A few weeks ago, the Council of Sustainable Leaders hosted Karen Washington (Links to an external site.), a community gardener and food justice activist in NYC for a talk titled “Food Justice is More than Growing Food and Feeding People.” Karen is also the co-founder of Rise and Root farm in New York, as well as the Black Urban Growers organization and board member of several food justice and policy initiatives in NYC. She gave a powerful dialogue about the importance of empowering local people, particularly Black and Brown communities, to have ownership over their food system in urban places. Karen speaks of not just food deserts, which are areas that lack access to fresh nutritious food, but food apartheid (Links to an external site.), which sheds light on the fact that our food ecosystem is plagued by racism and classism, with deep, widespread effects of hunger, poverty, and racial and environmental injustice. Karen calls out that the food we eat has been commodified (Links to an external site.) by a handful of massive elite corporations who have distorted what it means to grow and eat healthy food in order to derive wealth for these agricultural firms that exploit labor conditions. The majority of farm subsidies and USDA support goes to large white farming operations, leaving smallholder farms, community gardens, urban plots — particularly Black and Latinx — lacking access to capital or representation in food policy. Such communities rely on fast food or supermarkets, as well as food pantries for extremely reactive, emergency solutions to hunger and food insecurity. This creates a non-proactive health and food system that is unable to meet the needs of its community members by providing opportunities to have access to healthy, fresh, seasonal diets grown by local farmers in their own neighborhoods. Karen notes that lack of ownership and wealth building is a pressing issue in NYC neighborhoods in which people of color reside: many local residents lack access to living wage jobs, health insurance, healthy food and lifestyle options, home and business ownership, financial literacy and education. These issues of economic stability and health are deeply intertwined, and Karen believes that urban agriculture and community growing can help breathe health and economic access into these communities.

Karen urged us to take action on several things as members of a regional and national food system, such as continuing to have conversations about racism in the food and farming ecosystem and the fact that our agricultural roots as a nation rest on stolen land from indigenous peoples and exploitation of enslaved people for farmers and plantations. She encourages us to advocate for the idea of land and financial reparations; access to capital for BIPOC community members to own their own land, homes, and businesses. She calls for academia to invite grassroots activists to the table, including youth and Black and indigenous activists. She calls for local economies to view diversity and inclusion as assets and imperatives, and for healthy food and clean water to be prioritized as basic human rights. She plead us to break bread with someone who doesn’t look like us, and distribute our wealth and consumption practices to BIPOC businesses. I am really grateful for the opportunity to hear from such an incredible woman like Karen and hope that we can continue to call attention to the food apartheid that is deeply embedded our country, and be more mindful about the food we eat and where it comes from, and for whom it is meant to nourish.