CHAPTER 12
THE HIDDEN OPPRESSION OF BIG FOOD: SOCIAL INJUSTICE, POVERTY, AND RACISM
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to go on a whitewater rafting trip in Utah led by Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting our waterways. The trip was designed to bring awareness to the tar sands mining of the Tavaputs Plateau at the headwaters of the Colorado River. Tar sands mining for fossil fuels will pollute the waterways critical for local and native populations and the long-term health of the Colorado River. On the trip was a Hopi chief and his wife. They were both severely obese and diabetic. While rafting, they mostly drank Coca-Cola. The chief got sick from his diabetes on the walk down to the river, vomiting and becoming weak. After a few days floating down the Green River on a raft together, I suggested to him that he could reverse his diabetes if he wanted. He asked what he had to do. I said he needed to eliminate refined carbs, starches, and sugars. He paused for a minute and said that it would be very difficult to do this, because it would be impossible to do the traditional Hopi ceremonies without their traditional ceremonial foods.
“What foods?” I asked.
He replied, “Cake, cookies, and pies.”
How did this man come to believe that his traditional ceremonial foods were processed flour and sugar and refined oils? The story of the chief’s answer is the story of sickness, poverty, social disenfranchisement, loss of food sovereignty, and internalized racism. It’s what Paul Farmer calls structural violence—the social, economic, political, and cultural factors that determine disease.
The chief’s ancestors had no obesity, type 2 diabetes, or alcoholism. Now 80 percent of his people get diabetes by the age of thirty and life expectancy is fifty-three.1 So, what happened? First, the Hopi were moved to reservations. Second, the water resources they depended on for drinking water and to grow their own traditional foods were usurped by the damming and diverting of the Colorado River to supply California and desert cities such as Phoenix. This pattern was repeated throughout Native American communities. Nearly 60 million bison were slaughtered by the US government to cut off the food supply of tribes on the plains. Buffalo Bill Cody once said, “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”2
Unable to continue their traditional food systems, the Hopi received government-supplied commodities—white flour, white sugar, and shortening. They created new foods like “Indian fry bread.” There is nothing Native American about deep-fried flour, sugar, and shortening. Their Hopi genetics were adapted to scarcity and a high-fiber, plant-rich diet. This is often referred to as the thrifty gene (or genes) because throughout history they were more threatened with starvation than with abundance and thus became efficient at storing excess calories. Flooding their bodies with starch and sugar made them obese and diabetic. The tribes have a word for the type of obesity caused by these highly refined processed commodities provided by the government to “help” their people. They call it “commod-bod.”
This story is repeated over and over where our beliefs, attitudes, and policies perpetuate structural violence. This is a form of internalized racism. It is not as obvious as limiting voters’ rights and employment opportunities, the bombing of churches, or hate speech and hate crimes. But it is far more pernicious and destructive, in part because most of the victims have not identified it as a problem to be fixed.
Of all deaths, 1.1 percent are caused by gun violence.3 Seventy thousand people die every year from the opioid epidemic. Those problems are real and tragic and need to end. But 70 percent of deaths, or more than 1.7 million deaths, a year are caused by chronic disease such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and stroke4—mostly the result of our toxic food system. More African Americans, Hispanics, and poor people are killed by bad food than anything else. Drive-through fast food kills far more people than drive-by shootings. Yet we remain silent about the role of the food system killing millions of Americans.
RETHINKING THE CAUSES OF DISEASE AND SOCIAL INEQUITIES: SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC CAUSES
It is clear what we are doing is not working. More and more people are chronically ill, as costs and suffering escalate dramatically. I first began to think deeply about this issue in 2010 when I had the opportunity to be one of the first doctors on the ground in Haiti after the earthquake. In Haiti, I met Paul Farmer, who cofounded Partners in Health. Partners in Health has created a powerful and successful model for treating drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS in the most impoverished nations in the world. Most public health officials had abandoned these nations and diseases as too tough to address.
The brilliance of Paul Farmer’s vision wasn’t coming up with a new drug regimen or building big medical centers, but a very simple idea: The missing ingredient in curing these patients was not a new drug, but addressing the structural violence that perpetuates disease.5
Recruiting and training more than 11,000 community health workers across the world, Farmer proved that the sickest, poorest patients with the most difficult to treat diseases in the world could be successfully treated. The community was the treatment. It was about providing clean water, access to food, and support from community members. The model is called “accompaniment,” because the idea is that neighbors accompany one another to health.
I realized that this model was important not just for infectious disease, but for chronic “lifestyle” diseases as well. What determines your lifestyle? The community in which you live, your access to healthy food, the safety of your environment, your education, your family and your friends, and your level of income and employment.6
In Chapter 2, we discussed how “noncommunicable” diseases are mostly driven by our community and lifestyle. Only 10 percent of our health is determined by direct medical care. More than 60 percent is related to the social determinants of health. Your zip code is a bigger determinant of your health outcomes than your genetic code. But in health care we focus on the wrong end of the problem. Even though it is clear that the social determinants of health drive most disease, we continue to focus on the molecular pathways of disease, drug targets, and surgical innovation. We are promoting gastric bypass as the cure for diabetes even though it fails 25 to 50 percent of the time, because people go back to the same environment and culture without the health system addressing the real cause of their obesity or diabetes.7
Shifting our perspective from “blame the victim” to “change the system” is essential for addressing the social injustice that drives our chronic disease epidemic, obesity, poverty, food insecurity, and our toxic nutritional landscape, where making good choices is nearly impossible for many. Food is a social justice issue. Our industrial food system is an invisible form of oppression.
FOOD APARTHEID: POVERTY, DISEASE, AND FOOD INJUSTICE
A 2016 JAMA landmark study compared the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1 percent of the population. The difference between those two groups was 15 years for men and 10 years for women. That is equivalent to the loss of life expectancy that results from a lifetime of smoking.8 More than 38 million Americans live in poverty and almost 100 million live in near poverty.9
Life on the other end of the spectrum is also shortened. The United States has the worst infant mortality rates of the top twelve richest industrialized countries.10 But infant mortality among African Americans is two and a half times that among whites.11
Is there a reason that the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, and chronic disease are found in the African American, Hispanic, Native American, and poor communities? In the last decade, type 2 diabetes rates have tripled in Native American children, doubled in African American children, and increased 50 percent in Hispanic youth.12 Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and Asians are also twice as likely as whites to get diabetes. If you are African American you are more than four times as likely to have kidney failure and three and a half times as likely to suffer amputations as whites.13 Why are these numbers so staggering for our poorest citizens? Is this just bad luck, bad genetic cards, or something else?
Hundreds of thousands of African Americans, Hispanics, and the poor are killed every year by an invisible form of racism, a silent and insidious injustice. This is an often-internalized force of oppression that disproportionately affects the poor, African American, Hispanic, and Native American communities.
When we talk of racism we think of white supremacists, police brutality, job discrimination, limited opportunities, and hate speech, but rarely do we think of food as bigger than all those forms of racism. You’ve probably heard of food deserts—where the only food available is processed junk from convenience stores and fast-food outlets, the closest grocery store is more than a mile away, and it’s hard to find fresh fruits and vegetables or other healthy food. How can we take care of our communities when 23 million Americans live in these food deserts? But the problem isn’t only food deserts. It is food swamps—communities filled with fast-food chains and bodegas plying highly processed addictive foods. Food deserts imply a natural phenomenon, like an unfortunate desert somehow just occurred. Nothing is less true. It’s hard to find fresh produce but easy to find gallon cups of soda and other sugar-loaded beverages, and fast-food chains peddling burgers, fries, and fried chicken are on almost every street corner. These toxic food swamps are more predictive of obesity and illness than food deserts.14
I remember when my friend Chris Kennedy brought his nonprofit, Top Box Foods, to the South Side of Chicago. Top Box buys real whole foods wholesale from distributors and brings them into makeshift markets in church parking lots in areas of food apartheid, so that the poor can buy a week’s worth of real food for a family of four for $35. The local African American community came out in big numbers. Standing in the parking lot, I surveyed the landscape around me. As far as I could see was a sea of fast-food outlets. No real food in sight. The poverty, the limits on access to transportation, and the maze of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores that these communities live among all perpetuate disease, disability, and suffering.
In the 40 years since obesity and diabetes have exploded in America, the fast-food market has grown twenty times, that is, 2,000 percent. One in four Americans visits a fast-food restaurant every day. And Americans spend more money on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and music combined.15
Black communities have almost twice as many fast-food restaurants as white neighborhoods.16 The USDA found that only 5 percent of African Americans have a healthy diet.17 That is a big change from the 1960s, when African American diets were twice as healthy as average diets, with more fruits, vegetables, fiber, and good fats.18
We talk of food deserts and food swamps, but perhaps a better term is “food apartheid,” an embedded social and political form of discrimination that recognizes that these areas of food disparity are not a natural phenomenon like deserts. This term is increasingly used by affected communities to describe the lack of access to real food and the overabundance of disease-producing food-like substances. The history of sugar is closely linked to slavery. The slave trade served the growth of sugar production. Legal American slavery is over (although forms of slavery still occur on some farms with migrant workers). But today sugar, especially in its new form, high-fructose corn syrup, is connected to a new kind of oppression—food oppression, which makes people of color sick, fat, and disabled.19 It is a form of apartheid in which the poor and minorities live in areas that lack healthy food and have an overabundance of fast-food outlets and convenience stores.
The spread of fast-food and convenience stores in poor, urban, and minority neighborhoods—food swamps—has created a virtual food apartheid, an institutionalized form of segregation and racism embedded in the actions of corporations, business, and our government’s policies.
The targeted marketing of the worst food to the poor and people of color compounds the problem. And children are the biggest targets. Not only are they more susceptible to manipulation, but they also represent long-term investments for Big Food. Hooked young, they stay hooked.
Our health, our children, and many of our communities have been taken from us. It is time we take them back. It is time we address the institutionalized food injustice that is causing this slow-motion genocide. It is important to transition from a business model where corporate interests privatize the profits but socialize the costs of their products and the harmful consequences of their products are not taken into account. If these costs are not accounted for, we the taxpayers and our environment all pay the price. Historically corporations defined “value” as increasing shareholder profits, but times are changing. During a recent Business Roundtable, a group of the world’s leading corporations, 181 CEOs agreed to redefine the purpose of a corporation to benefit not just shareholders but stakeholders including customers, employees, suppliers, and communities.20 Omitted was any mention of the environment as a shareholder, but it is a step in the right direction, although transparency and accountability are essential to measure the impact of their intent.
FOOD INSECURITY
Even when food is available to disadvantaged communities, fresh whole foods can be expensive, which leads to the purchase of cheap, unhealthy junk food. Hawk Newsome, an African American community leader, shared his experience growing up in the Bronx, poor, hungry, and struggling. Hawk shared that many are food insecure in his community and struggle to get enough food on limited incomes. When the decision is between facing hunger and eating cheap processed food, the choice is inevitable.
Newsome grew up in a poor community where the only consideration about food was to feed the family as cheaply as possible to get them to the next paycheck. “You have to look at it from a perspective of people who are living in these conditions,” Newsome says. “You have $20, and it’s one or two days before payday. With a family of four, McDonald’s has a dollar menu that means you could get about eight burgers and four orders of fries for $12. It makes sense economically.”
He explained, “My mother carried the family. She was extraordinary in her strength. But we always consumed unhealthy amounts of bad food. It was to the point that before my dad died, I would bring them healthy food and they would look at it like, ‘I’m not eating that. Why would I eat that?’ Not only is healthy food not available, but also the majority of us look at it like it’s disgusting. My family is extremely intelligent. I went to law school. My sister went to one of the best universities in the country. We have a high IQ, but our food IQ is very low.”
Food insecurity can also have incredibly detrimental effects on pregnant mothers. A colleague at work grew up in East Cleveland, a place with no job opportunities and even less real food. They don’t even have a McDonald’s. They have Rally’s, a fast-food chain that makes McDonald’s look like a gourmet restaurant. You can get two burgers for $3. Who knows if it is even meat? Through hard work she pulled herself out of her environment, something most women in that neighborhood can never do. She had a role model, her mother, who was a police officer. She recounted the story of one young woman of fifteen who begged my colleague to help the young woman find a way to get out of that neighborhood. The girl knew she would end up like her mother, on welfare, with multiple children, living in the projects with no way out. Yet getting pregnant made her eligible for $20-a-month subsidized housing in the projects, food stamps, health care, and social services. It was her only way to survive. How is this a just society?
Data shows that preterm labor and infant mortality decrease if we provide housing and food to pregnant mothers, and this reduces overall health care costs.21 The same goes for the homeless. Provide housing and food, and health care costs plummet.22 Pay now or pay more later. But the perverse financial systems in health care and social programs don’t encourage us to do the right thing—the thing that will reduce costs, save lives, and protect our citizens.
The Food and Research Action Center produced a white paper in 2017 called The Impact of Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Poor Nutrition on Health and Well-Being.23 The consequences of our current food system for malnourished mothers are staggering. When children are born to malnourished mothers and grow up on a diet of artificially cheap sugar and processed and fast foods, they are stunted, developmentally delayed, and cognitively impaired, they suffer from learning disabilities, and they have behavioral and emotional challenges and increased rates of violence, obesity, and chronic diseases. The “food” they eat as children doesn’t change when they grow older, and the malnutrition continues, perpetuating mental health issues and increased rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, disability, and premature death, with a loss of an average of 10 to 15 years of life.
Living in poverty drives food insecurity, overconsumption of cheap processed foods, higher rates of obesity and diabetes, and a whole host of other chronic diet-related diseases. The risk of diabetes for any ethnic group is twice as high (100 percent increase) for those with less than an eighth-grade education. If you are food insecure, you are also twice as likely to be diabetic.24 Diabetes rates are lowest in whites, at 8 percent; they are 16 percent among blacks and 22 percent among Hispanics, and much worse in the poor of all ethnicities. Education is also a huge determinant of health status, regardless of income.
It is both the overconsumption of bad food and the underconsumption of real food that drive this problem. Not surprisingly, the research shows that those who are the most food insecure use more health care services and have the highest health care costs. The cost of food insecurity is estimated to be $160 billion a year, not including the $70 billion a year in SNAP (food stamp) assistance.25
FOOD PUSHERS: HOW BIG FOOD SELECTIVELY TARGETS THE POOR AND MINORITIES WITH JUNK FOOD
Of course, the food industry welcomes those suffering from food insecurity with open arms, aggressively advertising unhealthy foods to them. One day I was working in an urgent care center as a medical resident and a Hispanic woman came in for back pain with her seven-month-old baby in tow. The baby was sucking a bottle of brown liquid.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Coke,” she replied, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I asked her why she would give her baby Coke, and she said, “Because he likes it.”
In Chapter 8, you read about Big Food’s marketing ploys to reach children. That trend is amplified even more for minority children. In 2019, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity published a damning report entitled Increasing Disparities in Advertising Unhealthy Food to Hispanic and Black Youth.26 The big food companies target black and Hispanic youth with their least nutritious products, including fast food, candy, sugary drinks, and snacks. From 2013 to 2017, food advertising on black-targeted TV increased by 50 percent. Black teens viewed 119 percent more junk-food-related ads—mostly for soda and candy—than white teens. The top ads came from Nestlé, Yum! Brands (like KFC and Taco Bell), Mars, McDonald’s, and General Mills. The average teen saw more than 6,000 junk-food ads a year just on television. Even if you talk to your kid about healthy eating three times a day, there is no way to compete.
Food companies use cultural icons to influence minorities. Do you think LeBron James actually drinks much Sprite? McDonald’s uses Serena and Venus Williams and Enrique Iglesias in their TV ads to attract black and Hispanic consumers. Is a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke really Serena’s prematch meal? No matter, their dollars are well spent. Race-based advertising works.27
Our government is complicit in the perpetuation of these behaviors and the support of the production and sale of the very foods it tells Americans not to eat in its Dietary Guidelines. What may shock some is that government-guaranteed loan programs support fast-food outlets, which are far more prevalent in poor communities of color.28 Why should government loans pay for the expansion of food that kills Americans?
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OR CORPORATE SOCIAL EXPLOITATION
In Part 3, we dug deep into the ways that the food and agriculture industries manipulate public opinion, co-opt public advocacy and public health groups, corrupt science, use illegal tactics to influence policy, and overwhelm the political process with billions in lobbying dollars. And we learned how these companies exploit and target the poor and minorities through “corporate social responsibility” in order to buy friends and influence opinions. That helps explain why the groups that are most affected by soda and processed foods from a health and social justice perspective are Big Food’s best friends. The food industry employs nefarious tactics to squash opposition and prevent change to the status quo. They buy friends, silence critics, and sweeten their profits.
I was part of a documentary called Fed Up—a movie about how our food system makes us sick and fat with addictive sugary, starchy products. While on the road promoting the movie I met with Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, and she explained to me that nonviolence also includes nonviolence to ourselves. She was excited about showing Fed Up at the King Center in Atlanta. But a few days later I got a call to tell me that we couldn’t show the film.
“Why?” I asked. The answer: Coca-Cola funds the King Center. Coca-Cola is busy co-opting other advocacy programs or groups throughout Atlanta. During the 2019 Super Bowl, Coca-Cola gave a $1 million donation to another group, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, in Atlanta to provide free admission to visitors. How nice!
The dean of Spelman College in Atlanta told me that 50 percent of the entering class of African American women had a chronic disease—type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity. I asked her why there were Coke machines and soda fountains all over campus. Coca-Cola is one of the biggest donors to the college. In fact, Helen Smith, the vice president of global community affairs and president of the Coca-Cola Foundation, is on the board of trustees of Spelman College.
FOOD FIX: FOOD JUSTICE, FOOD SOVEREIGNTY, AND EMPOWERMENT
Often the people living in these circumstances are not aware they are victims of food oppression, food apartheid, and internalized food racism. The work of transforming this system of oppression must come from multiple sectors—changes in government policies at the local, state, and federal levels, regulation, litigation, health care reimbursement for food as medicine, nonprofits creating local programs to educate and empower people, and grassroots efforts of citizens working to change their communities and regain food sovereignty. In Atlanta, the Ebenezer Baptist Church—Martin Luther King Jr.’s church—started a 2-acre urban garden where parishioners participate in growing food for the local community. There are hundreds if not thousands of these stories of hope and empowerment.
One of the leaders in bringing health, food, and community to ravaged neighborhoods is Ron Finley, the Gangsta Gardener from South Central Los Angeles, a place of gangs, drugs, violence, and desperate poverty. He grew up in a food prison where he had to drive forty-five minutes to buy a tomato. Through a simple act, turning the dirt by the curb in front of his house into a garden, he started a small “horti-cultural revolution.” The dirt by the curb was owned by the city, and he was cited for gardening without a permit. Finley persisted but ended up with a warrant out for his arrest for growing 12-foot sunflowers by the curb. He fought back, got the local laws changed, and started curbside gardens, turned lawns into food forests, and created raised-bed gardens in dilapidated vacant lots, helping gang members, ex-convicts, and drug dealers find a way out of their struggles. Finley wants to transform the food desert into a food forest and is leading a movement to bring the education and skills needed to the youth in his community and beyond.
These pockets of redemption and innovation are happening all across the country; they are models for breaking the cycle of food injustice. Here are just a few examples that we need to nurture and support.
In West Oakland, California, a very poor neighborhood of 30,000 with no grocery store but fifty-four liquor and convenience stores, community members started the People’s Grocery, a mobile grocery store (much like an ice cream truck), to bring produce to the local community. They expanded into urban farming and leased a 2-acre parcel of land near the city to farm, staffed by community members. And they started community cooking classes. They provide grocery bags full of fresh produce to people in their community.
In the Bronx, Karen Washington founded Black Urban Growers to support black urban and rural farmers and help cultivate black leaders in the movement for food justice and sovereignty. Washington has helped turn abandoned lots in the Bronx into thriving community gardens, started farmers’ markets, and engaged her community, bringing awareness to the intersection of food, poverty, racism, lack of health care, and unemployment.
Food Tank is a remarkable organization whose mission is “building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.” They showcase organizations in the food movement working for food justice29 and for a better food system throughout the world.
Soul Fire Farm was started in 2011 by Leah Penniman in Petersburg, New York, focused on ending racism, injustice, and food apartheid in the food system by raising life-giving food and providing training for troubled youth and activist farmers in sustainable agriculture. Understanding that one in ten people of color is hungry, that the top five killers of Latinos and blacks are diet related, and that these communities have been dispossessed of the land, Penniman focuses on the fact that our food system is rooted in racism and slavery. She has built a model to address food injustice.
Penniman and Soul Fire Farm highlight the power of farming to lift up poor communities, shifting their perspective and bringing pride back into farming for the African American community. Through the farm’s community-supported agriculture program, Soul Fire Farm provides food to neighborhoods suffering from food apartheid and free food to refugees and families affected by incarceration. She even lobbied to allow SNAP benefits to be used for community-supported agriculture, which made it into the 2018 Farm Bill.
Faith and Food Justice
Increasingly African American pastors see the link between the plight of their congregations and food apartheid. They are helping their congregations link food and theology and improving their congregations’ lives through food.
Methodist pastor Christopher Carter, who’s also an assistant professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego, focuses his work on helping link the health of humans, the treatment of animals, and the destruction of the environment to the food we eat and how it all connects to racial equity and Christian theology. He invites his congregants to ask: How was this food raised? Were the animals treated humanely? Were the farmworkers subject to harsh working conditions, underpaid, or abused? What is the impact of industrial food on the health of individuals and communities? He believes this is central to shifting deeply held notions that allow African American communities to be oppressed by the food they consume. He seeks to do what he describes as an effort to “decolonialize the plate” and reclaim old traditions. A friend was ridiculed by his family for eating “white people’s food,” not realizing that the current diet of most African Americans is actually white people’s food. Carter’s new book, The Spirit of Soul Food, seeks to redefine soul food.
Reverend Dr. Heber Brown III, the senior pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, founded the Black Church Food Security Network. He recognized that in most food deserts (or areas of food apartheid) there was an abundance of churches, and he created a movement, not from farm to table but from “soil to sanctuary.” His network empowers black churches to grow their own food and partner black farmers and urban growers to bring fresh produce to churches. They create pop-up farm stands at churches, start gardens on church-owned land, and lead lectures and small group meetings that focus on food justice and food sovereignty.
Imagine if black church leaders (or any affected minority group) collectively joined in a campaign to link the struggles of minority communities to food, to food apartheid, to racial targeting by the food industry, to the invisible form of oppression that keeps communities down, a form of racism that is internalized and insidious, that disables and kills more people of color than anything else, and created a call to action to change all that. Black lives matter. But black health matters too. What if African American churches boycotted soda or junk food, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.’s Montgomery bus boycott in the 1950s challenging segregation on buses? There is untapped power that could shift culture, shift the physical and economic health of communities of color across the country.
Art, Social Justice, and Food
Understanding the link between social justice, food, and disease, the University of California San Francisco Center for Vulnerable Populations and Youth Speaks (a youth development and arts education program) partnered to create the Bigger Picture, a public health campaign using spoken-word poetry and hip-hop music videos to call out the connection between the social injustice of stress, poverty, and violence and food insecurity, lack of access to whole foods, and a plethora of ultraprocessed and fast food in their communities.30 The value teens place on social justice, their anger at manipulation by the food industry, and their witness to the death and destruction in their families and communities empowered them to create art that inspires awareness, agency, and change. It takes the blame away from individual choices and places it on the structural systemic problems that drive disease, disability, and poverty.
In his piece for the Bigger Picture, “Empty Plate,” Anthony Orosco, age twenty, addresses the legacy of poverty of those who pick and pack the produce that we buy at Whole Foods but don’t make enough money to buy the very food they pick.
Abuelas y abuelos, tias, tios, primos y carnales
Who picked processed and packed produce
Their pockets couldn’t afford to begin with.
Backs breaking, bones aching
Harvesting healthy fruits and veggies
Acre by acre,
The bounty of California’s breadbasket
That almost never blessed the tables of farmero families
In her piece “The Longest Mile,” Tassiana Willis, age twenty-four, a severely obese African American woman, highlights the toxic food environment that drives disease.
This about how I starve myself before blood work
Praying it doesn’t pick up the candy from my last time of the month
This is me praying I don’t forget diabetes knocked
2 uncles off their feet
And one is barely standing
This is my battle between diet and dialysis
About being stuck between two Burger Kings
And never having it your way…31
Whether through church leaders, activist farmworkers or farmers, or artists calling out social injustice, a growing awareness of food injustice attempts to correct the systemic conditions that fuel it. These are just a few examples of the movements happening across the country and the world, directed by local leaders and community organizers to reclaim the food system. It is a long road, with many obstacles, but we can drive change slowly from the margins. This is how all movements start. The abolitionists weren’t deterred that it might take 100 years to pass civil rights legislation or 150 years to have an African American president.
Many other systemic problems perpetuate the food system’s crisis of injustice; we need bigger, policy-wide reform. (Many of these ideas are also discussed in Part 3.) These reforms are very difficult to employ given our current political environment and campaign finance laws that make corporations able to contribute literally billions of dollars to influence policy and elections. The First Amendment protects speech, including apparently the right of corporations to target children and minorities with advertising. The most important reforms would be those akin to what we implemented for smoking and which have been effectively implemented in other countries such as Chile (see Chapter 3).
In fact, all the food fixes throughout this book are required to create a more equitable and just food system that serves individuals and communities, reforms agricultural systems, and protects our environment and climate.