food justice in claremont and beyond
Manifest-oh
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Food Justice Workshop at Pitzer College, led by Afro-Indigenous healer, Iyapo Moyende Ngina
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Black Lives and Food Justice:
“Food Justice is communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat healthy food. Healthy food is fresh, nutritious, affordable, culturally-appropriate, and grown locally with care for the well-being of the land, workers, and animals.”
-Just Food, NYC
About your authors:
We are white-reading womxn looking to provide space and learn in pursuit of advocacy and allyship.
We write to advocate for Food Justice, Food Sovereignty, and Intersectional Justice for/from/within/ with out ALL.
We fight for a radical shift in the way that food is produced to a more locally sourced and accessible system that fairly compensates and treats workers, animals, and consumers.
One must address racial equity in order to address food justice. One must acknowledge, respect, and provide space for the empowerment of Black Lives for all justice.
Our vision for a just food system comes from Eric Holt-Gimenez and Yi Wang’s definition of food sovereignty:
“a more radical interpretation of food justice that sees access to food, land and water as a human right, works for the democratization of the food system in favor of the poor and underserved, and specifically advocates dismantling the present global food system (Patel 2009; Wittman, Desmarais, and Wiebe 2010) (2011, 90).”
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HISTORY
Race + Class:
“Racial and class disparities are a structurally integrated part of the present food system” (Holt-Gimenez and Wang, 2010, 91) because capitalism in its “freest” form involves the rich benefiting exponentially in the face of another groups’ suffering.
“Race is the foundational structural reality of the United States” (Billings, Cabbil, 2011, p.110), and food is the foundational structural reality of the human body. The two necessarily act together.
Food Insecurity:
In 2017, 13.5% of African-Americans of all ages are in fair or poor health, according to the CDC. That number was at 9.3% for White Americans, who live longer, and suffer from lower rates of obesity and hypertension than their Black counterparts (CDC, 2017) (KFF, 2009). Food and its accompanying industries are a key player the health, or lack thereof, in African-American communities.
Our economic system enforces cycles of poor nutrition.
. A sixth of the U.S. population is food insecure, meaning they live without easy access to healthy food. Food choice is particularly limited for low-income groups. Those limitations tend to rise with increased intersections of oppression.
Black Lives and Food Justice// Then:
Food justice has sought to tackle inequality from its inception. The food justice movement arose to combat economic and systematic forces that prohibit people from accessing healthy food (Alkon, 2011). The movement was focused on racial equity: Culturally and economically accessible food was deemed to be a necessary part of healthy food from the start. The focus on the movement was to provide affordable, relevant, nutrition to those who had limited access, particularly people of color. In many instances, formal food justice movements have fallen short of demonstrating racial equity. Many non-profit organizations which arose in the 60s and 70s to provide equitable, culturally relevant food were run entirely by white people. Many such practices persist today: For example, food banks are often criticized for providing low-income people with food with little nutrition (Billings, Cabbil, 2011 p.110), even acting as a means of appeasing white guilt without providing sustainable solutions (my opinion).
Although they are not always formally labeled as acts of “food justice”, movements for food sovereignty have long been a part of African-American culture. In her TedX talk, LaDonna Redmond, founder and executive director of The Campaign for Food Justice Now, mentions the civil rights-era Woolworth sit-in as part of the struggle for food justice. The Black Panthers were also advocates of food and health rights. Despite the commonplace notion that the Black Panthers were “just a group of black men killing white people” (Austin, 2016), as Curtis Austin describes in his TedX talk, the organization primarily sought to remedy issues within their communities. When Panther members noticed that children were having trouble focusing in school because they were hungry, they started a free breakfast program. They asked for food donations from local grocery stores. There were about 40 of these programs around the country (Austin, 2016).
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PITZER STUDENTS--- WHAT CAN WE DO???
-Work with just organizations! You can volunteer on your own time, or to be held accountable, make it an independent study, or join the Pitzer In Ontario Program- where you get LOTS of class credit to learn from and give time to a community internship of your choice.
Pitzer in Ontario is a justice-oriented, interdisciplinary program in urban studies and community-based research...informed by long-standing relationships with community organizations, city agencies, and non-profits, and also by Ontario’s community organizing wing, which works with local youth organizers to identify and address pressing community issues.
-Grow your own. Pitzer garden club will pay for everything.
-Purchasing Power. If you have the funds, go to Uncommon Good (see map), the farmers market (every Sunday in the Claremont village from 8am-1pm), and buy locally and pesticide free. (If your food has seen pesticides, the hands that grew it had to as well). Don’t shop at Whole Foods (Jeff Bezos does not treat warehouse workers, predominantly poor people of color, well. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-share-their-horror-stories-2018-4).
Resources:
Food Justice Models Today, in their own words
Ron Finley
-“It’s my gospel.. grow your own food. Growing your own food is like printing your own money.”
-”Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus, you get strawberries.”
- “With gardening I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their community, to have a sustainable life.”
- “You’re gangsta with your shovel.. let that be your weapon of choice.”
LA Green Grounds
“LA Green Grounds is a grassroots organization of volunteers dedicated to working with residents of South Los Angeles, California to convert their front lawns and parkways into edible landscapes and urban farms...Our mission is to empower South LA's communities and beyond, one garden at a time.”
For more in la: https://foodoasis.la/organizations/
Huerta del Valle
“We envision one garden every mile in our city. We envision a city where all people can eat delicious, nutritious, fresh, local, sustainably produced and just food...Our mission is to cultivate an organization of community members to grow our own organic crops. Through growing our food we work toward sustainable community empowerment and health: creating meaningful work, building lasting skills and developing strong relationships within the city of Ontario.”
Uncommon Good
“Empowering families through education, medicine, and the environment”
“The mission of Uncommon Good is to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty and to work for the restoration of our planet. These two goals are intertwined, since the alleviation of poverty depends upon having a healthy earth with enough resources to support everyone.”
Sources:
Guthman, Julie. Weighing In : Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley :University of California Press, 2011. Print.
Holt-Gimeenez, Eric, and Yi Wang. “Reform or Transformation? The Pivotal Role of Food Justice in the U.S. Food Movement.” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011, pp. 83–102., doi:10.2979/racethmulglocon.5.1.83.
https://www.justfood.org/
Kretzmann, John P., and John McKnight. Building Communities from the inside out: a Path toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets. Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Neighborhood Innovations Network, Northwestern University, 1993.
Talks, T. (2013, March 04). Food Justice = Democracy: LaDonna Redmond at TEDxManhattan 2013. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydZfSuz-Hu8
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