Nadra Nittle | Civil Eats

With Season 2, ‘High on the Hog’ Deepens the Story of the Nation’s Black Food Traditions

Nadra Nittle — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:01:05 +0000

The Pullman porters. The Nation of Islam. The Black Panther Party. These are just some of the legendary groups that the Netflix docuseries High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America explores in its wide-ranging second season, which airs on November 22.

The first season offered a poignant history of Black American food, linking it to its West African roots and enslavement in the United States. The current season leaps ahead to the 20th century and explores the momentous changes Black Americans experienced during that period and how they informed their relationship with food.

These changes include the Great Migration, which took place from roughly 1916 to 1970, and saw over 6 million Black Americans leave the rural South in hopes of better jobs and fairer treatment in the industrialized North. As the Great Migration unfolded, African Americans working for the railroads became unionized for the first time, forming in 1925 the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. In the second season’s opening scene, host Stephen Satterfield dines on a train car and speaks with a 99-year-old former railway waiter and the son of a porter to examine food’s role in the Great Migration.

Just as trains took the Pullman Porters all over the country, Satterfield takes viewers across America—stopping in cities including Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles. At times, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, the culinary historian and author of the book from which the series takes its name, joins Satterfield on the journey.

The strength of the second season lies in its exploration of the little-known links between food and Black American progress. Most people know that civil rights activists desegregated lunch counters, but it is lesser known that Black restaurateurs hosted civil rights strategists, while home cooks sold cakes and pies to fund actions such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. During the Black Power Movement that followed, the Black Panther Party launched their free breakfast program for children, an idea the federal government would later appropriate.

In addition to speaking with activists to uncover the links between food and justice, Satterfield visits Villa Lewaro, the palatial estate of self-made millionaire Madam CJ Walker. Once a cook, the wealthy entrepreneur and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, entertained the nation’s Black elite before and during the Harlem Renaissance.

Civil Eats spoke with Satterfield and Harris about High on the Hog’s sweeping sophomore effort and how, like the first season, it highlights the ways that Black innovators have left an imprint on the country’s culinary landscape.

This season of High on the Hog mentions that many Black people have avoided agricultural work because of its association with enslavement, but points out that they are increasingly starting urban farms. Are Black Americans’ perceptions of working the land changing?

Jessica Harris: It is changing in the Black community, but we are far from monolithic. A lot of people moved away from the land, and with deliberateness. I think what has happened is many of those folks who migrated to the North lost land that they owned, or their families lost land, so now they have a desire to return to the land. There are people who, like Matthew Raiford—who is not in the episode but he’s a sixth generation farmer who has returned to his land in Georgia—and Karen Washington, who is in the last episode. She has a group for Black urban gardeners, and it’s an enormous group that’s bringing people back to the land in real and productive ways.

Stephen Satterfield: In part of the scene where I have a conversation [with former sharecropper Elvin Shields], I have an expression on my face like I’ve heard something surprising. He is inferring that the plantation . . . is something to be reclaimed. I had frankly not ever thought about that, and I felt challenged by that notion. But I thought it was a perfectly logical position, especially considering his life, what he’s seen, and what he’s fought to protect. I appreciated him for that enlightenment.

Dr. Harris, you mentioned Karen Washington. The fact that she coined the term “food apartheid” is discussed in this season. How much of a game changer is this term and why is it more accurate than “food desert” to describe challenges to food access?

Harris: Apartheid is caused by someone. Deserts are caused by nature. So, I think that’s part of the distinction that Karen may have been making very deliberately. I think the whole notion of where do you go for what you eat is something that merits a considerable amount more discussion than it’s getting, and it gets some of that discussion in episode four. Where do people get their food? What kind of food are they getting? Can they walk to it or do they have to have a car? Is there public transportation? So, you have all of those questions as well.

I found the interview with the former railway waiter and son of a porter very interesting. Can you discuss the significance of these workers both in terms of food and the labor movement, because Pullman porters really paved the path for other Black workers.

Harris: The Pullman car porters are important in the foundation of African American wealth and the migration of African American food. [George] Pullman came up with his railroad cars within a decade or two of emancipation. So a lot of people who had been enslaved as house people got jobs on Pullman cars, because they knew something about service.

The Pullman cars then took them all over the country. Anybody who was alive, or who has been alive as long as I have, will never forget A. Philip Randolph, who was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the way that he organized his union. The way that that union advocated for African Americans was of cardinal importance. He was one of the forces behind the 1963 March on Washington. He was galvanizing and that all grew out of that same culture of African Americans on trains in service.

Stephen, your grandfather was a Pullman porter, so this history is personal for you, right?

Satterfield: I never had a chance to meet my grandfather; he died before I was born. But he, like many Black folks, left the South to migrate to Chicago in the mid-20th century, as one of the modern industrial revolutions was underway. My family story is a pretty accurate microcosm for this story that we were telling about migration. Even though I was aware that he was a porter for many decades, I had never been on trains. There’s, of course, something to be said for the visceral quality of the lived experience. Really being there with someone close to my grandfather’s age, hearing him tell me about the hard parts of the job but, also, the mundane parts, was really a joy and, hopefully, a revelatory story about that part of our history.

Stephen, what was it like visiting Madam CJ Walker’s famous estate?

Satterfield: For A’Lelia [Walker] and Madam CJ Walker—food is at the center of everything. Whether it’s street food, rent parties, or the food in a juke joint, we’re going to get it in. The [Harlem] Renaissance was all about a kind of maximalist creative expression of brilliance from a very specific moment in time, a specific geographic radius in the way that’s like—you had to be there. Of course, for many of us who weren’t there, that lore and that magic still lives on. I think we tried to capture that in our Harlem episode.

Dr. Harris, your book and this series discuss the important connections between restaurants and the Civil Rights movement. Restaurants like Paschal’s in Atlanta served activists returning from demonstrations, for example. They sold desserts like pies and pastries to help fund the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But many of these stories have been ignored. Why was it important for High on the Hog to highlight these links?

Harris: [The Rev. Martin Luther] King strategized in places like Paschal’s and Deacon’s. The idea of Black restaurants as community hubs was very important to that time period. Places like Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans were safe spaces, some of the few places where African Americans and whites could meet. It was illegal, but they could do it.

Georgia Gilmore and the Club from Nowhere baked pies and sold them in Black beauty shops and barber shops to fund the bus boycott. All of those things are the hidden underpinnings of the Civil Rights movement that we will hopefully now begin to talk about. Think about the church suppers. Think about the restaurants that fed the Freedom Riders when they returned from jail. Think about all of those things. And when you put all of that together, you somehow manage to get a full picture. Food is a basic part of the human condition. If we don’t eat, we die. Food is connected to all of it.

Stephen, what was it like to meet some of the activists who fought to desegregate lunch counters as Atlanta University Center students?

Satterfield: It was a real highlight for me personally, especially in my hometown. It was extraordinarily humbling. It was one of those moments when I was rather unconcerned with the cameras. I was bearing witness to their detailed, gripping, and inspiring journey in a very historic restaurant, sitting at the same tables where people like Martin Luther King organized and strategized at for Black liberation. I felt a huge amount of pride, and I hope if people take anything away from that scene, it will be to consider how much planning, strategizing, and coordination went into those activations.

I also loved the inclusion of the Nation of Islam and the bean pies they sell. The show referred to it as a sort of “food ministry.” Many people who don’t belong to the NOI are fans of the group’s bean pies, including Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland. What is the appeal of the bean pie?

Satterfield: I loved [the bean pies] growing up. The one I had on the show was amazing. When something’s really good, there will be a market for it; it will likely be coveted. People will try to replicate it or, maybe, imitate it, but they can’t. I think that’s the larger point. Why is that? We touched on that a little in the scene, but it’s a source of pride in community.

Harris: Most people don’t know that [longtime Nation of Islam leader] Elijah Muhammad actually wrote two food treatises. They are about foods that he felt were digestible and foods that he felt were indigestible and that go beyond the rules of haram in Islam. The bean pie grows out of that. He felt that those beans [in the pie] were the most digestible of beans. I certainly remember it being sold on the streets of Brooklyn, along with what was called Muhammad Speaks.

High on the Hog also includes an interview with a former member of the Black Panther Party that discusses the party’s free breakfast program, which influenced the federal government’s decision to begin providing breakfast to students in schools permanently. In some ways, that is a success story. In other ways, this is a sad story because the government sabotaged the party’s program.

Harris: All history is complicated if you look at the multiple sides of it. I wish they’d been given credit, but I’m glad that kids are eating. Those are my thoughts in a nutshell. I was alive during that point in time, and I didn’t know that [the national school breakfast program] was a result of the Black Panther Party. But, once I did, I appreciated just how extraordinary that was, and I think it is one of those things that will [show] all Americans how our food. . . .influenced and informed the foodways of this country.

Satterfield: One of my favorite stories in U.S. history is about the social programs of the Black Panthers. My favorite is the free breakfast program. It really speaks to an active, vibrant, and flourishing movement that is bringing our people back to the land in urban spaces.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The post With Season 2, ‘High on the Hog’ Deepens the Story of the Nation’s Black Food Traditions appeared first on Civil Eats.

Delta Fresh Foods Is Bringing Food Security to Northern Mississippi

Nadra Nittle — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 08:00:52 +0000

Though the Mississippi Delta is home to some of the nation’s most fertile soil, residents of the region have experienced food insecurity and poverty for generations. In fact, an estimated 77 percent of Mississippi’s 82 counties meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) definition of food deserts, meaning they lack full-service grocery stores and other food retail establishments.

Determined to remedy this problem, a group of community stakeholders established the Delta Fresh Foods Initiative in 2010. Delta Fresh uses mobile markets sourced by community farms to expand access to locally grown fresh food, improve diabetes and obesity, and increase economic opportunities for local farmers. In Bolivar County, in northwestern Mississippi, where the organization has concentrated its efforts, 37.5 percent of adults report an obesity-level body mass index, and 16.5 percent report a diabetes diagnosis. To quash such health problems, Delta Fresh has supplied more than 5,000 North Bolivar County residents with fresh fruits and vegetables.

By tapping into the sustainable community food systems that already exist in the Delta, the organization—made up of growers, funders, health and agriculture educators, food retailers, and community-based organizations—aims to build supply and demand for fresh foods. To that end, Delta Fresh also provides training and technical assistance for sustainable growers, consumers, and advocates, and to young people interested in developing community food systems.

In addition to running farms, the young people Delta Fresh trains surveyed community members in 2017 about the barriers they face to accessing fresh produce and found that 88 percent of respondents would support a mobile market to increase how many locally grown foods they could buy. Now, four years later, the Delta Fresh Foods Mobile Produce Market has provided local fruits and vegetables to thousands of residents, and, if needed, they can use SNAP benefits to make purchases. On the supply side, the local growers who provide fruits and vegetables receive stipends for participating in the mobile market.

While Delta Fresh has focused its work in northern Bolivar County, the organization’s goal is to replicate its efforts statewide, and it has already expanded its outreach to Quitman and Hinds counties. Hinds is home to Jackson, the state’s capital and most populous city; Jackson is 82.2 percent Black, making it one of the nation’s most African American cities as well. At 25.4 percent, the city’s poverty rate is more than double the national poverty rate of 11.4 percent, indicating why food insecurity and other socioeconomic problems persist there. But wherever Delta Fresh’s “Good Food Revolution” goes, its leaders say, the initiative considers the specific needs of the communities it serves.

Julian D. Miller, a co-founder of the organization and a longtime board member, works as an attorney and the director of the Reuben V. Anderson Institute for Social Justice at Tougaloo College in Jackson and as an assistant professor of political science there. He helped Delta Fresh receive more than $1 million in grant funding to develop local community food systems. Civil Eats spoke with Miller about Delta Fresh, as well as food insecurity in Mississippi, the importance of involving young people in food advocacy, and the link between the food justice and civil rights movements.

What’s the origin story behind Delta Fresh?

This is the second-poorest region in the U.S. behind Appalachia. Historically, it has some of the most fertile soil in the world, but the reality is it’s dominated by corporate agro-farming, and local growers capture a [miniscule] amount of the food market in the Delta. Because of the agrarian nature of the area, the legacy of slavery, the level of poverty, [the area] has basically been marked by low-wage jobs and worker exploitation.

Delta Fresh was created with the idea of developing sustainable food systems to address the chronic health issues here—obesity, diabetes, infant mortality. The idea was to develop a sustainable food system in the Delta with a workable, concrete model to address those chronic health issues by providing locally grown fresh foods and creating a sustainable economy.

How did you get involved with this work?

I’m a lifelong fifth-generation Mississippi Delta [resident]. After college, before I went to law school, I did anti-poverty work for an organization, and the goal was to figure out how to build collective action and project approaches that can be leveraged to address long-term chronic issues of economic injustice and poverty in the Delta. Naturally, the idea to develop food system work was really gold, because it hit both economic justice and worker exploitation and issues with wages, as well as preventative health, to deal with chronic illnesses.

Then, I got together with a huge group of farmers and organizers in 2010. One group was engaged in greener agriculture and had already been pioneering organic farming in the ‘90s. They were farmers from the Delta, mostly Bolivar County, led by Dorothy Grady Scarborough, who is a legend and pioneer and who mentored me in this work. So, we had growers, farmers, health practitioners. We had about 125 organizers who got together to form this organization, Delta Fresh Foods.

What did Delta Fresh set out to accomplish when it first started?

In 2010 when we started, we did over 30 community garden projects. We pioneered the Mississippi Farm to School project. We started bringing in school districts so they could have local growers supply their cafeterias with food. But we wanted to figure out how to develop a sustainable food system, community by community, county by county, that will be unique to those particular counties and communities in the Delta, and that way we can have the local citizens take ownership of it.

Then we decided we’re going to focus on Bolivar County, where I’m from and where a big chunk of our co-founders are originally from. It was a good fit, and we had really good partnerships there with local growers. Also, Alcorn State University had a demonstration farm in Mound Bayou, in Bolivar County.

In 2017, through a generous grant from the Bolivar Medical Center Foundation, we started working on our youth-led projects. From there, we developed a mobile market led by the youth in partnership with six growers, and we traveled around selling local produce. Then, we developed our own youth-led six-acre farm. We have a goal to scale this model and to be a model for other counties to replicate food system development.

What work are you doing as director of the Anderson Institute for Social Justice at Tougaloo College?

We developed a sustainable food system project on the campus of historic Tougaloo College, where I’m on the faculty with the pre-law program. We built raised beds and developed our production through raised beds and a high tunnel. The goal is to supply the cafeteria at the school to provide students and faculty access to local, fresh foods and expand out to the greater community.

I’m part of a group called the Mississippi Food Justice Collaborative, which is trying to work with organic farmers, growers, and food justice advocates across the state. They’re trying to develop this model statewide to really build up this industry and basically capture that multibillion-dollar food market for local growers, for the communities, and to create wealth and eliminate poverty in the Delta, and in Mississippi in general.

When you talk to people who aren’t from the Delta, are they surprised by the fact that there are so many food insecure people living in a region with such fertile soil?

Not when you explain to them the legacy of slavery and economic injustice. The land was exploited for the purposes of creating wealth through slave labor. Then, there was sharecropping in the Jim Crow era. After that, farming was mechanized, particularly in the ‘60s, and the land was monopolized. Black farmers who had been able to live on the land essentially lost that opportunity. Now, the land is ultimately used for [commodity] crops. It’s not used for growing local fresh foods, even though the soil is fertile. So, when you explain the history of exploitation through slavery and Jim Crow . . . they understand why [food security here] isn’t an anomaly.

What other factors make it hard for Delta residents to secure the food they need?

The issue in the rural Delta is transportation. In my town, we have to travel 12 miles to get access to groceries and other basic needs, and that’s why we have the mobile market. We come to your communities.

It’s the same here with our urban model. We know for Tougaloo, it’s going to be fairly easy for students to get access, because we provide food through the cafeteria. There’s also a food pantry on campus. With the urban model, there might be a situation where we still do a mobile market. We’re also thinking about doing a grocery store partnership. It just depends, but we want to make sure that the model is tailored to each particular community.

What more can you say about how Delta Fresh Foods is training young people?

We call them our Bolivar County Good Food Youth Ambassadors, and they have been trained in food production, distribution, and in understanding the public health aspects of food. They also get leadership development training as part of the program. They do different modules for these activities, but then they also get hands-on training because they run the farm.

The kids did part of their module in food production with mentor farmers. We had other modules in marketing and consumer education. They did pamphlets on food that we presented as part of our Healthy Food Kitchen Program, where we teach people how to cook the produce and whatnot, so the kids did presentations as part of that. And we had speakers brought in weekly.

How has life changed for residents who take part in the program?

Before, people were not health-conscious and focusing their diet on locally grown fresh produce. So, when this project began, it brought them out to come to the market, purchase this produce, and get access—and to really be engaged. As part of this project, we set up a local food policy and it really engaged the community in a collective way to support this work and, at the same time, to be more health conscious and take advantage of this initiative to change their diet.

What’s next for Delta Fresh Foods?

We’re trying to get more acres to expand our youth farm. The goal is to continue to scale this model in Bolivar County and replicate it in another county. At Tougaloo, and we’re looking into expanding our production and thinking about how we’re going to approach the community with that same mobile market model.

Additionally, we’re working on a public health equity project in Bolivar County to address infant mortality, which is a huge problem in the Delta. There’s a project called Delta Health Partners that does wonderful work in addressing infant mortality, so we want to work with a primary care physician to provide prescriptions for local fresh foods to address chronic illnesses. And we want to look at how that can address the chronic health issues of mothers and babies. Based on that, we want to propose getting Medicaid dollars to support local growers supporting prescriptions for fresh foods.

Do you see a connection between your work and historic Mississippi activists like Fannie Lou Hamer, who fought not just for civil rights but also to create more opportunities for Black farmers and growers?

Absolutely. A lot of people talk about Fannie Lou Hamer, but not a lot of people realize that she started a cooperative pig farm. I just took part in a social justice conference, and one of the topics these prodigious civil rights organizers and legends talked about was that there was this huge push for cooperative farms and how the idea of cooperative economics was a big part of the civil rights movement.

So, that’s kind of full circle, and that was a big part of what I talk about when pointing out how social justice, racial justice, economic justice, [and] food justice are intertwined. Community food system work is so crucial because it brings all these things together as one.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

The post Delta Fresh Foods Is Bringing Food Security to Northern Mississippi appeared first on Civil Eats.

Mayukh Sen Celebrates Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized American Food Culture

Nadra Nittle — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:00:01 +0000

In Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, award-winning journalist and author Mayukh Sen writes that while he wants to warm readers’ hearts, he also wants to make them squirm.

Although readers will likely delight in the stories of the seven women he profiles in the book—including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, Italian-born Marcella Hazan, and Jamaican-born Norma Shirley—Sen suggests they should also be appalled at the way American society values the experiences of some immigrants and devalues those of others.

Women immigrants, especially those of color, have been particularly marginalized, and as a result, Taste Makers is as much a recovery project as it is a group biography. Within its pages, which span from World War II to the present, Sen unearths the history of immigrant women who have left a lasting mark on American food culture, whether or not credited for their contributions in their lifetimes.

He details their entrepreneurship, ethnic pride, and dedication to the culinary craft as well as the xenophobia, racism, and misogyny that often limited the recognition they received. Some of these women did achieve stardom in their day but not posthumously, while others, such as Hazan, are revered today.

Although Taste Makers levels criticism at the American food establishment, the book also highlights how Sen’s subjects persevered in the face of oppressive social constructs. Iranian-born Najmieh Batmanglij is a case in point: She moved to the U.S. in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and faced fierce discrimination as a result; finding the food establishment unwilling to embrace her, she published her culinary writing on her own terms.

A self-described “queer, brown child of immigrants” from India, Sen himself can relate to the challenges endured by the women he chronicles in Taste Makers. “That is crucial to why I have chosen to write this book and tell these stories,” he told Civil Eats. “I have occasionally faced questions, like, ‘Why are you—as a man—writing these stories? What attracts you to these stories?’ The answer is partially due to the fact that I have a very complicated relationship with gender, and I also belong to many marginalized communities.”

The immense empathy Sen has for his subjects pushes readers to reflect on the women, recognized and unrecognized, responsible for shaping the American palette. Civil Eats spoke with Sen about his motivation for writing Taste Makers, his hopes for its influence on the food establishment, and how much progress marginalized people have made in the American culinary world.

In Taste Makers, you profile seven immigrant women. How did you narrow it down?

There are so many brilliant immigrant women throughout American history who have shaped food in various ways—teachers, cookbook authors, chefs, et cetera. What really helped clarify things for me was to ask myself, “What kind of statement do I want to make with this book, especially with regards to assimilation, and whether that is the only pathway for success in America and under American capitalism?”

I tailored my seven subjects with that guiding credo. I wanted to include a mix of more familiar names—Marcella Hazan, for example, is a widely revered figure—alongside lesser-known names, ones who have not been sufficiently honored by the dominant white culture, for lack of a better term. I also wanted to make sure that readers with just a passing interest in food have a reason to pick up the book, and in doing so, they might be able to get to know some figures they think they know, like Marcella, in a deeper, more complex way while also being introduced to a wide variety of other figures whose names they may not have heard before.

And what can you say about the genesis of this book?

Back in 2017, I was a staff writer at Food52. I had been writing a lot of stories about people of color, women of color, immigrants of color, queer people of color—people who have not necessarily been given the appreciation that they deserve.

I had a friend named Shuja Haider, and he floated this idea to me. He said, “I wonder if these essays can amount to some sort of book about the immigrant story.” So, I put that in my back pocket.

Fast forward a year later, and I start to see some troubling narratives in food media pop up, a lot of stories and social media campaigns that basically say, “Immigrants get the job done.” I was really disturbed by these talking points being so prevalent in food media because I knew that they came from publications and folks who probably self-identified as liberal. Yet, these talking points felt so consumer-focused to me in a way that was dehumanizing immigrants but centering this white middle- to upper-middle class consumer.

When you say immigrants get the job done, it’s like, “What’s the job, and who doesn’t want it? Who’s being centered there?” So, my frustration led me to formulate the idea for this book. I told myself, “Well, I think the most quietly radical way to push back against that sort of trope in food media is to tell the stories of various immigrant figures throughout American history who shaped food in the most granular way possible. Make sure that their stories are being centered rather than the perspectives of those middle- to upper-middle class consumers.” That’s where it began.

In the introduction, you discuss Elizabeth Black Kander, born in 1858 to German Jewish immigrant parents in Wisconsin, and her Settlement Cook Book, which included Eastern European and American recipes. You argue that it set the foundation for how immigrant women in the U.S. would write about and engage with food. Can you elaborate on that?

Kander was responsible for putting together the Settlement Cook Book, which was published in the early 20th century and would go on to have many reissues, additions, and expansions over the decades. She herself was the child of German Jewish immigrants who came to America in the 1800s, and they really tried their best to fit in. They adopted the American way of dressing. They got stable jobs. They really absorbed themselves into American capitalism.

In the 1880s, when there’s this new wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, Kander worried that they would have a tough time in America, that they would not be able to assimilate in the way that her parents did. As a result, she taught them the American way. And one of those ways was cooking. She taught a bunch of young immigrant girls how to cook American dishes and, through that, they would kind of master how to become American. And I found it so fascinating.

This cookbook, which is still incredibly important to so many people, is also a document of assimilation. There’s a reason it endures, and I think it’s because assimilation is so powerful. It’s such an attractive idea to so many people in the food space—this idea that you can kind of mute your differences and then overcome barriers through food.

Kander was working and compiling this cookbook in a time when assimilation was seen as the only path for immigrants to survive in America. In the 1960s, you start to see the various restrictive immigration laws start to loosen quite a bit, and that coincides with more immigrant authors being able to express themselves in culinary terms without filter. They were not necessarily interested in assimilation or pleasing the dominant white American palette. They wanted to shout their differences as much as possible, so putting Kander’s work into this larger context was essential.

How much progress do you think has been made over the past century or so? Are immigrant women given the credit they deserve for their contributions to the culinary sphere?

I’m sorry to sound cynical here, but I’ve just completely lost faith, especially in the American food establishment and the American food media. The reason I ended the book with the stories of Najmieh Batmanglij and Norma Shirley is because those women forged paths for themselves that were completely independent of that establishment.

Najmieh Batmanglij was born in Iran but fled, first to France and then America. When she came here in the early 1980s, it was just around the time of the Iran hostage crisis and of course the Iranian Revolution was still fresh in many people’s minds. As a result, she faced enormous prejudice, and could not sell her cookbook. So, she and her husband, Mohammad, started their own publishing house, and it still stands strong today. It published her first English language cookbook Food of Life in the mid-1980s and that is an incredibly important title in terms of Iranian cooking in America, but she had to forge this path completely independently; all her books are still independently published.

By a similar token, Norma Shirley, who was born in Jamaica but lived in America for a period in the late ’60, ’70s, and early ’80s. She tried to open her own restaurant in New York that would allow her to express her culinary philosophy, which was Jamaican food filtered through French technique. Yet, she could not find investors, and it was difficult for her in a time when most white Americans, certainly those in the food establishment, did not understand Jamaican food. She had to go back home to Jamaica, and that’s where she opened so many restaurants in her name and became a huge star—but she could only do that after she returned home.

I have become a cynic, though I am actually hopeful that there will be more brilliant folks like Najmieh Batmanglij and Norma Shirley, who are forging their own path, independent of the establishment.

Which of these woman’s stories filled you with the most pride? Which story was the most heartbreaking?

The subject of my third chapter, Madeleine Kamman, is from France, and she made a name for herself as a brilliant cooking teacher, cookbook author, and restaurant owner. Beginning in the ’70s and onwards until her death a few years ago, she also became somewhat unfairly, in my view, notorious for punching up at figures in the food establishment, mainly Julia Child. As a result, what really broke my heart was just how eager the American food media was to overlook the brilliance of her work and her culinary philosophy and instead frame her in terms of this so-called conflict that she had with Child, and the “jealousy” that people perceive her to have had.

To diminish a woman’s brilliance and body of work to some kind of high-school pettiness, is so unfair. As I was researching this book, I came across so many articles about her that could not resist mentioning Child, talking about how “abrasive” Kamman was and a host of other descriptors that many of us now recognize as sexist dog whistles.

Kamman had a lot of frustrations in her career. But what did warm my heart is the fact that about a decade and a half ago, she was reflecting on her career with another author, and to paraphrase her, she said, “I’ve never wanted to become a star, and I resisted that very strongly by saying whatever was on my mind. So what? I didn’t become a star.”

She had no interest in playing the fame game of the American food media. I think that her commitment to making the work as strong as possible and letting that work speak for itself is incredibly inspiring.

What influence do you hope this book has on the American food establishment? What do you hope its legacy will be?

I hope that this inspires more work of this kind, and even better work of this kind. I don’t want my book to be the only group biography that honors the incredible labor of people from marginalized communities. There are so many other books to be written by the many talented food writers who are working today and will be working for generations to come. I hope that this can just be a contribution to that larger library, not the definitive or end-all, be-all on this subject.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The post Mayukh Sen Celebrates Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized American Food Culture appeared first on Civil Eats.

Meet the Black Women Driving New Ag Policy

Nadra Nittle — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 08:00:30 +0000

When Kim Jackson became a Georgia state senator in January, she didn’t hesitate to stand out. The day after taking office, she joined the state’s Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee, becoming one of only two Black women on the committee. And the appointment was a natural fit for Jackson: The 36-year-old hails from a multigenerational farming family in South Carolina and now owns a five-acre farm in Stone Mountain, Georgia, 20 miles east of Atlanta.

“My parents have a tree farm; my grandparents had a farm that we all had to work on. At the time, that did not feel like a good thing in South Carolina, where it’s very, very hot,” she said with a laugh. “My aunt has an organic farm, and so it’s just been a part of our family that we stick closely to the land.”

As an elected official, one who made history as Georgia’s first LGBTQ+ state senator, Jackson aims to leverage her knowledge of agriculture to advocate for food justice and marginalized farmers. During her short tenure in office, Jackson has already secured state funds to support a Black-led community food hub in Albany, Georgia, and she has more plans in store.

Jackson is far from alone in her advocacy: Legislators around the country are fighting to ensure that farmers of color receive the loan forgiveness and debt relief outlined for them in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The rollout of this relief has been delayed by white farmers alleging in court that the legislation’s provisions for farmers of color constitute reverse discrimination. But Black women lawmakers are working to benefit disadvantaged farmers and African Americans in their states by serving on agriculture committees, introducing legislation to promote equity in agriculture, and fighting food insecurity.

A number of these lawmakers, including Jackson, Ohio State Representative Juanita Brent, and Illinois State Representative Sonya Harper also have direct experience growing food. Their first-hand experience with farming has strengthened their ties to the farmers in their communities and uniquely positioned them to lead food and farming activism in the political arena.

While Brent, an urban farmer, is one of two Black women now serving on the Ohio House Agriculture Committee, Harper is the first woman of color to chair the Illinois House Agriculture and Conservation Committee. With a background in urban agriculture, Harper is currently sponsoring two pieces of legislation—the Black Farmer Restoration Act and the Black Farmers in Illinois Resolution—that would direct the Illinois Department of Agriculture to investigate the loss of Black-owned farmland in the state and the impact it has had on Black farmers.

The work of legislators like Harper, Brent, and Jackson is an outgrowth of the long tradition of farmers who have “pursued legislative remedies to dismantle anti-Black racism within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), FSA [Farm Service Agency] local offices, and county committee system,” said Tracy Lloyd McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center and co-organizer of the Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign.

Their activism culminated in the landmark Pigford v. Glickman class action racial discrimination lawsuit against the USDA, which the government settled in 1999. The suit spotlighted the agency’s ongoing discrimination against Black farmers, paving the way for the debt relief and financial help that the American Rescue Plan designated to farmers of color.

“This historical moment demands the continued leadership of Black farmers—legacy, returning, and landless,” McCurty said. “I am inspired by the Black women farmers who are now carrying the torch to restore Black agrarianism in their legislative efforts nationally and locally.”

Routing Funding to Georgia’s Black Farmers

The Black women legislators advocating for Black farmers share key commonalities. They are mostly Millennials, and none have been in office for longer than six years. In fact, most of them have been elected within the past two years. Their involvement in agricultural advocacy marks a renewed interest in an agrarian way of life that has drawn interest at the policy level as well as in the food sovereignty and land rematriation movements people of color are leading.

“It goes back to a statement that my mom made to me when I was a child: ‘Hopefully, you have a job that will pay you, but at the end of the day, you’ll never be hungry because you know how to grow your own food,’” said Jackson. “Being able to feed yourself—that is liberation, and I think that’s what young Black farmers are seeking. When you are no longer dependent on outside resources to provide sustenance for your family, you are free.”

Georgia State Senator Kim Jackson. (Photo courtesy of SIX)

She applauds the work of Black women in other states emerging as agricultural leaders. For example, North Carolina State Senator Natalie Murdock in 2020 became the first Black woman under the age of 40 elected to the state legislature, and she’s now working on a reparations bill for Black farmers. Elected in 2019, Delaware State Representative Sherry Dorsey Walker serves on the state’s House Agriculture Committee and has organized discussions with Black farmers, agency officials, and others in food and agriculture to make the industry more equitable.

There’s also Rachel Talbot Ross, who is Assistant Majority Leader of the Maine House of Representatives and a small-scale farmer. She’s interested in making sure all communities in her state, from Somali refugees to Native American tribes, can access healthy and culturally relevant foods.

As for Jackson, who grows a number of fruits and vegetables on her hobby farm and orchard, sitting on her state’s agricultural committee is a way to work for the preservation of Black farmland.

“It’s really important to remind Georgians, and people more broadly, that Black farmers are present,” she said. “Yes, we exist. And I’m really committed to trying to make sure we have justice for Black farmers. One of the fastest ways for Black families to lose their farm is because of not having a will. Georgia has a good heirs’ property law, but I want to make sure that it’s working properly.”

The USDA recently announced a new initiative to make $67 million in loans available to address problems related to heirs’ property.

Immediately after taking office, however, Jackson advocated for the state to appropriate $100,000 in funds to the Southwest Georgia Project (SGP), which serves farmers and works to prevent Black land loss. The change was signed into law in May, and the senator is still elated.

Jackson learned from Shirley Sherrod, the former Georgia state director of Rural Development for the USDA and the head of the SGP, that the allocation marked the first time the 60-year-old service organization received state funding. The fact that it took so long, Jackson said, points to a larger historical pattern of Black farmers being denied resources at the local, state, and national levels. The funds she secured for SGP will serve as seed money to help it create a food-processing hub that will provide Black farmers in southwest Georgia with refrigerated produce-storage space and refrigerated trucks to deliver food to consumers in 14 Georgia counties.

When constituents ask her why she cares about what’s happening in southwest Georgia, Jackson tells them that the farming there feeds the residents of her district, which includes metropolitan Atlanta, providing a direct connection between urban and rural Georgians. Having come from a family that has owned farms of all sizes, she’s also grown familiar with the state’s many agricultural rules, regulations, and practices.

“When I talk about having to mend my fences because my goats keep trying to get at one another, there’s camaraderie that gets built in, and there’s real trust between me and the cattle farmer who sits next to me on the committee,” Jackson said. “And what we know about passing legislation is, if you don’t have relationships with the majority party, nothing’s gonna move. So, that connection point [with rural Republicans] has been really, really important.”

Her farming background is also why she plans to introduce legislation that would promote soil health—a topic that’s gaining urgency around the country.

Raising Soil Health Awareness in Ohio

Serving Ohio’s 12th District, southeast of Cleveland, Representative Juanita Brent did not grow up in a farming family. But her involvement in 4-H, starting at the age of 5, gave her roots in agriculture. Throughout her childhood, she continued to take part in the program, especially enjoying the county fair, which she likens to the “Olympics of farming.” The 4-H program, “developed this network of people that I’ve known since I was a small child and I’m still very much connected with,” said Brent, now 37.

Although her interest in ag sometimes raises eyebrows among people who regard it as an undertaking for “rural, old white men,” Brent said, as a Black woman, she’s interested in the ways that agriculture can lead to food equity.

Ohio State Representative Juanita Brent. (Photo courtesy of SIX)

When she bought a plot of land in Cleveland six years ago, she initially grew cucumbers, tomatoes, and other produce to relieve stress and practice better eating habits, but she took a more serious interest in growing food when her neighbors said they wanted to garden to combat food insecurity.

“A lot of people want to figure out how they can better use land besides just having [a lawn], and there are a lot of people who live in food deserts and have to literally go outside of their communities if they want some produce,” she explained.

But before urging Ohioans to turn their yard into a garden, Brent tells them about the importance of soil health. Cleveland soils have high lead levels, and Brent plans to introduce statewide soil health legislation in September. “If your soil is not healthy, that will contaminate anything you grow, so it’s vital that people are very much aware of the toxins in the ground.”

She said her initiative would help small-scale farmers who want to go commercial take their first step toward doing so with soil testing. If passed, her legislation would establish a statewide task force on the topic.

The soil health bill will be Brent’s first piece of legislation focused on ag. But as a member of the Ohio House Agriculture Committee, she strives to represent the interests of urban farmers, many of whom are people of color. While politicians have long focused on the needs of rural farms, she said, the challenges of urban farmers are often overlooked. She points to the Ohio House’s recent passage of the first-time farmer tax credit as an example.

“Even though we do have this tax credit, it is not equitable, particularly when it comes to urban farmers, because it is geared toward farms that are on more than five acres of land,” Brent said. “So bringing up the concept of equity is vital; we want everyone to have access to farming.”

Brent has seen African Americans turn to farming as they grow increasingly more health conscious. They no longer want to depend on grocery stores alone to meet their nutritional needs, she said. “People realize you are what you eat.”

Fighting for Illinois’s Rural and Urban Farms

In the predominantly Black and impoverished Chicago neighborhood of West Englewood, the dearth of grocery stores all too often leads residents to go without the fruits and vegetables they need to have a balanced diet, said Illinois State Representative Sonya Harper. A West Englewood resident herself, Harper pointed out that it’s not uncommon for community members to do their food shopping at gas station convenience stores. And she’s seen many people, including her own father, die prematurely from complications related to heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—conditions she believes better nutrition could have prevented.

Before taking office in 2015, Harper had already grown interested in food and farming justice. Over the past decade, she has co-founded a community garden in West Englewood, served as an outreach manager for a local urban farm, and led a food-justice organization called Grow Greater Englewood.

When she became a lawmaker six years ago, Harper prioritized food insecurity and equity in agriculture. But she encountered resistance from fellow ag committee members who ridiculed urban farming or objected to exploring policies to better serve Black farmers, she said. Harper recalled being told, “We can’t support any policies that may favor one group of farmers over the others.” And when she discussed urban farming, “I would get laughed at, even by people who were farmers themselves,” she said. They told her, “Oh, you’re just gardening in your backyard.”

Illinois State Representative Sonya Harper. (Photo courtesy of SIX)

Today, attitudes have changed dramatically. A number of state officials have accompanied her on urban garden tours, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed legislation this year directing the state’s Department of Agriculture to study racial disparities in farm ownership. Fewer than 200 of Illinois’s 70,000 farms are Black-owned.

Harper said that Black farmers in Illinois haven’t received the same access to information about grants and government programs as their white counterparts have. And that lack of knowledge and resources has not only resulted in a loss of farmland, she said, but it has also hurt urban Black neighborhoods.

Communities like West Englewood, according to Harper, once relied on Black farmers in rural areas such as Pembroke Township for much of their food. Founded in the 1860s by formerly enslaved African Americans, the township was once the largest Black farming community in the North. Now, a planned natural gas pipeline through the township has sparked controversy, pitting those who believe it will attract jobs and economic resources against others who say it could jeopardize the region’s agricultural future.

Harper hopes to preserve Black farming communities and give them the support they need to thrive once more. She plans to go on a listening tour to hear the concerns of Black farmers, and she wants the state to allocate funding to them. Whether that happens, she said, will largely depend on the results of a disparity study the state will complete by the end of the year.

“We’re trying to restore the historic Black farming communities to create this urban-rural link and support the new up-and-coming urban farmers,” she said.

David Howard, the state policy campaigns director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, said the legislation Harper has successfully sponsored, such as the Farmer Equity Act, pushed the state government to become more progressive.

“The bill took the federal socially disadvantaged definition and applied it at the state level, just to have a baseline within agricultural policy,” he said. “If we’re going to have a set-aside [for disadvantaged farmers], we need the legislative language to build on to really drive resources toward farmers of color. We need to really shift power and leadership resources to the people who are most marginalized.”

Howard added that it’s exciting to see Harper and other women legislators of color become food and agriculture advocates because their lived experiences reflect those of the communities they serve.

Networking for Impact

Like Jackson and Brent, Harper often brainstorms her ideas with other legislators who share her interest in food and farming. She’s part of a cohort of roughly 75 politicians from more than 30 states who share policy proposals through participation in the State Innovation Exchange (SIX), a national policy and research center.

According to Kendra Kimbirauskas, SIX’s Director of Agriculture and Food Systems, the African-American women serving on state ag committees can play a vital role in shaping policy.

“The folks who are leading these conversations at the state level are largely Black women,” she said. “And they’re doing it in an issue space that is dominated by male voices and white voices. You can imagine how difficult that is, particularly in a place like Georgia, to really be a champion for [progressive] policies.”

Kimbirauskas said the fact that these legislators know what it means to dig their hands in the dirt and feed their communities gives them a rare perspective. “They’re not just talking about hypotheticals,” she said. “I think that lends a lot of credibility and authenticity to their policymaking.”

For Jackson, serving on an ag committee helps her to empower the communities that have lacked political influence historically. And, through farming, she is honoring the African Americans of the past.

“For many of us who are descended of enslaved Africans, there is a deep connection to our ancestors and the work that they were forced to do—and also the work they did really, really well,” said Jackson. “That connection matters to me.”

The post Meet the Black Women Driving New Ag Policy appeared first on Civil Eats.

On Pine Ridge Reservation, a Garden Helps Replace an 80-mile Grocery Trip

Nadra Nittle — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 08:00:02 +0000

Buying groceries can take Doug Pourier the better part of a day. A member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, Pourier lives on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota, where he says local convenience stores sell limited quantities of expiring produce at inflated prices. For that reason, he spends his weekends driving to and from Rapid City, which is 80 miles away, to purchase a variety of higher-quality foods.

“It’s frustrating because you have to drive that far just to get your fresh vegetables, and you have to buy [in bulk] because you don’t want to be taking a trip every other day,” said the 43-year-old father of twins. “And it starts to go bad in your refrigerator because it was sitting there too long.”

More than 40,000 members make up the Oglala Lakota Nation and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation spans nearly 3,500 square miles, but the dearth of grocery stores and the high poverty rate put residents in a profound state of food insecurity, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The reopening of a small grocery store in Pine Ridge was cause for a community celebration in 2019, but only large grocery stores that earn millions in annual revenue and have all food departments meet the federal government’s definition of a supermarket. Health inspectors found that its predecessor in the same location had combined and sold packages of rotten and fresh hamburger, among other health violations.

“The quality isn’t that great; it’s hitting the bottom of the barrel,” said Phil Zimiga, a 60-year-old former casino manager, of the food available at stores on the reservation. “It’s old; it’s almost ready to expire by the time it’s available to us here locally.”

In addition, an estimated 95 percent of the food consumed on the reservation is imported, while most of the food produced there is shipped away, according to the Lakota Food Sovereignty Coalition. Food insecurity on the reservation contributes to chronic health problems among the Oglala Lakota, since it’s more convenient for tribal members to load up on processed foods during their trips to the supermarket than on fresh produce with a short shelf life. As a result, a fifth of Oglala Lakota County residents have diabetes, and half of all adults there experience obesity.

“What everybody does is the moment they get their EBT allotments, they pack the Walmarts,” said Tom Cook, founder of the Slim Buttes Agricultural Development Program, a nonprofit that works to combat food insecurity on the reservation. “My wife worked there for five years and was surprised that [her fellow] Lakotas pile up with cornflakes, cookies, pop, bologna, and all this junk food.”

Both Pourier and Zimiga hope to change these outcomes and foster food autonomy among the Oglala Lakota. As students in the Medicine Root Gardening Program on the Pine Ridge reservation, they’ve learned to grow their own food. Part of the Oyate Teca Project, which promotes the well-being of Oglala Lakota children and families, the program teaches participants how to start organic home gardens, supplying them with seeds, soil, and tools along with fencing and irrigation assistance. Offered annually since 2016, the nine-month gardening program has given Pine Ridge residents increased access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and students in the course have produced 20,000 pounds of crops since its launch.

After years of struggling to garden, stay-at-home mother Alice Leftwich now grows onions, tomatoes, jalapeños, and pumpkins at her home. The shift began over the past year when she enrolled in the Medicine Root Program and became a star gardening student. The 30-year-old, who is pursuing an associate’s degree in carpentry, has passed on her new skills to her 11-year-old daughter, a natural at growing strawberry plants.

Gardening interested Leftwich because she worried about pesticides and other harmful chemicals in store-bought foods. Growing her own, she said, “helps us eat better, and it also tastes a lot better, and we know where the food is coming from.”

More than Gardening

As the COVID-19 pandemic heightened food insecurity nationally, home gardens allowed Medicine Root participants to have some control over their food supply and to help community members in need. Located in one of the nation’s most impoverished counties, the unemployment, hunger, and housing instability that have made headlines nationwide during the pandemic have persisted in Pine Ridge for generations due to the legacy of colonization and systemic oppression.

That’s why the program doesn’t just turn participants into skilled gardeners, it also trains them in financial literacy. Students learn how to make seasonal income by canning their crops or selling surplus produce at farmers’ markets, and they receive accounting lessons to equip them to become produce vendors should they want to turn their gardening skills into a full-fledged business. With this multidimensional platform, the program has gone from training eight students per session in 2016 to 65 today.

“I know that people have these garden clubs all around the world, but this is something new for us here,” said Rose Fraser, executive director of the Oyate Teca Project. “It’s new and it’s exciting. I think everybody loves coming to our classes.”

The course also helps to preserve Lakota culture, teaching students Lakota food names and traditional food drying methods. In a community that was struggling long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the gardening program has provided participants with at least one path to offset the devastating effects of food and financial insecurity.

“In the beginning of the class, we do a lot of surveys with our students and ask them what they like to eat, because that’s where it all starts,” Fraser said. “You’re not going to plant something you’re not going to eat.”

Many students like to grow what they’ve nicknamed salsa and soup gardens. One focuses on tomatoes, onions, and peppers—the ingredients needed to make salsa—while the other involves growing the cabbages, potatoes, and carrots commonly used in soups. Students can learn growing practices suitable for a row garden, container garden, box garden, no till garden, or a hay bale garden. “We also provide fencing for a standard 40-foot-by-60-foot garden, which is 10 rows,” Fraser said. “We teach them how they can feed a family of four with just those rows.”

Although John Haas, a retired Oglala Lakota educator who lives on the Pine Ridge reservation, has gardened for most of his life, he signed up for the program a few years ago to learn how to grow high-quality produce. He especially enjoyed learning about the Mittleider gardening method, which covers everything from seed selection to irrigation. “It teaches companion planting so that your vegetables complement each other and help each other fight bugs and diseases,” Haas said. “And it goes into how to grow them more effectively and efficiently.”

Haas appreciates the course’s emphasis on accountability and record keeping, which helped him track which of his efforts made his garden thrive. The focus on organization and documentation also made it clear which plants he could expect to pop up in his garden and where. “It’s not just feeding chickens, where you throw seeds on the ground and hope something will come up,” he said.

Connecting with fellow gardeners is one aspect of the course he’s most enjoyed. “I’ve learned quite a bit in talking with other gardeners,” he said. “You learn why they did something a certain way when maybe you were faced with that same dilemma and you didn’t know which way to turn. That camaraderie with other gardeners is really important.”

Slim Butte’s Tom Cook admires the program because of the support participants receive. “It’s continuous over the growing season, so students get the reinforcement and help they need [related to] production, preservation, or sales,” he said. “It’s all integrated there because they’re surrounded with the structure of the program.”

Sharing the Harvest

When Haas harvests vegetables from his garden it’s a group affair. He uses his heirloom tomatoes in a salsa he gives away to community members. He hands out his corn as well. “You cut it, and then you dry it in the sun,” said the 73-year-old. “That’s the traditional Lakota way that we learned so that we could store it. It can be used over the winter in soups and other dishes, and sometimes I put it in quart jars and put a bow on it and give it out for Christmas presents. The old women—older than me—really like that.”

In addition to drying corn the Lakota way, Medicine Root students learn to make jam out of the chokecherries and buffalo berries that are traditionally part of the Lakota diet. “We also do drying of the meat. It’s called papa,” Fraser said. Together, dried meat and dried chokecherries are the foundation of the Lakota food called wasná, and dried corn is called wastunkala.

Students at the Lakota Waldorf School in Pine Ridge are learning a variety of words for traditional foods and gardening methods, according to Fraser. After faculty members took the class, she said, they decided to replicate it for their students.

“They use the vegetables in the school lunch program where their kids are eating better than public school kids because our kids in public schools eat canned vegetables,” Haas added.

Like most gardening programs across the country, Medicine Root has seen a surge of interest over the last year and a half. When the pandemic hit, people worried that fruits and vegetables would become even more scarce in the Pine Ridge region.

“We had people calling us in a panic,” recalled Fraser, who said she’s fielded more calls over the past 18 months than ever before. People were desperate to plant a garden and sign up for the program, although it was too late for these would-be gardeners to enroll. So, Fraser launched a basic gardening class to meet their needs. More than 100 people signed up for the four-week crash course, and then some of those participants signed up for the full nine-month program at the start of this year.

“The other thing that was really good about our gardening program during that time was that we were able to provide produce,” Fraser said. “We did fresh vegetable distributions on a weekly basis. We were able to distribute up to 125 bags of produce some [weeks].”

Brandon Rook, spokesman for Newman’s Own Foundation, a funder of the Medicine Root program, said that the pandemic has put everyone into survival mode. As community members on and off reservations struggle to get their basic needs met, Rook considers the gardening program to be a vital resource.

“One in four Native Americans is food insecure, so [the program’s] work is so critical,” he said. “COVID-19 has proven that it’s important to be self-reliant, and that’s what they’re doing—they’re teaching these families how to grow their own food.”

Fostering Entrepreneurship

While Medicine Root students learn the fundamentals of gardening, they also have the opportunity to study financial literacy and business planning, which Fraser said helps them channel their garden expertise into a career. Learning the principles of business is a requirement for course participants interested in applying for microloans for farm equipment from the Lakota Federal Credit Union.

Alumni of the program have gone on to start their own farmers’ markets, meal programs for the elderly, and a garden at a local correctional facility. Others, such as Phil Zimiga, earn extra income selling their produce. He is now considering selling his potatoes full time in a farmers’ market—a turn of events he credits to the knowledge he’s acquired during his four years taking Medicine Root classes.

“I tried to garden for maybe eight years prior to taking the class, and I had no idea what I was doing,” Zimiga said. “Some years, I would have a little bit of success. The next year I’d have no success, so then I wouldn’t garden the next year. But when I got introduced to the class, I started to connect the dots.”

By some estimates, only 4 percent of Pine Ridge land is conducive to agriculture due to the overgrazing of cattle and, as Zimiga notes, the federal government’s history of forcing Native Americans onto inhospitable lands. In the Medicine Root program, he learned about composting techniques. “Each year [my] soil is getting better and better,” he said.

Although Pourier didn’t garden before taking the course, Medicine Root made such a profound impact on him that he now works as the program’s garden manager. He studied construction in college, and that background has proven helpful in building garden beds.

“It’s a lot of fun; I love gardening,” Pourier said. “It takes passion to [manage] a garden.”

He balances his time between construction work and managing the program’s garden, but he also started a farmers’ market with the help of his teenage sons, who have been inspired by their father’s enjoyment of gardening.

“They started loving all the fresh vegetables,” Pourier said. “They got their friends into doing it, too, and now we have a little crew of high schoolers who garden.”

There’s no comparison between growing one’s own food and eating food sold commercially, Fraser contends. “Being able to provide produce within our own families is healthier,” she said. “The taste is different and the quality is a lot different, so I think everybody’s just enjoying providing their own food.”

For Pourier, gardening has proven life-changing. After struggling for years to access fresh produce or paying high gas and grocery store costs to obtain it, he now has too many fresh fruits and vegetables. Turning a profit at the farmers’ market on his excess zucchini is now the norm for him.

“Everything that we have in abundance we sell, sell, sell,” he said of his garden. “You actually make money for something that you fell in love doing.”

The post On Pine Ridge Reservation, a Garden Helps Replace an 80-mile Grocery Trip appeared first on Civil Eats.

Narsiso Martinez is Painting the Plight of Farmworkers

Nadra Nittle — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 11:14:04 +0000

As a child in Oaxaca, Mexico, Narsiso Martinez loved drawing, but he never dreamed he’d grow up to become a professional artist. And he almost didn’t. The 43-year-old spent years working as a farmworker to pay for his education and pursue an art career. Now, he’s an acclaimed artist based in Long Beach, California, and his striking portraits of agricultural workers have largely propelled him to success.

Filled with mixed media works featuring farmworkers, produce boxes, and agricultural landscapes, Martinez’s portfolio has earned comparisons to the social realism movement of the 1930s. The artist also feels a connection to 19th-century painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Jean-François Millet, both of whom painted peasants and rural landscapes. But Martinez’s biggest influence remains his experience as a farmworker in Washington state, a job that exposed him to the grueling labor farmworkers perform—typically without recognition or labor protections—since so many are undocumented.

Born in 1977 to Zapotec parents, Martinez moved to the United States at age 20 without a high school education. Over the next two decades, he obtained a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, and, finally, a master’s degree in fine arts from California State University, Long Beach in 2018. That year, he celebrated his first solo show, “Farm Fresh,” held at the Long Beach Museum of Art. The next year, the museum featured his exhibition, “Friends in Freshness,” which included three-dimensional displays of his former colleagues.

Today, Martinez’s work has been exhibited globally by institutions and organizations including the National Immigration Law Center; the Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts of the Consulate General of Mexico; Art Space Purl gallery in Daegu, South Korea; the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; and the CSULB University Art Museum. Ultimately, he intends to spark a dialogue about the relationship between field workers and the agricultural industry.

Most recently, Martinez’s work was featured in the Billboard Creative’s spring exhibition, which showcased pieces by 30 artists on billboards across Los Angeles. In July, he will participate in an outdoor exhibition organized by the Torrance Art Museum in Southern California.

Martinez spoke with Civil Eats about his art, education, career, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn unprecedented media attention to the contributions of food and farm workers.

Your determination to get an education is incredibly inspiring. What motivated you to keep pursuing your education despite the challenges you faced?

It really was about setting goals. Growing up, I didn’t have role models. My father had a fourth-grade education. I got kicked out of high school in ninth grade for failing too many classes. When I came to the U.S., I wanted to go to school and learn the language, because I wanted to know what the songs were about. In ESL school, my teachers were really encouraging. I realized that I was capable of doing the work, so I signed up for the high school program, and it took a long time because nobody was funding it. I was doing it on my own. and sometimes my schedule would change. But I never stopped, and I graduated from high school in 2006. I wanted to break the cycle in my family. At one point, it became not just for me but for everyone else—my family, my nieces, and nephews.

Three years later, you graduated from Los Angeles City College (LACC). There, you took an art history class where you studied Vincent van Gogh. How did he inspire you to center farmworkers in your art?

When I took an art history class at LACC, I came across these van Gogh paintings. Obviously, the colors were really attractive, but I also learned that he was inspired by Millet, who painted peasants, and it really reminded me of growing up in my community. And I was like, “Okay, I want to go to grad school and do paintings like this.” That was the beginning of it.

The rural environment van Gogh and Millet captured wasn’t just a reminder of your childhood, since as an adult you worked in the fields.

We would work from 1 a.m. to 3 p.m. I was annoyed to get a paycheck at the end of the week that was just a few hundred dollars. I was like, “Really? I don’t think I’m going to make enough to pay for college with his money.”

I read one old interview where you described picking asparagus as a farmworker, and some of the injustices you faced doing so.

I was working very early in the morning when it was very dark. We had spotlights on our heads, and there were certain tricks that the farmworkers used to make sure the asparagus was the right length. If [it wasn’t], the asparagus was counted as trash, and the weight was discounted from the amount we would get paid. But I discovered that [those smaller pieces] were preserved. They put them in jars or something like that, and it would still make a profit for the company, which annoyed me. I didn’t know if they would fire me or retaliate against me if I spoke up, which is traditionally what happens.

Can you give some examples of retaliation farmworkers face?

Based on my experience, if you speak up, they might not fire you on the spot, but they will tell you there is no more work. Because a lot of these people work seasonally, they’ll keep an eye on you, and the next season when it’s time to pick the harvest, they will say, “I’m sorry, we don’t need any more workers.” It’s kind of scary when it is your only source of income.

You’ve sometimes been labeled as “too political.” Given the climate of the country today, has that changed? Are you now celebrated for highlighting farmworkers?

A lot of that would come out in critiques and conversations we had in class when I was an art student. At first, I was trying to defend [my work], like, “This is nothing bad. This is just me and what I experienced.” But I realized [that my art] is political because as a minority, as an immigrant, as a migrant worker, as a foreign worker, work is political. Then, I realized that farmworkers need to be highlighted. Some people say I’m an art-ivist or an activist, which is cool; I don’t mind those labels. The fact that I now create this work that includes all of these social issues that are embedded in our communities, that makes it, for me, even more valuable.

Your art also incorporates produce boxes. How did that start?

When I was an undergrad, I went to see a show that had a couple of paintings on cardboard, which I thought was pretty interesting and beautifully done. After I graduated, I started doing sketches on cardboard, and it was pretty satisfactory to rub the charcoal in the cardboard. When I came back for the graduate program, I started painting on oil on canvas again. I was trying to paint landscapes, but I would paint farmworkers here and there because I wanted to know how I could address these differences of lifestyle between the orchard owners and the farmworkers. Then, I went to visit my brother, and he sent me to Costco to go get pizza, and there was a pile of boxes lying around. One that really got my attention was a banana box. I took it to my studio, drew on the box, and showed it to my art class, and the response was really positive. I started doing multiple compositions and collages of boxes and sculptural pieces, and that’s how it all started.

Given the long journey you took to become an artist, how did it feel to start taking part in art shows?

I felt a great sense of accomplishment. My first show at a museum felt like a breakthrough. As a person of color, as an Indigenous person, I’ve been struggling throughout my life to even have an education. Breaking those barriers felt like I was doing something not only for myself but sort of setting an example to others.

During the pandemic, food and farmworkers received unprecedented media attention after being ignored for too long. How do you feel about this shift?

I didn’t have to go farther than my social media pages, where people were sharing the news, to realize this was happening. People were cheering the farmworkers and bringing them mariachis and tacos and food, and I think it was great. It’s amazing. One of the things that I questioned, though, is what’s going to happen after the pandemic. Farmworkers are really struggling to survive, so hopefully more people are going to speak up and organize. In many states, people—who are usually afraid of speaking up—are organizing, protesting, and demanding better wages, better protection of women. I’m glad they are taking matters into their own hands to demand change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Narsiso Martinez is Painting the Plight of Farmworkers appeared first on Civil Eats.

‘High on the Hog’ Celebrates Black Contributions to Global Food and Culture

Nadra Nittle — Wed, 26 May 2021 08:00:06 +0000

In the first episode of Netflix’s new docuseries, High on the Hog, host Stephen Satterfield meets a woman who runs a floating market in the West African nation of Benin. With a straw hat on her head and paddles in her hands, she hawks fresh and packaged foods from her rowboat on Lake Nokoue in the village of Ganvié. It’s Satterfield’s first time in Benin and he takes in the scene from a nearby boat with a look of calm wonderment.

A floating market in the West African nation of Benin.

But this isn’t quite the “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment you’ll see in most food travel shows. And Satterfield, founder of Whetstone Media (and a Civil Eats alum) isn’t the standard white male host tasked with making the cuisine and culture of a foreign people palatable to Western audiences. Rather, he’s a Black food writer from Georgia exploring the influence of West Africa (the ancestral home of most enslaved African Americans) on Black American foodways. In a television format dominated by white men, with the notable exceptions of Padma Lakshmi, Samin Nosrat, and Marcus Samuelsson, that makes Satterfield an anomaly. The series also stands out because of its virtually all-Black creative team, including executive producers Fabienne Toback, Karis Jagger, and Academy award-winner Roger Ross Williams, who directed most of the episodes as well.

High on the Hog‘s subtitle—How African American Cuisine Transformed America—not only explores African American food, but also frames it as a defining force in the evolution of American cuisine. Based on the book with the same name by food historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris, who appears in the first episode, the four-part docuseries, which premieres tonight, starts in Benin and ends in Texas. In between, there are stops in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, home of the Gullah Geechee people, as well as major cities including Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles.

Throughout the series, we learn about African-origin food staples such as collard greens, okra, and yams, and how the agricultural expertise of enslaved African Americans left a permanent imprint on the nation’s rice industry. Black Americans also influenced the country’s catering profession and set cuisine trends as chefs for presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Additionally, the series emphasizes the resourcefulness of enslaved African Americans, who made use of every part of the animals they cooked. Rarely did they have the opportunity to enjoy the best pork, said to come from the hog’s back and upper legs—the highest parts. But thanks to their innovations and rich culinary traditions, the meals African Americans made often felt like they came from high on the hog, anyway.

I spoke with Satterfield about the journey he made as the host of High on the Hog, the most memorable meals and moments, and how African American food is foundational American cuisine.

Tell me how you became the High on the Hog host. I read that one of the producers reached out to you, and at first you thought they just wanted your help to pitch the series, and then you found out they actually wanted you to host it. You didn’t hesitate to accept the opportunity. Why?

You read the story correctly. The immediacy of me wanting to take the role was contingent on getting the blessing of Dr. J [Jessica B. Harris] because she has already for many years been such an enormous intellectual influence in my life and in my vocation in particular. So, after I talked to her about it and she told me to do it, I said yes right away because it’s a huge honor—not only because the show, subject matter, people, and the content need to be celebrated, and that celebration has been deferred for way too long, but it was like magic to have someone that you so admire and look up to asking you to join them on this historic journey and be the face of it.

Do you remember what initially led you to Dr. Harris’s work?

I was introduced to it probably around 2007. I was a sommelier in my early 20s. I had just moved from Portland, Oregon, where I was working, to my hometown of Atlanta. A big part of that move was because of the disillusionment that I was feeling as a sommelier, because I was in a field that was overwhelmingly homogenous and white. And that experience created a lot of emotional turmoil for me because I loved wine. I really saw myself pursuing it as a career, but there was no way to build a diverse community of sommeliers [because social media was still in its infancy], so I moved to Atlanta to really reimagine my participation in that industry.

I ended up starting a nonprofit that worked with Black vintners in the Western Cape in South Africa, which is where the nation’s wine region is, and helped Black folks in South Africa get their wines distributed to the U.S. I created a lot of media on behalf of those individuals, which is how I got my foot into the world of media, making content that was agrarian-based and had a food justice point of view underlying whatever food or drink we were celebrating.

From that kind of diasporic food and beverage connection, I started to read Dr. Harris, and I was so taken by her anthropological approach to food. I was taken by the fact that she had focused primarily on the foodways of Africa and the diaspora. So, I saw the work that I was doing in wine as an echo of the work that she was doing as a writer and as a scholar.

While discussing the wine industry, you mentioned that it was very white-dominated. Now you’re hosting a food travel docuseries, a TV format that’s also dominated by white men. How does it feel for you to take part in shifting that trend? High on the Hog doesn’t feel like a show that was designed for the white gaze.

I’m overjoyed to hear you say that, and I think at the core of what makes the show special, original, unique, overdue is the creative agency on display throughout the entirety of the process. The level of care and intimacy that is achieved because of the lived experience of a Black author, director, showrunners, executive producers, and host is going to give you a final product that is completely unlike anything that we’ve seen before because of that sensitivity. That’s not something that can be fully understood without the embodied experience of understanding what it means to be a Black person in most cases.

As you say, it’s not a show for the white gaze. It is a show that is very proudly made for Black people around the world to join a celebration of our contributions to the world of food and the world of culture. That is not to say that people of other ethnicities or racial identities are not welcome to watch or enjoy the show. There’s so much to learn and so much beauty to take in, but for Black folks, in particular, there will be a perception of a level of care and intimacy that, “Wow, they really did make this show for us.”

Black creatives just want the space to tell our own stories. It sounds really simple, but it’s so rare that the opportunity is granted, and when it is, I think the results speak for themselves, and they’re powerful and transformational in most cases.

I know this series didn’t just focus on soul food, but when the topic of soul food or Black cuisine comes up in the media, it’s often pathologized. It’s blamed for giving Black people diabetes, making Black people obese, killing us. Can you talk about how High on the Hog stands out for celebrating Black food?

I think that pathology that you’re referencing speaks to an imbalance of power. It speaks directly to how important the role of story is in maintaining power, or, in this case, shifting power. What I mean by that is, as a Black person who grew up in the States, I know that that is not the singular narrative of the culinary tradition of my family.

Because I’m not an editor at the New York Times [or a media outlet of that magnitude], my power to disseminate a more diverse story about the food traditions and food culture of Black people is going to be limited. So, our imagination around what Black people are capable of, just in general, is really limited, and media and story has so much to do with that because it is all about our perceptions through a particular editorial, creative lens, or filter from people who have not had the lived experience of the [individuals] they are trying to portray.

I’m so glad that High on the Hog exists because there’s a new generation of young Black children all over the world who will watch this and be influenced and inspired in ways that I cannot imagine. To have a show like this is really exciting and I’m very, very privileged to be a part of it.

Stephen Satterfield

Which of the foods that you ate during the making of this show left the biggest impression on you?

There were a couple of really special dishes. One was actually caught on camera, and that was the collard greens we had in North Carolina at [food preservationist] Gabrielle Etienne’s house. I feel like some people have a particular way of preparing greens where I can just tell that they came from the South. The greens [were grown just] a few miles away from Gabrielle’s house, so I think that Carolina soil matters, too. The snap of the greens—they were just incredible.

I was sitting next to a farmer in that scene, and when he ate the greens, there was a palpable pause. None of that was contrived. It was funny because I was having the same moment, like, “Damn, this tastes like my granny’s greens, like something from my childhood.”

Also, the macaroni and cheese [culinary historian Dr. Leni Sorensen and I prepared from a recipe by Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef James Hemings]: It was memorable for me because it was such a cool experience to be surrounded by the heirs of the Hemings family and cooking in a way that Hemings would’ve cooked 250 years ago. It was probably one of the most enlightening but still pleasurable experiences that I had, even though it was shot on a plantation.

That mac and cheese really gets to the crux of the show, which is, we take for granted things that are ubiquitous in our lives that we have not properly investigated. The show is now going to present these stories about things that you fell in love with from a completely new perspective and with a historical context. It’ll be emotional, it will be delicious, and you will learn in the process.

Are you hoping that highlighting the contributions of early Black chefs and caterers teaches viewers that African Americans played a foundational role in shaping U.S. food culture?

Foundational is the right word to use. The mac and cheese was the low-hanging fruit because it’s so much a big part of U.S. food culture, but it really began with the rice trade. The foundational relationship between Black people and what [became] the United States is rooted in exploitation, and that exploitation wasn’t just about the bodies in captivity. The intellectual capital of the enslaved people was exploited because they were very, very skilled rice farmers and growers, and it is incredibly difficult to cultivate rice. So the Carolina Gold rice that was the foundational wealth of the nation [explored in the “Rice Kingdom,” episode 2 of High on the Hog] was made possible by the physical labor as well as the intellectual capital of people coming from the rice coasts of West Africa. It can’t be overstated that the relationship between Black folks and food and the wealth of the nation actually precedes the [founding] of the country itself.

On a lighter note, one minor quibble I have is that in Benin, you all discuss quintessential West African foods like yams, okra, and rice but leave out one regional culinary staple—plantains. While filming, did you all have any plantains, my personal favorite?

Totally. If I’m not mistaken, I think there they call it alloco. There was a lot of food that we didn’t focus on on an individual level, but if it makes you feel better, lots of plantains were had and enjoyed. And, you’re right, it’s a classic staple food. We had them at just about every single meal. I don’t know why it was left out.

That is reassuring. Finally, since the show starts in Benin and ends in Texas, I wanted to ask you about the Northeastern Trailriders, the league of Black cowboys you encountered in the Lone Star State. You’ve said they made a big impact on you. Can you talk about why?

For me that was another massively revelatory moment because I had read so much about Black cowboys, about their role in the origins of the cattle industry in the U.S. The culture of the people themselves and the tradition that they’ve kept alive isn’t one can experience just in reading.

So, it was humbling to be in North Houston with the Northeast Trailriders. During the ride that we took, there were probably 100 beautiful Black people from ages five to 95 years old on horses and in carriages wearing cowboy hats. It was so surreal and beautiful. Seeing how much energy goes into the actual preservation of those traditions and keeping those horses alive and organizing these trail rides—it’s really incredible.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

High on the Hog premieres today on Netflix.

The post ‘High on the Hog’ Celebrates Black Contributions to Global Food and Culture appeared first on Civil Eats.

Why Did It Take So Long for Food Companies to Rebrand their Racist Products?

Nadra Nittle — Tue, 25 May 2021 08:00:28 +0000

The Movement for Black Lives has come for your racist food brands.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, perhaps one of the most-overdue and yet least-expected changes in American culture finally began: the replacement of racist, stereotypical “spokescharacters” on packaged foods, including Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Mia—the Native American “butter maiden” from Land O’Lakes.

While Land O’Lakes announced that it would remove Mia from its packaging the month before Floyd’s murder set off a global uprising, in the days and weeks afterward, other brands followed suit. In June, Quaker Oats, the PepsiCo subsidiary that owns the Aunt Jemima brand, announced its intention to rename and rebrand its products. It also acknowledged that the character was based on a racial stereotype. Scholars have said that it represents the Black mammy.

“Over the years, the Quaker Oats Company updated the Aunt Jemima brand image in a manner intended to remove racial stereotypes that dated back to the brand origins, but it had not progressed enough to appropriately reflect the dignity, respect, and warmth that we stand for today,” a Quaker Oats spokesperson explained to Civil Eats. Earlier this year, the company announced that Pearl Milling Company would be the brand’s new name.

For generations, stereotypical imagery of Black and Indigenous people has appeared on food brands. Amid 2020’s “racial reckoning,” Uncle Ben’s, a subsidiary of Mars, Inc., announced that it would modify its name and remove the Black man on its products who was inspired by an African American cook and waiter.

“While never our intent, the picture of the man on the Uncle Ben’s packaging elicits images of servitude for some, and, in the U.S., the word ‘uncle’ was at times a pejorative title for Black men,” Denis Yarotskiy, regional president for Mars Food North America, told Civil Eats. “As a result, we committed to change our name to Ben’s Original and remove the image on our packaging to signal our ambition to create a more inclusive future.”

Similarly, Eskimo Pie, which featured a cartoon Inuit boy in a fur-lined parka on its ice cream, removed that image and name, which had drawn objections from Inuit people. It is now named Edy’s Pie after company co-founder and candymaker Joseph Edy. Cream of Wheat also dropped the character widely known as Rastus, the Black cook long featured on its products.

Eager to show that these rebrands and name changes are more than just performative, some food companies have also committed to making multi-million dollar investments in communities of color. On May 13, Pearl Milling Company announced that it would grant $1 million to nonprofits that empower Black women and girls. And in 2020, the brand’s parent company announced a $400 million, five-year commitment to uplift Black businesses and communities.

“The journey for racial equality is one that calls for big, structural changes, and . . . we have the resources, reach, and responsibility to our people, businesses, and communities to be agents of progress,” PepsiCo said in a statement provided to Civil Eats. “As people around the world demanded justice for the countless lives taken too soon, PepsiCo committed to helping dismantle the systemic racial barriers that for generations have blocked social and economic progress for communities of color in this country, particularly Black and Hispanic communities.”

PepsiCo’s Pearl Milling isn’t alone in its efforts. A spokesperson for Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, the parent company of Edy’s Pie, told Civil Eats that it would invest $1.5 million in donations over the next three years to organizations that support marginalized and underrepresented creators. And Ben’s Original this year launched its Seat at the Table scholarship, in partnership with the National Urban League and the United Negro College Fund, to support Black students pursuing food industry careers. The company is also investing $2.5 million over a five-year period to support educational opportunities and fresh food access in Greenville, Mississippi, where Ben’s Original products have been made for 40 years.

“There are significant portions of the Greenville community that can be classified as a food desert, so over the past several months, we have spent time engaging and listening to a variety of partners, including Mayor [Errick D.] Simmons, our associates and several local [non-governmental organizations],” said Yarotskiy. “We are all committed to bringing fresh food to the neighborhoods that need it most through new initiatives that are efficient, modernized and sustainable for the long term.”

The response to the company’s rebrands and their financial commitments to foster racial equity has been mixed. Consumers across the political spectrum have questioned whether these image overhauls were necessary, arguing that characters like the Land O’Lakes maiden weren’t really stereotypes. On the other hand, scholars told Civil Eats that the changes at these food labels were long overdue, and they question why it took a year of unprecedented outcry over racial injustice to usher in these rebrands. It’s also important, they say, that these changes not be surface level but part of a sustained effort toward compensating communities of color for capitalizing on racial caricatures.

“I feel bad that it took George Floyd’s tragic death and protests unfolding in all 50 states and around the world to be the tipping point toward measurable changes—that it’s taken so long,” said Riché Richardson, an associate professor in Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. “But it’s definitely important for the change not to merely be cosmetic. It’s important to dig deep to grapple with what is at stake in these images and the serious damage they do.”

A Promising Sign

“Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of ‘Aunt Jemima’?” Richardson asked in a 2015 New York Times essay calling for the shift. She pointed out that the character was inspired by the minstrel song “Old Aunt Jemima” and described Jemima as an outgrowth of Old South plantation nostalgia that romanticized the mammy, “a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own.”

The egregious marketing of such a stereotype in the 21st century—though the company removed Jemima’s kerchief in 1968 and rebranded her as a “young grandmother” in 1989—is why Richardson finds it unsettling that the change took so long. That said, she views the company’s financial commitments to communities of color as a positive development.

“I think it’s important to make investments in the communities most implicated in and damaged by the images,” she said. “Those are, at least, promising signs. And they’re good to see.”

Psyche Williams-Forson, associate professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland–College Park, agrees that these food labels should have been rebranded ages ago. But she sees their decisions to part ways with stereotypical imagery as largely “symbolic.”

The rebrands suggest little more than that these companies “know how to read the room” during a time when Black Lives Matter has become a rallying cry for consumers of all racial backgrounds, and social media gives young people a platform to call out companies that fall short, she added. A viral TikTok video about Aunt Jemima’s minstrel show roots by Millennial singer Kirby Lauryen intensified the calls for the line to rebrand last year.

Although Land O’Lakes decided to remove the butter maiden from its packaging before protests against racial injustice spread worldwide, Williams-Forson doesn’t think the company deserves more credit for making the call a month early.

“People put enough money in your pocket to do the right thing,” she said. “Unless this particular butter is made by Native and Indigenous peoples, why do you have any imagery referencing that on the product? Are you somehow using that product to fund Native people? No. Well, then take it off.” (Land O’Lakes did not respond to a request for comment on this story.)

Rafia Zafar, professor of English, African & African American, and American Culture Studies at Washington University, feels simultaneously optimistic and skeptical about these companies’ commitments. Zafar said that she “wouldn’t look a good reparation in the mouth.” But she also wants to know if the funding will actually make it into communities of color—”to land trusts, community gardening [programs], agricultural education or something like that,” she said. “I think it can do good, particularly if [these companies] weren’t doing anything before.”

Dreyer’s has already made its first donation of $100,000 to the Hillman Grad Productions Mentorship Lab to support underrepresented creators, a spokesperson told Civil Eats. Founded by filmmaker Lena Waithe, the lab helps marginalized storytellers successfully pursue careers in television and film. In addition, applications for the Ben’s Original Seat at the Table scholarships are being accepted through June 30. And Pearl Milling announced on May 13 the P.E.A.R.L. Pledge, the funding initiative aimed at supporting Black women and girls.

Richardson, however, would like to see these companies hire more employees that better reflect the diversity found throughout the country. Mars, which owns Ben’s Original, has said it intends to make its workforce, leadership, and talent pipeline more inclusive. It’s a move that National Urban League President Marc Morial applauds.

“Diversity and inclusion cannot be solved by name and packaging changes alone—real change takes effort, time, and money, which is why it’s critical for companies like Mars to showcase their commitments through meaningful actions,” Morial told Civil Eats. “We’re proud to partner with Ben’s Original to help create these opportunities for those who truly deserve it, as well as support recipients in building successful careers in the food industry through the Seat at the Table Fund [scholarship].”

Cornell’s Riché Richardson said that diversifying the workforce is important because monolithic work cultures give rise to racially insensitive marketing.

“The lack of diversity is intimately linked to how and why these images have circulated for so long in the first place,” she said. “When you have a more diverse workplace, there’s more likely to be ingenuity, and there’s more likely to be observations that, you know, certain things are a problem. You need the person sitting at the table to say that.”

Backlash to the Rebrands

While proponents say these rebrands are long overdue, critics object to the fact that they’ve taken place at all. After learning that Eskimo Pie was changing its name, Donald Trump, Jr. declared “The bullshit never ends”—a tweet that garnered more than 40,000 likes.

“The backlash is all about MAGA [Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’],” said Zafar, suggesting that critics of the rebrands long for the days when it was acceptable to depict Black and Indigenous peoples as servile and exotic.

But not everyone who has expressed concern about the changes is an avowed Trump supporter. Robert DesJarlait, whose Ojibwe father, Patrick DesJarlait, redesigned Land O’Lakes’s Mia in 1954, doesn’t find the character offensive. He has pointed to the fact that his father included details, such as culturally specific beadwork on her dress and two points of wooded Minnesota shoreline recognizable “to any Red Lake tribal citizen” that underscored her authenticity

The author of an educational booklet about stereotypes and a critic of sports team mascots that dehumanize Native Americans, DesJarlait argues that Mia does not “fit the parameters of a stereotype,” as her physical features were not caricatured and her cultural heritage was not demeaned.

Similarly, relatives and supporters of the African-American women who portrayed Aunt Jemima in live promotions for the company early in its 132-year history fear that the rebrand erases them. “It’s a gross miscarriage of justice,” Dannez Hunter, great-grandson of Aunt Jemima performer Anna Short Harrington, told Chicago’s ABC7. “Let’s put it in context of what it actually is, a propaganda campaign.”

Richardson is aware of the concerns that these families have expressed as well as the argument that the rebrands stem from cancel culture. But she emphasized the argument that these representations of people of color were never accurate or empowering. The idea that Aunt Jemima, in particular, “represents Black heritage is actually deeply insulting and short-sighted,” she said.

Richardson added that no one is negating the work of the African Americans who historically portrayed Aunt Jemima, as she does not conflate these women with the fictional character. In fact, when the food line rebranded, she felt it missed an opportunity to showcase the work of African-American artists who radicalized Aunt Jemima’s image during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. At that time, artists such as Betye Saar pointed to the character’s historic and racist origins and reframed it as a source of Black empowerment.

While Pearl Milling removed Jemima’s name and visage, the new packaging does not look significantly different from the old packaging, nor does it educate consumers about why the Aunt Jemima character was problematic.

“The box looks the same,” Zafar said. “The lettering is the same. Same colors. They have a circular logo that’s probably placed around the same [spot] where there was the circular logo with Jemima in it.”

The company may not have chosen to highlight the more revolutionary images of Aunt Jemima or educate the public about her origins, but Richardson said that “any rational person would conclude” that U.S. consumer culture is in a period of transition. She remains cautiously optimistic about what impact these rebrands and financial pledges will ultimately have on communities of color.

“Let’s hope this is a real paradigm shift,” Richardson said. “We definitely need to see follow up and follow through. The hopes are high that maybe we are getting somewhere.”

The post Why Did It Take So Long for Food Companies to Rebrand their Racist Products? appeared first on Civil Eats.

The Rise of Guaranteed Income Programs Could Offer a Lifeline for Food Workers

Nadra Nittle — Tue, 04 May 2021 08:00:19 +0000

Sukhi Samra grew up with a mother who worked up to 80 hours per week to support three children and a husband with a disability. None of her three jobs paid her well enough to make ends meet in Fresno, California, in the late 2000s. So she juggled work as a housecleaner with shifts at a Subway restaurant and a gas station convenience store, and still struggled financially.

Samra said receiving just $500 in additional income a month would have reduced her mother’s workload and stress load, she said. Instead, the food worker developed hypertension, arthritis, depression, and anxiety before dying suddenly in June after 25 years of low-wage labor.

“In the richest country in the world, one job should be more than enough to make sure that you’re able to keep the lights on and feed your children, but that wasn’t the case for her,” said Samra, director of the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) project and Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Both programs were founded in 2020 by former Stockton, California Mayor, Michael Tubbs, and they’re both on a mission to provide low-wage earners, a category that disproportionately includes food workers, with a guaranteed income.

The idea is rapidly gaining traction nationwide. While universal basic income (UBI) initiatives provide no-strings-attached cash payments to all community members whether or not they are economically disadvantaged, guaranteed income projects like SEED aim to reduce income inequality by specifically giving “free money” to financially fragile constituents.

“Guaranteed income is a targeted policy solution to address racial and gender disparities in income insecurity,” Samra said. “Also, guaranteed income comes in a little bit cheaper than universal basic income just by virtue of the fact that you’re not serving the same number of people.”

In recent years, several cities have begun offering a guaranteed income to small groups of economically disadvantaged residents, and a number of others—including Los Angeles—are considering doing so. In February 2019, the SEED project launched a two-year guaranteed income program in Stockton, a racially diverse city of 300,000 on the eastern edge of the Bay Area that has been working to rebound from bankruptcy since 2008. The program provided a $500 monthly allotment to 125 randomly chosen residents in neighborhoods where earnings fall at or below the city’s median household income.

Recently released data from the program’s first year indicates that receiving a guaranteed income allowed participants to pay down their debts, cover unexpected expenses, and improve their mental health. In addition, full-time employment among these residents rose by 12 percent, a finding that flies in the face of the notion that free money disincentivizes low-income people from working. The success of Stockton’s program inspired other California cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Compton, to follow suit. Nationwide, Richmond, Virginia; Saint Paul, Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and the Massachusetts cities of Chelsea and Cambridge have all adopted guaranteed income programs.

While most of these initiatives focus on low-income families, San Francisco’s program stands out in that it will funnel $1,000 to 130 struggling artists for six months starting in May. This could pave the way for other municipalities to target economically specific groups of disadvantaged workers. The effort is being watched closely by food workers’ advocates, who say that monthly cash payments could offer those workers the financial stability to live in dignity.

Madeline Neighly, director of guaranteed income at the Economic Security Project, a funder and partner of SEED, pointed out that many foodservice workers don’t earn a living wage. The Raise the Wage Act of 2021, introduced to the U.S. Senate in January, would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by June 2025, but has faced pushback from industry groups such as the National Restaurant Association. The proposal also suffered a blow when the Senate opted against including minimum wage legislation in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus plan.

“We’ve learned a lot over the past year about the ways we rely so heavily on foodservice workers—from the people who pick our food to the people who deliver it and prepare it to everybody in between,” Neighly said. “So, a demonstration that shows how guaranteed income can level some of the economic shocks for those individuals seems like a great idea.”

Fighting to earn a living wage, relying on tips to survive, facing sexual harassment, and often getting paid under the table because of their immigration status, food workers are among the nation’s most exploited group of workers, advocates say. A guaranteed income could be just what many need to transition out of poverty and work in settings where they’re treated with respect.

The Case for a Guaranteed Food Worker Income

Food workers are significantly more likely to live below the poverty line than other workers. Roughly 30 percent of farmworker families live in poverty, as do 16.7 percent of restaurant workers. About 43 percent of restaurant workers earn twice the official poverty level, which suggests that they are barely making ends meet. Overrepresented in low-paying restaurant jobs—cashiers, counter attendants, dishwashers, or cooks—food workers of color, especially women, are among those most prone to poverty. In addition, more than half of the people working for supermarkets and big box stores earn poverty-level wages.

The COVID-19 pandemic only worsened economic conditions for restaurant workers, with nearly 400,000 restaurant jobs lost in December alone. Overall, the coronavirus resulted in the restaurant industry losing almost 2.5 million jobs. Tipped workers were acutely impacted, according to Sekou Siby, president and CEO of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. “It is not a wage,” he said of tips. “It’s a gratuity.”

Because restaurant staff typically worked fewer hours last year, their tips went down proportionally. That is one reason why ROC has been advocating for restaurant workers to earn a federal living wage of at least $15, but Siby said that a guaranteed income could also help. “We should provide targeted outreach toward families still working full-time but not making enough to [get by].”

A guaranteed income could provide some much-needed economic stability to restaurant workers whose wages have fluctuated or stopped entirely over the past year, Neighly said. As restaurants open up to full capacity, she added, it will take time for workers to resume earning their pre-pandemic wages, even if those wages were meager. A guaranteed income could also empower workers in other ways.

According to a recent study from the living-wage advocacy nonprofit One Fair Wage, more than 40 percent of restaurant workers reported “a noticeable change in the frequency of unwanted sexualized comments from customers” during the pandemic. Because they rely on tips, many of these workers feel they have no choice but to endure sexual harassment in the workplace.

Similarly, 58 percent workers said they hesitated to enforce COVID-19 protocols for fear that they would receive smaller tips. In fact, 67 percent of workers said they got unusually small tips after enforcing these protocols.

A guaranteed income would make restaurant workers less dependent on tips. “Cash is freedom, and it’s the freedom to walk away from a situation that’s unsafe,” Neighly said. “It’s the freedom to make decisions about your career that are best for you and your family.” A demonstration focused on food workers would allow researchers and advocates, “to show the power that workers have when they have economic stability to call for better working conditions,” she added.

In addition to leaving unsafe work environments, participants in the Stockton program reported that they left abusive partners and did not have to rely on financial help from family members with whom they had strained relationships, Samra noted. So, a guaranteed income, “really allows you to shift to situations that you choose to be in,” she said. “It’s giving people their agency back.”

Jose Oliva, campaigns director for HEAL Food Alliance, said a basic income would be “hugely beneficial” to farmworkers. He argues that they are among the most vulnerable, particularly because they work seasonally and perform grueling labor. But he also said such an income would help food workers employed in transportation, logistics, and warehousing roles, since automation and mechanization are increasingly threatening their job security. Their job protections also depend on whether or not they belong to a union. He suspects that a basic income could lead employers to improve the wages and conditions they offer to workers, who would have more leverage.

For this shift to occur, Oliva said, immigration reform is a must. Without it, employers can pay undocumented workers low wages and avoid making substantive changes. But at present, restaurants are struggling to find enough workers as business picks up and more than half of U.S. adults have received the COVID-19 vaccine.

Some experts blame this problem on food workers leaving the industry when restaurants limited their hours of operation during the pandemic. And, in many cases, the alternative work they landed provided higher pay and more job security than their food industry positions did. Others attribute the trend to these workers collecting unemployment benefits and stimulus payments that collectively amount to a higher sum than their restaurant wages did. In any case, the food industry might have to do more to cater to workers to lure them back.

The inaugural SEED study found that a guaranteed income isn’t likely to stop the public from working—but it did give them the resources to explore their options. “People had a lot more brain space and mental capacity to set goals for themselves and envision a different future,” Samra said. “So, you combine the mental capacity with the tangible ability to take the day off from work—as we know a lot of [low-wage] jobs don’t come with paid time off—and people were taking days off to go to interviews, whereas that just wasn’t possible before.”

Addressing the Critics

Although Stockton’s project saw positive results, guaranteed and basic income programs still face opposition. Critics argue that they would do very little to decrease income inequality. Rather, they say the programs could cause inflation and taxes to increase, landlords to raise rent, and people to lose the will to work. In response to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s recent proposal of a $24 million “basic income guaranteed” pilot program, Jon Coupal, the president of the anti-tax Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, told the Los Angeles Times that government initiatives that “give away free money” minimize the importance of hard work and being “a productive member of society.”

Samra said these messages are rooted in damaging stereotypes related to race, gender, and class. They play on stereotypes that suggest “poor people are poor because of their own choices, and that if you give people money, they will spend it on drugs and alcohol or they will stop working,” she said. “None of the data bears out in that way. For us, it was really important to reverse the pattern of not trusting families who are experiencing economic insecurity and show that they’re just like the rest of us. When they’re given $500 a month, they spend it to better take care of themselves and their families.”

Samra also disputed the idea that “free money” would stop people from working, since $500 or $1,000 is not a large enough monthly sum to meet cost-of-living needs. As for the idea that a guaranteed or basic income might depress wages, rather than raise them, Samra said that such initiatives should not exist in a vacuum. A number of policies should be put in place to reduce income inequality and improve living standards—from tenant protections to a living wage.

“These policies are not in competition, and, in fact, they work best in tandem: [workers need] a living wage and guaranteed income,” Neighly said.

The Stockton program not only garnered attention for distributing “free money” but also because it didn’t require participants to take drug tests or spend their cash in a certain way. Compare this to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which restricts what recipients’ purchases, most notably prohibiting hot foods. Moreover, some states have tried to bar recipients from purchasing unhealthy foods, such as candy or sweetened beverages, with SNAP benefits.

Samra said it was important to give Stockton’s guaranteed income recipients autonomy because no government program or policymaker can predict families’ individual needs on a month-to-month basis. In May, they might use the money to pay for a car repair, and in June, they might spend the money entirely on food.

“Cash is something that allows freedom and choice,” Neighly said. “By showing how [guaranteed income programs] work in different communities, we’re seeing how something can be universal in its solution, even though each family, each community, each individual, interacts with it differently.”

The post The Rise of Guaranteed Income Programs Could Offer a Lifeline for Food Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.

This Doctor Is Working to Build Resilience and Land Justice for Communities of Color

Nadra Nittle — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 08:01:50 +0000

Dr. Rupa Marya has spent two decades studying how social structures predispose marginalized groups to illness. This year, Marya aims to foster healing in vulnerable communities with a new farm, Ma Da Dil; a new nonprofit, Deep Medicine Circle; and a new book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, set for publication in August.

A women of color-led organization made up of farmers, healers, activists, and artists, Deep Medicine Circle recently launched its Farming Is Medicine program on a 1-acre rooftop farm in Oakland as well as on a 38-acre Indigenous-run farm on the California coast south of San Francisco. The farmers at both locations will take an agroecological approach to growing organic food that will be distributed for free to institutions—such as the American Indian Cultural District and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation—to address food insecurity and hunger in the community. The organization links both of these socioeconomic conditions to colonization. To that end, Deep Medicine Circle will invest in farmers of color to accomplish climate, racial, health, and economic justice goals, including rematriating (or returning) land to Indigenous people, cultivating plant medicines, and supporting food liberation for oppressed groups.

Marya intends for the farm to be a source of healing that confronts the displacement and decimation of Indigenous people. Food, she asserts, can serve as medicine by restoring physical health and vitality and by addressing the historical injustices that have occurred on the land.

In her forthcoming book, coauthored by economist (and Civil Eats advisory board member) Raj Patel, Marya draws a link between systemic inequality, multigenerational trauma, inflammation, and the immune system. A holistic approach to health not only considers a community’s access to food and medical care, she says, but also these underlying factors. The daughter of Punjabi immigrants with Jatt Sikh “farmer-warrior” ancestors, Marya grew up in a household that embraced both Western medicine and traditional Indian medicine.

The farm’s name—Ma Da Dil—is Punjabi for “mother’s heart,” a reference to the earth mother and a way to connect the circle’s efforts to the current farmer revolution in India. “This is about billions of people around the world fighting for control of our material reality,” Marya said. “And in capitalism, which almost the whole world is suffering from, the people who are working the land do not have control of their material reality as they should. We work in solidarity with all those people who are struggling in this way.”

Marya has long been working to decolonize food, land, and medicine. In partnership with Lakota leaders at Standing Rock, she is helping to establish the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic and Farm, an initiative that has raised $1 million, including a grant from Colin Kaepernick. She is also investigating police violence’s impact on health through a landmark research project known as The Justice Study. And through her band, Rupa & the April Fishes, she uses music to raise awareness about social justice and climate change.

Marya, A-dae Romero-Briones of the First Nations Development Institute, and author Anna Lappé will participate in a conversation and webinar about strategies to preserve and maintain Native agroecological traditions after centuries of U.S. government-backed land dispossession and cultural annihilation.

Civil Eats spoke with Marya about her land rematriation activism, the new farm, and the long-term effects of colonization on food and medicine in communities of color.

How does your medical background inform your understanding of land, climate, food, and water?

As a doctor, I think of them as health issues. How are humans supposed to survive when the water is poisoned? When it’s so hot that our seeds won’t start at the right time and the pollinators don’t come at the right time? When we’re running away from wildfires, and we’re breathing that air?

So that’s the lens with which I come to this. It’s from that understanding that we are working with the Ramaytush Ohlone people on a 38-acre rematriation project. These are the original people of the San Francisco peninsula. There are just a handful of Ramaytush people and families who are left, who have survived the genocide of their tribe, and none of them hold land in their ancestral territory. In a year’s time, we’ll have the opportunity to move this land back into their hands.

How will Deep Medicine Circle make this happen? Can you discuss the process?

We’re farming 38 acres through Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST)’s farmland initiative. They put out a proposal request for farmers, and [in October] we proposed a project to farm the land under Indigenous stewardship. That initiative gives the farmers an opportunity to buy the land that they’re stewarding at below-market rates after a year of work. So, we do have the opportunity to buy land, but we are not going to ask our Indigenous partners to lease the land this year. So, this land return is an act of historical reparations.

All of our work and energy will be put toward advancing this model of farming that fits with our Ramaytush Indigenous partners’ stated ancestral responsibilities to both care for the earth and care for the people. We created a model that we’re calling Farming Is Medicine, in which we liberate farmers and the food they make from the market economy, and we focus their work on ecological care. So, while they grow food, their principal work is to care for the soil and the water, and all that food then is going to San Francisco to the American Indian Cultural District and to the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation to be distributed through their food hubs to offer organic, agroecologically grown food to people who need it most.

As a physician, how did you come to develop your interest in agriculture and decolonizing the land?

I’m a farmer’s wife. It’s a beautiful, amazing life full of hardworking people who should be truly uplifted. When we realize the connection between soil health and human health, especially through the conversations between the microbiome, we understand that farmers are truly the original stewards of our health.

I’ve always had a very broad understanding of health and I’ve always been very interested in agroecology. Now, Benjamin [Fahrer, my husband] is designing rooftop farms on new buildings. One of them is an acre of rooftop farm in Oakland, where we are doing the urban component of the Farming Is Medicine project. We’ve secured that rooftop for a very low lease, and we’ve hired the best farmer we know in the city, Kevin Jefferson, who is a beloved member of the Black urban ag community. He will be growing all that food to give away to the food pharmacy at the pediatric clinic next door. So, all that food will go to food insecure families who come to their appointments.

Top Leaf Farms, our farm design/build business, is also helping to design a rooftop with the Friendship House, an urban Indigenous health project in San Francisco. They’re building a five-story building, and on the roof will be food and medicine that they grow, and we’re helping to design and implement that.

And then the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation—which provides low-income, affordable housing in San Francisco that services mostly Black and brown community members—Benjamin has been designing and implementing farms on all of their new buildings, so they’ve gone whole-hog, committed to hyper-localizing their food security.

In the face of the [recent] massive wildfires, people couldn’t get the food in from Capay Valley [100 miles northeast of San Francisco], so, it’s like, “What do we have within our 20-mile radius that can increase the food security of people right here?” It is through my beloved husband and his community that I’ve gotten more deeply involved in getting these farms up and running.

Your efforts speak to a larger movement of Black and Indigenous peoples returning to farming, rematriating seeds, and working toward food sovereignty. Do you believe that we’re in a unique cultural moment right now?

We are creating a new culture of the field right now, and it’s extremely exciting. It’s healing. And I wonder, as we are working on these food liberation and land rematriation projects, what the food is going to taste like and how it will nourish people when it is grown in this way that starts with following Indigenous leadership on their own lands.

The human body stores trauma over several generations. That trauma is transmitted and held, and it shapes our health. The soil also remembers what happens here on this land. It knows that the people who are practicing their agricultural practices on the land, are not the same as the people who were tending this land for tens of thousands of years. It knows that the grizzly bear is not here, the salmon, the beaver, and the wolves have all been killed, the mountain lions have been incarcerated. It knows all those things because the soil microbiology changes, the water hydrology changes, and our cycles have completely changed in ways that are destructive to human and other life.

On the farm, there’s a half mile of creek restoration along the San Gregorio Creek, which has been listed as one of the key watersheds in which to reintroduce coho salmon. We’re working with the [Ramaytush Ohlone] tribe on the ecological restoration work that they’re leading on this site to rehabilitate the stream and bring back the salmon. They have aspirations to bring back the beavers, too.

You’ve said that colonization has directly contributed to the ecological disasters that the nation and the planet are currently experiencing.

Climate collapse is here because of the colonial architectures that were brought to these lands 600 years ago. For tens of thousands of years, the water here was drinkable, the ecologies were in balance, the land was not poisoned, hunger was not known, homelessness was not known. But since the arrival of European cosmologies through capitalism, like the privatization of property, there’s been a growth of wide disparities that predispose Black, brown, and Indigenous people to poor health outcomes, which COVID is showing glaringly in our faces. Since the arrival of that cosmology in these lands, everything has been disrupted, and now we’re being told that this fire season will be even worse than the last one.

Yes, California had its worst fire season ever last year, and experts predict that the 2021 season could top that.

During the last one, here in the Bay Area, we were surrounded on all three sides by fire. The air was unbreathable; it was at levels that were hazardous for human health for several consecutive weeks. Even in that context, thousands of people were left languishing outside, unhoused in San Francisco—with the pandemic raging and [under] toxic air, people were left outside. Why is that acceptable and normal? How have we grown accustomed to the violence of looking away, as “Tiny” Gray Garcia, who’s a formerly unhoused poet-activist, says. How have we learned to continue this violent act of looking away?

We are here today because of a very specific mindset. If we want to look at real solutions to the climate change problem, then we have to start looking at when and why it started changing in this way. With that in mind, I do believe that any move toward sanity and safety and health is going to prioritize [rematriating land to] Indigenous people and following their leadership, because we know that they are living in a culturally intact way to steward the greatest amount of the world’s biodiversity.

Indigenous people have had their cultures purposefully robbed from them through the residential boarding schools, through genocide, through cultural erasure. Our duty, as settlers on colonized stolen land, is to provide the opportunity, space, and safety for Indigenous people to reclaim their ancestral knowledge and to guide us to what sanity and health look like.

What does a culture look like where the care of all living entities is prioritized over everything else? Where the dignity of living things is prioritized over everything else? We are not living in a culture that centers that dignity and care, and climate change is providing us with an opportunity to look deeply, diagnostically at how we got here. What is the mentality behind the practices that brought us to this moment?

You mentioned the pandemic. What role do you think that lack of access to ancestral foods has played in the comorbidities—diabetes, hypertension, and obesity—that make Indigenous peoples and African Americans more likely to suffer serious complications from COVID?

I wrote about this a lot with my coauthor Raj Patel in our book. Black and Indigenous people suffer from high rates of diabetes, not only because of the food availability offered to them, but because of the lines of power that restrict their lives to constant trauma and constant inflammation. Diabetes, we now know, is an inflammatory disease, and things that cause inflammation will make diabetes more prevalent, while mitigating inflammation will make it less prevalent.

For example, there was a study that showed that Indigenous people in Canada who had a high level of cultural continuance—they spoke their languages, they had their foods, they had their knowledge—had way lower rates of diabetes than those who didn’t have that cultural continuance. So, what is it about culture that has a protective effect not only against diabetes but suicide, which is quite high in Indigenous groups in Canada and here too? And how can we address that without taking a pharmaceutical approach to “food as medicine,” [which tells people to] just add red peppers and stir, because it’s not that kind of recipe.

It’s about dismantling a system of oppression. Part of that is by building alternatives that can nurture and uplift us and help us reawaken our own connections to our ancestral dignity, stories, and ways of being—our ways of relating, and our sense of being integrated into the web of life. Those things are much bigger than a food choice. So, when we talk about food sovereignty, it has to be seen in a context of systemic oppression and power.

Can you paint the bigger picture for us?

When you have control of your food system, that’s where your health starts. What did the colonizers do when they came here? They got rid of the food and the medicine of the Indigenous people. They removed them from their land, which is the medicine. So, when you talk about how “the Europeans brought over diseases, and that wiped people out,” my question is, was that it? Or did they [also] remove them from the microbiota that they were surrounded by that supported their health for 30,000 years? And in that removal from that land, were their immune systems then somehow compromised, and how did that impact how they were able to fight off new exposures [to disease]?

COVID is thriving in spaces of incarceration, in spaces where people are chronically oppressed. If you’re going through that trauma, and then you add COVID, you’re going to express it as a hyperinflammatory experience. And that goes back to what Rudolf Virchow, a German physician, said in 1848. He was an amazing doctor who was really pioneering the thought about decolonization from German imperialism in Poland and Czechia and what is called Upper Silesia. Virchow believed that it wasn’t the bacteria that made people sick; it was the conditions around the body that predispose certain bodies to sickness in a certain way. The body’s response is what brings us sickness. And that is how I see the issue of food sovereignty.

If we can adjust the structures around our bodies to allow our bodies to thrive, then we will have health in a deep way. Not health in a, “I do yoga, and I meditate, and I buy the right things” [manner] but health as a possibility for everybody.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post This Doctor Is Working to Build Resilience and Land Justice for Communities of Color appeared first on Civil Eats.