Don’t call it a food desert. “Food apartheid” is more accurate.
The description of a place as Food Desertsays food sovereignty activist Sophi Wilmore, “implies that this is a natural phenomenon – that the lack of healthy, fresh, nutritious food in certain urban areas is completely normal and organic.”
On the contrary, says Wilmore, the real problem is structural racism and unjust systems that cause people to live in poverty and hunger and end up in prison.
Wilmore is co-director of Feed Black Futuresa community-based, Black/queer-led food sovereignty organization in California that connects Black and brown farmers with Black mothers and caregivers whose lives and families have been impacted by incarceration and the criminal justice system.
“This is all part of the systems of oppression and how they work,” she says. “Moving us further away from the places where food distribution is highest is a contradiction to food apartheid. These are the places where there is limited or no access to fresh food and vegetables.”
Essen AparthHolidaya term coined by the farmer and lawyer Karen Washingtonhas real impact. According to the Prison policy initiativeAmong the more than 54 million Americans who lack access to healthy food, former prisoners and their children are at least twice as likely to be food insecure. People with serious drug offenses, for example, are permanently excluded from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, although many states, including California, have waived this ban.
Yet even participating in or rejoining government food programs can be difficult for former inmates, who often lack the information, resources and support they need to restart their lives. This makes lack of healthy food an “often overlooked consequence of incarceration” that is linked to other societal injustices such as homelessness and unemployment.
This type of structural racism impacts the well-being of black women and caregivers who are impacted by the justice system and who deserve redress, Wilmore said.
“After the abolition of slavery, we were promised land and we never got that land,” she said.
In response, Feed Black Futures seeks redress through a teach them to fish Food justice strategy, nutrition education and farmer training to reduce dependence on industrial and capitalist food systems that put profit ahead of people and the planet.
Ali Anderson, founder and co-executive director of FBF, launched Feed Black Futures with a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 to feed 20 families affected by the annual Rescue on Black Mamas Day at the beginning of the pandemic. She worked with the Essie Justice Groupa women-led membership organization that supports Black and Latino women and families affected by incarceration. A month later, Anderson had surpassed the initial goal, raising around $90,000.
That initial effort motivated Anderson, an experienced community organizer who holds a master’s degree in public health from Emory University, to start Feed Black Futures.
Today, the organization, founded on the principles of abolition, liberation and empowerment, connects black women and their families and caregiverss with nutritious food and fresh produce purchased from Black and brown farmers – what Anderson calls “building pathways to food and land sovereignty in California.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, a community organizer and civil rights activist who died in 1977, once said, “We use food as a political weapon. But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family, and nobody can push you around.”
Feed Black Futures brings Hamer’s words to life by training participants to plant and maintain gardens in backyards, apartments, and community gardens – and to advocate for food sovereignty policies and practices that provide marginalized communities with access to fresh food production and equitable food distribution.
In practice, Wilmore and Anderson’s organization has made over 5,000 food deliveries to over 215 people, trained over 166 people in agricultural practices, and invested $120,000 in Black and Brown-owned farms in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Feed Black Futures considers all the people they serve to be members. This includes people who receive food services and have completed training as gardeners and farmers. Participation replaces membership fees or other types of compensation. Wilmore hopes that FBF’s investment in members will create a larger base of people committed to food sovereignty. She also sees a future expanded platform that includes Black and balso arable farmers.
Joymara Coleman of Oakland, whose family members are in prison, has been a member of Feed Black Futures for two years. She says knowing where her food comes from has had a positive impact on her emotional, mental and physical health.
“Anyone can get a box of non-perishable food full of genetically modified organisms from the local food bank,” she said, but Feed Black Futures “offers us even more, like being conscious of the quality of the food, the energy that went into growing that food, and knowing that it’s a symbiotic relationship between producer and consumer. That to me is the ultimate self-care.”
By partnering with groups like the Essie Justice Group, Agroecology Commons and others in California and across the country, Wilmore hopes that Feed Black Futures will one day become irrelevant because more BIPOC women and families abandon unhealthy food systems, support environmentally responsible Black and brown farmers and no longer go hungry because they or people they love were once in prison.
“One good way to keep people in poverty is to make them dependent on a system they can’t control,” Wilmore said. “Their choices about where they get their food from are limited. So we talk about food sovereignty as a mechanism of liberation.”