Watch recording of conversation here.

The third installment of the Conversations on Food Justice Series – a collaboration between Share Our Strength and Food & Society at the Aspen Institute – focused on the devastating effect of structural racism on the health of the Black community.

Dr. J. Nadine Gracia, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Trust for America’s Health, moderated the conversation between Chef Tamearra Dyson, owner of Souley Vegan LLC, and Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College.

Here are three major takeaways from the insightful and stirring event:

We Need to Understand Our History

Both speakers looked at history for lessons and inspiration. 

Dr. Opie explained how lack of access to healthy food had been used as a tool of oppression against the Black community throughout history. 

“It is interesting to think that one of the most offensive things someone could do to you is deny you a place at the table,” he said. 

In particular, he called out how slaves had to worry constantly about accessing food, while slavery in the Americas largely existed because of the demand for sugar. Still today, he said, the sugar industry disproportionately targets Black individuals in their marketing, and diabetes runs rampant in communities of color.

Dr. Opie and Dyson also focused on how food had been an essential tool for the Black community to resist oppression. They pointed out the ingenuity of slaves to grow their own food, the restaurant sit-ins during segregation and the Black Panther Movement creating the model for the National Breakfast Program.

Dyson drew on personal experiences to highlight the impact of structural racism in her health and how she used food as a tool of empowerment. 

Her mom would work hard to bring healthy food to the table, but sometimes there was not enough. As a young girl, Dyson would sneak into the kitchen and eat unhealthy food when she felt stressed out about the economic challenges they faced, which were tied to systemic racism. 

After working in the medical field and seeing the effects of unhealthy diets in her community, Dyson took a leap of faith to open a vegan restaurant. She started with no savings or experience, and today she shares healthy affordable and traditionally-rooted food with her community. 

Human Connection Should Become a Priority

Similar to Dyson’s experience as a young child, the speakers highlighted the vicious cycle of economic hardship, stress and health issues.

“I don’t think it’s any revolutionary information to say that, when people are stressed out, they often cope by drinking. They cope by eating,” Dr. Opie said. 

Still, he highlighted how most people of color live in food apartheid, communities with no supermarkets or reliable public transportation to reach them.

Both speakers agreed communities needed to come together to take care of each other. Dr. Opie proposed using the efficient canvassing system — where people go door to door promoting a particular candidate — to offer help to the community.

“We need to check in to make sure our neighbors are okay,” Dyson added.

Education is Essential to Fight Structural Racism

Dyson explained how Black individuals often feel they are undeserving without understanding the systems that maintain them oppressed and the tools that can help them.

“We lack information, therefore we lack access to the solutions,” she said. “You don’t have to be a victim of your circumstance”

Similarly, Dr. Opie made calls for the importance of learning history and becoming food literate to understand how food affects us.

Moderator Dr.Gracia closed the conversation asking participants what made them hopeful. 

The three speakers, who all mentor young students, answered they saw hope in the curiosity and sense of community of new generations. For them, education was the key to uprooting systemic racism.

“What gives me hope is what I see as the growing recognition and the growing sense of ownership that we all have a role to play in creating a more equitable and just society. And that it certainly relates to hunger and food insecurity,” Dr. Opie concluded. 

Stay tuned for more Conversations on Food Justice. Please email foodjustice@strength.org to share any feedback and ideas of what topics you would like to see.

Click here to watch our previous installment in the series, which featured Dr. John B. King Jr., the president and CEO of the Education Trust and former secretary of education, and former Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards.

The post Racism, Hunger and Health appeared first on Share Our Strength.

The second installment of the Conversations on Food Justice Series – a collaboration with Food & Society at the Aspen Institute and Share Our Strength – focused on hunger as a racial equity issue. 

Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree moderated the event, which featured Dr. John B. King Jr., the president and CEO of the Education Trust and former secretary of education, and former Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards. 

[Read the After Action Report]

Here are five key takeaways from the conversation:

We Must Make Systemic Change to Solve Hunger

Both King and Congresswoman Edwards drew a direct line between slavery, Jim Crow and the disproportionate rates of hunger among people of color today. They argued that transformational change needs to happen at the government level, as they see many federal and programs as designed to actually keep people from accessing them through. 

Congresswoman Edwards shared her experience being unable to receive help in a moment of economic hardship because she worked full time. Congresswoman Pingree talked about some states failing to effectively implement the Pandemic EBT Program – which offered temporary emergency nutritional funds loaded on EBT cards for children who normally receive free or reduced-price lunches in school.

They offered ideas for practical solutions like extra EBT assistance in the summer similar to Pandemic-EBT, universal school lunches for kids, and encouraging leaders to listen to families.

King noted that it’s going to take all of us to achieve lasting change. “We have to move from performative wokeness to policy wokeness,” he said, asking people to go beyond putting a Black Lives Matter sign on the yard and encouraging them to vote for equitable policies.

Stigmatization Causes Hunger

Former Congresswoman Edwards shared her own personal story about receiving food assistance in the past, and the shame that came with it. “I would come home from my job, take off my suit that I had to wear to work, put on jeans and a t-shirt and a baseball cap and go around to different food banks in order to avoid just being seen.”

The story highlighted how we need to move past demonizing people who need help. The ongoing pandemic has increased the number of people collecting meals at food distribution centers, and for many it is the first time doing it.

“Let’s change the narrative on how we think about them. Think of them, not as individuals who need help, because we’ve all needed help in one form or another,” Elliot Gaskins, a managing director at Share Our Strength concluded. “Let’s think of them as the resilient, determined and extraordinary individuals that they are.”

Healthy Food is Essential for Ending Hunger

Pingree noted that we must move past people just getting enough calories and, instead, think about the ability to access healthy food. 

They explored the historical origins of unhealthy eating and its connection to slave diets and federal policymakers choosing not to focus on healthy foods. “The irony is we think that that’s somehow saving us money, but actually, if you look at the health consequences, it’s costing us money,” King argued. 

But too many low-income families live in food deserts where there are simply no supermarkets with fresh produce and foods nearby, making healthy food all but impossible to find.

Hunger Doesn’t Stop in College

Congresswoman Edwards emphasized that many college students are not hungry because they are trying to save money for a concert. Many experience economic hardship,and of those that do, 20% are parents.”. With the cost of college increasing, and assistance like Pell grants covering only 28% of the overall costs, too many college students are turning to food banks or simply going hungry.

Calling for policies to protect these students, King noted the negative educational impacts, saying, “Think about how hard it is to be focused when you are desperately hungry. Or how much of your mental energy, if you’re a parent, is going into thinking about how I am going to get food for my kids?”

We Can’t Forget 2020

2020 has been a year that has exposed inequities and pushed us to have advance serious conversations about systemic racism and the steps to fight it. The speakers expressed that we cannot turn the page.

“My fear is that 2020 has been such a bad year that all of us want to put it in the rear view mirror, but we really can’t afford to do that when it comes to hunger,” said Congresswoman Edwards.

Please join us in the fight against systemic racism to ensure that all children and families have the food they need to thrive and the opportunity to pursue their aspirations.

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The Food Justice Conversation Series will continue in 2021. Please email foodjustice@strength.org to share any feedback and ideas of what topics you would like to see next year.

Click here to watch our first installment in the series, which featured Black Panther leader, Erika Huggins, and executive director at FoodLab Detroit, Devita Davison.

The post Hunger as a Racial Justice Issue: Why That Matters and What We Can Do About It appeared first on Share Our Strength.

The new series, from the organization behind the No Kid Hungry campaign, will examine the roots and evolution of the food movement and the ways it intersects with race and class, as well as with educational, environmental and health inequities. 

For Huggins, the power of the people was what drove the Black Panther Party to start what inspired the National Breakfast Program, an essential part of the fight against childhood hunger in the United States today.

Huggins discussed the history of the food justice movement with Devita Davison, executive director at FoodLab Detroit, an organization supporting independently-owned food businesses who are exploring models that create a more equitable and sustainable environment. The conversation was moderated by Norbert L. Wilson, professor of food economics and community at Duke University’s Divinity School.  

They highlighted the importance of history to inform current realities and the work societies have to do today. The conversation started with acknowledgements of the ancestral lands where the speakers were located and the legacy that slavery has had over the three Black speakers.

Davison highlighted the Greenwood Food Blockade in the early 1960’s, in which the Board of Supervisors of Leflore County, Miss. stopped winter food assistance to Black sharecroppers, including Davison’s parents, to repress their right to vote. 

“We cannot free ourselves until we feed ourselves,” she concluded.

Around that time, Huggins and the Black Panther Party went to communities, asking them what they needed.

“‘Our babies are hungry,’” they told her. “‘They go to school, but they don’t have nutritious meals because we live in conditions of poverty and can’t provide what they need.’” 

The Party started a revolutionary program to feed all kids who needed food by providing free breakfast at schools. The program was so successful that it inspired the federal government to start today’s National Breakfast Program.

But those conditions of inequity persist today.

Davison drew a strong connection between how hunger and the coronavirus disproportionately affect Blacks in Michigan today, where Blacks represent 13% of the state’s population but 40% of people infected and killed by the pandemic. It’s a trend that holds true for people of color nationally, as we noted in our report, The Longest Summer. 

Still, Huggins and Davison are hopeful.  

“Restoring justice means, where there has been inequity, where there has been a continuous stream of violence meted out to one people, we need to think about what we can do together and individually to shift it,” Huggins said. 

This was the first of a series of conversations, that as explained by Share Our Strength’s Elliot Gaskins, highlight the connection of food justice and anti-hunger work. “One without the other one,” Gaskins said, “won’t lead to the systemic change that will be essential to eradicate the hunger crisis.”

Stay tuned for updates about the next Conversation on Food Justice, and please stay with us in the fight to ensure all kids get the food they need. We’re committed to breaking down any and all systemic inequalities that stand between a hungry child and healthy meal. 

Gaskins closed the conversation by quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”

The post Black Activists Remember the Radical Origins of the Food Justice Movement appeared first on Share Our Strength.

You can listen on our website or on iTunes.

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• Coretta Scott King

Share Our Strength and Community Wealth Partners colleagues:

Our family tradition for the past 5 years has been to celebrate the Martin Luther King holiday by participating in the service day of Project 351 in Boston which brings together eighth grade service ambassadors from each of Massachusetts’s 351 towns. The launch of their year of service in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall always includes remarks from Governor Charlie Baker and various service heroes.  Then everyone fans out to serve at the Greater Boston Food Bank, Cradles and Crayons, and The Pine Street Inn.,

The speakers this Saturday morning included Share Our Strength champion Joanne Chang, and newly elected Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, the first African American woman ever elected to Congress from Massachusetts.  In addition to sharing the Coretta Scott King passage above, Rep. Pressley recounted the story of Coretta’s role after meeting Martin Luther King in Boston in 1952 where they were both studying at the time.

Coretta was a talented soprano studying opera at the New England Conservatory of Music. Martin was doctorate student at Boston University. After they married and their involvement in the civil rights movement deepened Coretta realized she wouldn’t have time for the performing career for which she had prepared.  Instead she raised money for the cause by singing at Freedom Concerts “where I narrated the story of the civil rights movement that we were involved in, and sang freedom songs in between the narrations that told the story of our struggle from Montgomery to Washington at that time.”

Up in the balcony where we were sitting, Rosemary elbowed me in the ribs, a usually reliable signal that she’s caught me daydreaming when I should have been paying attention to something important.

“What?” I whispered.

“She found a way to literally share her strength. Her voice. That was her strength to share.”

And that’s why we always participate in service on MLK Day, and why I always sit next to Rosemary.

Billy

The post “I must remind you that starving a child is violence.” Remembering Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King appeared first on Share Our Strength.