Nadra Nittle | Civil Eats

This Man Is Feeding California’s Incarcerated Firefighters

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:44 +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.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/08/24/meet-the-black-women-driving-new-ag-policy/feed/ 1 On Pine Ridge Reservation, a Garden Helps Replace an 80-mile Grocery Trip https://civileats.com/2021/07/19/on-pine-ridge-reservation-a-garden-helps-replace-an-80-mile-grocery-trip/ https://civileats.com/2021/07/19/on-pine-ridge-reservation-a-garden-helps-replace-an-80-mile-grocery-trip/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2021 08:00:02 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=42541 “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 […]

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Tracy McCurty Has Worked a Long Time to See Historic Wrongs Righted for Black Farmers

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:00:52 +0000

“This is a full-circle moment for me.”

That’s how Tracy Lloyd McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center (BBJC), describes Congress’s historic decision to approve $5 billion in debt relief and other assistance for farmers of color as part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

For decades, McCurty has fought for justice for African American farmers. As a law student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she clerked for the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers’ Land Loss Prevention Project, working on a racial discrimination claim for a Black farmer. In 1997, African American farmers across the country took part in a class action lawsuit alleging that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) racially discriminated against them by denying them access to farm loans and other support. Settled in 1999, Pigford v. Glickman allocated $50,000 in cash payments to 15,645 Black farmers as part of a $1 billion package.

Because Pigford left out thousands of Black farmers who could not provide the evidence required to participate in the suit or were unaware of the opportunity to take legal action, President Barack Obama signed legislation in 2010 known as “Pigford II” to fund a $1.25 billion settlement for the farmers excluded from the original suit. Then a representative of the Black Farmers Council, McCurty helped to develop recommendations for the Pigford II class counsel. But neither settlement, she said, gave African Americans enough resources and debt relief to recover from decades of discrimination.

These problems continue today. As recently as last year, Black farmers missed out on the federal assistance that white farmers received. Disproportionately small-scale farmers, African Americans obtained just 0.1 percent of former President Donald Trump’s COVID relief, which mostly benefited white-owned and large-scale farm operations.

To give Black farmers much-needed support, McCurty co-founded the BBJC in 2012. A legal nonprofit and advocacy group, the BBJC helps African American farmers and landowners in the South’s Black Belt region retain land, establish sustainable land-based cooperatives and enterprises, and expand community wealth. “We were inspired to launch the center to provide legal support to Black farmers and rural communities and to revivify the Black agricultural land base,” she said.

McCurty is also the co-organizer of the Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign, the supporters of which include attorneys, researchers, musicians, heritage quilters, and other creatives who have raised awareness about the importance of debt forgiveness for Black farmers.

On March 22, McCurty and Lawrence Lucas, president emeritus of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees and representative for the Justice for Black Farmers Group, moderated a briefing to discuss the $5 billion in debt relief and other support that the American Rescue Plan will provide for farmers of color. A group of Pigford legacy farmers joined them, as did U.S. Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia), who wrote the stimulus bill’s debt relief provisions, and Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who co-sponsored this landmark initiative.

During the briefing, the farmers discussed the history of discrimination they’ve faced, while the senators celebrated the American Rescue Plan’s passage. Warnock said the relief would help farmers and residents of rural communities alike. But the lawmakers also stressed the need for sustained action to reverse the effects of historic discrimination against farmers of color.

“This is our first step,” Booker said. “We must provide more access to credit and land for these farmers who have suffered this long history of wretched and painful discrimination.”

What effect will the American Rescue Plan have on Black farmers? Civil Eats spoke with McCurty about her longtime advocacy for these farmers, the systemic racism they’ve suffered, and the impact the legislation might have on their legacies and livelihoods. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling about the $5 billion in debt relief, farmer grants, and other assistance that President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan will provide for Black farmers and other disadvantaged farmers?

It just feels really good to be running this victory lap now with our farmers. The big issue now, of course, is implementation. During a BIPOC farmers and ranchers stakeholder call on March 16, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said that the implementation of the debt cancellation would be a long, drawn-out process. The following week, several media sources reported that USDA was adopting a tiered approach to implement the debt cancellation provisions. Vilsack also referred to this tiered approach during his remarks at the House Agriculture Committee hearing to review the state of Black farming in the U.S. on March 25.

Our coalition is opposed to the tiered approach because it has not been vetted by Pigford legacy farmers. Given USDA’s reprehensible track record on civil rights, the implementation process must center Pigford legacy farmers and be rooted in transparency and accountability. Our coalition has spoken to several Pigford legacy farmers who have debt in the millions of dollars, and they reject a tiered approach to debt cancellation. The farmers contend that USDA should discharge all of the interest from the debt because it is racially motivated, contested, exorbitant, and cruel. During the 1997 Congressional Black Caucus hearing on USDA loan discrimination, Gladys Todd, a legacy farmer from Zebulon, North Carolina, testified that $20,000 of her $25,000 annual debt was interest. Another farmer from Northumberland County, Virginia, Phillip Haynie, testified that his loan had been growing interest at a rate of $352 a day for 10 years.

You want to challenge the perception that the Pigford settlement actually helped them. Why did this class action lawsuit fall short?

There’s this dominant narrative around Pigford providing restorative land justice to Black farmers, but it did not. The primary objective for the farmers was to receive their land and to receive monetary compensation for the egregious economic harm USDA did against them through racial discrimination, animus, and criminality; and of course, [farmers need] the debt cancellation.

Those were the three primary tenets of the lawsuit with respect to the Black farmer, and we know that it was a $1 billion settlement, and only 4.8 percent went to debt cancellation. There was, at the time, 1.5 million acres of land. Most of that was Black-owned land in USDA [possession], and the Black farmers wanted their land back, but only one farmer received his land back. And, for the last 20 years, Black farmers have not been able to stand fully in their freedom dreams, because they haven’t had access to credit with the USDA, or with any other traditional lending institution. They have not been able to pass on generational wealth, and many of the farmers have been pushed off their land. For example, farmer Eddie Slaughter—he’s a double amputee and blind in one eye—had his disability, his Social Security, and his peanut subsidy offset for nine years, amounting to $41,000 [in lost income].

How did that end up happening to Slaughter and other farmers?

That happened because none of this debt was canceled. So, then [the government recovered] the debt with the Social Security payments, with their farm subsidies, with their federal tax returns, with their disability payments. That’s how it happened, and I think it’s something that we really need to wrestle with. How could Black farmers suffer for over 20 years as a result of class action racial discrimination lawsuits that left the vast majority of them in unconscionable debt, threat of foreclosure, and no legal recourse to save their land? The importance of implementation [of the American Rescue Plan’s debt-relief program] comes in when we look at the disastrous implementation of the Pigford lawsuits, particularly Pigford I.

Can you elaborate on why you believe the Pigford I settlement was disastrous?

With respect to Pigford I, there was rampant attorney malpractice, incompetence and the aggressive posture of the Department of Justice and USDA in challenging the Black farmers’ claims. No one has really focused on this aspect of the lawsuit. The attorneys for the Black farmers, they negotiated away discovery. So the burden, then, was placed on the Black farmer to find a similarly situated white farmer who had not been discriminated against. But you see not only the burden but the equity of putting that on the Black farmer when they don’t have to compel USDA to provide that information.

And if you go back and look in the historical record, class counsel made representations that they would provide this information readily to the Black farmer, but that wasn’t the case. We know that thousands of Black farmers were denied outright on their claims. So, we want to challenge the dominant narrative of Pigford and reeducate the community on the injustices of the lawsuit.

Given the historic discrimination farmers of color have faced, what are your thoughts on politicians such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who criticized the American Rescue Plan’s debt relief provision as “reparations,” and called it unfair to white farmers?

It really shows that our politicians don’t have a firm grasp of U.S. history, world history, and federal ag policy, because we know that, with the Homestead Act of 1862, 270 million acres of land were transferred from and stolen from Indigenous nations and provided to mostly white male settlers. We also know that the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 transferred 46 million acres of land from Indigenous nations to, again, mostly white male settlers. Even with that, fewer than 1,000 African American farmers received land titles with the Southern Homestead Act, and then of course, we have a history of decades of well-documented discrimination by the USDA against the Black farmer that has led to over 98 percent of farmland being owned by European Americans.

I also think it’s important to note that Duke University economist William Darity, who has studied reparations, stated that the recovery to restore the Black farmer would need to be between $250 billion and $350 billion. So, it’s not reparations, but debt cancellation is a necessary step in the long journey toward restorative land justice for Black farmers.

Do you think the debt relief will enable Black farmers to recover or acquire more land?

We don’t know. There were 1.5 million acres of land in USDA inventory back in 1999. Most of this was Black farms. The farmers say that, with this debt cancellation, it liberates 1.5 million acres of land from USDA land dispossession through debt. Again, we would have to confirm those numbers. We’re not sure, but the impact is significant. It’s a milestone in Black agrarian history, because we’ve never received federal legislation to undergird or support Black economic wealth creation and land ownership in this country. If anything, it’s been hostility, animus, and criminality against the Black farmer to erode those gains of Black land ownership that came through our own determination and grit.

What about young African Americans and other people of color who would like to become farmers today but lack the land access, generational wealth, and other resources that their white counterparts have? Will the American Rescue Plan help them?

There’s a $1 billion provision in the American Rescue Plan that provides financial funding for land acquisition, technical assistance, legal support, and cooperative development. There is a provision, also, that includes funding for Pigford legacy farmers who were dispossessed of their land due to the discriminatory actions of the USDA but no longer have debt. So, I think that $1 billion provision to support the land base of farmers of color can be utilized by returning-generation farmers.

How important is the Justice for Black Farmers Act introduced by Senator Booker in this effort? If passed, do you expect this legislation to give Black farmers from multiple generations the help they need to succeed?

The Justice for Black Farmers Act includes a provision that provides land to returning-generation farmers, or landless farmers. So, the provision that farmers can obtain up to 160 acres of farmland at no cost and with access to technical support, a farm operating loan, and a USDA single-family home mortgage is important. I’m very hopeful with respect to the Act. Of course, we would need the right political climate. The fact that the vote in the Senate for the American Rescue Plan Act was very close speaks to the war with respect to the moral compass and consciousness of this country when it comes to committing to restorative land justice to Black farmers and farmers of color.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What New York City Schools Learned Feeding Millions During the Pandemic

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 08:00:59 +0000

With 1.1 million students, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) feeds more people every day than almost any other public institution in the country. It earned widespread praise for its decision to provide meals to not only students, but also community members in need during the pandemic. Now, experts say the school system could fine-tune its outreach efforts to ensure that the most vulnerable New Yorkers get enough to eat during an ongoing public health crisis that has given rise to an economic crisis characterized by growing rates of food, housing, and job insecurity.

With 488 public high schools scheduled to reopen in New York City on March 22, food advocates are looking back over the past year, and largely applauding the NYCDOE’s outreach to needy families. During the pandemic, the agency has operated much like a food bank, handing out meals to anyone who requests them—no questions asked. The school system has also received praise for heavily concentrating its grab-and-go meal sites in low-income communities of color—the neighborhoods most prone to food insecurity, and most vulnerable to COVID-19.

In 2020, the NYCDOE even announced plans to improve the quality of its food. And a recent study in the Journal of Urban Health described the school system as a national leader in providing information about meals in multiple languages and accommodating a variety of dietary needs with kosher, halal, and vegetarian food options.

“Preventing hunger and continuing to promote nutritious eating were critical priorities for us from the beginning of this crisis, and, over the last 11 months, we have served nearly 90 million meals to our students, whether they are learning remotely or in person, as well as any New Yorker who is in need,” said Nathaniel Styer, NYCDOE’s deputy press secretary, in a statement provided to Civil Eats.

And the community has needed the help: Food insecurity increased precipitously in the city during the pandemic, with the proportion of New Yorkers obtaining meals from food pantries or soup kitchens nearly doubling from April to November, according to a recent survey by the City University of New York. The poll also found that the percentage of families who received grab-and-go meals and other food from New York City school programs spiked more than 250 percent during the same period—from 13 percent in April to 33 percent in November.

But mingled in with the praise for NYCDOE’s efforts are also concerns: While New York City public schools have served roughly 90 million meals during the pandemic as of February 2021, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has served more than 100 million, even though its student population is about 600,000, just over half the size of New York City’s. The Journal study found that New York City had the lowest participation rate in its food distribution programs of the four large public districts studied, which also included LAUSD, Chicago, and Houston.

The researchers suggest that this finding may not be a reflection of the effectiveness of NYCDOE’s school food programs, since New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic when the study was conducted. In subsequent months, however, LAUSD also became a COVID epicenter but still managed to serve more meals over the past year. Advocates blame the discrepancy on a wide range of factors, including a communication gap between NYCDOE and the public, narrow pickup windows to collect meals, weather conditions, and families hesitant to leave their homes or use public transportation during the pandemic.

“Never has food been more at the core of societal ills and possibilities than it is right now,” said Stephen Ritz, an educator who founded Green Bronx Machine, a nonprofit that uses an academic curriculum to teach students to grow vegetables. During the pandemic, the organization has worked to combat food insecurity in the South Bronx and collaborated with the NYCDOE to distribute fresh produce to students and their families.

“I’ve always said the most important school supply in the world is food,” Ritz added. “With supermarkets closing and children shopping out of bulletproof windows in gas stations and the occasional bodega . . . food is the most critical thing that we can provide to families, and most importantly fresh fruits and vegetables, because we know that is the number one thing that helps boost immunity.”

As food insecurity continues to spread in New York City, advocates say that the nation’s largest school system can keep playing a vital role in providing nutritious meals to students and their families. To expand its reach, they recommend that the NYCDOE step up communication with the public, give students and caregivers more flexibility to pick up meals, and explore strategies and partnerships to route food to the city’s most disadvantaged families. What the department does next could be a blueprint for other school districts around the country.

The Successes of NYCDOE’s School Food Programs

When the pandemic forced New York City public schools to close last March, the department of education launched its grab-and-go Meal Hub program to serve students who rely on school food to meet their nutritional needs. By April, the program expanded to include any New Yorker seeking meals during the COVID crisis. Over the summer, the Meal Hub service expanded to offer take-home meal kits, now found at more than 1,100 public schools, to allow families to retrieve food from the campuses closest to them. Take-out meals include items such as baked ravioli, beef burgers, burritos, fish patties, grilled cheese sandwiches, and omelets.

“None of this would be possible without our courageous foodservice employees, who helped the city to immediately open meal hubs at the start of the pandemic,” Styer told Civil Eats.

It’s a sentiment shared by Julia McCarthy, coauthor of the Journal of Urban Health report and interim deputy director of the Tisch Center for Food, Education, & Policy at Columbia University’s Teachers College. McCarthy noted how NYCDOE staff have worked nonstop over the past year to serve food to a population larger than “any entity in the country other than the Department of Defense.”

She’s encouraged that the public school system has chosen to take a no-questions-asked approach to feeding the entire community, as NYCDOE meals are available to the public regardless of income, citizenship, or age. Additionally, McCarthy said that her study found that New York City public schools have done a better job of concentrating its meal pickup sites in high-poverty communities than the Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston school districts have. Houston stands out, however, for maintaining the highest number of meal distribution centers in neighborhoods where residents live a half-mile or more away from a supermarket.

In New York City’s South Bronx neighborhood, located in the nation’s poorest congressional district, the needs of the community are particularly complex. There, Green Bronx Machine grew 5,000 pounds of food, rescued 10,000 additional pounds, and delivered more than 100,000 pounds of it as well. The nonprofit set up grab-and-go grocery stations near schools and partnered with NYCDOE on grab-and-go meals on school campuses. But some families find it difficult to leave their homes, preventing them from regularly visiting school meal sites, Ritz explained.

“I’m in the middle of public housing—45 buildings, 25 stories up—where little kids haven’t been able to come out more than once a week,” he said. “They are prisoners in their home experiencing a lack of exercise, a lack of activity, a lack of connectivity, and a whole lot of packaged food.”

Liz Accles, executive director of Community Food Advocates, which supports public policy to give New Yorkers access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food, praised the school system’s take-home meals, pointing out that, over the summer, “the pizza meal kits were very popular, and, later the holiday meals were, so we think that’s a very promising move for variety.” And by serving both students and adults in need, NYCDOE has shown an “extraordinary commitment” to the community, Accles contends.

COVID Offers an Opportunity for Healthier Meals

In addition to offering a variety of food to a variety of community members, the department of education has received an opportunity to rid its meals of seven harmful ingredients—trans fats; high-fructose corn syrup; hormones and antibiotics; artificial sweeteners, colors, and preservatives, and bleached flour—thanks to a five-year, $1 million grant from the Life Time Foundation announced in October. Although the school system has already eliminated some of these ingredients, notably securing antibiotic-free meats for its students, the grant will help NYCDOE accelerate the removal effort and adopt made-from-scratch cooking techniques.

Megan Flynn, a registered dietitian with the Life Time Foundation, which partners with more than 25 school districts across the country, is in the process of reviewing NYCDOE’s food labels.

“As I’ve been looking at the labels, I can really tell how much work they’ve put in over the last few years with their manufacturers on getting the product to where they want it, and I think our partnership is going to take them across the finish line concerning ingredients that we want to address,” she said.

The Life Time Foundation has already given the school system $46,000 for its immediate COVID-19 related needs, and once Flynn shares the results of her label review with the district, it can start working with vendors and request ingredient changes in products. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, she said that the effort to provide healthier meals to students continues in large part due to the work of the staff in NYCDOE’s Office of Food and Nutrition Services. “They are still going above and beyond to make sure their students have access to free, high-quality meals every school day.”

McCarthy noted that the school system has also undergone internal changes to efficiently serve meals to students during the pandemic. This includes improving how kitchen staff communicates with the central office. Before the pandemic, she said, it was difficult for the central office and the kitchen staff to directly communicate, but now they do.

“So, they don’t have to be contingent on whispering down the lane through managers who are traveling between a variety of different schools,” McCarthy said. “Another thing is that New York City schools were trying to move to one menu where everyone was served the same food. They’ve given the kitchens control, so the kitchens have a menu of options that they can pick from now, and that used to not be the case. So, there’s a little more control and ability to respond to what students at that site particularly like.”

While New York food advocates agree that there’s plenty to applaud about the department of education’s efforts to serve meals during the pandemic, there is also room for improvement. Communicating better with families is one way experts say NYCDOE can expand its outreach during the crisis.

Improving Meal Access

Alexina Cather, deputy director of the Hunter College New York City Food Policy Center, recognizes that NYCDOE was one of the first public agencies to radically overhaul its institutional meal service, and she calls its effort “commendable.” But Cather would also like the school system to intensify its outreach efforts.

One way the agency can get more families to participate in its food programs is to make sure they can easily access information about the resources available. Cather said that when the schools shut down, even internet-savvy parents struggled to identify where they could get meals. She wants the district to come up with creative ways to get the word out about its offerings, including exactly how many people are accessing meals and the nutritional quality of the items included.

“They did a massive job overhauling this huge city agency to meet a very big need, and that’s incredible,” she said. “But I think communication is a huge reason why people aren’t accessing these meals, and I also think a lot of the low-income families, even if they know that [grab-and-go meals] exist, just can’t get to the site. Other parents are juggling working at home with also homeschooling their kid on Zoom, and they can’t get to the site [during the hours of operation], so there’s a lot of different factors.”

Grab-and-go meals are available during the business day, but school districts such as LAUSD offer food as early as 7 a.m., allowing parents to collect them before they go to work and before their child’s school day begins. Chicago Public Schools offers these meals slightly later, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., but earlier than NYCDOE’s starting time of 9 a.m., while Houston Independent School District’s curbside meal pickup times vary by site.

To spread the word about its grab-and-go offerings, the Green Bronx Machine has relied on a network of community elders, faith-based groups, and housing authority leaders, Ritz said. He’s even shouted outside public housing buildings for residents to come and collect the green leafy vegetables, eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vegetables his organization grows.

“I can stand outside of a building and scream and talk to 1,000 residents in one shot in a 25-story building, bringing them to their windows,” Ritz said. “That really made a huge difference, and we found in the South Bronx that we are the ones we are waiting for. There were so many of our children, even pre-pandemic, who came into school to get two, sometimes, three meals a day, every day. This [pandemic] was a disruption of epic proportions.”

With volunteers in the community each day of the week and home deliveries, the Green Bronx Machine has helped to provide food to 2,300 families daily, according to its 2020 impact report. Steps like these are necessary because many low-income families lack internet access or have a spotty connection at best, Ritz said. Summer power outages only made it harder for families to get information online. Collectively, these problems worked against the school system’s best efforts to distribute food. They also underscore how important it is to “put humanity back into the community and meet people where they are—in their apartment buildings and in their places of worship,” Ritz asserted.

The sheer amount of fear in the South Bronx likely stymied NYCDOE’s efforts as well. Rising rates of crime, substance abuse, mental illness, and the threat of the coronavirus have made some of the city’s most food-insecure families terrified to leave their homes.

“I do give credit to the New York City Department of Ed for providing meals, and I want to be very clear that by no means am I being critical,” Ritz said. “It’s a very well-intended effort, and it should be lauded and celebrated, but there are so many other mitigating factors in communities like ours that it needs to be more thought out. That’s where Green Bronx Machine got really nimble. We felt that if we were able to use the network of grandmas and grandpas and aunties and uncles and caretakers who would be able to get into buildings, we could really penetrate the impenetrable.”

Community Food Advocates’ Accles would like to see the expansion of a coordinated and sustained communications plan to ensure that everyone knows that food is available. Providing families with several days of meals at once might also increase participation in the program, as some advocates suspect that students and their parents might be accessing food from agencies outside NYCDOE. On some days, they might get school meals, and on others, they might obtain food from an emergency food provider like a soup kitchen. But Accles said that emergency food providers are limited in what they can do for families, while government agencies make a lasting difference, which is why she’d like NYCDOE to devise some flexible and creative ways for more families to get school meals.

She also recognizes that a school district like Los Angeles Unified might be outpacing New York in serving school meals because the city has more of a car culture, making it easier for families to grab and go than their New York City counterparts who rely on public transportation or walking to get to school. Los Angeles’s warm climate also means that even families who travel by foot can do so without worrying about snow, frigid temperatures, and other forms of inclement weather.

Although the infrastructure and climate of New York City is beyond the department of education’s control, without feedback from parents it will be tough for NYCDOE to maximize participation in its school food programs, Cather suspects. She’d like parents to be surveyed about their concerns and to be invited to play a role in the decisions made about school meals—from their contents to how they’re distributed.

“I’d really love to hear community members’ voices be incorporated into the city planning at this point,” she said.

But above all, Cather would like to see schools across the city reopen. As New York City’s public high schools reopen, roughly half of them will have students in class each weekday. The city’s middle schools reopened last month, and the elementary schools resumed in-person classes late last year. She said that some families might be too embarrassed to be seen waiting in line to get a free school meal. They worry what others might think, especially if their economic status worsened during the pandemic.

“New York City is amazing at having free universal breakfast and lunch so that there’s absolutely zero stigma attached,” she said. “There are kids whose parents work on Wall Street or kids living with a single parent who doesn’t have a job—anybody can have lunch. So, getting kids back in school where it doesn’t feel shameful to go wait for a meal is really important.”

The post What New York City Schools Learned Feeding Millions During the Pandemic appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2021/03/18/what-new-york-city-schools-learned-feeding-millions-during-the-pandemic/feed/ 1 ‘Minari’ Shines a Spotlight on Asian American Farmers https://civileats.com/2021/02/12/minari-shines-a-spotlight-on-asian-american-farmers/ Fri, 12 Feb 2021 09:00:37 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=40499 David Paeng can’t pick just one part of the new film “Minari” that resonates with him. As a Korean American farmer, he relates to every scene of filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung’s drama about a Korean immigrant who moves his family from California to Arkansas to start a farm. “Culturally, the subtle nuances, the interactions between […]

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As COVID-19 Ups the Stakes, Advocates Say Prison Food Needs an Overhaul

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 09:00:44 +0000

The food Emile DeWeaver ate during his two decades incarcerated in the California prison system often made him feel terrible.

“I’ve eaten things that may have given me food poisoning,” he said. “I’ve broken out in hives and not known why. I’ve been hospitalized for sharp stomach pains.”

Released from San Quentin State Prison in 2018, DeWeaver saw norovirus outbreaks in prison and cooks serve to inmates food that had fallen on the floor. But the experience of constant malnourishment is what stands out to him most about doing time. “You basically live in a state where you’re always hungry,” he recalled.

DeWeaver’s story is not unusual, according to a new report from advocacy group Impact Justice. Published in December, the six-part investigation draws from surveys of 250 formerly incarcerated people in 41 states and interviews with 40 current and former correctional staff. Ninety-four percent of survey respondents said they didn’t get enough food to feel full in prison, and 75 percent recalled receiving spoiled food, including moldy bread, sour milk, rotten meat, and slimy salad. The prevalence of this problem factors into why incarcerated people are more than six times as likely as the general population to develop foodborne illnesses.

“The number of anecdotes we got about really unsanitary and disgusting food was horrifying and really sad,” said Mika Weinstein, an Impact Justice program manager. “And we heard from folks that they would receive boxes in the kitchen that said either ‘not fit for human consumption’ or ‘for correctional use only.’ That does something to your head, to read that on a box and prepare that food.”

Spoiled or rotten food isn’t the only concern advocates have raised about prison meals, which on average cost states well under $3 per person daily. With roughly a quarter of the world’s prison population, the United States struggles to cover the costs associated with keeping large swaths of the public incarcerated. To maintain this system, lawmakers in various states have lowered the price of feeding inmates by reducing the number of meals served or hiring private contractors to provide food service. In states such as Pennsylvania, incarcerated people have previously filed federal civil rights lawsuits alleging that they’re not receiving large enough portions even “to fill a 5-year-old child.”

Cost-cutting has not only led to smaller portions but also poorer meal quality. Impact Justice reviewed food service policies affecting 1.3 million people in state prisons nationally and found that prison food lacks vital nutrients and is typically high in salt, sugar, and refined carbohydrates. These ingredients are associated with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease—conditions prisoners have at higher rates than the general public. Previous studies have reported that incarceration increases body mass, with some research indicating that women are particularly vulnerable to becoming overweight or obese in prison. The diet of the prison population is implicated in these trends, and the pandemic has intensified calls to improve the health and nutrition of inmates and ensure food isn’t used to punish them.

While one in 20 Americans has contracted COVID-19, one in five prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries have. And meals made up of low-quality foods that suppress the immune system may put incarcerated people at increased risk.

“Prisons are like these closed systems where if someone gets sick, everyone’s going to get it. With coronavirus, food and nutrition are more important than ever,” said 42-year-old DeWeaver, who is now the cofounder of the prison abolition organization Prison Renaissance and an Impact Justice fellow. In December 2017, former California Governor Jerry Brown commuted DeWeaver’s sentence for killing a man as a teen, citing his community service and personal transformation in prison.

Since most prisoners reenter society, often in poor health, and the pandemic is ravaging prisons, Impact Justice asserts that the food justice movement must include the 2.3 million people behind bars in the U.S.

Securing Food in Prison

When COVID-19 forced much of the U.S. into lockdown last March, the pandemic didn’t feel quite real to Johnny Angel Martinez, then incarcerated at the Correctional Training Facility (CTF), a minimum–medium security prison in Soledad, California. But news reports and the view from his window onto a startlingly empty freeway convinced Martinez that the pandemic was now part of life. So, he sewed a mask, washed his hands frequently, and tried to improve his diet.

“I was very fearful. I thought, ‘I’m pretty healthy, but maybe I have an underlying condition,’” said Martinez, who was released from prison in September after spending a decade incarcerated due to his participation in a fatal robbery 20 years earlier. (He confessed to his involvement and legislative changes in California ultimately freed him.) “I remember learning that being overweight or obese actually puts you more at risk, so it motivated me to make sure that my body is at its optimum. I was buying vitamin C daily supplements.”

Martinez, 43, had reason to be scared. He was released before the apex of the outbreak, but by late December, CTF was leading the California prison system in coronavirus infections with nearly 900 active cases. Martinez credits his ability to buy the foods and nutritional supplements needed to lose 40 pounds and maintain his health last year to his wife. Her financial support gave him choices beyond the prison chow hall and allowed him to buy foods like curry, rice, and noodles. He got almost all his protein from canned tuna, mackerel, and oysters.

Three in five former prisoners told Impact Justice they couldn’t afford commissary items, and many reported having to choose between food or toiletries. Some reported being so hungry that they performed sexual or illegal acts to gain access to commissary food.

As a member of his prison’s Indigenous population—Martinez identifies as Mexica, Miwok, and Costanoan—he was the rare U.S. inmate with access to a garden. Located near the sweat lodge and reserved for members of that spiritual community, the garden allowed him to grow and eat fresh tomatoes, squash, and peppers, as well as herbs like mint and mugwort. According to Eating Behind Bars, 62 percent of prisoners surveyed reported rarely or never receiving fresh vegetables, while 55 percent said the same about fresh fruit.

“We didn’t come across any facilities that had fruits or vegetables or other fresh products in the commissary,” said Leslie Soble, the report’s lead author and an Impact Justice research fellow. For instance, the report includes a partial copy of the Kansas Correctional Facility’s commissary list, and the only foods listed under “vegetables” are instant mashed potatoes and jarred jalapeño peppers.

As a practicing Buddhist and vegetarian in prison, DeWeaver would have appreciated access to fresh produce. When his facility refused to accommodate his dietary needs, he filed a complaint.

“I basically just ate beans every day for dinner,” he said. “There was a long stretch of time when I was deeply deficient in protein and iron. Even when I won my legal action, there were times when I would go to dinner, and they would give me a plate of pudding.”

To help incarcerated people meet their daily nutrient needs, a number of prisons provide inmates with fortified powdered beverages. But both DeWeaver and Martinez said they avoided these Kool Aid-like mixes because of the cancer warnings on the packages. Soble noted that many former prisoners complained to Impact Justice about the chemical taste of these drinks and described inmates using them as hair dye.

Working in the kitchen is one way for incarcerated people to obtain a wider variety of foods, but DeWeaver didn’t enjoy the experience. It only heightened his concerns about the safety of prison meals. And Martinez, who never worked in the kitchen but had a cellmate who did, recalled how those in charge would take chunks of chicken out of the stew and create a black market by charging their fellow inmates for bits of meat. Prison kitchens are also notoriously unsanitary. Former inmates told Impact Justice that they frequently spotted rats, roaches, and mold in these spaces, which sometimes even lacked soap and water.

But some correctional facilities have transformed how they feed incarcerated people. They are integrating fresh produce and from-scratch cooking into meals.

Overhauling Prison Food

Impact Justice calls “home cooking” in prison one way to resist a system built on dehumanization. At Mountain Correctional Center in Charleston, Maine—a minimum-medium security prison—meals from scratch have largely become the norm. Fruit and vegetables from the apple orchard and gardens onsite go straight to the prison kitchen.

With a background in organic farming and the hospitality industry, the facility’s foodservice manager, Mark McBrine, has led the effort to transform what prisoners eat. That includes working with local producers to acquire fresh eggs, high-quality meat, dairy, flour, and vegetables. It took work to shift from buying mass quantities of frozen potatoes and chicken patties, but the food handlers have grown to appreciate the process.

“Fresh food takes more time and effort,” McBrine said, “but the incarcerated residents who work in our kitchens were very glad to do it because it means better meals for them and for the other residents.”

McBrine had the support of Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty, whose father was once incarcerated. In an effort to improve prison meals statewide, Liberty has increased prison gardening programs and the minimum quantity of fresh and whole foods correctional facilities must buy from local producers.

“People think they can’t make these changes [in prisons] because of cost, but I’ve been under budget, more so than any other facility in the state,” McBrine said. “We use more local foods than any other facility, and we provide more home-cooked types of meals.”

Across the country, efforts are also underway to improve the food in California prisons. Impact Justice recently won a California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) grant in partnership with ChangeLab and the University of California Nutrition Policy Institute to increase the use and consumption of local produce in prisons. Another goal of the grant is to conduct nutrition and cooking workshops with people recently released from the California Department of Corrections.

“They’re the largest single food purchaser in the state, so it seems appropriate that that institution would be focused on California-grown produce,” said Wendi Gosliner, who heads research at the Nutrition Policy Institute and teaches at U.C. Berkeley. “We know from what people say and the limited information available that the food quality in prisons certainly needs a lot of work.”

The $439,000 specialty crop block grant offers the partners an opportunity to learn more about food in prison, which Gosliner described as an understudied area. She would like to examine disparities in access and overall food quality, in part, by studying the institutions that have successfully improved their meals.

“We need to know what’s happening,” Gosliner said. “And we need to figure out how we can begin to influence what’s happening in these systems with the larger long-term goal being to correct the problems.”

In January, the board of supervisors in nearby Alameda County signed a resolution to begin working with the Good Food Purchasing Program, a national effort aimed at helping institutions invest in their local food economies.

A Matter of Public Interest

Due to the work of activists who’ve demanded prison abolition and criminal justice reform, public attitudes toward incarcerated people have changed dramatically since the tough-on-crime 1990s. Well before last summer’s response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, support for prison reform had already been growing. A 2015 American Civil Liberties Union poll found that 69 percent of voters agreed that the prison population should be reduced. Three years later, a survey conducted for the Vera Institute of Justice revealed that 67 percent of respondents believed that building more jails and prisons would not lower crime rates. And by 2020, a Data for Progress poll indicated that 66 percent of likely voters supported decreasing prison and jail overcrowding amid the coronavirus crisis.

Although attitudes have changed, the shift in thinking has not wholly challenged the idea that people go to “prison as punishment, not to be punished,” which is a common refrain among prison reformers and abolitionists. The adage emphasizes that incarcerated people deserve humane treatment.

After Jacob Anthony Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was arrested for his participation in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, social media users widely balked at his request to be fed an organic diet while in federal custody, quipping that he was in prison, “not at Whole Foods.” Television personality Meghan McCain of ABC’s “The View” responded to Chansley’s request with even more scorn. “He’s a criminal. . . . He should have dog food,” she said. (A judge ultimately denied his request.)

While organic food is inaccessible to many outside the system, such responses underscore the notion that prison food should be, in essence, inedible.

As Soble sees it, however, the prison population should have access to a well-balanced diet because “food is a human right” and incarcerated people are “human beings who are parents, siblings, partners, and friends.”

Those questioning why people who have done “bad” things deserve “good food” should keep in mind that 95 percent of the prison population will eventually be released, Soble noted. “So, those people are coming back into the community, which means if we’re not feeding them well, then we’re putting them in potentially worse physical and mental shape when they get out,” she said.

Martinez said taxpayers may not be moved after learning about food insecurity in prison, but they should be concerned about the toll the poor health of current and former prisoners takes on the medical system.

“You’ve got guys going home with diabetes, congestive heart failure . . . all these underlying conditions that they develop in prison,” he said. “And the reason they develop them in prison is because of the eating habits and the traumatic experiences they have faced.”

While a percentage of the public remains indifferent to the horrific conditions people in prison endure, including food that’s hazardous to their health, DeWeaver would rather focus on the growing number of Americans who support prison abolition and criminal justice reform than try to convince those who don’t care why prisoners should be treated humanely.

“People should care because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “People should care because it’s unethical not to care.”

The post As COVID-19 Ups the Stakes, Advocates Say Prison Food Needs an Overhaul appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2021/01/21/as-covid-19-ups-the-stakes-advocates-say-prison-food-needs-an-overhaul/feed/ 1 Should Food and Farm Workers Be Next in Line for the COVID Vaccine? https://civileats.com/2020/12/22/should-food-workers-be-next-in-line-for-the-covid-vaccine/ Tue, 22 Dec 2020 09:00:56 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=39834 January 12, 2021 update: A group of New York state lawmakers have just sent a letter requesting Governor Andrew Cuomo to include gig workers, such as food-delivery platform drivers for Uber Eats and Grubhub, as essential workers in line to receive the next round of COVID-19 vaccinations. Although he has tested negative twice, the 77-year-old […]

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Once Called Naïve for His Focus on Returning Land to Black Farmers, Thomas Mitchell Is Now a MacArthur Genius

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:00:52 +0000

The call for African Americans to receive redress for the farmland they’ve lost to systemic racism has snowballed in recent years. One of the people who got it rolling, more than two decades ago, is Thomas W. Mitchell, a Texas A&M University law professor and co-director of its Program in Real Estate and Community Development Law.

Mitchell’s efforts to reform the laws and policies that have stripped African Americans of their land earned him the 2020 MacArthur fellowship—a so-called Genius Grant. Shortly afterward, Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey)—along with Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York)—introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act. The legislation aims to help African Americans recover the farmland they lost due to decades of discriminatory government policies. Mitchell helped to draft the bill, which would permit Black farmers to reclaim as many as 160 acres apiece through a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) land-grant system.

Mitchell has also spearheaded the overhaul of the heirs’ property laws that go into effect when landowners die without wills. For generations, land that had been purchased or deeded after the Civil War was passed down informally, often leading to a large numbers of owners, each with a fractional interest in the whole property, rather than an individual portion. With each generation, the number of heirs compounds, and any one of them can sell their interest or force a sale of the property—“sometimes for pennies on the dollar,” Mitchell said.

This issue disproportionately affects African Americans because historic barriers to legal services have resulted in about three-quarters of this population dying without wills, resulting in court-ordered sales of heirs’ property for far below market price. In the South, where Black-owned land is concentrated, heirs’ property is worth approximately $28 billion.

To help African Americans keep their land and protect their real estate wealth, Mitchell wrote 2010’s Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act (UPHPA), which includes recommendations for courts about how to approach partition actions, guidelines for co-owner buyouts, and methods to ensure that properties are sold for their fair market value. So far, 17 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands have implemented the UPHPA, and more are likely to follow since the 2018 Farm Bill gives states that haven’t adopted the legislation incentives to do so.

Mitchell spoke to Civil Eats recently about the farm bill, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and his longtime advocacy for Black landowners.

How did you lend your expertise to the sponsors of the Justice for Black Farmers Act and what makes this legislation stand out?

Photo courtesy of Thomas Mitchell.

The sponsors consulted with me about the bill before finalizing it to get my input. Black farmers and heirs’ property owners often have had a substantial lack of access to affordable legal services, which is why families stay trapped in that form of ownership. A significant part of the cycle of families having heirs’ property from one generation to another is the lack of wills or estate plans, so what’s good about the bill is that it takes the 2018 Farm Bill provisions—which were kind of like a pilot program to provide some legal assistance to Black farmers and landowners who own heirs’ property—and substantially enhanced the provision for legal services.

The Justice for Black Farmers Act is one of the first federal bills that seeks to address the fact that Black farmers have been pushed out of the agricultural industry—going from 1910, 1920, when 14 percent of farm owners in this country were Black to today where it’s less than 1 percent. So, it actually acknowledges that cutoff; it acknowledges that discrimination. It’s not limited to the USDA, but the USDA played a substantial part in driving Black farmers out of farming.

But you also have some concerns about the legislation. What are they?

The land grants that the bill talks about—go to 160 acres. That sounds great, but the average farm size in United States today is 444 acres. Over the last several decades, there’s been a massive consolidation in the farming sector and small family farms are being pushed out. So, 160 acres is great in terms of an acknowledgement. But if you still have the same kind of macroeconomics and federal policy that goes back to President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, famous for saying that farmers needed to “get big or get out,” then, providing African Americans with the opportunity to own a relatively small farm is not going to be sufficient.

You’re going to have to enable a much smaller group of Black farmers to use whatever land grant they have and expand it over time or reject the get-big-or-get-out model. I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, because right now the Justice for Black Farmers Act is just a bill, but if it were actually going to become law, there would have to be some sensitivity to that issue.

Should the Justice for Black Farmers Act become law, what impact do you hope it has?

It’s an incredibly exciting bill. It is far wider and broader in scope in terms of any bill that’s ever been introduced [to address racial injustice in agriculture]. I hope that it’s going to catalyze a conversation about the need for the bill, and even this incredibly ambitious bill doesn’t fully address the amount of the harm.

There is a research team that I’m part of called the Land Loss and Reparations Research Project. We’ve done an initial estimate of the value of agricultural land that African Americans have lost over the last hundred years, and the conservative amount is $350 billion. And what we’re doing now is looking at other variables to generate a figure that’s bigger than $350 billion. It’s going to take into account things such as [the fact that] these families who lost their land also lost the ability to use their land as collateral to finance their children’s college educations. And it will look at the economic ramifications of all these people who could have been provided an education but weren’t. There are a number of variables, but when you look at the magnitude of the harm, it makes the bill seem eminently reasonable, actually.

You wrote 2010’s Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which was given a boost by the 2018 Farm Bill. Can you explain how the farm bill motivated states to reform their heirs’ property laws?

The 2018 Farm Bill actually has a couple of heirs’ property provisions that specifically reference the Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act and give states that have not enacted it into law an incentive to do so. The incentive is that farming and ranching families who own heirs’ properties in those states are entitled to a greater set of USDA benefits. With the 2018 Farm Bill, we were able to flip states that we would have had no chance [with]. Like, we would have had zero chance in Mississippi, but the farm bill gave us that opening. It was the same thing in Florida, Virginia, and Illinois. All of a sudden, heirs have a new ally on our side, and that’s the state farm bureaus.

When you began your career in the 1990s, why did other scholars discourage you from pursuing ways to help African Americans preserve their land?

When I started my work addressing Black land loss through property laws . . . I was considered hopelessly naïve. I was told I was wasting my time. People would say, “It’s not that you have incorrectly diagnosed that there has been racial injustice. What you haven’t factored in is that African Americans and other disadvantaged farmers fundamentally lack political and economic power, and as a result, no legislature is ever going to respond to their needs.” I could have accepted that and then just folded the tent, but over the last 20 years, I’ve been able to defy the cynics and the skeptics.

There were certain things that happened that I couldn’t have counted on. The media took an interest in this issue. The Associated Press 20 years ago did this award-winning series on Black land loss, and that really was the catalyst. It caused this broader awareness; it got some important stakeholders, like the American Bar Association, interested. When the moment came, I was ready with a plan. I have a similar way of looking at the Justice for Black Farmers Act. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but there’s a plan, and it is incredibly comprehensive and incredibly solid.

You’ve been pretty adamant that Black land loss isn’t as dire as it is sometimes made out to be. Explain how you arrived at this conclusion.

In 1910 and 1920, African Americans who owned agricultural land had active farm operations. What has happened over time is that there are a number of African American families who own agricultural land, but the family doesn’t own a farm operation. Those who do have an active farm are theoretically counted in the agricultural census, but if they are renting their land to—in almost every case I’ve seen— a white farmer, that land is not captured by the ag census because the Black family is not the owner. In some cases, the family is letting the land lie fallow, so, nobody’s farming it. That is not captured the agricultural census either. So, there’s substantial loss of African American land in this country, but it’s not a 90 percent loss. And we still have a chance to meaningfully address some of the laws that contributed to this loss.

The Washington Post reported that, in the 19th century, white farmers seized 500 acres of North Carolina land owned by the great-grandfather of George Floyd. Given this context, the loss of Black-owned land is being raised as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. How do you feel about this?

I didn’t know about this history, but it’s a legitimate and important issue for Black Lives Matter and other organizations or government officials committed to social racial justice to address. With this massive loss of land, not only was the land itself lost, which is important in terms of being an economic asset that would help families build wealth across generations, but you also have the loss of culture and history.

At one point, most of the African Americans in the upper middle class were farm owners. And this ownership wasn’t just good for these families, but it had positive benefits for the African American community more generally. During the Civil Rights Movement, you had these gatherings designed to increase the number of African Americans voters held on farms. You had farmers who were able to use their property to organize for the ability of people to participate civically and politically in this country. So, farmland and property ownership within the African American community has tremendous importance if we want to have a more racially just society.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Once Called Naïve for His Focus on Returning Land to Black Farmers, Thomas Mitchell Is Now a MacArthur Genius appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Black Land Matters. But Is Crowdfunding Enough?

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 09:00:13 +0000

November 19, 2020 update: Today, Democratic senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand announced the planned introduction of the “Justice for Black Farmers Act,” which would require the U.S. Department of Agriculture to adopt reforms that increase access to land and funds for Black farmers and would-be farmers, including an $8 billion annual fund for purchasing land and granting it to Black farmers.

When Adrian Lipscombe, owner of Uptowne Café & Bakery in La Crosse, Wisconsin, set out to use crowdfunding to buy farmland, she named her effort the 40 Acres and a Mule Project.

The name harkens back to the unrealized Reconstruction-era promise of reparations to 3.9 million formerly enslaved African Americans. According to the 1865 order issued by General William T. Sherman, Black Southerners would receive 400,000 acres of land—“a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland 30 miles in from the coast.”

President Abraham Lincoln approved the order, but after his assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed it and returned the land to its previous owners. Ever since, African Americans have wondered how different their fate might have been if they had received that land. As Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. put it in 2014:

“Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue, and pass on wealth.”

Lipscombe has pondered the “what ifs” as well. Had African Americans received reparations immediately after the Civil War, she wonders, how many more Black entrepreneurs would exist? There might have been dozens of affluent African American towns, she said, and more historical Black colleges and universities.

A Texas native, Lipscombe’s late great-grandfather taught her that land ownership is important because it gives people a sense of identity. “It allows you to become an entrepreneur, whether you’re a farmer, you decide to rent it, build a house on it, or live on it to raise a family,” she said. “It gives you something. That was always driven into me. When I had my first kid, my husband and I bought a house because I felt that we needed to buy property. It was never about me; it was always about the future generation.”

Adrian Lipscombe. (Photo courtesy @40acresproject)

But Lipscombe didn’t decide to crowdfund for land until June when she started getting checks from strangers with no strings attached. They simply wanted to support her and her business in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread outrage over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which is just two-and-a-half hours away from La Crosse.

At first, Lipscombe wasn’t sure how to put these donations to use, but she eventually decided to use them to buy farmland. None of the local farmers who provide food to her restaurant are African American, she said, and fewer than 1 percent of all Wisconsin farmers are Black; purchasing land could help her support both Black farmers and Black foodways.

“If you look at the numbers, you know that there’s a high percentage of Black farmers who are over the age of 65,” Lipscombe said. “How do we protect their legacy and knowledge for the next generation?”

Lipscombe has raised more than $132,000 to date, and last week she received a $5,000 grant from Black Food Folks. Just last month, she announced that she had purchased 38 acres of land in St. Helena, South Carolina, in partnership with the nonprofit Muloma Heritage Center. In addition to using the land to teach others how to farm, she plans to partner with Muloma to create an archive with the help of chefs such as Mashama Bailey, Micheal Twitty, David Thomas, and Tonya Thomas. The focus will be on “developing a sanctuary to preserve for Black agriculture and foodways,” Lipscombe added.

The chef is also searching for farmland to purchase closer to home. However, finding it will be a challenge because land in the Midwest is much more expensive, she said.

Lipscombe isn’t alone in looking to crowdfunding as a form of reparations when it comes to land ownership. This year has seen several similar efforts, including Brianna Meeks’ effort to buy back her grandparents’ farm in Petersburg, Tennessee, which has been featured in People and has so far raised over $136,000.

The crowdfunding platform GoFundMe has also shined a spotlight on this important work. In July, a post on the company’s blog noted, “Farmers across the country are turning to crowdfunding to buy back the land of their ancestors, generate financial support for their operations, and rejoin the agricultural landscape on behalf of themselves and their communities.”

Leah Penniman’s Soul Fire Farm has also been using an online mapping tool to help potential donors identify BIPOC-led farms to support as a form of reparations since 2018.

Amber Tamm tends her rooftop farm. (Photo credit: Safiyah Chiniere / )

The Black Land Matters movement also includes New Yorker Amber Tamm, who became interested in farming to reconnect with the land. Her family has lived in the city for at least four generations, and has lost touch with the agricultural knowledge their ancestors had. Scores of other Black and brown New Yorkers find themselves in the same situation, said Tamm, and it’s a predicament she hopes to address through her Future Farm Fund, which has raised over $132,000. Having farmed for five years in an array of regions—upstate New York, Northern California, Hawaii, and Florida—Tamm would like to share what she’s learned with other Millennials of color interested in reclaiming their ancestors’ agricultural wisdom.

She decided to crowdfund for land after her Instagram followers repeatedly asked her if she owned a farm. When she told them that she did not, people began to send her Venmo donations earmarked as “reparations.” In June, she decided to launch a formal GoFundMe campaign and the donations came pouring in, a fact she attributes to the country’s current political climate.

“This round of Black Lives Matter [activism] amplified Black voices, including farmers,” said Tamm. “I think once people heard our stories, they felt very inclined to support us, especially because most of us are doing it for the community.”

But Tamm’s traumatic personal history has also compelled people to donate to her campaign. Six years ago, when she was a college student, she lost her parents to murder-suicide. She was left with no financial support and nowhere to go. As she tends to the earth, Tamm believes she is also tending to her mother, whom she buried in the earth after her policeman father took her life. Now she hopes to use any land she buys to grow food—and to provide a safe haven for others who’ve survived trauma and need a place to heal.

“As long as we’re living on other people’s land, in terms of system and government, then we’re not free,” Tamm said.

She’s now contemplating where to invest in land. Tamm would like to remain in New York, but with her end goal of $150,000, she might only be able to buy a few acres. In Alabama, she could buy as many as 240 acres for the same amount. But before she makes a transaction, she plans to apprentice with more experienced farmers—such as Mark Kimball of Essex Farm in New York, Jamila Norman from Patchwork City Farms in Georgia, and Chris Newman from Sylvanaqua Farms in Virginia—to gain a better understanding how to manage a farm and own land.

Ultimately, Tamm would like to see the Black Land Matters movement result in an expansive Black food chain. “We want Black seed keepers,” she said. “We want Black truck drivers, Black farmers, Black chefs, Black composting companies, and Black restaurants. We want a whole Black food chain, so we can support each other first.”

Restitution for Black Landowners

The success that Lipscombe, Tamm, and others have had crowdfunding points to rising awareness among the public about the history and impact of Black land loss, says Texas A&M University law professor and 2020 MacArthur fellow Thomas W. Mitchell. He considers this a positive development, given how little interest there was in the issue at the start of his career in the 1990s, but he also questions whether crowdfunding efforts will produce widespread and lasting change. Crowdfunding for medical expenses, for example, doesn’t address the pervasive inequities in the nation’s healthcare system.

“It’s not going to move the needle in a significant way or really address the magnitude of the problem unless there is a far greater commitment of public resources,” said Mitchell. “Another issue is that more likely than not, the land acquired [through crowdfunding] is going to be small in the grand scheme of things.”

To expand and preserve Black landownership, Mitchell added, legislation designed to help African Americans needs to be passed at both the state and federal level.

Mitchell has worked to reform the laws and policies that have stripped African Americans of their land, particularly for families without written wills. An estimated 75 percent of African Americans die without wills, and court-ordered sales of heirs’ property typically lead to purchases of land for well under market price, further disadvantaging vulnerable Black families. Scholars estimate that in the South alone, heirs’ property is worth about $28 billion.

To help African Americans and other marginalized groups keep their land in their families, Mitchell worked with community stakeholders, attorneys, and scholars to write 2010’s Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), which, among other reforms, includes provisions for co-owner buyouts, guidance for courts about resolving partition actions, and a procedure to ensure that sales reflect a property’s fair market value. To date, 17 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the UPHPA, and Mitchell is working to see that others enact this legislation to help disadvantaged property owners keep their land and safeguard their real estate wealth.

Since then, agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), such as the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), have contacted Mitchell about collaborating on ways to better serve heirs’ property owners. But the notion that there’s virtually no Black-owned land left makes it harder to convince policymakers to advocate for African American landowners, he said.

Using figures from the Census of Agriculture, a number of media outlets have reported that African Americans lost 90 percent of their farmland from 1910 to 1997. Mitchell doesn’t dispute this figure; he said, however, that it needs to be qualified because the census doesn’t reflect African Americans who own agricultural land but don’t own or operate commercial farm operations. He argues that the 1999 Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey (AELOS) provides a more complete picture of Black landownership.

That survey found that “despite many decades of land loss,” African Americans own 7.8 million acres of land, significantly more than the 1.5 million acres cited in the 1997 census. According to the most recent count in 2017, Black-operated farms accounted for 4.7 million acres of farmland, but, again, this figure excludes African Americans who own land but don’t operate farms.

“By showing empirically that there actually is more Black-owned agricultural land or land in general than people realize, I’ve been able to develop this model state statute that would provide greater property rights protections to stabilize the ownership of this property for the families,” said Mitchell.

The 2018 Farm Bill also gave the UPHPA a boost because it gives states that have not yet enacted the legislation incentives to do so. Mitchell credits the farm bill with influencing states like Mississippi, Florida, Virginia, and Illinois to adopt the policy. The farm bill, he said, is his newest ally.

To effect long-term change, though, the government will ultimately need to provide restitution to Black families deprived of their land or create a program to enable African Americans to acquire land through grants, low-interest loans, technical assistance, or other methods. And restitution, he asserted, should include an acknowledgement of wrongdoing to the African American community.

“Specifically, it would take into account the long history of complicity of the federal government and state governments in undermining the ability of African Americans to maintain ownership of their property,” said Mitchell.

Adrian Lipscombe also points to extrajudicial violence, such as the 1919 Elaine Massacre of Black Arkansas sharecroppers, as an example of how racism thwarted the progress of African American farmers. She asks herself what Black Americans could have achieved in agriculture without generations of brutality and discrimination.

“Land has been driven into us since before we came here,” she said. “We were in tribes, and we lived off the land. We were brought here to cultivate the land, and after we moved here, we talked to the Indigenous people about the land. So, imagine if we were allowed to work the land without force, without violence.”

The Black Land Matters movement is not just imagining those possibilities but working to make them a reality.

Top photo by Amber Tamm.

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By Switching to a Plant-Based Diet, Eric Adams Is ‘Healthy at Last’

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 09:00:52 +0000

Update: Shortly after this interview ran, Eric Adams announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City. On July 6, 2022, he was declared the winner of the Democratic primary, and extremely likely to be elected the next mayor.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams still remembers the terror he felt when he woke up four years ago and couldn’t see well enough to make out the outline of his alarm clock. He stumbled to his mirror and noticed that his right eye was bloodshot and he couldn’t see out of his left eye at all. A visit to his doctor revealed that his trouble seeing stemmed from undiagnosed type 2 diabetes, a condition associated with eye problems ranging from blurry vision to glaucoma.

The diagnosis didn’t entirely surprise the then-56-year-old. His mother has diabetes, and, as an African American, he knew that his racial group disproportionately suffers from the condition. But when his doctor told him that he would be living with diabetes for the rest of his life, Adams set out to reverse his diagnosis—and he succeeded over the course of the next few months. He cut out fast food and high-fat soul food to switch to a plant-based diet and has maintained his healthier lifestyle in the years since.

Today, he’s 35 pounds lighter, has restored his eyesight, and has blood sugar levels that put him safely out of the diabetes range. In his new book, Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses, which debuts October 13, Adams recounts how he made the lifestyle shifts necessary to restore his health and offers advice to readers about how they can follow suit.

Although Healthy at Last includes nutrition tips, recipes, and details about Adams’ life, it is far more than a diet guide, cookbook, or memoir. The book cites research comparing the American diet (and related illnesses) to the diets of countries in Africa and Asia. It addresses the realities of living in food swamps—neighborhoods overrun with businesses selling mostly highly processed foods and fast food. It also examines how in West Africa, leafy green vegetables, legumes, and tubers were the primary ingredients of what is known today as soul food. After slavery, however, African Americans increasingly prepared these foods with animal fats, sodium, and sugar—leading to health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

Civil Eats spoke with Adams about his journey to health and the barriers to wellness that his readers, especially those in low-income areas or communities of color, bear the burden of overcoming.

Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. How was your health in 2016?

I was on the traditional American diet, where meat was the center of my diet. I really ate whatever I saw or what tasted good, and for the most part, that was food fried, processed, and filled with sugar, oil, and fat. [In addition to the eye problems] I was experiencing tingling in my hands and feet. I later learned that it was neuropathic nerve damage that can lead to amputation.

And you had no idea that you had diabetes?

The signs of [diabetes] had been there, and I was dismissing them as part of getting older, but the vision loss was just happening so rapidly. At that point, I went to see several doctors and I was told I was going to have to be on insulin for the rest of my life. That just didn’t sit well with me. Every doctor had given me pamphlets about living with diabetes, so I went to my computer and changed one word. Instead of living with diabetes, I searched for “reversing diabetes,” and that sent me down a different path.

What made you try to reverse this medical condition rather than just accept the diagnosis that tens of thousands of Black people get each year?

There was a brief moment where I said to myself, “Well, Eric, you knew this was coming. Your mother is diabetic, and your other family members are experiencing similar issues. You knew this was something that you were going to face.”

But they say there’s always a voice inside you that says something different, and often times, we ignore that voice. This time I listened to that voice, and it told me to go further. I went to see a doctor in Ohio and, for the first time, I heard someone, outside of the internet searches that I was doing, talk about a plant-based diet. That inspired me, and after embracing a plant-based diet, I returned to the doctor three months later, and my diabetes had gone into remission.

You routinely patronized KFC, Pizza Hut, and the omnipresent food carts on the streets of New York City. How did you wean yourself off those foods, which some researchers say contain addictive chemicals?

I felt like I was going through withdrawal. There was this sweating, this uncertainty, this high degree of wanting to taste those foods again. It took a week or two before that started to change. And I remember going from “why me?” to “why not me?”—and I turned my attention from what I couldn’t eat to what I could.

You discuss the need for a good support system while transitioning to a healthier life, but some people may not have that support. What’s your advice for them?

That is so important. The most you can do is have a real conversation with your loved ones and explain what you’re going through. Give them information so they can see the science [behind plant-based eating] because it’s unfortunate that we have embraced sick care as health care. Then, explain the support you need.

You cite research comparing the diet and health of people in countries such as China and South Africa to those in the U.S., pointing out that they don’t suffer from cardiovascular disease and other conditions at the same rates. Did this data surprise you?

It really was shocking. Here, we have the highest standard of living and, they say, the best medical care, but there’s no benefit of living to be 100 if we’re on respirators or dialysis. That is part of why it’s so important to look at what other countries are doing.

And then there’s a common thread that is happening throughout the entire globe, and that’s wherever the American diet goes, people go from being healthy to being ill, and that’s consistent.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the brokenness of the food system and the health divides that separate those most vulnerable to the virus from the rest of America. Are you hopeful that this pandemic results in change for the better?

Diabetes, heart disease, and other preexisting conditions account for most of the hospitalizations, and they happen in poor communities where people have poor access to food. So, it’s almost a continuation, a pipeline, to not only poor health habits but death rates. That’s why it’s imperative that we find an approach to dealing with the pandemic amidst chronic diseases that includes both intervention and prevention. After someone has it, how do we address it? And then we must have a very active prevention method to prevent people from getting [COVID-19] because it is not sustainable to continue to move in this fashion.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams visits the Farmshelf at the Brooklyn Democracy Academy. (Photo credit: Eugene Resnick, Brooklyn Borough President’s office)

Since you live in a food swamp, I wanted to hear your tips for other people who live in similar environments. How can they change their habits in neighborhoods like yours?

I wanted to show people how to look at what we have available to us in local markets. There’s a lot of healthy food in front of us, but it is being hidden between the rows of bad food.

They’re as simple as dried beans and dried lentils. You can eat in a cheap way, but in a healthy way. We need to ensure that people in the inner cities have the access [to healthful foods]. There are some great programs; in the Bronx we have the Green Bronx Machine. They have been growing food in the classroom and teaching students nutritional-based education.

You can go [shopping] right in your own neighborhood and just start in a very inexpensive way to turn your life around.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Top photo credit: Erica Sherman, Brooklyn Borough President’s Office.

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