salt-and-pepper shakers. A popular postcard portrayed an elderly black man carrying a watermelon in each arm only to happen upon a stray chicken. The man laments, “Dis am de wust perdickermunt ob mah life.” As a black man, the postcard implied, he had few responsibilities and little interest in anything beyond his own stomach. Edwin S. Porter, famous for directing The Great Train Robbery in 1903, co-directed The Watermelon Patch two years later, which featured “darkies” sneaking into a watermelon patch, men dressed as skeletons chasing away the watermelon thieves (à la the Ku Klux Klan, who dressed as ghosts to frighten blacks), a watermelon-eating contest, and a band of white vigilantes ultimately smoking the watermelon thieves out of a cabin. The long history of white violence to maintain the racial order was played for laughs.

It may seem silly to attribute so much meaning to a fruit. And the truth is that there is nothing inherently racist about watermelons. But cultural symbols have the power to shape how we see our world and the people in it, such as when police officer Darren Wilson saw Michael Brown as a superhuman “demon.” These symbols have roots in real historical struggles—specifically, in the case of the watermelon, white people’s fear of the emancipated black body. Whites used the stereotype to denigrate black people—to take something they were using to further their own freedom, and make it an object of ridicule. It ultimately does not matter if someone means to offend when they tap into the racist watermelon stereotype, because the stereotype has a life of its own.

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Decolonizing Guam’s Diet

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Tending the Wild: Decolonizing the Diet

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Food Justice Resources

Books

• Land Justice: Re-Imagining Land, Food, and the Commons by Food First
• Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman (Soul Fire Farm)
• Black Food Geographies by Ashante Reese
•  Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, Monica White
  
• The Color of Food by Natasha Bowens

Food Justice Organizations

• Change Food
• Food First
• Nyéléni Newsletter for Food Sovereignty
• Teaching for Change
• The Responsible Consumer: White Privilege and Racism: Food System
• Via Campesina

Organizations fighting food apartheid in DC

• Empower DC
• DC Grassroots Planning Coalition
• ONE DC
• DC Fair Budget Coalition

Events

• Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners Conference
• DC Food Justice Youth Summit
• Just Food Conference
• National Farmers Union (NFU) Women’s Conference
• Mid-Atlantic Regional Agroecology Encounter

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