She did exactly that at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, created by the state in 1890 to provide agricultural education to Black Americans while maintaining segregation. And she worked on equity in food systems at North Carolina State University, the state’s primary educational institution for farmers, which didn’t allow Black students to enroll until the 1950s.

In both positions, she connected Black farmers to technical and financial resources and helped to eliminate the barriers that they continued to face in getting access to programs and funding.

So she was honored, she said, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tapped her to serve on the its Equity Commission. The commission was created in 2021 through the American Rescue Plan to address the agency’s history of discrimination, after former President Joe Biden issued an executive order to prioritize equity across all government agencies.

“I didn’t go in there with the mindset that we were going to flip the USDA upside down,” said Ammons, now the co-executive director of Farm Aid, a nonprofit organization and festival that supports small family farms. “But we knew that we could make some strides and kind of create a path so that some of those past and historic wrongs were on the way to being made right.”

Past lawsuits and reporting have found that, for decades, the USDA purposefully and systematically denied farmers loans and other support based on race, contributing to a massive decline in the number of Black farmers in the U.S.

In February 2024, after three years of research, public meetings, and subcommittee meetings, the commission—which included civil rights advocates, diverse farm group representatives, and rural development experts—presented its final report to former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. It included 66 detailed recommendations laid out over 87 pages, the first of which was simple: “Institutionalize equity within the Department.”

Instead, within President Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office, USDA officials scrubbed the report and information on the Commission’s work from the agency’s website.

It’s one of several initiatives at the USDA that has already hit the cutting-room floor as a result of Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”

At the end of January, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo directing the USDA to analyze its programs for anything that involves diversity, inclusion, accessibility, environmental justice, or equity. Career employees who previously worked on equity programs have already been put on leave. Employees within the agency say the sweep continues, with no clear sense of which programs might be next on the chopping block.

In addition to ending initiatives Trump considers related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within all federal agencies—including those that touch the food system, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—the order extends beyond the agencies themselves, requiring recipients of federal grants to certify they don’t operate “any programs promoting DEI.” The order also encourages the private sector to end DEI programs.

That puts into question the future of the USDA’s many grant programs that focus on supporting and feeding underserved farmers and communities. (Most of those programs are authorized and funded by Congress, but Trump has already defied laws meant to maintain checks and balances on other fronts. His abrupt firing of the independent inspector generals is one example.)

On January 31, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) posted a list on X showing more than $110 million in “contract cancellations” related to DEI at the USDA. But it’s unclear what the list refers to, and the USDA did not respond to detailed questions about the number or other points in this story by press time.

What constitutes “DEI” is also still unclear. In the original order, Trump argues he is putting an end to “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) that can violate the civil rights laws of this Nation.” As laid out in the order, that might apply to a wide range of varied efforts, from “equitable decision-making” requirements to “promoting diversity” to “advancing equity.”

But advocates like Ammons and other individuals and groups across the country who have been working for decades on racial justice in the food system say it’s just another example of the age-old effort to erase the country’s still-recent record of slavery and race-based discrimination and stall progress toward a fairer future.

In conversations with Civil Eats over the past few weeks, advocates, organizers, and nonprofit directors were exhausted. They worried about funding for organizations that serve farmers and rural communities. They were concerned about funding for organizations that provide food aid to communities of color—cuts that might happen in conjunction with Republicans’ promised cuts to the country’s safety net. They feared the ripple effects of the federal order spreading and hurting groups working on food justice in local communities from coast to coast.

But they were also undeterred.

“People of color, farmers of color—we’re still here. This effort to erase us hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work this time around,” Ammons said. “Part of the reason those folks were brought together for the Equity Commission is because it’s work they’d already been doing. The work doesn’t stop just because the report’s crumpled up and thrown in the trash can.”

Similarly, in an email to the group Black Professionals in Food and Agriculture shared with Civil Eats, President Kent Roberson acknowledged that members might already feel worn out by the attacks on equity work. “I believe the present age is what our organization was founded for,” he said, “not for the times when we have Black leadership across government, in our corporate organizations or associations, but for the times when we are under attack and fighting for the rights and respect of Black people in food and agriculture.”

Impacts Beyond the Beltway

In 2021, after Democrats in Congress included a pot of money in the American Rescue Plan to compensate Black farmers for historic discrimination, for example, conservative groups filed multiple lawsuits to block the program, claiming discrimination against white farmers. The largest suit was filed by Sid Miller, the Texas secretary of agriculture and a close Trump ally. Rather than fight the suits, lawmakers later rescinded the program and wrote a new one into law that was race neutral, allocating money based on discrimination of any kind.

A zeitgeist took hold in which political points could be scored by opposing any effort on behalf of marginalized communities. In the fall of 2024, the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund was forced to shut down a venture capital fund for Black women entrepreneurs after conservative activists sued the group for racial discrimination. Several food companies were among those supported by the fund, including Fresh Bellies, Air Protein, and Partake Foods.

In Aurora, Colorado, a small nonprofit called Food Justice NW Aurora spent two years proposing and fundraising for a project that would have renovated three city-owned greenhouses that had been empty since 2010 and were in danger of collapsing from disrepair. The group proposed restoring them and turning them into spaces for food production, job training, and educational programming in a low-income neighborhood where fresh food is hard to find.

The group was selected as a top contractor for the project and raised the funds to make it happen. But at their final meeting with the Aurora City Council last summer, during which they expected the council to sign off on the project, they were shocked when council members denied them the contract, Food Justice Executive Director Caitlin Matthews told Civil Eats in an interview.

According to Matthews, members of the council then shared the reason: Conservative council members spotted a statement on the group’s website that acknowledged the American food system had been built on Indigenous land theft and the enslavement of Africans.

“All work to imbue racial justice in food work is under threat,” said Shakirah Simley, the executive director of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in San Francisco, told Civil Eats in between emergency meetings to discuss whether her organization might be impacted by pauses or cuts to federal funding.

“What we’re seeing is a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion, a lot of disruption, which I think is meant to distract us from something more nefarious,” said Simley, who is also on the Civil Eats advisory board. “But these decisions make direct, immediate harm to our most vulnerable communities.”

The Booker T. Washington Center was created more than 100 years ago to serve Black soldiers returning from service in the first World War and their families. Today, it provides affordable housing, food sovereignty, and nutrition programs, including feeding about 1,500 residents each week.

Simley said she was especially worried about funding to food justice organizations being stalled at a time when Republicans in Congress are also discussing cuts to federal hunger programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid.

“If things dry up or disappear or are held up, then that trickles down to a local level,” she said. “It’s just cruel and inhumane.” For example, she said that when one pandemic-era assistance program was ended last year, the Center saw around a 30 percent increase in enrollment in its programs that provide food assistance.

The pandemic, she said, also provides a model for responding to disruption. “It feels a little bit like déjà vu. From an organizing and justice perspective, there’s a lot of good conversation around saving ourselves, focusing on mutual aid, focusing on community care. I think a lot of this stuff is going to have to stay local,” she said. “We can’t respond to every fire. We have to triage and think about where our energies are most directed. We have to be adaptive and nimble, and we have to look out for each other.”

Continuing the Work in D.C.

Ammons spoke to Civil Eats from a farm conference in D.C., where she said many conversations focused on the fact that “we’ve been here before” even as the groups present fretted over funding cuts. “We’re not just thinking about ourselves, we’re thinking about all these organizations that have received funding to do a range of work that are on the chopping block now,” she said. “We’re here to support them as best we can.”

As Agriculture Secretary nominee Brooke Rollins sailed toward confirmation in the Senate last week, Nichelle Harriott, policy director at the HEAL Food Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 farm, food, and environmental organizations, sent out a statement.

“Her history demonstrates a disregard for and lack of commitment to supporting Black, Indigenous, and other farmers and ranchers of color, as well as small and family farmers, farmworkers, and the working people who sustain our food system,” Harriott said. “Despite this, we call on this new Secretary to prioritize disaster relief for farmers facing climate-related disruptions, invest in small farms and those practicing traditional, cultural, and ecological farming methods, ensure protections for food and farmworkers, and safeguard vital nutrition programs like SNAP to reduce hunger nationwide.”

On February 3, a coalition of groups that includes the restaurant worker union ROC United sued to stop the executive order on DEI from being implemented.

At the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), the policy team is busy working on developing proposals for an upcoming farm bill or other legislation that they believe could help solve land access challenges for young farmers from diverse backgrounds, a priority that they feel holds sway on both sides of the aisle because of growing concern over the aging of American farmers—regardless of anti-DEI rhetoric.

Michelle Hughes, a former hog farmer and now the co-executive director of the NYFC, also served on the USDA Equity Commission. She said throwing out the Commission’s report and the dismantling of equity throughout USDA is “the reason to invest in advocacy and federal policy change work. It’s a setback, for sure, but do I think that it’s going to stall the movement? No. If anything, it should ignite people to do the work themselves.”

Ammons was also adamant that Trump’s executive order misconstrued racial justice efforts as programs that reward and promote less-qualified individuals. (Others have called out the fact that while Trump says his intention is to create a merit-based system, several of his cabinet nominees lack experience in the subject areas covered by the agencies they’re now leading, including Rollins at the USDA.)

In the order, Trump said that DEI initiatives shut hardworking Americans “out of opportunities because of their race or sex” and that they threaten American safety by “diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society.”

Ammons said that she believes efforts to acknowledge race-based discrimination and make hiring and programming more equitable do the opposite of what Trump claims.

“Many of the people on the Equity Commission come from a lineage of people who literally help build this country. We come from people who are some of the hardest-working people—who grow our food, get it safely and efficiently on our plates, in our stores, into our homes,” she said. “The purpose of DEI initiatives is to broaden the pool of qualified candidates, knowing that historically some of the most qualified were overlooked and dismissed.”

She added that when diversity is prioritized in food and agriculture in a thoughtful, intentional way, it benefits all farmers and rural communities.

In the end, the NYFC’s Hughes said that while she still believes the Equity Commission and its report was something to be celebrated, there was always going to be more work to do. “I don’t see the federal government as the be-all, end-all for equity work. I don’t even think they’re a major player. I think they’re a major player in inequity,” she said. “I’m not scared, and I don’t really feel like there’s anything that could happen that would make me back down from advocating against injustice. I see it as a long-term movement and effort that I have completely committed myself to.”

The post Despite Cuts to DEI Initiatives, Food and Farm Advocates Say They Will Continue to Fight for Racial Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/02/10/despite-cuts-to-dei-initiatives-food-and-farm-advocates-say-they-will-continue-to-fight-for-racial-justice/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/01/13/seattles-little-free-libraries-offer-a-catalog-of-collections-and-connections/ Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:19 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60416 This article first appeared in Pacific NW Magazine, the Sunday magazine of The Seattle Times, and has been republished with permission. With the aid of Holloway’s “partner in crime,” Kathleen Dickenson, they prop the lid of an old-fashioned school desk in Holloway’s front yard and fill it with cupcakes. Holloway adds edible pearls and glitter. […]

The post Seattle’s Little Free Libraries Offer a Catalog of Collections and Connections appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> This article first appeared in Pacific NW Magazine, the Sunday magazine of The Seattle Times, and has been republished with permission.

With the aid of Holloway’s “partner in crime,” Kathleen Dickenson, they prop the lid of an old-fashioned school desk in Holloway’s front yard and fill it with cupcakes. Holloway adds edible pearls and glitter. Shortly after 3 p.m., the Little Free Bakery Phinneywood is open for business—the business of sharing.

“I love to bake, and many people have told me, ‘Oh, you should open a bakery.’ And I just think, ‘No, no, no, no. It would take the joy out of it for me,” Holloway says.

Like hundreds of other Little Free hosts in the region, she’s found joy instead in giving.

And, like so many good ideas, this one started with a book.

In 2009, a Wisconsin man named Todd Bol built a Little Free Library in his front yard, encouraging passersby to take a free book or drop off extras. The idea and the format—a wooden box set on a post, usually with a latched door—seeded a movement, with more than 150,000 registered worldwide.

“Seeded” got literal fast: The Little Free book idea spread to other sharing opportunities, including a rampant crop of Little Free Seed Libraries, where people swap extra packets of cilantro and Sungolds.

Seattle’s density, temperate climate, walkable neighborhoods—and maybe our introvert culture?—make it easy for the little landmarks to thrive. They exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when locals thought outside the box by putting up a box, including what’s believed to be the nation’s first Little Free Bakery and first Little Free Art Library. Many built on the region’s existing affinity for hyperlocal giving—the global Buy Nothing phenomenon, for one example, was founded on Bainbridge Island.

“We just seem to do more of all these versions of sharing,” says “Little Library Guy,” the nom de plume of a longtime resident who showcases the phenomenon on his Instagram feed and a helpful map.

The nonprofit organization now overseeing global Little Free Libraries finds the nonbook knockoffs “fun and flattering,” communications director Margret Aldrich says in an email. (She also notes “Little Free Library” is a trademarked name, requiring permission if used for money or “in an organized way.”)

Some libraries stress fundamental needs: A recently established Little Free Failure of Capitalism in South Seattle provides feminine products, soap, chargers, even Narcan. A Columbia City Little Free Pantry established by personal chef Molly Harmon grew into a statewide network for neighbors supporting neighbors.

Others are about the little things: Yarn. Jigsaw puzzles and children’s toys. Keychains (one keychain library in Hillman City has a TikTok account delighting 8,000+ followers). A Little Free Nerd Library holds Rubik’s Cubes and comic books.

Regardless of where each library falls on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they stand on common ground. “There’s a line from [Khalil] Gibran: ‘Work is love made visible,’ ” Little Library Guy says in a phone call. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re showing that they love the community by doing something for them.”

Here’s a little free sample of what you might find around town:

Seeding a Movement

One chilly November day, students and volunteers on the self-sustaining farm worked with the small staff to inventory what seemed like countless seeds for next year’s plantings: Parade onions, Autumn Beauty sunflowers, Painted Mountain corn, Genovese basil. Packs with just a small number of remaining seeds were set aside for the Little Free Seed Library installed near rows of winter greens.

Farm manager Perry Acworth organized the little library during the pandemic, seeing the renaissance in home gardening coupled with a run on supplies. “Seeds were sold out … even if they had money, they couldn’t find them,” she says.

Acworth picked up a secondhand cabinet—one with a solid door, rather than the usual Little Free Library glass window, because seeds need to be protected from light. Althea Ericksen, a student at the time, designed it, painted it with a cheerful anthropomorphic beet, and installed it.

Seeds were packed inside jars to protect them from rodents and birds who otherwise would have a feast, and the Little Free Seed Library was born—shielded from rain and direct sun, convenient to pedestrians as well as cars.

On a recent day, seeds for radish, mizuna, red cabbage, and flashy troutback lettuce waited in lidded jars for their new winter homes.

On the side of the seed library, thank you notes sprout comments such as, “Thank you for sharing.” Enough harvests have gone by to see the library’s benefits, from flowering pollinators to harvests of food. A mere handful of seeds isn’t useful for the farm’s scale, Acworth notes, but for library guests, “If I have five sunflowers in my yard, five heads of lettuce, that’s great.”

The post Seattle’s Little Free Libraries Offer a Catalog of Collections and Connections appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/06/14/the-struggle-for-food-sovereignty-in-immokalee-florida/ Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:55 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=52181 Although Vasquez handled food every day for work, she couldn’t afford to buy groceries. Instead, she began exchanging food with friends and learning about Immokalee’s community-based resources through word of mouth. Immokalee is known as the tomato capital of the United States, yet 28 percent of the town’s 24,500 residents—the majority migrant farmworkers from Central […]

The post The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida appeared first on Civil Eats.

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After leaving three children in Guatemala, Maria Vasquez spent 15 years working in the agricultural industry in Immokalee, Florida. She worked in the fields for three years picking jalapeños, watermelons, cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, and pumpkins before spending 12 years processing tomatoes in a warehouse.

Although Vasquez handled food every day for work, she couldn’t afford to buy groceries. Instead, she began exchanging food with friends and learning about Immokalee’s community-based resources through word of mouth.

Immokalee is known as the tomato capital of the United States, yet 28 percent of the town’s 24,500 residents—the majority migrant farmworkers from Central America, Mexico, and Haiti—live below the federal poverty line and without easy access to healthy foods. This poverty rate is more than double the statewide average, and it’s compounded by higher-than-average food prices, a housing crisis, and minimal public transportation options.

A volunteer distributes bags of free food at the Meals of Hope weekly Thursday distribution at Immokalee’s Farmworker Village. (Photo credit: Julia Knoerr)

To face these challenges, Vasquez connected with local organizations committed to mutual aid and self-reliance. She began attending meal distribution events at Misión Peniel, a ministry of Peace River Presbytery that supports the Immokalee farmworker community, and joined the mission’s women’s group to build connections.

When she gave birth to a son with Down syndrome in 2015, she gave up the demanding hours of agricultural work to care for him and began providing cleaning services for the mission. She volunteered at the community garden behind the building run by Cultivate Abundance, an organization that addresses food insecurity and livelihood challenges in low-income, migrant farmworker communities, until the group hired her on as a garden aid.

Like Vasquez, many in this tight-knit community have found strategies for collaborative resilience as the pandemic and Hurricane Ian have made food access even more challenging in recent years.

A combination of informal mutual aid networks, small-scale farms, foraging, and donated meals from local organizations such as Misión Peniel and Meals of Hope keep the community nourished. Additionally, Cultivate Abundance is growing crops such as amaranth, Haitian basket vine, and chaya (a nutritious shrub native to the Yucatan peninsula) to move beyond charity and equip community members with culturally relevant, locally recognized produce.

These efforts not only bolster food security, but they also support the community’s autonomy to grow their own food and engage in collective healing. While many Immokalee residents report that they practice grueling labor each day and have experienced xenophobia, sexual violence, and rent gouging in their recent pasts, the garden behind Misión Peniel offers a safe space for community members to speak their own languages, share memories from their home countries, practice meditation, and return to their ancestral cultural knowledge to grow their own food as stewards of the land.

One of Cultivate Abundance’s community gardens sits behind Misión Peniel and has helped the organization produce over 59 tons of produce since beginning operations in 2018. (Photo credit: Julia Knoerr)

Food and Housing Insecurity in Immokalee

Immokalee’s Main Street boasts a few blocks of small markets featuring products from the community’s predominant Mexican, Guatemalan, and Haitian diasporas, as well as money-transfer services for migrants to send money home. Old school buses transporting farmworkers to work pull into the parking lot of La Fiesta supermarket, a key intersection in town bordering on the land owned and occupied by Misión Peniel and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a high-profile farmworker advocacy group.

Here, wild chickens cluck at all hours of the day, their chorus mixing with broadcasting from Radio Conciencia 107.7, the CIW’s community radio station. Green space is scarce, and beyond the town’s center, sidewalks fade into neighborhoods of run-down trailers and busy roads lined with fast food restaurants.

Though Immokalee sits just 30 miles from Naples, one of the wealthiest cities in Florida, wages remain a primary barrier to residents’ adequate food access. The most recent Census found an average per-capita annual income of $16,380 in Immokalee between 2017-2021. Nearly 39 percent of the town’s population was born outside of the U.S., and the number of farmworkers varies based on the season; some sources estimate that as many as 15,000–20,000 migrant seasonal farmworkers typically live in the area.

In the winter months, the majority of those workers are there to pick tomatoes. From 1980 to 2009, farmworkers received 50 cents per bucket picked rather than a guaranteed minimum wage, meaning they had to harvest at least 150 buckets per day to make enough income.

Cultivate Abundance’s banana circle offers different varieties of banans and plaintains. (Photo credit: Julia Knoerr)

CIW’s Fair Food Program, which began in 2010 to create a fairer food industry for workers, farmers, buyers, and consumers, improved those conditions. The program is known nationally as a model for providing farmworkers with human rights, and requiring that growers selling to participating buyers (such as McDonalds, Walmart, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s) clock workers’ time and pay them minimum wage (currently $11 per hour in Florida), as required by federal law. Participating buyers also agree to pay at least a penny more per pound of tomatoes they buy, translating to a bonus that gets split among qualifying workers.

However, not all buyers participate in the Fair Food Program. The CIW has called for Publix, Kroger, and Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program, but so far, they have refused. Julia Perkins, education coordinator for the CIW, says even with these gains, many workers struggle to feed themselves. Agricultural work is inconsistent, and an individual’s income will vary greatly by season.

“When there is a lot of picking to be done, when it’s not raining a lot, [if] it’s the first pick, you can do pretty well for a number of weeks,” Perkins says. “[But] not well enough to feed you for the rest of the year.”

The pandemic exacerbated farmworkers’ struggle for adequate income. The market for wholesale crops declined because industries like cruises, hotels, and restaurants shut down, lowering the prices of commodities and increasing grocery store prices.

Farmworkers experienced the brunt of the economic downturn—lower demand for the crops they picked meant fewer jobs, and inflation limited their wages’ reach. If farmworkers fell sick with the virus and couldn’t go to work, they received no pay, and as they remained essential workers, they couldn’t shelter in place.

Furthermore, many Immokalee residents are undocumented, meaning they didn’t qualify for federal stimulus checks under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), nor have they received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to help them purchase food.

Beyond wages, housing often demands 60 percent of Immokalee residents’ income, according to Arol Buntzman, chairman of the Immokalee Fair Housing Coalition. The same five or six families have owned the majority of Immokalee properties for years and charge weekly rent for each individual, including small children, living in 50-year-old trailers. Multiple families and strangers often share rooms.

In September 2022, Hurricane Ian further increased the cost of rent. Intensifying the already severe housing shortage, Hurricane Ian destroyed housing in Naples and Fort Myers, leading some residents of those towns to move to Immokalee and outbid farmworkers, which Buntzman says in turn raised rents even more.

Feeding Farmworker Families

To address these growing needs, nonprofit and religious organizations have been providing fundamental support through basic health and food services.

Julyvette Pacheco, office manager at the food security organization Meals of Hope, saw need increase in the wake of Hurricane Ian, compounded by inflation. Her organization used to feed 200 families in Immokalee every week, but after the hurricane, that number rose to 350.

“Something we have been noticing since the hurricane,” Pachecho says, “is that people are not patient. When they come here, most of them are struggling. They need food, they have been waiting.”

Meanwhile, Cultivate Abundance addresses food insecurity by growing produce reflective of migrants’ foodways and empowering them with skills to grow their own. The main garden behind Misión Peniel is one-tenth of an acre and has produced more than 59 tons of fruit and vegetables since its start in 2018.

During the garden’s inception, members of the mission’s women’s group contributed to a participatory decision-making process about the type of produce they valued, and community members can now volunteer in the garden in exchange for produce to take home. Whether through their families or professional lives, staff members share connection to the agricultural industry and have built partnership with other local farms and gardens.

Lupita Vasquez-Reyes, Cultivate Abundance’s community garden and outreach manager, grew up in Immokalee as the daughter of migrant farmworkers from Mexico. After 20 years away, she returned in 2019, just one year after the garden started in collaboration with Misión Peniel. Vasquez-Reyes says the group has worked to build intentional solidarity with an intersectional approach to diversity in the garden. The beds now boast a wide variety of medicinal herbs and produce, including edible weeds like yerba mora that many would discard.

“To the north, you have the Kelly Miller housing projects, where about 94 percent of residents are below the federal poverty limit and most are unemployed,” says James, who worked as the farm programs manager at Common Good City Farm until early January. “To the south, you have people who had the chance to get their master’s degrees or are captains of industry and can afford million-dollar homes.”

The half-acre nonprofit farm is caught in the middle of these two economically divergent communities and offers a “pay-what-you-can” farm stand for residents in both neighborhoods with the hope that one group will help pitch in to feed the other.

“Some people have the means and some don’t,” James admits. “I started looking around, and I said, ‘What can I do to get the south side of the park to help support the people that live on the north side?’”

D.C. isn’t the only place where this kind of model is proving useful. People from all walks of life have been impacted by the pandemic and recent record-high inflation, which peaked at 10.4 percent for food prices last summer—the largest increase since 1981. And increased SNAP benefits just dropped at the end of February, leaving households to receive at least $95 less in benefits each month. As a result, sliding scale produce is playing an increasingly important role in keeping communities around the country healthy. But it hasn’t been an easy few years for farms using the pay-what-you-can model.

Produce for the ‘Common Good’

Yet more than an estimated one-third of all D.C. area residents are still food insecure. Ward 1, where Common Good City Farm is located, houses an estimated 88,800 residents, or more than a tenth of the total D.C. population.

Among them, 11 percent fall below the federal poverty line. A fifth of all households earn less than $49,999 annually, an economic problem intensified by race. White households, on average, earn $155,497 compared to $66,506 among Black households.

The sliding scale business model is a response to this inequality. Shoppers are told the full price of the food and given the opportunity to pay 25, 50, 75, or 100 percent of that price for a maximum of $30 off their total purchase. Roughly 35 to 40 percent of all the farm’s customers now accept a discount, and that’s twice the number that did during the market’s first pay-what-you-can season in 2021. That year, Common Good City Farm received $255,600 in foundation and government grants, according to Josephine Chu, the farm’s interim executive director.

It has taken a while for the farm’s managers to arrive at this approach. When Common Good first launched the model, James says the math equation at the heart of the farm was changing week to week. At one time, more people were getting food at zero-cost than actually paying for it, forcing the nonprofit to start asking for donations at the register, he says.

“We definitely felt [the impact of inflation], but I had to keep my finger on the pulse of the market and adjust from week to week,” says James.

Although the urban farm grew 3,800 pounds of produce last season, James still had to purchase fresh food from outside vendors to properly stock the stand. It also meant that he never hesitated to accept free produce—even when the calls from his charitable network of farms would take him hours away to pick it up.

“I remember picking up a thousand heads of lettuce, 600 dozen eggs, whatever it takes to keep it going,” adds James. “I care about my community, so I made that drive—[I was] probably a little overcommitted sometimes.”

Last year, Common Good City Farm spent more than $40,000 on food from outside vendors, slightly less than the previous year, says Chu. And some varieties were more available than others on any given week, depending on the season and the purchasing costs.

“Imagine if I had to pay my salary, cover the cost of the assistants and of all the program materials and do a pay-what-you-can market. I’d be filing for bankruptcy within three months,” says James. “We have support from a lot of our community that helps us keep things going.”

‘Pe’ah-What-You-Can’

The operation was part of a larger nonprofit, the Leichtag Foundation, in 2014, before it splintered off to become its own nonprofit two years later. Backed by community grants, it donates three-quarters of its annual harvest directly to a plethora of strategic local partners combating food insecurity. The stand also provides a way for the public to purchase their regeneratively grown produce twice a week.

Kesha Dorsey Spoor, director of philanthropy, program strategy, and communications at Coastal Roots Farm, says the stand had sold more than 57,000 pounds of food this past season alone, with the revenue from those sales contributing about 5 percent of the organization’s overall annual budget.

“We’re not a religious organization, but there are values that inspired the founding of Coastal Roots Farm and the way that we conduct our business,” says Spoor. “For us, it was truly about caring for our neighbors.”

“One [value] is called Pe’ah, which is kind of funny. We teach pe’ah-what-you-can, a similar-sounding word,” Spoor elaborates. “Pe’ah is a Jewish ancient law that instructed to leave the corners and the edges of one’s fields unharvested for those in need.”

Off-site food distribution partners have requested additional food for low-income seniors and Indigenous families in the San Diego area. And Spoor says the rising costs associated with these services, including gas, time, and labor, “impact their ability to source food” since there’s finite funding and financial resources at their disposal.

“Since COVID [began], the demand for and use of our pay-what-you-can model increased,” says Spoor. “We know that our customers and beneficiaries were impacted by inflation, adding additional barriers to meeting basic needs.”

Prior to the pandemic, one in five people in San Diego were food insecure, and that number more than doubled to one in three in the early days of the pandemic. The sliding scale model allowed the farm to adapt during these ups and downs: Spoor says a third of their roughly 37,000 annual customers were paying a discounted rate before COVID hit, and now it’s more than two-thirds. The remaining third are either paying full-price or in some cases donating above the listed value.

“I think the trust is there; people are paying what they can,” says Spoor, “and their needs change from week to week. It’s creating a culture of trust and dignity.”

‘A Fun, Social Experiment’

“The pandemic really made us realize now is the time to do something and kickstart this idea,” says Gerker. “The model we realized would work the best is pay-what-you-can, not a sliding scale, so nobody is turned away from our produce.”

It wasn’t easy though, especially with inflation. “We have seen a large increase in prices for everything that we use on the farm. Shipping prices have also gone up, from seeds to irrigation tape to plastic for our high tunnels,” says Gerker. “We held off for as long as we could, but it made sense to increase prices a bit this year since everything has gone up.”

EarthDance soft-launched the model in July 2021 and learned immediately that many shoppers needed to pay less than the retail value for the vegetables the farm produces on its historic 14-acre property, which is said to be the oldest operational organic farm west of the Mississippi. The 2022 season, which wrapped up in November, saw 36 percent of all customers paying less than the full price.

The majority of EarthDance’s customers are people of color, predominantly over age 60, but the group also includes university students and residents from more affluent areas like St. Louis, about 15 miles away.

“Last year, our donations were higher than our discounts, but this year, it has been the opposite,” says Gerker. “We live in a [place shaped by] food apartheid and want to spread the word about our farm to people in the community, because for a lot of people it’s off the beaten path.”

The Logic Behind Warm-Glow Economics

He found that consumers “recognize some fairness in having a different level of pay or cost” depending on how much income they earn. But he adds that even economically disadvantaged shoppers “prefer to pay something rather than nothing.”

While flexibility is attractive, Just explains that the model needs to be simple since it “becomes somewhat paralyzing” for shoppers to navigate complex discount structures while standing at the checkout counter. He also added that well-heeled, generous customers are also key.

Just refers to the “warm glow,” a theory economists use to describe the emotional reward of giving to others. At the same time, inflation pressures can also put a damper on the conditions that make the warm glow effect work. Just points to the brief rise of pay-what-you-can restaurants in the early 2000s, right before the 2008 recession, for instance.

“If you hit some sort of financial crisis or something that gives people a moral out, then this becomes unsustainable,” according to Just.

So far, that hasn’t happened for any of the three operations in this story. James, Spoor, and Gerker say they have all been met with skepticism, but they’re all still making it work.

“I don’t know that we could keep our doors open if our only source of revenue was the pay-what-you-can farm stand,” says Spoor. “We are very lucky that we’re structured the way that we are, supporting our sustainability [through] other sources of earned revenue from programs and whatnot.”

In D.C., James says their full-price customers want to see the stand continue just as badly as the ones who take the discount, like a gentleman named Gary, who frequents the farm and has been described by James as a chemically dependent, brilliant chess player.

“One day I didn’t see him anymore. Come to find out, Gary had robbed somebody because he was hungry. That story always stuck with me, tugged on my heartstrings. People who don’t have food will do anything to [get it],” says James. “This is a program we designed to make sure people have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, no matter what they’re going through.”

Gerker has seen a similar loyalty arise in her customers. “It has reinstated my faith in humans; people will show up when they need to and use the service if they can’t,” she says. “Given our first two years, I’m very hopeful for the future.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2023/03/01/pay-what-you-can-farm-stands-feed-communities-against-tough-odds/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2022/07/11/the-brooklyn-packers-vision-for-a-community-based-micro-food-hub/ https://civileats.com/2022/07/11/the-brooklyn-packers-vision-for-a-community-based-micro-food-hub/#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:00:33 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47501 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only email newsletter. Become a member today to get the next issue in your inbox. “We’ve never had a space before,” said Ray. “Feeling landed somewhere is a huge relief.” They were three months into leasing the storefront—which is just big enough for […]

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“We’ve never had a space before,” said Ray. “Feeling landed somewhere is a huge relief.”

They were three months into leasing the storefront—which is just big enough for a long table for packing boxes and rows of industrial shelves stacked with honey, maple syrup, and root vegetables still smelling of sweet dirt. The space is mainly a packing and distribution center, but on Thursdays, between 4 and 6 p.m., people can swing by the farm stand, or pick up groceries from their community supported agriculture (CSA), known as Brooklyn Supported Agriculture (BSA), sourced from nearby, small-scale farms.

The Packers’ newly leased space is key to their larger vision—already well underway—of building a local production and distribution network of farms, retailers, nonprofits, and other businesses, largely owned by Black folks and other people of color. The honey, for instance, is sourced from Zach & Zoë, a Black-owned apiary in New Jersey, while the maple syrup comes from Triple J Farm, run by a Black family in New York’s Hudson Valley. The idea is that by networking together in a coordinated system, they will shorten the supply chain and drive down the cost of high-quality local food in Brooklyn.

As Ray put it, they hope to “make these things that are usually a rarefied commodity—like actual vegetables from real people—accessible to everybody.”

Since its founding in 2016, the Packers have been working out of temporary spaces—an old lighting factory, a church, a community center, the dining room of the nearby Haitian restaurant Grandchamps, and the Pfizer Building—to name a few.

They refer to the rental space as “the hub” because it functions as the central spoke in this interconnected system, built on the community relationships they’ve cultivated. “It’s a micro hub, basically. We receive and distribute food from there. We store food there. We have a little market outside sometimes. We interact with the community,” said Steph Wiley, a founding owner of the cooperative and entrepreneur. “It’s a small-scale example of the bigger thing that we want to grow.”

The bulk of the group’s work involves sourcing, packing, and distributing food for mainly Black and Latinx-owned businesses. Their most forward-facing work is BSA, available for pick-up, delivery in Queens and Brooklyn, and with their local partners, such as the community organizing hub Mayday Space and the Black-owned food market Buy Better Foods. They also work in a more behind-the-scenes role, packing and distributing for mutual aid groups such as Bed-Stuy Strong and East Brooklyn Mutual Aid, and nonprofits including Ancient Song Doula Services.

“They are community focused and it’s run by BIPOC individuals,” said Chanel Porchia-Albert, founder and CEO of Ancient Song. “That was really important to me as a woman of color organization whose primary constituents are Black, brown, and Indigenous folks.” Since the height of the pandemic, Ancient Song has partnered with the Packers to host a monthly giveaway of groceries and other essentials. As food prices have spiked, she says this is especially important.

This way of operating is on par with the definition of a food hub. “Food hubs are pretty unique from place to place. But what I usually tell people is that they are a business that aggregates, distributes, sells, and markets local and regional food products,” said Jillian Dy, former deputy director of the Common Market MidAtlantic. That said, Dy notes, “If you’ve seen one food hub, you’ve seen one food hub.”

Mission-driven food hubs prioritize a commitment to values, whether it’s local food procurement, or supporting Black-owned producers and businesses. Unlike other food-distribution models, these operations tend to place sustainability, community impact, and social justice at the center of their work—across the entire production and distribution chain.

For members of the Brooklyn Packers, the fact that they’re building a micro food hub as a worker-owned cooperative is key. It harkens back to the Black-led work toward self-determination and collective care seen in previous generations, and it allows for a model that rejects some of the most problematic elements of food retail. Their success comes from building relationships, within the cooperative and the broader community—the backbone of their hyperlocal food hub.

The challenge with any work related to the food system is the low profit margin paired with physically challenging work. With the worker-owned model, the Brooklyn Packers all have an equal stake in the process and the profits, and they make major decisions through voting and a discussion process. “I think that’s where our expertise actually lies—in how we organize ourselves and how we make decisions as a labor cooperative,” said Ray.

From Responding to the Emergency to ‘Building Something Real’

“We’re still growing and making necessary changes,” said Scott Wiley, Steph’s brother and another worker-owner. “How do we sustain what we want to do?”

During the height of the pandemic, the Packers’ mission was simple: responding to the immediate need, the growing pantry lines of the 1.5 million New Yorkers couldn’t afford food by October 2020. It became evident that the city itself didn’t have the existing local infrastructure or community networks to respond to the food crisis effectively, so it relied heavily on local groups, like the Brooklyn Packers, to fill in the gaps.

The Packers rapidly scaled up their operation, hiring employees for the first time, under a contract with the Corbin Hill Food Project to deliver emergency food boxes under the city-funded program, COVID-19 Emergency Food Distribution (GetFoodNYC), which ran from the spring of 2020 to the fall of 2021. “At its peak, in April of 2020, the program provided 1 million home-delivered meals a day to New Yorkers,” said a representative from the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy in an email.

They put their longer-term vision on hold to respond to the crisis. And they quickly learned how to do mass distributions of food. They moved into a lighting warehouse during this period. Shawn Santana, one of the group’s co-founders, who had never worked as a trucker prior, learned how to drive a refrigerated truck that contained 12 pallets of food, navigating the often-crowded Brooklyn streets.

“We were all essentially working on quicksand all the time. In and out,” said Ray. They typically worked six days a week, while continuing to run the BSA alongside the emergency distribution. “I would go home after working around the clock and go sit in the bathtub at like 6 p.m. and just fall asleep.”

The Packers’ strengths as a food distribution cooperative, embedded in local communities and equipped to quickly move food about the city, made the group uniquely poised to help. This included helping scale up the operations of volunteer-based mutual aid groups, which often began by making individual grocery runs.

Sandrine Etienne is among the mutual aid volunteers who worked alongside the Brooklyn Packers with East Brooklyn Mutual Aid (EBMA). As a medical social worker, with patients in Brownsville and East New York, Brooklyn, she witnessed the acute food insecurity her clients—many who already were suffering from diet-related illness—were facing during the pandemic. After observing how much neighbors enjoyed produce given away by the Packers, Etienne advocated for EBMA to switch to routinely providing fresh produce.

“I have to educate my clients all the time about foods that are high in sodium, like canned stuff. It just seemed wrong to be advocating for this group [that was] just giving out canned stuff,” said Etienne.

Soon the Brooklyn Packers started hiring and training some of the EBMA volunteers to work with them on large-scale packs. Sally Weathers, a current worker-owner in the cooperative, started off as an EBMA volunteer.

Weathers didn’t know who they were, but one day someone from Brooklyn Packers asked if she could stay after she was done with her pack. “I ended up staying for like four hours, trying to keep up because it was really fast. You have to learn how to do that,” she said. “And then, at the end of the day, I found out that everyone else on the line was getting paid and it was their actual job.” She was hired that week.

Like Weathers, Ray started working with the Packers as a temporary employee. “One thing that did get me while working with mutual aid groups is this reliance on volunteers to do a lot of labor,” he observed. This is where the Brooklyn Packers differ from volunteer-based mutual aid groups. While driven by similar principles of food justice, their goal is to fairly pay all of their worker-owners, building long-term good jobs. “I think it’s important that we’re organized as a labor cooperative, as opposed to a mutual aid group,” said Ray.

Now, as the cooperative pivots away from emergency food distribution work, the members see the new hub as an important step in building a food system with deep-rooted longevity—a more permanent space and a reflection of the larger system in the works. As a cooperative, they’ll be making these financial decisions collectively, with a shared goal in mind: “Instead of looking for these sources of emergency funding, what we’re trying to do is build something real,” said Ray.

City Funding In Crisis

The city said the need has dropped, however. “As the city continued into recovery, demand for this program rapidly decreased,” said the representative from the mayor’s office.

Tahirah Cook, policy advisor and board member of Just Food, is concerned about the larger trend. Cook used to manage funds from the N.Y. State Department of Agriculture and Markets (NYSDAM) and was involved with the state’s initiative to fund a food hub in Central Brooklyn. As part of that initiative, Restoration Corporation completed a feasibility study that determined a hub-and-spoke-model, with smaller “spokes,” or micro-hubs in key neighborhoods, would be best for the community.

During the pandemic, she says many of the community groups that had been funded to create alternative food economies, like CSAs and farm stands, transitioned to emergency food distribution, and more funding was allocated to mutual aid and non-food groups to double down on the emergency food efforts. The NYSDAM office in NYC shifted from prioritizing sustainable food systems work to emergency food efforts.

“We started seeing all of this [funding]—federal, private, state, city—really start pumping into these emergency food programs,” said Cook. “It wasn’t surprising to me that funding ran out, but also that a lot of organizations were burned by it, because there was so much money and so many people were going after it.”

Yet this rapid influx of funds wasn’t designed to last. Although the Brooklyn Packers is distinct from the mutual aid groups, Cook said they also face the same questions about whether and how to carry on the work that started in an emergency, now that funding has dried up: “What are you going back to? Are you basically creating [a new] organization?” asked Cook.

She points to a lack of strategy and sustainable investments in long-term solutions to food insecurity that has put many people and projects back at square one.

“The [food bank] line is not going to get shorter without better access to health insurance, access to proper wages, jobs, et cetera,” she said. “What didn’t happen was a strategic conversation between the state and the city and the private funders to say, ‘Hey, once the state funding dries up, we’ll kick in the city funding in a way that’s more strategic. What happened was all the funding [left] at once.”

The Brooklyn Packers see this experience as a lesson. “[Programs] oriented around emergencies tend to wither away, and the infrastructure that goes along with them can’t be supported,” said Ray. “So, we’ve learned a lot.” Responding to the crisis not only changed the structure of the work, but prohibited them from building and capitalizing on the partnerships they depend on to do the work sustainably. Finding a permanent space in Bed-Stuy, where they started, has brought them back full circle.

A Cooperative Food Hub That Reflects the Community

“When they drop off the food, it’s like, ‘Oh, hey, what’s up? How are you? How are your children?’ Like that kind of a thing,” said Albert, referring to the monthly food and essentials giveaway at Ancient Song.

As the Brooklyn Packers think through their next steps, they continue to return to an idea that’s long been there: building upon their relationships to form a cooperative, community-based micro food hub, as part of a regional distribution network.

As detailed in a report by Dara Cooper, a national organizer and co-founder of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, and the Center for Social Inclusion, Black communities have built regional food hubs and cooperatives for decades—often as a means of “countering dispossession, building power, reclaiming culture, improving health conditions, growing economic opportunities, and dreaming and reclaiming alternate realities.”

Recently, the cooperative has decided to invest more of their profits back into their business, a risk they’ve taken on collectively with the hope that it will pay off.

“We are the masters of our own fate in this small realm. We bought a new website, we got this space, and we got a big fridge,” said Ray. “That probably means we’re going to be in a tight spot [financially]. But we have something we all decided on together.” The group has also put in work to make the food it distributes available through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the near future, which should make its programs even more accessible to low-income New Yorkers.

Over the years, they’ve come to trust each other, growing more confident in their individual strengths and roles, enough to make smaller decisions on their own. For instance, Raina Kennedy, a board member of and organizer for the Central Brooklyn Food Cooperative and recent graduate of the NYU Food Studies program, handles sourcing. The group trusts her decisions about what specific produce to buy each week, and when it comes to larger decisions—such as whether or not to add a new farm to the network—she brings it to the group. So far, she has found this way of working to be dignifying.

Like Kennedy, each member-owner has an operational niche: Ray has carved out a role handling data work and business development, building on his work co-founding a labor union for musicians. Santana, a former restaurant owner and caterer, handles transportation. Steph Wiley spearheads partnerships and business development. His brother Scott, also an entrepreneur, heads up the warehouse operations.

In the coming months, the group intends to add more farms and producers to its CSA program. Just last month, for instance, it added Star Route Farm, which donates the vast majority of its produce to mutual aid and emergency relief. At the same time, it is in active conversation about what a larger, regional food distribution network could look like.

In collaboration with Sabrina Brockman, the owner of Grandchamps restaurant, the Packers applied for a city agency grant that would support large-scale procurement and food distribution in the city. Though they didn’t receive the grant, Brockman is focused on ways to work more intentionally with them to scale the work.

“How do we collectively do things better?” she asks both of herself, and of the food landscape. “This [is a] hyperlocal model that supports the people who live in the area. [How do we bring] local economies closer together and make them more supportive to each other? That system that’s being created needs to be protected.”

In this way, the Brooklyn Packers are connecting parts of a food chain that already exists but has operated in a scattered, less operationalized form. The general principle is “allowing other people and groups to do what they do best to help us do what we do best,” said Wiley. But it won’t happen overnight. “We are trying to change the food system. And it’s slow work.”

When it comes down to it, human relationships take time. “Communication. That’s what people don’t have time for,” said Brockman. Focusing on building better relationships with the resources available, she believes, can create stability in the Brooklyn supply chain.

“This is an ecosystem of people, and [that] requires working slowly,” said Ray. “But it’s much more gratifying, and I think it holds strong roots in the future.”

The post Inside the Brooklyn Packers’ Vision for a Community-Based Micro Food Hub appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/07/11/the-brooklyn-packers-vision-for-a-community-based-micro-food-hub/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2022/06/28/buy-nothing-groups-facebook-food-distribution-networks-food-pantry-hunger-san-francisco/ Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:00:33 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47398 “For my parents, it’s very helpful because they see the support of the members of our community,” Koudriashova said. “They have nothing, they don’t have money, and we are sharing the same budget for five people.” If Koudriashova can’t make a pickup, which typically takes place on Saturdays, she will likely receive a text message […]

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Yulia Koudriashova is a single mom and teacher living with her two daughters in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood. Her parents moved in with them in March when they were evacuated from Kiev after Russia invaded Ukraine. With Koudriashova’s salary as the household’s only source of income, the family has come to rely on the boxes of food they pick up nearly every week from a neighbor’s garage.

“For my parents, it’s very helpful because they see the support of the members of our community,” Koudriashova said. “They have nothing, they don’t have money, and we are sharing the same budget for five people.”

If Koudriashova can’t make a pickup, which typically takes place on Saturdays, she will likely receive a text message from host Priscilla “Cilla” Lee to make alternative arrangements. For the last 15 months, Lee has hosted a weekly food pantry out of her garage for the community of people she connects with through the online platform Buy Nothing. The neighbors share everything from food to clothing and furniture.

Lee is the administrator for the official Outer Richmond Buy Nothing group, which has more than 700 members on Facebook, and she recently launched an unofficial Buy Nothing sister group that also includes a nearby neighborhood to accommodate residents who wanted to participate. Within a month, it had 350 members, and now it’s close to 500.

Koudriashova estimates that the boxes save her at least $50 on groceries; without Lee’s food pantry, Koudriashova would have to visit a food bank, which she says would be much less convenient and welcoming.

Lee envisions her hyperlocal food pantry as a feel-good familial event, where members can meet their neighbors and build community. Members must RSVP to visit the food pantry to ensure Lee has enough food, but she has noticed that spaces are filling up faster these days. At a time when inflation has skyrocketed across the country, making everything from groceries to clothing and services more expensive, members of the group view the food pantry as a valuable resource that helps feed their families while preventing food from going to waste.

Grocery prices have soared nearly 12 percent in the last year, the largest increase since 1979. At the same time, 1 in 6 adults turned to charitable food in the previous 12 months, according to a December 2021 Urban Institute survey. Although that’s a 10 percent decline from 2020, the rate is still higher than before the pandemic.

If it weren’t for Lee’s food pantry, Koudriashova says she would probably have to visit a food bank, which she said would be much less convenient and welcoming. She estimates that each week, the boxes save her family at least $50 that she can use for children’s activities or other expenses. “That’s why it’s very important,” she said, “Now prices are so high in the shops, so I need to pay much more [for groceries] than before.”

On a recent Saturday, a Buy Nothing member with a flower-decorated van pulled up in front of Lee’s house loaded with fresh food from the Second Harvest food bank; Lee coordinates volunteers through her community to pick up the food at various food drives if she can’t do it herself. Perishable items like meat are transported in cooler bags before they’re placed in ice chests. For food safety reasons, Lee said she typically distributes food within an hour of its arrival.

Carr and I were interested in asking: What does an abolitionist approach to food systems change sound and look like? That op-ed followed only one line of thinking, but for many others across the food system, applying abolitionist politics to the food world is a welcome challenge and necessary endeavor for thinking more holistically about what we’re transforming and how we should go about doing it.

For this conversation, I invited five inspiring people to talk with me about food in far more expansive ways than its biological function. Beatriz Beckford is an artist, educator, and strategist with over 20 years experience in community organizing. Kanav Kathuria is a co-founder and collective member of the Maryland Food and Prison Abolition Project. Navina Khanna is executive director of the HEAL Food Alliance. Joshua Sbicca is associate professor of sociology and director of the Prison Agriculture Lab at Colorado State University. And Randolph Carr joined us in this conversation.

From interrogating how policing functions to how people’s consumption is surveilled to what having incarcerated loved ones teaches us about redefining relationships, we reflected on what carcerality and abolition teach us about how to liberate the food system and ourselves.

What brought you to thinking about carcerality, abolition, and food?

Kanav Kathuria: The Maryland Food and Prison Abolition Project is a Baltimore-based collective working to change food conditions in prisons, really to explore the use of food as a tool of resistance. We recently published our capstone report on the Maryland Correctional food system, speaking to how food on the inside is a form of control, violence, punishment, a source of profit for private food service corporations, and ultimately a means of premature death with impacts that last long after folks are released. And then we also speak to the intersections between food apartheid in Baltimore, and neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration. Ultimately, our work is centered around positioning food sovereignty as an abolitionist project.

Navina Khanna: Health, Environment, Agriculture and Labor (HEAL) Food Alliance is an alliance of about 35 organizations that are working together to transform food and farm systems. What that really means is working towards our collective liberation. Food systems and the prison industrial complex intersect in a lot of ways. But the fundamental place we’re coming from is that our work for transformation and collective liberation is about reclaiming right relationships between people, and between us and the planet. [We look at] the prison industrial complex, incarceration, and criminalization of people who work in food and agriculture, and all of that is tied to the dehumanization of ourselves, of people, of communities.

Joshua Sbicca: I come into this work from my work with Planting Justice, where I was a founding board member who served from 2009 to 2014. Planting Justice, like other similar organizations, was connecting economic, racial, food, and restorative justice frameworks, and mutual aid work alongside formerly incarcerated people to things like urban food system development and organizing. And this work started to get me to think about some connections between food and the prison industrial complex, and specifically how people were intervening in mass incarceration.

It led me to ask more critical questions. For instance: What if agriculture in prisons is actually a much more oppressive practice and institution [than people realize]? About two years ago, I started the Prison Agriculture Lab alongside Carrie Chennault, who is the co-director. This is a collaborative space for inquiry and action that focuses on agricultural practices within the criminal punishment system. Our research and advocacy focus on place, power, inequality, and resistance. We’re working to build out a map of U.S. prisons that have agricultural practices, as well as begin to tell a more critical story about what agriculture looks like in prisons and how it can be used as a site for imagining abolition and food justice.

When you say carcerality in your work, what are you referring to?

Sbicca: I see carcerality as both a material system and an ideology of social control. And so, while carcerality obviously operates through prisons and policing, it’s also operating through discipline and surveillance specifically aimed at racialized, classed, and gendered groups. It’s sort of this endemic part of the criminal punishment system, but it can take place all over, including in food systems. And it generally shores up profit and power over people.

Randolph Carr: For me, it’s a response to people and ideas that are considered excess—[people] who we don’t have actual responses to, who we don’t actually have the care for, the love for. Our response is to cage them, to hold them, and like Josh said, to control them. I’m [interested in] talking about the lived reality of carcerality. The actual, everyday realities of it. But I do think it is important that we’re precise in terms of defining things.

Kathuria: I completely agree with both Joshua’s and Randolph’s framing. The only thing I would add is Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s framing of carceral geographies, tying it to place as well as to a global scale. Beyond just the physical institutions, [I’m interested in] looking at spaces of unfreedom in whatever shape or form they take across the world. I think of carcerality as an imperial and neocolonial project.

Khanna: I really see it as a culture of fear that we live in together. The idea of private property ownership [is central], and we’re not living in a culture of care where we are making sure that everybody’s needs are met, and everyone is nourished in different ways. Instead, there’s some material thing to be protected over the lives of humans and our planet.

Beatriz Beckford: The only thing I would add is we’re responding to the ways in which white supremacy [sends] tentacles into our lives and seeks to subjugate our bodies, particularly Black bodies. Carcerality is a tentacle of white supremacy that seeks to subjugate and subaltern Black people. Whether within the food system or outside of it, we are seeking to create the beloved [community], to create the type of world and societies where [no] Black bodies, no bodies, are disposable or rendered subaltern. We are resisting carcerality, and we’re resisting white supremacy. The two are intertwined and deeply entangled.

How did you come to abolition as a way of thinking through your work with food?

Carr: A big part of how I understand that world is it’s where I grew up. I come from a family where my cousins’ [father] and my sister’s father were locked up when I was born. My father was locked up when I was five and remains locked up. And so when we talk about abolition, it’s first from a place of intimacy; the people I know and love the most have experienced for most of their lives or throughout their lives, some form of incarceration. A number of people in my family have also been deported. My most intimate moments, my upbringing, was defined by different aspects of the carceral system—prisons, policing, surveillance.

I gained a more precise understanding of how power works through my organizing, and through a series of happy accidents. In 2010, during my first year in college, I met a woman, Susan Burton, who was from my hometown, Los Angeles. And she started A New Way of Life Reentry, an organization around women in [the] Watts [neighbornood]. She was also part of a broader, California-based coalition of formerly incarcerated people, All of Us or None. She gave me a book called The New Jim Crow. From there, I started running with it.

I joined student organizations that were challenging the presence of police on campus, and that grew into a deeper understanding of how police show up in communities. I met Jalal Sabur, who was bringing some surplus vegetables to Cop Watch meetings from Victory Bus Project [which brought children to see their parents in prison and fed them at the same time]. He asked me: “You know what you’re fighting against, but do you know what you’re fighting for?” And he introduced me to a world of farmers, to this conference called Black Farmers and Urban Growers. That’s where I met Beatriz. He connected me to good people upstate, and I ran into the National Black Food and Justice Alliance.

Kathuria: I came to abolition as a form of uncovering or reclaiming imagination in a sense. I was searching for answers. I grew up in India, the grandson of migrants [who left] around the time of the partition of Pakistan and India. And [I grew up] with the understanding that prisons, policing, and courts have never been the answer. It was just so blatantly visible all around us there. In coming [to the U.S.], especially to Baltimore, I found that for the answers I was seeking and the types of worlds I was looking to create, revolutionary abolitionist language really led the way. I found light in it. I found hope. I found parts of myself that I had been suppressing for a long time, as a lot of immigrants are taught to do in this country.

Beckford: I grew up first-generation with parents who immigrated here from the Caribbean, and from the minute they landed on this land, they were criminalized. I watched uncles, my father, parents, people who were caregivers, whisked away into prisons and jails. When I became a teenager, I experienced a sexual assault during a “routine traffic stop” by a police officer. And so being able to position a body of work and a range of relationships, kinship bonds, was ultimately my way to heal.

There are a whole host of ways in which we can define abolition, but ultimately, it is the deconstruction of those systems by way of our relationships, by way of building the beloved. And we do that by building deep, deep bonds with each other through our personal narratives and stories. We’re always going to be in tension with the state. We’re always going to be fighting for the abolition of [carceral] systems, and the harms that are evoked in us by the state. But we do that by way of relationships.

And so carcerality has also ultimately been the way in which I have sought healing. And I come in as an organizer who believes that those loved ones who have been affected are best positioned to come up with the solutions and strategies to evoke change. And anybody else in the conversation is there to support and should not be leading.

Khanna: Like Kanav, I grew up in the U.S. and in India, and really started my adulthood in the U.S. right around September 11th. It’s always been so clear that the systems were not designed for Black or brown people. I started seeing people who look like me, my family members, surveilled and stopped all the time while traveling. And then, of course, I met and fell in love with folks who had had family members incarcerated, or who had been incarcerated, or who were undocumented and living in fear because of the formation of ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], which came very shortly after 9/11.

Abolition as a framework is a newer articulation for me. But it has always been clear that the system throws people away and has always worked against us and our people. The only way to the other side of that is by destroying this entire system and building something new.

What Beatriz was saying around these kinship connections and relations has me thinking a lot about abolition as a politics of scale. At what scales do we practice abolition? We talk about the destruction of these harmful systems [at a large scale], which I think is really important, but, what does your daily abolition practice look like?

Beckford: You’re absolutely right. So much of abolitionists’ conversations are system-wide. But the practices are actually more ritualistic, more ancestral. My abuelita, while on food stamps—despite having sons and daughters ripped from her and pushed into the prison system—always maintained her rose bushes. And she built her own grape arbor because she wanted to make her own wine—bottles of cojito—every holiday. And my grandmother, on my Jamaican side, always started seedlings and gave them to her children to have in the homes—everything from Scotch bonnets, to callaloo grown in the projects of Brownsville. And my dad, who has been clean and sober for 11 years now, moved back to Jamaica to farm as a way of continuing the legacy of my grandparents.

I think about it in relation to the way that I raise my children, and the way that I build chosen family. And the decisions that I make around where I shop and how I support my kin when they need me. Those are the ways we embody abolition in our everyday lives. And I think it is about really sitting with the materiality of the things that intersect in our lives. And how just by interrogating those things, we are pushing against harmful systems broadly, even beyond the food system.

Carr: I’m thinking about my own position as a man and about carcerality as not just a system of white supremacy and capitalism, but patriarchy, too. [This is] one of the spaces of conflict that I’ve been called into several times, to support other men who are [working through] patriarchy. The best way to call someone in—and not call them out—is to share a meal. And to bring up the most harsh but loving criticism while handing them a plate, by taking care of them, by showing part of what it means to be in community.

For me, [abolition is] really about Black folks fighting for our freedoms in the context of the U.S. That is the how that philosophy emerges—from enslaved Africans. And recognizing the ways they built intimacy, bonds, relationships, and care, but also the way they turned that indignation into something consequential.

Sbicca: I’ve been thinking a lot about my practice in the context of the university system. Universities are deeply entangled in the prison industrial complex, in militarism, in white supremacy, in many of the oppressions that we’ve been identifying.

On a practical level, universities have investments in so many carceral practices and institutions, and they support carceral systems through their purchasing practices. If we take food, I’ve been living in Florida for the past year [during sabbatical], and I’ve been supporting some of the work of a group of college students and community members working to get the University of Florida to change their purchasing practices away from corporations and companies that contribute to the prison system, either in using labor or selling food to prisons.

I have the mindset if we can’t change the places where we work, it’s going to be really difficult to change these other practices. I’m inspired by the work of folks doing Cops Off Campus. I think this is a great example of how people are seeing how carcerality functions to police places of learning, and how that gets in the way of actually learning.

What piece of advice or encouragement would you give to someone who is trying to connect abolition to food?

Khanna: I loved the last question, so I will answer both. It made me think of that beautiful quote from Camus: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of liberation.” And I was thinking about the places where I find the most freedom.

One of them is being in the space where we are constantly willing to learn and be in authentic conversation with each other. To learn the ways that our minds have been colonized. To unlearn that, and to root into how we are in active practice with each other in our workplaces. How are we in active practice with each other in our families around what you called the cops in their minds, right? How do we just break that up? It’s one piece of it.

A part of that is always recognizing where I have power to confront something. And being willing to be a part of nonviolent direct action that confronts systems as they are and use the position and privilege I have to take risks that a lot of other folks can’t take.

Carr: A bit of advice is to find community and others who wish to organize, who want to make change and make solutions. There’s always a solution or alternative to combat the prevailing ideology, which is that there is no alternative. And if we find the parallels [across history and experience], we can build alternatives. Keep loving, keep living.

Beckford: There’s something about doing your work, right? Doing the work on yourself, and not in the traditional sense. Yes, go and get therapy, talk to your people, and do the lineage stuff, but also [do] the work of giving yourself permission to be fully in this work. To be wayward, to embody fugitivity.

And so I would suggest people do that in creating spaciousness for yourself to do what Randolph just lifted up so beautifully—the right to live, to love, to connect, to research, to search, with a sort of fanaticism. We always come out different on the other side. And the movements we touch, the lives we connect with, always come out different on the other side.

Kathuria: I’m really grateful for these answers. In thinking of practice, and in thinking of, as Joy James puts it, abolition as a plurality, one form comes through restorative practices and restorative justice, and [thinking about] what it really means to address all relationships in life—including our relationships with ourselves—from a restorative mindset, especially in conflict.

I’m also thinking of abolition as a creative practice. Capitalism has divorced and alienated us from our own creativity, capabilities, and relationships to food and land. And creative forms include grounding, returning home to the self. I’ve been lighting palo santo this whole time. And that, to me, is a way of coming home to the self and being rooted.

But also the act of growing food. Capitalism has divorced us from producing our means of sustenance. What does that look like? For that I give thanks to Black Yield Institute in Baltimore. Another hopeful practice rooted to food is cooking for my mother, who has a lot of health-related issues that are rooted in colonialism, in her journey to the U.S. as an immigrant. It is not an uncommon phenomenon for South Asian women over a certain age. For me, as folks have already lifted up, abolition is a practice that is rooted in love in all of its forms.

Sbicca: The only thing that I would add is to remain hopeful. One thing that I’ve learned from Mariame Kaba, for example, is that hope is a discipline and it requires energy and effort to remain hopeful in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. I have two young children, and I cook breakfast every morning for them, and lots of dinners. It’s become a space to start having conversations about the complexities of the world and the things that they’re experiencing and learning or mis-learning. I’ve been seeing that as a space to give in to love. It’s this idea of growing where you’re planted. So find those spaces where you’re embedded and can enact abolitionist nows and abolitionist futures.

Reese: I would give someone the advice to sit with the contradictions of the world that we want versus the world that we have. That space between those—that’s where the process is. But until we get there—and we might not ever see it in our lifetimes—we just have to embrace the contradictions.

Thanks, y’all. This was fun.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/07/02/op-ed-the-revolutionary-power-of-food/ https://civileats.com/2021/07/02/op-ed-the-revolutionary-power-of-food/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2021 08:00:05 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=42371 As we mark the Fourth of July—following our first-ever national recognition of Juneteenth as a “second Independence Day”—it’s worth recognizing the power of food to ignite movements for justice and change around the world, and throughout history. The Abolition Movement in England The group developed the Free Produce Movement as a way to pressure Parliament […]

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In my many years of organizing community kitchens, I have seen how food—and organizing to feed people in need—can create profound benefits in even the poorest communities, uniting, organizing and instigating change from the bottom up. And through a review of history, I have also repeatedly encountered the ways food sits at the center of revolutionary movements.

As we mark the Fourth of July—following our first-ever national recognition of Juneteenth as a “second Independence Day”—it’s worth recognizing the power of food to ignite movements for justice and change around the world, and throughout history.

The Abolition Movement in England

In the late 1700s, Thomas Clarkston saw the light of abolition while preparing an essay at Cambridge University arguing against the slave trade. With a young person’s zeal, he set out to be part of the abolition movement, distributing thousands of copies on his travels throughout England, and became a founding member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, whose members would actively work to get Parliament to end the slave trade.

The group developed the Free Produce Movement as a way to pressure Parliament to act. Urging consumers not to purchase goods made with slave labor—particularly sugar, the widely popular import that had become a staple in almost every British household—Clarkston’s group created the first modern boycott. Although the boycott was not financially crippling in and of itself, it served a higher purpose in revealing the power of poor people’s commerce, when combined and withheld, as well as the fast growing dedication of women to be involved in political action. Through this effort, and years of hard work, in 1807, England became the first European power to abolish slavery.

Mahatma Gandhi’s India

In the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi used the same tactic to help liberate India from generations of English colonial rule. The key to British rule, Gandhi knew, was to exploit divisions of creed, caste, and community to keep Indians divided and fighting each other, and keep them under British control.

Gandhi, in seeking something to unite all Indians, found it—in salt. The British had made it illegal for Indian people to produce or sell salt; instead, they were forced to buy it from the British.

Gandhi challenged the people of a divided India to see their shared subjugation through salt, and at the end of his famous March to the Sea in 1930, he announced his intention to challenge that policy with his “Salt Satyagraha.” Gandhi, like the British abolitionists before him, used the power of food to unify, and everyday commerce to amplify that unity. It would take another 17 years for Indians to gain independence, but it was simple salt that finally united the nation’s diverse population behind the cause.

Indigenous Sovereignty in the Early Americas

In the Americas, food has a long history of being used to unite subjugated peoples. In 1540, when the Spanish colonizer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado ventured north out of modern day Mexico in search of Cibola, the fabled golden city, he encountered the diverse pueblo communities of the Southwest. Over the next 100 years, Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and settlers enslaved natives, introduced diseases and weapons, and relentlessly punished those who practiced ancient faith traditions.

When Po’pay, a leader from the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, was arrested and publicly whipped in the plaza of Santa Fe, he swore to drive the Spanish out. For five years, Po’pay built alliances amongst diverse, and often hostile, pueblo communities throughout the region. When the final stages of the uprising were being planned, he devised an ingenious use of a staple food to coordinate the attack.

Along with the “three sisters” of corn, beans and squash, maguey—a relative of the agave plant—has been a mainstay of the Indigenous diet for centuries, used as nourishment and medicine, its fibers woven to make paper, clothing, and rope.

To insure that they acted simultaneously, Po’pay sent runners to all the pueblos with a knotted cord of maguey, with instructions to untie a knot every day. The day the last knot was undone was the day to attack the colonizers.

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 succeeded in uniting the pueblos and expelling the Spanish for 12 years. Although the Spanish returned with a fury, and brutally re-conquered the region, many of the faith traditions that Po’pay fought to preserve remain defiantly intact to this day.

The U.S. Food Justice Movement

Almost 300 years later, food would again unite revolutionaries in the American West, drawn together by their Spanish roots and a shared history of abuse and lack of basic human rights in their places of employment.

In 1965—just as it is today—most Americans enjoyed cheap, plentiful food, while ignoring the plight of the migrants who planted, picked, and packed it. Landowners pitted migrant workers against one another, hiring Mexican and Filipino workers as strikebreakers when their competing unions stopped work.

When Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led Filipino workers out on strike against Coachella Valley growers, he appealed to César Chávez—who led the competing National Farm Workers Association—to not only not help break the strike, but to join them and form a united front to demand better wages and basic human rights.

The first-of-its-kind alliance led to the creation of the United Farm Workers (UFW); together, through the Delano Grape Boycott, they convinced thousands of consumers to stop buying grapes and brought the plight of migrant workers to the center stage of American life and politics. These two leaders, along with the indomitable Dolores Huerta, inspired their members to endure long strikes against recalcitrant grape-growing landowners who were aligned with racist law enforcement agencies and unsympathetic elected leaders like then Governor Ronald Reagan.

At around the same time, the Black Panther Party launched their Free Breakfast Program, which operated in 45 communities across the U.S. This inventive program used breakfast to challenge deeply rooted, racist tropes while demonstrating the impact that a nutritious meal could have on a child’s ability to learn. Their work laid the groundwork for the expansion of federal school-based meal programs, as well as the need for more community growing spaces in urban America.

The Black Panthers and the UFW also often worked in coalition, supporting one another’s efforts. And just like in England, India, and Indigenous America, they harnessed the symbolic and economic power of food to create resilient and powerful alliances.

All these lessons have driven my work with D.C. Central Kitchen, L.A. Kitchen, the Campus Kitchens Project, and more. Although they’re often seen as simply using surplus food to train undervalued people for jobs, the real revolution has been in bringing culinary students, volunteers, politicians, and funders around to the same side of the table, working side by side as equal and essential members of a shared community.

While my journey of learning about the role food has played in revolutionary movements continues, it also points to another, urgent opportunity to unite groups who are divided and pitted against one another.

On a daily basis, thousands of members of the U.S. food movement—food justice, anti-hunger, workers rights, mutual aid and environmental groups—compete with each other for proverbial scraps from the table of corporate and philanthropic America. They meet at annual forums, or in online echo chambers to talk endlessly about “taking back the food system.”

They fight for funds to continue their mission, each working in their own silo, on their own issue, with their own strategy. Each one is talking about food, versus using food to create an inter-generational political alliance with food as its unifying ingredient, powered by the strength of millions of voters with a powerful hunger for change.

Food has that power. And these divergent movements need to realize that there is only one power that can wrest control of the food system away from the powerful companies, their lobbyists and the elected leaders they’ve placed in D.C. specifically to safeguard their profits: political power. And the only way to gain that power is to unite generations of voters in common cause.

As we have seen so many times before, food can be that unifying force.

This must begin at the local level, not with Facebook likes or indignant tweets, but with votes. There should not be an election anywhere where voters don’t demand, and candidates don’t provide, details about their food policies.

Where do they stand on universal, free school meals? How will they nourish millions of aging Americans? How will they support the growth of cottage chefs and street vendors movements? How will they work to open grocery stores in every corner of the town, city, or state? How will they enact living wage legislation? How will they push for environmental sustainability throughout the farm system? How will they support small farmers, create a pathway to citizenship for migrant farmworkers and provide childcare for foodservice workers? How will they help confront chronic diet-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, and challenge food companies to produce healthier foods and—more importantly—to stop flooding the market with highly-processed, addictive ones?

These are not marginal issues; they are central to the lives and livelihoods of all Americans. And an inter-generational army of diverse voters now cares deeply about them. All we need is a united effort to channel that energy and idealism, and those votes, into a new food movement; one bent on electing a new generation of leaders, and empowering a new generation of consumers to make the food system work for us—not the other way around.

Let’s use food to transform the food system to put public health above corporate wealth, and toward greater justice, equality, opportunity, and healthy, affordable food for all.

There’s room for millions at that revolutionary table.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/07/02/op-ed-the-revolutionary-power-of-food/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2021/05/27/how-a-year-of-mutual-aid-fed-minneapolis/ Thu, 27 May 2021 08:00:57 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=41825 This story was produced in partnership with Eater. People took numbers and those numbers were called when it was their turn to come up to the tables and take what they needed. Cars lined the streets as parents with children in tow waited their turns. It was loud; our “customers” spoke mainly Spanish, Oromo, and […]

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This story was produced in partnership with Eater.

I arrived in Minneapolis in July of 2020 to find buildings turned to rubble, people grieving, and a community rebuilding. I arrived for my first volunteer shift at Phillips Community Free Store, which was being run out of the Grease Pit Bike shop in South Minneapolis, to find tables lined up outside, pop-up tents shading all manner of produce and household items, and a mountain of diapers that were ready to be given away.

People took numbers and those numbers were called when it was their turn to come up to the tables and take what they needed. Cars lined the streets as parents with children in tow waited their turns. It was loud; our “customers” spoke mainly Spanish, Oromo, and Somali and younger members of the families would often translate their words into English.

Those first few months, I learned a lot about what people look for and how they cook their food. I convinced Latinx families that yellow and green summer squash are virtually the same and that both can be tasty. And I watched the way that scarcity can wreak havoc and stoke fear in a community and can be a divisive tool that separates us from one another. We all continued to show up and we grew together and learned not only how to work with each other but also what it means to be in community together.

The free store was just one project in a larger constellation of mutual aid projects that expanded or took root in Minneapolis in 2020. In a city where the history of redlining and the legacy of racism dates back to the early 1900s, the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer spurred a string of protests that lasted all summer—the nation’s second-largest uprising, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The response also resulted in the largest National Guard deployment since World War II and over $500 million in property damage. Target and Cub foods—the largest suppliers for groceries in the area—were both damaged and the community of South Minneapolis was left with very few options for accessing food.

South Minneapolis is full of community gardens, tiny libraries, and neighbors who know one another. It’s a melting pot for First Peoples, East African refugees, African Americans, and Latinx, Hmong, Vietnamese, and white people living at various intersections of marginalization. Before the pandemic, the neighborhood was already home to a number of established mutual aid groups, including Southside Food Share, which began feeding residents at an encampment called the Wall of Forgotten Natives in 2018, and Sisters Camelot, which has been giving out free organic food twice a week for the past 20 years. But after the uprisings, many community members leaped into action to help meet the increasing needs of the community. Now, a year after the uprisings, rates of food insecurity in the Twin Cities have remained high and many mutual aid projects are finding ways to continue their work.

Direct Action

Mutual aid at its essence gives communities the opportunity to self-determine and organize in the ways that allow everyone to live a dignified life. Unlike charity, which tends to involve a one-way dynamic—as organizations enter neighborhoods dictating their own agendas, mutual aid is reciprocal, inherently political, self-organized, and egalitarian. It often involves direct action and is rooted in a desire for social transformation. Whether it involves the distribution of seeds and plants, groceries, or medical supplies, mutual aid also takes place outside of systems of governance that silence the marginalized, and it is based on the understanding that communities have the power to dictate the world they want to live in.

At the Phillips Community Free Store, which is run by a collective, we see these principles play out every day. Community members can access fresh food from local farms, food staples like rice and sugar, and essential household items. Alex Gomez, who has been involved from the beginning, told me that the first days after the George Floyd uprising were marked by a collective acknowledgement of the need. “There were people driving around who would notice the tables of food and goods and stop on the side of the road and unload hundreds of dollars [worth] of items from their car for us,” said Gomez.

In its first year, the Phillips Free Store managed to raise over $100,000 to buy food and other costly items such as diapers and menstrual supplies, through a combination of individual donors and fundraisers. The group maintains community accountability by being wholly transparent about their finances through a public Google doc linked to their Instagram account—an important choice considering the public criticism of how some groups that responded to the uprisings handled a large influx of donations.

The free store has used the uprisings as an opportunity to connect community members to local farmers. We purchased items such as eggs directly from local farms, received donations of meat from farms, and, through the LEAFF Program run by the Good Acre, received over 80 cases of free local produce a week from BIPOC farmers. The store has also moved its operations to a local church and scaled down from its original five-day- a-week schedule to just one day a week.

The store provided home delivery to 174 families over the winter and currently has a waiting list of over 40 people, but it now hopes to continue expanding the service. We are also forming new relationships with more farms and organizations in order to get food directly to more people while bypassing grocery stores. And, unlike many mutual aid groups, the store has also become fiscally sponsored by the Social Good Fund.

Self-Organization and Determination

Meanwhile Southside Foodshare—a self-described “constantly communicating amorphous blob”—grew from a group of seven people operating one day a week before the pandemic to a group of about 44 people operating five days a week.

The group’s response to the uprisings and the pandemic were fueled by a crew of residents of one south Minneapolis punk house and their friends. They had been feeding people—primarily BIPOC folks—living in homeless encampments for years. But they organized, expanded, and started a pop-up outdoor kitchen in their backyard. The goal was to provide food support to people participating in the Black Lives Matter actions as well as those whose food access had been cut off.

In a recent email conversation, a spokesperson for the group told me, “More and more people got involved, [planning] out everything you might imagine—equipment, safety protocols, menu planning, food sourcing, scheduling, etc. People who had experience cooking at Standing Rock and Line 3 protest camps were in town, and they had invaluable knowledge.”

At the height of the uprising, the group was serving 300 meals a day. Since then, it has joined forces with the Seward Cafe and the group’s members work out of the café’s commercial kitchen four days a week to serve 120 meals a day. It receives food through donations primarily from North Country Food Alliance, a worker-run food sovereignty nonprofit in the Twin Cities Metro Area.

The group has maintained a focus on feeding unhoused people. In 2018, there were about 4,100 people experiencing homelessness in Hennepin County; 49 percent of those people were Black, and 15 percent were Native American, despite being one percent of the population. Over the last year, there has been continued violence and frequent evictions of the people in the encampments by the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department.

“Violent evictions displace people, they separate people, and they disconnect people from resources. We have tried to stay connected with our friends and community who are directly experiencing this violence by staying consistent and showing up at new locations people are forced to move to,” the spokesperson told me. They said the group’s relationships with their community members and their ability to marshal resources grew exponentially in that time.

One of the founding principles of mutual aid is that those providing service also stand to benefit equally. So what does it mean for a group who primarily serves unhoused individuals to be run by people with houses? Southside Food Share members asks residents what kinds of food they want to eat, they take into consideration the dental needs of the people with respect to the kinds of foods they cook, and they actively go out to encampments and hand people meals and interact with them face to face.

The group distinguishes itself by rejecting what its members see as “colonialist mentalities of saviorship that often come from religious-based charities and government aid.” They prioritize treating people with respect and care. Whereas soup kitchens and food banks also often involve a time commitment, “we believe that bringing food to people and meeting them where they are at is a way to give them their time back,” said the spokesperson.

Egalitarianism

Before it began collaborating with Southside Food Share, the Seward Cafe closed its doors to transition from being a space run by a primarily white collective and to a primarily BIPOC collective with 15-20 members, including east Africans from the community it is situated within.

Kieran, a member of the new collective who didn’t want to share their last name, hopes the café can be a “place where people can get what they need, physically and emotionally.” The café now functions as a free store giving out food primarily to the East African neighbors in the area and had a soft opening last fall serving a rotation of different Oromo dishes and featuring a menu that is mostly vegan and far more affordable than it had been.

“In the same way that the uprisings pushed friends and neighbors to become organizers and comrades on an individual level, they also pushed the café’s collective to build a space where a community could live up to its potential,” Kieran told me.

The collective’s members are also committed to ensuring that their work is culturally relevant—which is a distinguishing factor of many mutual aid projects.

”The best way we can—and have—differentiated ourselves from the one-directional model is by recognizing that we cannot truly serve the community unless it has tangible agency in how our process is undertaken,” Kieran adds. “I remember finding a great deal on shampoo to give out but hearing from an East African collective member that folks would prefer something better fitted to their hair textures. That meant going with a slightly more expensive option that actually [worked for] those who’d be using it. I think a lot of one-directional work assumes an organization’s knowledge base goes beyond that of the community, whereas in many cases, the opposite is true.”

Social Transformation

As food insecurity has begun to receive less public attention, South Minneapolis mutual aid groups have stopped receiving the kinds of large donations that were common early in the pandemic. But that hasn’t stopped them from serving those who are still in need.

Community members built a greenhouse last fall at George Floyd Square to keep plants safe from the subzero temperatures; the collective behind the Seward Cafe hosted a community workday at their garden space and are finding ways to incorporate both the community and farming into their programming. Southside Food Share members are still serving their neighbors at encampments, and the Phillips Free Store is restarting in-person distribution every other week.

Mutual aid is an act of resistance, and we are just some of the people in Minneapolis who have chosen this path. The murder of George Floyd has been an impetus for those of us who believe in making healthy, whole foods more accessible in a country that constantly fails BIPOC people in a myriad of ways. This is mutual aid at its essence. We’re working together to serve one another, listen deeply, and create the world we want to live in. And we are proving that feeding ourselves and finding happiness don’t need to involve the mindless extraction of resources, or the emotional energy or labor of marginalized bodies.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/12/04/the-2020-social-justice-movements-were-fed-by-food-trucks-and-chefs/ Fri, 04 Dec 2020 09:00:49 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=39307 For Nikeisah Newton, 2020 started off on a promising note. Just a year earlier, Newton had launched Meals 4 Heels, a catering and delivery company serving vegan and vegetarian meals to Portland, Oregon’s sex worker community—and it was going well. Then the pandemic happened. As social distancing measures stopped most in-person sex work from taking […]

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]]> For Nikeisah Newton, 2020 started off on a promising note. Just a year earlier, Newton had launched Meals 4 Heels, a catering and delivery company serving vegan and vegetarian meals to Portland, Oregon’s sex worker community—and it was going well. Then the pandemic happened.

As social distancing measures stopped most in-person sex work from taking place, her business dried up.

“Most strip clubs closed in Portland, so I turned my focus to community-based social justice organizations,” said Newton.

Then, when George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake were killed at the hands of police, and thousands of Portlanders took to the street to protest, Newton decided to start feeding the protesters hitting the streets instead.

Newton was asked to help feed protesters from multiple mutual aid groups. “Meals were going for a $8 suggested donation, but no one would be turned away,” she said. “If you want to show support this is how you do it. You buy from Black businesses. I’m a Black female chef in Portland . . . a predominantly White city.”

Newton is far from alone in her efforts: In addition to feeding people impacted by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, a wide range of food trucks and catering companies across the country stepped up to feed the millions who took the streets in racial justice protests earlier this year. Those trucks and others returned in October and November to help feed people waiting in long lines at the polls. Using everything from pay-what-you-can models to foundation funding, these efforts have helped keep small businesses afloat while filling important nutritional gaps where they can.

During the height of the protests in New York, a group of culinary activists combined forces to feed protesters in the Bronx. The Bronx-based culinary collective Ghetto Gastro and the nonprofit Rethink Food teamed up to use donations to feed people who took to the streets demanding justice.

Nikeisah Newton. (Photo courtesy of Meals 4 Heels)

Rethink used upcycled U.S. Postal Service vans to create a donation-based mobile version of their Rethink Café. The group distributed meals in the Bronx and across New York City. “At the core of our work we want to be there to support our communities and nourish them. We believe when communities are nourished they thrive,” Rethink Food executive director Meg Savage told Civil Eats.

Similar projects popped up across the country, including others in Portland, Oregon, and Dallas, Texas.

But with the increased momentum, many food trucks were also increasingly exposed to people who weren’t as keen on their message. They became targets. That was the case for Riot Kitchen, which launched this past spring as a mutual aid organization in Seattle amidst the protests there.

As protests continued to take place nationwide, they took their mutual aid program on the road. Riot Kitchen (which did not respond to Civil Eats’ request to comment for this story) was the subject of consistent targeting by law enforcement while feeding protesters—most notably in August, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

According to the Seattle Times, they were stopped alongside volunteers at a gas station filling up canisters they intended to fuel generators use to cook food to feed protesters. According to police reports, the officers assumed the volunteers? were going to use the fuel to incite riots. They arrested nine members of the group for disorderly conduct. The police response to Riot Kitchen is indicative of the systemic behavior that launched these protests in the first place.

That was the summer. Then, election season rolled around. Taking advantage of the grassroots momentum from caterers and food trucks in supporting the protests, comparable groups headed to the polls. Vote.org, a tech organization focused on breaking down barriers to voting, partnered with local food truck operators to bring Vote.org-branded food trucks to lines of voters and voter-education initiatives around the country. In addition to food they offered information about voting and connected voters with nonpartisan Election Protection hotlines for any issues they had at the polls.

“Typically, we [provide] the tools that other organizations use to power their in-person registration events,” said Sydney Rose, director of programs for Vote.org. This year, however, the organization turned to “not only give people access to our tools in a safe, socially distanced way but also a mutual aid opportunity. It was an opportunity to create some joy in a time where everything feels confusing and may be even scary.”

A voter checks their registration using the side of a Vote.org food truck. (Photo courtesy of Vote.org)

While Rose saw the lines people had to wait in to vote as a form of voter suppression, she finds the long lines for food equally problematic. She says some communities they visited were facing high rates of food insecurity, and many people waited in line out of necessity. The trucks saw massive lines at polling stations in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Georgia, and Texas. In some cases they gave away more than a thousand meals a day.

Like Vote.org, Pizza to the Polls, a nonprofit founded in 2016, also turned out food trucks to feed people at voting sites. This election cycle, they sent more than 66,000 pizzas to more than 3,000 polling locations in 48 states. They partnered with companies such as Uber to operate the trucks.

“As apocalyptic as 2020 has been, voting in this presidential election gave a lot of people hope. Food trucks helping to sustain voters cemented that feeling of community and invigorated countless American who stood on line for 2, 3, 4 plus hours,” said Andra Tomsa, founder and CEO of spare, a national nonprofit working to end food insecurity.

Photo courtesy of Vote.org

“They especially focused on communities susceptible to voter suppression and voter intimidation and allocated most of their efforts to parts of the nation that have been hit hardest,” said Tomsa.

Humanitarian chef José Andrés took a similar approach with an initiative called Chefs at the Polls. They served roughly half a million meals to voters at 735 polling locations in 235 municipalities. They worked with 500 restaurants and food truck operators nationwide ranging from Metzger’s Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Virginia to Melba’s in New York City.

“This movement has also made an effort to utilize trucks that are owned by women, minorities, and veterans. They have been instrumental in allowing people to practice their right to vote, and a welcome respite for those who struggle to string three square meals together due to the economic crisis,” said Tomsa.

Now, as we face the winter months, it’s not clear whether this distinctly 2020 trend will continue into next spring. As the nation inches closer to a COVID-19 vaccine, it’s likely that indoor dining will return in 2021. Will food truck operators and caterers still be vectors for social justice when society is back to business as usual?

Nikeisah Newton. (Photo courtesy of Meals 4 Heels)

For Meals 4 Heels, the answer is a crystal clear yes. Even when business gets back to normal, Nikeisah Newton says the fight for equity will continue.

“It’s a lifetime fight. It’s ingrained in me, just like oppression and systematic racism is ingrained in the United States. Absolutely the fight and the support from Meals 4 Heels will continue,” Newton said.

The post The 2020 Social Justice Movements Were Fed by Food Trucks and Chefs appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2020/09/25/neftali-duran-is-using-indigenous-wisdom-to-educate-eaters-and-address-inequity/ https://civileats.com/2020/09/25/neftali-duran-is-using-indigenous-wisdom-to-educate-eaters-and-address-inequity/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2020 09:00:51 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38432 Neftalí Durán wants more people to rethink the inequities in our food system. The food rights activist argues that we need food sovereignty for people of color, food justice in general for everyone, and systems change at the government scale. “It’s 2020,” he said. “The fact that many Native and Indigenous people, either in the […]

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]]> Neftalí Durán wants more people to rethink the inequities in our food system. The food rights activist argues that we need food sovereignty for people of color, food justice in general for everyone, and systems change at the government scale.

“It’s 2020,” he said. “The fact that many Native and Indigenous people, either in the U.S. or in Mexico, don’t have running water or electricity is a stark reminder of the inequality.”

Hunger, driven by a lack of access to nutritious foods, has been a serious problem in Indigenous communities since long before the pandemic began. One study based on data collected between 2000 and 2010 found that Native Americans and Native Alaskans had an average food insecurity rate of 25 percent, compared to 10 percent among white Americans. Other studies have identified much larger numbers; one that looked at communities in the Klamath River Basin near the Oregon-California border found that 92 percent of households had experienced food insecurity.

COVID has made things worse, but it’s not yet clear how those numbers have grown. In May, five months into the pandemic, Feeding America estimated as many as one of every three adults and one of every two children will be food insecure during the crisis.

Durán’s works to address food insecurity and food sovereignty involving Indigenous communities and other communities of color.

Originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, Durán is of the Ñuu Savi, or “People of the Rain,” Mixtec Indigenous people. To be Indigenous in Mexico, Durán explains, is essentially to live under a modern-day caste system, with white Mexicans at the top of the system, and Afro-Mexican and Indigenous Mexicans at the bottom.

Durán moved to the U.S. at 18 in search of economic opportunity and started his two-decade food career in Los Angeles as a line cook. He eventually became a small-business owner and baker at El Jardín, a wood-fired oven bakery that he ran for more than 10 years in Massachusetts.

Neftalí Durán. (Photo courtesy of I-Collective)

Now, Durán lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where he focuses his time on education and activism. He is the cofounder of the I-Collective, a national group of Indigenous food activists, chefs, and educators that since 2017 has been organizing events to create awareness of Indigenous food movements.

He also teaches classes (now online) to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients through the Share Our Strength’s Cooking Matters program, where he works with communities on food skills, budget planning, and nutrition education. In addition, he recently founded the Holyoke Food and Equity Collective, an anti-racist organization working to build food sovereignty and access to healthy food in his town through techniques ranging from policy change to gleaning.

Civil Eats spoke with Durán on how the pandemic is impacting SNAP recipients and Indigenous populations—and how we might start fixing the food system.

What does the pandemic mean for communities that rely on SNAP?

We know that the amount of SNAP recipients has increased dramatically. I believe we went from like 40-ish million [food insecure] people to 50 million [during the pandemic]. And we also have to remember the numbers we know are only the people who qualify or were able to [receive the] benefits. Not everyone that [needed them] applied, [and] you can apply and not receive anything.

Talk about your work with I-Collective. How are the Indigenous chef and activist communities responding to the COVID crisis?

I think everyone is doing the best they can depending on their circumstances—where they are, whether they have access to a kitchen.

Brian Yazzie in Minneapolis has been feeding the elders since the beginning, and I believe he is going to continue to do that. And then we have people like Karlos Baca in the Southwest who has been doing mutual aid work. We [also] have people in other parts who have been part of the activism and Black Lives Matter movement.

I have been part of mutual aid work, besides my regular work, just because it’s needed, whether it’s raising money for excluded workers in our communities, or right now, doing gleaning and food recovery for the city where I live.

What is mutual aid, and how has it become a response to food insecurity?

Mutual aid is nothing new for communities of color. In very simple terms, when I was a kid and I was hungry, moms—my friend’s mom or my aunties or whoever—fed me. That’s mutual aid. And for communities of color, we’re relying on one another to be able to survive because of stark inequalities.

Now, the term during COVID has become more of a nonprofit terminology. But, in essence, it is just helping one another, oftentimes without expecting anything back. Right? If you’re feeding someone, you’re not expecting they’re gonna pay you later. Mutual aid, specifically for communities that are excluded from benefits, is super important.

In most states, if you have a felony, you don’t qualify for benefits. You don’t qualify for SNAP or housing. If you’re undocumented, obviously, you’re not going to qualify for any state support. And there are other people, people who even if documented are scared to apply for SNAP [because] they don’t want that to prevent them from the process of applying for citizenship.

People who work in the cash economy, who don’t do taxes, who cannot provide a pay stub, fall through the cracks. So mutual aid during COVID is making sure that everyone has a little bit of help.

How do you see the pandemic changing the focus of the I-Collective in the future?

Essentially, we see that mutual aid and community organizing have to be stronger within the collective. We have to do a lot more of that. And it has to become an essential part of our community building. Along with that, [we need to incorporate] some [more] webinars and conferences. There are people in the collective who are going to step up and do that, whether it’s leading webinars or organizing with other people.

For many decades, hundreds of years, people have been building food movements and organizing through being together—through food, hanging out, having [a] beverage together. That has been an essential part of the movements, and that’s being taken away.

“People who work in the cash economy, who don’t do taxes, who cannot provide a pay stub, fall through the cracks. So mutual aid during COVID is making sure that everyone has a little bit of help.”

For the last few years, the I-Collective has been building a movement through in-person dinners. We started in November 2017 with partners and restaurants in New York City, doing an Anti-Thanksgiving dinner, and we’ve been doing those kinds of dinners and participating in conferences through food and with food at the table. So, it’s really unknown right now how this is going to work.

Indigenous community elders are at a greater risk from COVID-19. How does this threaten Indigenous culture at large?

When I think about elders, I think of elders in the U.S. and in Oaxaca, right? I think of my mom, but I also think of elders who have mentored me in the U.S. And it’s a very precarious situation in the sense that the last two things that we have left [to prevent] our cultures [from dying] is our food and our language. And if you don’t have your elders to tell you stories about food, then you’re really losing an intricate part of your cultural heritage.

It can be really, really simple things. It can be like me walking with my uncle last December, and in passing him telling me “Oh yeah, we used to eat that kind of plant for this” and “that makes tea and you harvest it this time of the year.” [Many] think that this knowledge belongs to academia. For us, it’s for storytelling, generation by generation.

Native Americans are twice as likely to have diabetes than white Americans, which puts them at greater risk for the virus. How does this tie into historical food injustice?

(COVID) is one of the most stark reminders of food injustice, but also it’s something tangible, because we have data to back it up. That’s what makes this situation different. We can see that people in communities of color are dying at a higher rate, and we know it’s because of poor health outcomes in general. A good diet is an essential part of being healthy.

“If you don’t have your elders to tell you stories about food, then you’re really losing an intricate part of your cultural heritage.”

What is an example of a positive outcome or response that you’ve seen to the crisis regarding food insecurity and activism?

I think the fact that farmers are a lot more open to let[ting] us come and glean and do food recovery on their farms is a simple understanding that they are part of the community. But there’s a lot of issues with local food movements, because they also perpetuate inequalities and racism.

For example, it is well known that the community supported agriculture (CSA) model specifically caters to wealthier people, who happen also to be white. We should stop replicating that. We should move to a model where that nice CSA also agrees to have a partnership with communities of color that lack that kind of access.

If there is something positive that we can take out of this whole pandemic, it is that we have to work on local food movements. To make sure that they are an intrinsic, essential part of what the food system looks like going forward.

We have to be able to support small farmers, new farmers of color, Indigenous farmers. We have to be able to provide loans and land grants for farmers of color all across the country. We have to focus and make sure that Hawaii [goes] from producing 2 to 5 percent of the food [its residents consume] to producing more. We have to make sure that Alaska goes from 5 percent to 10 percent—or 20 percent. Let’s have a set goal by 2030, 2040, 2050.

“We have to be able to support small farmers, new farmers of color, Indigenous farmers. We have to be able to provide loans and land grants for farmers of color all across the country.”

Massachusetts farms produce only about 20 percent of what we consume. We can do better. Puerto Rico is a beautiful island with fertile soil. Why are they producing only 10 percent [of what they eat]? There’s a treaty [The Jones Act] that says everything Puerto Rico imports has to come through Miami or through a U.S. port. That’s insane. That essentially goes against food security.

What’s next for you?

We are building a new organization in the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts—The Holyoke Food and Equity Collective. It is going to be an anti-racist organization that focuses on food, the food system, and food sovereignty for our community. The collective hopes to promote economic, racial, and environmental justice in collaboration with the local city government.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Top photo courtesy of Neftalí Durán.

The post Neftalí Durán is Using Indigenous Wisdom to Educate Eaters and Address Inequity appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2020/09/25/neftali-duran-is-using-indigenous-wisdom-to-educate-eaters-and-address-inequity/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2020/07/30/op-ed-why-those-community-fridges-wont-solve-hunger/ https://civileats.com/2020/07/30/op-ed-why-those-community-fridges-wont-solve-hunger/#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2020 08:01:06 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=37749 Community Fridges have been showing up in low-income neighborhoods around the country. Credited with “fighting food insecurity, reducing waste, and uniting neighbors,” these free-standing refrigerators are often placed outside apartment buildings, businesses, and bodegas, where they’re filled with donated food, free for whomever needs it. They’ve also been celebrated all over the media, but if […]

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]]> Community Fridges have been showing up in low-income neighborhoods around the country. Credited with “fighting food insecurity, reducing waste, and uniting neighbors,” these free-standing refrigerators are often placed outside apartment buildings, businesses, and bodegas, where they’re filled with donated food, free for whomever needs it.

They’ve also been celebrated all over the media, but if you dig a little deeper, however, you’ll find the fridges are merely an extension of the existing emergency food system, a system never designed to solve hunger.

It’s difficult to take a hardline stance against a good-natured effort—especially now, as unemployment rates in New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities hovers around 20 percent, and food insecurity has reached record levels. But the fridges and other charity-based projects run the risk of distracting from the long-term, community-based food sovereignty and food justice work that is already taking place.

As a food justice activist with a community-led approach, I’ve also found that the people installing these refrigerators don’t often represent the communities where they’re placed. Many of these organizers are relatively new to the food justice landscape, and they rarely seem to be asking residents what they need.

Meanwhile, some residents—like Stephanie Esquivel of Crown Heights—are more than a little skeptical. A self-proclaimed “prickly” person who is generally averse to community engagement, Esquivel saw a Facebook post about a fridge being placed in front of her building, and decided to weigh in.

“Still no extermination and last night the building was shot up, yet again. . . . This will not stop and we are facing a hot, hot summer,” she wrote, acknowledging the fact that even on her “radically gentrified” block, violence and landlord negligence are ongoing problems.

Esquivel had seen a sign about the fridge posted in the hallway, asking for resident input, while also acknowledging that the project had landlord approval. She was annoyed to see that the newer tenants in one of the renovated units had such reliable access to the landlord, when she couldn’t get him to attend to longstanding repairs. The building also had a rodent problem, and there hadn’t been any extermination for going on 10 years; she worried that the plan to install the “outdoor food pantry with fresh food” in the heat of the summer could make it worse.

Community fridges also exemplify a charity-based approach, says Andy Fisher, long time food security advocate and author of Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups.

While feeding the community is commonly framed as the solution to the food waste problem, Fisher says the charity-based approach is one that casts food as “an undifferentiated commodity.”

Fisher says “food is food is food is food,” is an idea that ignores the preferences of the charity’s intended recipients.

Meanwhile, he adds, hunger policy is often created in response to the nation’s surplus-heavy, profit-based agricultural industry. This dynamic is inherent in emergency food from its inception. Food is determined to be waste when someone no longer wants it.

The message to those on the receiving end of this charity, said Qiana Mickie, special projects consultant and former executive director of Just Food, is: “You are not worthy enough to know and make decisions about your food, just be happy it’s here.” These fridges are a symbol of a system built on distributing food deemed waste without asking the recipients if that’s what they want. It’s emblematic of all of our hunger policy, from the federal level to the city.

“The end consumer or the end business has no use for it,” said Mickie. “Essentially, [companies are] getting a tax break off waste by giving it to people in need. It looks like food, but what kind of food is it? Is it food the community needs? Is it food the community wants?”

These questions sit in tension with the current moment’s renewed attention to emergency food, as late-night hosts sit in their living rooms, soliciting donations for both food banks and food “rescue” organizations. New York’s state government has played a part: In May, Governor Andrew Cuomo launched the Nourish NY initiative to address agricultural excess resulting from the sudden loss of sales to schools, institutions, workplaces, and restaurants.

Funding went directly to emergency food providers to help them buy food from hurting local farms, a shift in the approach that usually relies on donated surplus. In this way, Cuomo replicated the process of starting with surplus in the agricultural industry to address hunger and poverty. Rather than give money to those in need, or even to smaller- scale farms directly, he gave it to the food banks and pantries, and trusted that through their vast bureaucracies, the money and resources would trickle down.

Emergency food efforts that spring up overnight are not sustainable, as many of the so-called mutual aid efforts behind them use the rhetoric of community solidarity but show little accountability to the community. True mutual aid is a consistent presence in communities, not only during times of emergency, and involves reciprocity. The very nature of these efforts—one group giving, another group taking—make true mutual aid impossible.

Some of the groups involved have said that these efforts come out of “love,” with goals of “reparations” and Black liberation, but that doesn’t change the actual model, which is pure charity. And with efforts that are charity-based, the hard labor done by volunteers to organize, aggregate, and transport food, form an unsustainable model, fueled by the privilege of time, energy, and millions in emergency food funds. What happens when volunteers are worn out or go back to work? Or when the state, city, and private foundation money runs out, but folks are still hungry?

“Emergency food is addressing immediate hunger, but immediate hunger has become persistent,” said Mickie. For any of these current efforts to actually benefit the community, she added, they would have to both address the root causes of hunger (poverty), and work to eventually put themselves out of business, instead of constantly being celebrated and growing. Otherwise, “you are making people reliant on something that’s not sustainable,” Mickie said.

There are ways to help those in immediate need with dignity and care, but doing so involves building relationships and talking to those who are already engaged in food sovereignty and food justice work. Organizations such as Neighbors Together, created a model, pre-COVID, that addresses the immediate need for food while working to organize participants to address the roots of hunger and homelessness.

Long standing community farms like Isabahlia Ladies of Elegance in Brownsville have adjusted and shifted to providing free fresh produce to the community. The Central Brooklyn Food Coop (of which I am a founding member) has fundraised to create Hold Down BK, which seeks to provide emergency food as they bring awareness of the long term goal of a community-owned grocery in Central Brooklyn. These groups all take an approach that involves being thoughtful about getting to know their neighbors, supporting them in ways they ask to be supported, and finding the best resources for that support. Yet the work of these long-standing efforts get little notice compared to the splashy coverage given to novel, flash-in-the-pan emergency food efforts.

Stephanie Esquivel exemplifies the need for longer-term structural change that really begins with centering those directly impacted by the economic downturn. She lost her job in March as a direct service provider, and landed a job managing a kitchen, returning to the hospitality industry, which she had worked in off and on for 20 years. Along with her concerns about pests, she worries about the temperature of the refrigerator, as different types of food are put there by volunteers.

She has noticed a racially diverse mix of people, mostly men, accessing the refrigerator and most haven’t been recognizable to her as neighbors. When I visited it on a recent day in July, the only things in the fridge were a bag of frozen French fries and a bunch of lettuce. It wasn’t clear how often it was being refilled or by whom and it didn’t look like there was not a lot of attention being paid to the type or condition of the food available.

Adela Wagner, one of the mutual aid organizers working in Crown Heights, said that it’s not being managed by anyone specific, but rather it’s “maintained and filled by people from the community, and supported by local businesses, farms, and individuals.” It was easy to see how interference or neglect could lead to contamination or illness.

But the true source of Esquivel’s frustration went deeper than food safety. It was the sense she got that community fridges aren’t being seen in the true context of the neighborhoods in which they’re being placed, and that resident’s priorities aren’t being heard. What was driving the anger underlying her response was the fact that, a few feet from where the fridge stands, a 25-year-old man was shot and murdered in early May.

She saw the original posting announcing the fridge on a queer exchange group on Facebook that used a photo taken at the site. “The very day of the biggest memorial, was the day [the fridge] was activated, and there were signs saying, ‘Hey, free food!’ I noticed the angle that the picture was taken, you couldn’t see any of the memorial, you couldn’t see what you were potentially walking into. It was completely tone deaf.”

 

Top Photos: A free food refrigerator stands on the sidewalk on May 5, 2020 in the Bushwick neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough in New York City. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

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