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February 9, 2023

Black Culture Center hosts Food for the Soul tonight | news

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January 23, 2023

UN report reveals stark gap in access to healthy diet | News

A new United Nations report, ‘Overview of Meals Protection and Nutrition 2022’, finds that 22.5 for each cent of the Latin America and the Caribbean populace can’t afford to pay for a balanced diet plan. In the Caribbean, this determine reaches 52 for each cent in Mesoamerica, 27.8 per cent and in South America, 18.4 per cent.

The publication studies that 131.3 million people today in the region could not pay for a healthier eating plan in 2020. This represents an improve of eight million, in comparison to 2019. This is due to the greater common each day price of healthy diet programs in Latin The us and the Caribbean, when compared to the relaxation of the world’s locations, achieving in the Caribbean a value of US$ 4.23, adopted by South The usa and Mesoamerica, with US$ 3.61 and US$ 3.47, respectively.

This issue is connected to diverse socio-financial and nutritional indicators. The report offers a obvious romance involving the inability to manage a healthier diet plan and this kind of variables as a country’s money amount, the incidence of poverty, and the degree of inequality.

The report also reveals that the increase in international food selling prices skilled since 2020, exacerbated after the start off of the conflict in Ukraine, and a regional maximize in foodstuff inflation higher than the general degree, have enhanced the issues for folks to obtain a healthy diet.

The document also includes tips primarily based on proof and an examination of policies already applied to increase the availability and affordability of nutritious foods, focusing on supporting the most vulnerable men and women and lower-income homes that commit a more major proportion of their spending budget on foods.

“There is no unique plan that can resolve this trouble independently. Countrywide and regional coordination mechanisms want to be strengthened to react to hunger and malnutrition,” explained Mario Lubetkin, FAO assistant director and regional agent for Latin The united states and the Caribbean.

Develop INCENTIVES

“To lead to the affordability of healthier diets, it is necessary to create incentives for the diversification of the production of nutritious meals aimed primarily at family members farming and little-scale producers, choose steps for the transparency of the rates of these meals in markets and trade, and actions such as money transfers and bettering school menus,” Lubetkin said.

Trade and marketplace policies can play a essential job in strengthening meals stability and nourishment. Greater transparency and efficiency improve inter-regional agri-foodstuff trade by changing uncertainty with industry predictability and balance.

“We are chatting about the location of the environment with the most highly-priced balanced diet program, which particularly impacts susceptible populations – small farmers, rural gals, and indigenous and Afro-descendant populations – who allocate a better percentage of their earnings to the acquire of food stuff,” stated International Fund for Agricultural Development Regional Director Rossana Polastri. “To reverse this scenario, we must advertise modern remedies that diversify output and improve the provide of wholesome food items, and that boost compact producers’ accessibility to markets and excellent food, such as electronic methods that articulate food stuff supply and need.”

The report also describes how some nourishment-delicate social security programmes have worked and are vital to assistance the eating plans of the most susceptible populace, specifically in periods of disaster.

“Food insecurity will go on to rise because of to the food stuff and gasoline rate crisis triggered by the conflict in Ukraine and the aftermath of COVID-19,” said Lola Castro, Globe Food Programme regional director. “We have to act now, but how can we do it? Supporting governments to grow social protection networks, simply because the pandemic, as soon as all over again, shown that social defense is handy to improve the affordability of a wholesome food plan, protecting against crises like this from hitting afflicted populations even much more.”

Meals Insurance policies

Other food guidelines, these as nourishment labelling, subsidising wholesome foods, and taxing unhealthy or non-healthy meals that do not contribute to healthy eating plans, if well built, can make improvements to the affordability of healthier meal plans and stop debilitating conditions and diseases related to over weight and weight problems.

“We need to redouble attempts to address malnutrition in all its varieties by promoting community procedures to produce healthier food environments, eradicate industrially created trans fats, carry out entrance-conclude warning labelling, regulate marketing of unhealthy food items, tax sugary beverages, and assist wholesome consuming and bodily activity in educational institutions,”Pan American Wellbeing OrganizationDirector Carissa Etienne reported. “Understanding the factors that decide inadequate nutritional tactics is essential to getting solutions and making certain that absolutely everyone in the region has entry to wholesome meals,” she stated.

For instance, countries with greater ranges of poverty and inequality have a tendency to have far more considerable problems accessing a healthier diet, which is immediately connected with a larger prevalence of starvation, long-term malnutrition in boys and women, and anaemia in women of all ages age 15 to 49.

“For kids to grow up healthier, it is not only urgent to make certain the availability of nutritious foodstuff at very affordable selling prices. It is also important to establish community procedures that promise enough nourishment, in addition to nutritional counselling, concentrating steps on the most vulnerable populations,” stated Garry Conelly, UNICEF regional director for Latin The us and the Caribbean.

The socio-economic overview of Latin The united states and the Caribbean is not encouraging. The most afflicted inhabitants groups are little ones less than 5 and women, who suffer a higher prevalence of food items insecurity than guys.

The Regional Panorama of Foods and Nourishment Stability 2022 is a joint publication of the Food items and Agriculture Business of the United Nations the Worldwide Fund for Agricultural Growth the Pan American Wellbeing Business/Planet Health Business the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Environment Foods Plan .

Raise IN Starvation

In between 2019 and 2021, the variety of hungry people today in the area amplified by 13.2 million, achieving 56.5 million in 2021. The maximum boost was in South America, exactly where an further 11 million individuals suffered from starvation. Amongst 2019 and 2021, starvation achieved a prevalence of 7.9 per cent in South The us, 8.4 per cent in Mesoamerica, and 16.4 per cent in the Caribbean.

In 2021, 40.6 for each cent of the regional population seasoned moderate or serious meals insecurity, in contrast to 29.3 for each cent globally. Serious foodstuff insecurity was also extra repeated in the region (14.2 for every cent) than in the world (11.7 for every cent).

Other figures introduced in the report indicate that the area registers an vital and constructive evolution regarding the prevalence of continual malnutrition in kids below 5 decades of age. In 2020, this determine was 11.3 per cent in Latin The us and the Caribbean, about 10 proportion points under the earth ordinary. Nevertheless, 3.9 million kids up to five several years of age are over weight.

December 16, 2022

Pollination loss linked with excess deaths | News

For immediate launch: December 14, 2022

Boston, MA – Insufficient pollination has led to a 3-5{d2b09b03d44633acb673e8080360919f91e60962656af8ade0305d5d8b7e4889} decline of fruit, vegetable, and nut output and an approximated 427,000 extra deaths every year from lost wholesome foodstuff usage and involved ailments, like coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and sure cancers, in accordance to investigation led by Harvard T.H. Chan College of Public Health and fitness. It is the initial review to quantify the human health and fitness toll of inadequate wild (animal) pollinators on human wellness.

“A critical missing piece in the biodiversity dialogue has been a deficiency of direct linkages to human health. This exploration establishes that reduction of pollinators is already impacting wellbeing on a scale with other world wide health and fitness threat elements, such as prostate most cancers or substance use disorders,” said Samuel Myers, principal analysis scientist, planetary health, Section of Environmental Health and fitness and senior writer of the research.

The analyze was printed December 14, 2022 in Environmental Wellbeing Views.

Rising human stress on organic programs is resulting in alarming losses in biodiversity, the matter of the COP 15 UN Biodiversity Meeting at this time having spot in Montreal. This consists of 1-2{d2b09b03d44633acb673e8080360919f91e60962656af8ade0305d5d8b7e4889} annual declines of insect populations, leading some to warn of an impending “insect apocalypse” in the coming many years. Essential among insect species are pollinators, which improve yields of 3-fourths of crop versions and are critical to growing balanced foods like fruits, greens, and nuts. Improvements in land-use, use of unsafe pesticides, and advancing local climate transform threaten wild pollinators, imperiling human provide of healthier foods.

The scientists applied a design framework, which incorporated empirical evidence from a community of hundreds of experimental farms across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin The united states, that appeared at “pollinator generate gaps” for the most significant pollinator-dependent crops, to display how a great deal crop reduction was due to insufficient pollination. They then used a world possibility-ailment design to estimate the health impacts the changes in pollination could have on nutritional dangers and mortality by country. Moreover, they calculated the loss of financial value from shed pollination in a few circumstance study nations.

The final results confirmed that lost food items creation was concentrated in lessen-profits nations but that the wellness burden was larger in middle- and bigger-money countries, where by costs of non-communicable conditions are increased. The geographic distribution was fairly unconventional in that normally the health and fitness effects from world environmental change are centered among the the poorest populations in locations these types of as South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Right here, middle-money countries with large populations—China, India, Indonesia, and Russia—suffered the biggest load.

The examination also showed that decreased-income countries misplaced sizeable agricultural revenue thanks to insufficient pollination and lessen yields, probably 10-30{d2b09b03d44633acb673e8080360919f91e60962656af8ade0305d5d8b7e4889} of overall agricultural price.

“The outcomes may possibly feel surprising, but they replicate the complicated dynamics of aspects guiding food items techniques and human populations close to the world. Only with this kind of interdisciplinary modeling can we get a much better repair on the magnitude and influence of the trouble,” explained co-creator Timothy Sulser, senior scientist, Global Food items Plan Investigate Institute.

Approaches to protect wild pollinators are not just an environmental concern, but a well being and financial just one as well. “This examine shows that doing also little to assist pollinators does not just hurt character, but human overall health as perfectly,” stated lead author Matthew Smith, analysis scientist, Division of Environmental Health and fitness.

“Pollinator deficits, meals consumption, and consequences for human overall health: a modeling examine,” Matthew R. Smith, Nathaniel D. Mueller, Marco Springmann, Timothy B. Sulser, Lucas A. Garibaldi, James Gerber, Keith Wiebe, Samuel S. Myers, Environmental Overall health Views, Dec. 14, 2022, doi: 10.1289/EHP10947

Help for the examine was supplied by grants from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Weston Foods Inc., Fifth Technology Inc., and the CGIAR Study Program on Procedures, Institutions, and Marketplaces.

Visit the Harvard Chan School web-site for the latest news, press releases, and multimedia choices.

For additional facts:

Todd Datz
tdatz@hsph.harvard.edu
617.432.8413

picture: iStock

###

Harvard T.H. Chan Faculty of Public Health and fitness brings together committed specialists from quite a few disciplines to educate new generations of worldwide wellness leaders and deliver impressive thoughts that strengthen the lives and health of folks everywhere you go. As a local community of top scientists, educators, and learners, we perform together to acquire revolutionary thoughts from the laboratory to people’s lives—not only making scientific breakthroughs, but also performing to adjust person behaviors, public guidelines, and wellbeing care tactics. Each individual yr, additional than 400 school members at Harvard Chan School train 1,000-furthermore whole-time pupils from all around the entire world and educate 1000’s more by on-line and govt education programs. Started in 1913 as the Harvard-MIT College of Overall health Officers, the College is identified as America’s oldest skilled coaching method in community overall health.

December 9, 2022

Cooking up favorites with the library staff | News

The holidays and chilling temperatures are upon us, drawing us into a world of family and friends, warmth, and food. Many of us love to look at cookbooks at any time of year, but the full-on entertainment season adds a bit of sparkle to search for a new dish or a reminder of an old family favorite. The Scott County Public Library has a fabulous collection of cookbooks, from the healthy to the decadent, but the staff would like to mention some of their favorites.

Cravings: Recipes for All the Food You Want to Eat (2016) by Chrissy Teigen. Filled with fabulous recipes, life hacks, and fun, snarky stories to go along with the food, Teigen’s collections are a must-have. Roseann from the youth department recommends all of Teigen’s books and enjoys the writing as much as the ideas.

December 6, 2022

Working at the intersection of nutrition and health equity | News

December 5, 2022—In this Big 3 Q&A, Cindy Leung, assistant professor of public health nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discusses a recent paper she co-authored linking food insecurity and food addiction, as well as her other research efforts.

Q: Tell us about your recent study and the interesting findings around food insecurity.

A: Food insecurity is a socioeconomic condition of limited access to affordable and healthy food. In my prior research, I found that people experiencing food insecurity are more likely to have poorer quality diets and are at higher risk for chronic conditions. Food addiction is a newer paradigm where we’re seeing experiences of withdrawal and other symptoms similar to those, for example, of alcohol abuse, as a result of eating highly processed foods. Knowing that highly processed foods are abundant in low-income neighborhoods, we wondered if people who are food insecure might be more vulnerable to food addiction.

In two different samples—one of low-income pregnant women in the San Francisco Bay area, and another of mothers of preadolescent children in southeast Michigan—we found a consistent and significant positive association between food insecurity and food addiction, even after adjusting for sociodemographic factors like education, race/ethnicity, and income level.

In our study, we couldn’t tease apart the mechanisms behind this link, but I believe that stress and ubiquitous access to highly processed foods are big components. Food insecurity is a source of chronic stress—a constant cognitive process to manage one’s food resources in relation to the family’s food needs. This chronic stress may alter the reward system to overconsume highly processed foods, increasing the risk of food addiction over time. The combination of high stress and easy access to highly palatable foods may also explain the higher risks of other chronic diseases that we’ve seen in relation to food insecurity.

Q: What other research questions are you looking at?

A: When we talk about interventions for food insecurity, we automatically go to our federal food programs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen swift expansions of our biggest nutrition programs, showing that they are important levers to reduce food insecurity during national emergencies. My colleagues and I are evaluating some of these recent policies. I am also really interested in seeing how poverty alleviation programs might reduce food insecurity. Programs and policies that address the minimum wage or reduce unemployment could have secondary impacts on preventing food insecurity, which is so intimately tied to poverty.

Separate from this, I am interested in testing and evaluating environmental interventions to improve dietary intake. I have been involved in some large-scale interventions to reduce sugar-sweetened beverage consumption. Currently, I am working with a team at the University of Michigan to test various dining hall changes to reduce red meat consumption, which is an important goal for both health and sustainability reasons.

Q: What does it mean to you as an alumna to be back at the School as a faculty member?

I am excited and humbled to be back at Harvard Chan School, where I got my foundational training and launched my career. Now, ten years later, I think I have a more holistic perspective of how I can take my work to the next stage. I also feel very privileged to work alongside my former mentors and colleagues, and the increasingly talented pool of students that we have.

Overall, I am really optimistic about growing my research program at the School, focusing on the intersection of nutrition and health equity. I am deeply committed to serving the public health community in that space.

—Amy Roeder

November 22, 2022

Rethinking Food Culture Might Save Us – Non Profit News

“HAWTHORNE IN THE CORNFIELD” BY CHIP THOMAS/JETSONORAMA.NET

Editors’ note: This article is from the fall 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “The Face of Climate Change.” and was first published by NPQ on April 4, 2022, and is republished here with minor alterations.

Food changes into blood, blood into cells, cells change into energy which changes up into life . . . food is life.

–Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, culinary griot

This work we’re doing in food culture is ultimately healing work. And those foods, and seeds, and the land are the agents of healing:

They are the healers, they are the curanderas, they are the medicine people who are increasing our capacity to look at the grief all around us . . .

it’s only the seeds, and the land, and the food, that have the capacity to take that grief, and to metabolize and digest it.

—Rowen White, Mohawk seedkeeper, writer, culture worker

Imagine a future where the ways we grow, cook, and gather around food affirm our relationships to the places we live, to the people who came before us, and to future generations. Imagine a future where we recognize care as the essence of all labor and appreciate all people’s labor, no matter the form it takes. Imagine that we joyfully nourish each other, that we all know we belong, and that we recognize and as kin. What images come to mind? What longing is sparked in us?

Right now, we are living through escalating crises, both within living ecologies and socially constructed systems.¹ A dominant worldview shaped by settler colonialism and white supremacy has proliferated practices of extraction and exploitation that benefit few at the expense of many. Our commercial food system is an expression of this. Industrialized supply chains abuse people and the planet, feeding exploitation and injustice.

A respectful, reciprocal food culture can help us imagine, build, and sustain possibilities for a more equitable future, in which our world’s natural abundance is shared.

But systems and practices do not exist in a vacuum; they are an expression of the culture that underpins them. As many Black, Indigenous, and diasporic people of color food leaders have long asserted, dominant food narratives—from bootstrapping² to “you are what you eat” diet shaming³—often explicitly affirm logics of individualism, ignoring structural inequities and oppression and perpetuating support for massive globalized, profit-driven food industries that kill people and destroy ecologies.⁴ To transform our food system, address our legacies of harm, and interrupt our reckless relationship to ecosystems, we need to look beyond food supply chains to the culture underpinning how we produce and share food. We need to advance narratives that celebrate interdependency and care. Stated otherwise, we need to transform our food culture.

Food culture consists of the relationships and experiences we engage through food—the way food shapes our experiences of the world and of ourselves and each other. A respectful, reciprocal food culture can help us imagine, build, and sustain possibilities for a more equitable future, in which our world’s natural abundance is shared. Food-culture organizers, predominantly Black, Indigenous, and diasporic people of color, are already inviting us to engage with food as life force, as culture. They remind us that food culture is a powerful organizing force that feeds the body, lives in embodied relationships, and animates the world. Food is a world-builder and place-maker, and the way many of us find a sense of home and belonging. As such, when we transform food culture, we transform culture as a whole—from how we relate to one another, to our stories of who we are, and our visions for who we can become. In the process, we empower ourselves to transform the systems that govern our world.

Setting the Table: Food as Teacher, Food as Healer

“People want to put us in boxes all the time,” Mohawk seedkeeper, writer, and activist Rowen White tells a crowd of squares assembled on Zoom. Last November, our organization, Food Culture Collective (previously Real Food Real Stories), hosted a conversation between White and Black liberation cook-activist Jocelyn Jackson, for a virtual Around the Table event on decolonizing food culture.⁵ These two visionary food-culture workers lit up the screen and the hearts of those listening with their descriptions of “storied” food cultures that nourish complexity and accountability. “[People] always say, she does food systems work,” White continued, “and I’m like, I don’t do food systems work! I do something way more expansive than that.”

A passionate advocate for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty, White serves as the educational director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds, a cooperative seed company committed to cultivating a network of seed

stewards in Northern California. She is also the founder of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. White frames her work as a lifelong “apprenticeship to seeds.” Through seeds, she sees a path of “rehydrating” cultural values of reciprocity, care, and collective nourishment—those “original agreements” that affirm a symbiotic relationship among all beings. In her workshops, speeches, and writings on seeds, culture, and ancestral knowledge, White invites the public into a deeper, reciprocal relationship with the land.

Jocelyn Jackson—cofounder of the People’s Kitchen Collective, a community dining and political education project based in Oakland, California—has often experienced the true breadth, impact, and political clarity of her work shoehorned into expected categories. She’s been described as everything from a dietician to a culinary instructor—in fact, Jackson is a culture worker who uses recipes, ingredients, and shared meals to dialogue with ancestors, claim collective power, and evoke visions of justice. With a background in law and education, Jackson founded JUSTUS Kitchen to create healing food experiences that inspire folks to reconnect with themselves, the earth, and one another, inviting us to grow together toward collective liberation.

For example, in 2021, Jackson launched an interactive, virtual tablescape, “Fixed Price Menu,” in partnership with ARRAY Alliance and the Law Enforcement Accountability Project (LEAP).⁶ Jackson created the conceptual menu and table setting for Philando Castile, the thirty-two-year-old Black man killed by police, and Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who murdered him. At Yanez’s place setting she put some of Castile’s favorite foods— honoring Castile’s humanity. In this way Jackson asked, “What culture did Yanez feed on that would allow him to take life so swiftly?”

Using food as an art form—as a way to reflect on how Castile’s and Yanez’s story unfolded—Jackson invited audiences to cook the recipes, contemplate the story, and consider our own responsibility and accountability. As Jackson explained in our Around the Table conversation, “That’s ultimately what’s going on every time we eat a meal. We’re talking about a liberation moment. We’re talking about a cultural moment. We’re talking about a sacred moment.” It was fortifying, Jackson told us, to have food recognized as playing an essential role in exploring police brutality, abolition, and accountability.⁷

Both Jackson and White are part of a growing movement around food-culture reclamation and revitalization that is challenging how we think about food systems change. Supply-chain systems analysis reduces food to nutrients, narrowing our understanding of the many ways that food shapes our lives. In contrast, food-culture bearers, organizers, and creatives recognize that food is intersectional—inexorably tied to practices of healing, identity formation, belonging,⁸ and placemaking. Food-culture work offers us a praxis with which to affirm our mutuality with each other and the ecologies that feed us as we grow our collective well-being. This work has the potential to shift our global trajectory away from escalating social and climate chaos. To borrow the language of visionary author Toni Cade Bambara, food offers us the seeds and rich soil to shift our worldview and cultivate an irresistible future.

Challenging White Supremacist Logic

U.S. food systems are fundamentally shaped by violent land grabs9 and plantation economies,¹⁰ growing into today’s megacorporations that produce ecologically destructive and nutritionally empty food for a buck.¹¹ The same colonial logic that established and upheld these violent systems has shaped how most of us think and talk about food, including the development of a “good food movement” that reinforces systemic inequities and a racial hierarchy that prioritizes whiteness.¹²

Indeed, what is often described as the organic, sustainable, slow, good, or regenerative food movement has celebrated mostly white farmers and chefs who championed fresh, “wholesome” food, often without acknowledging the legacies of institutionalized racism and land theft that facilitated these white farmers’ and food leaders’ access to resources.¹³ Nor has the movement adequately acknowledged the Black, Indigenous, and diasporic communities of color whose work and leadership it drew from. For example, the Black origins of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) were eclipsed by white farmers,¹⁴ and Indigenous fights against government-provided commodity foods were marginalized.¹⁵ This has had tangible physical and economic repercussions for entire communities. For example, when public and business decision makers underinvest in Black or Immigrant neighborhoods and tribal communities, they create conditions of food apartheid.¹⁶

One potent example of such selective celebration illustrates the problem. Around the same time that Alice Waters was solidifying her position as the “mother of farm-to-table,”¹⁷ Black culinary griot, anthropologist, and artist Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor published her seminal autobiographical cookbook and memoir, Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.¹⁸ In this groundbreaking work, Smart-Grosvenor wove together “recipes” evoking instinctual and inherited knowledge with stories of her upbringing in South Carolina’s Lowcountry and commentaries on cultural dynamics, from culinary appropriation to gentrification.

When the third edition of the book was published, in 1992, Smart-Grosvenor described it as a book that “slipped through the cracks for more than two decades and lived.”¹⁹ White critics struggled to categorize the book and were unsure of how to describe Smart-Grosvenor. Even in her 2016 New York Times obituary, Smart- Grosvenor was described as someone “who liked to call herself a ‘culinary griot’” (emphasis added), implicitly casting doubt on the validity of her work.²⁰

The white-dominated narratives of the “food movement” have failed to give essential lineage holders of food- culture work, like Smart-Grosvenor, their due. Generations of vital Black, Indigenous, and diasporic people of color–led food- culture work have been underresourced and overshadowed—with the expertise of food- culture workers unfairly questioned, and their access to funding and infrastructure support unfairly constrained. As White reminds us, “Colonial culture tries to make what we do smaller, or fit it into their paradigm, or their understanding of what it is.”²¹ Crucially, many BIPOC food-culture workers whose work has been diminished or dismissed offer a powerful map toward a food culture that affirms reciprocity and mutual belonging, and ensures a livable future.

Food Is Culture

Over the past decade, growing numbers of organizations across issues and sectors have recognized that systems are rooted in culture and that systems change requires a cultural shift.22 To quote Jeff Chang in “A Conversation about Cultural Strategy,”

. . . culture has two definitions: (1) The prevailing beliefs, values and customs of a group; a group’s way of life. (2) A set of practices (including all forms of storytelling and artmaking) that contain, transmit, or express ideas, values, habits and behaviors between individuals and groups.²³

When we understand culture as beliefs, values, customs, and practices, we see how our beliefs and practices around food are culture, and how our intentionality around food culture is crucial to creating a sustainable, just, and joyful world.

When we approach food work as cultural work, we are able to crack open, reimagine, and rewrite the implicit assumptions of fiercely held narratives, transforming the shared spaces, practices, and norms that make up culture.

Our current food system is an expression of the core values of dominant food culture. So, to heal our food system, we must heal our shared food culture. At a 2021 Food Culture Collective storytelling gathering, food scholar, writer, and editor of the seminal anthology Sistah Vegan,²⁴ A. Breeze Harper put it simply: “Racial justice, decolonization, and a sustainable food system cannot exist in—or on—soil that continues to be ‘purified’ through white supremacy and monocultural belief systems.”²⁵ When we approach food work as cultural work, we are able to crack open, reimagine, and rewrite the implicit assumptions of fiercely held narratives, transforming the shared spaces, practices, and norms that make up culture.

Speaking to the centrality of storytelling in her approach to food work, Black food scholar–activist Lindsey Lunsford recently told us, “The things that come natural are easy to write off as being unimportant or nonsubstantial.”²⁶ In the same way that humans couldn’t describe the color blue before we began producing blue pigment––despite the fact that the fundamental elements of air and water are now defined by the hue–– food-culture work has always been fundamental to our world, even if our colonized languages and worldviews haven’t allowed some of us to “see” it.

Understanding food work as cultural work calls many people and communities into the movement to collectively reclaim and transform our relationship to food, at all scales. A food systems analysis invited consumers to ask: Where does your food come from? Food-culture work calls us all into the question: What culture do we feed?

Bringing Narratives of Wholeness to Life

Food-culture work is necessary to alter existing extractive and exploitative power structures. Unlike a “vote- with-your-fork” politic that centers consumption as the space of action, food-culture work affirms our individual and collective power to shape culture beyond consumption.²⁷

Indigenous communities and leaders have long offered an understanding of human relationship to food and land as sacred, in ways that are profoundly distinct from the worldviews that dominate food culture in the United States. “There’s a circle of relationships that happen in our territories that people have forgotten about, about how we live in reciprocity and don’t take more than we need,” Corinna Gould—Lisjan Ohlone leader, community spokeswoman, and cofounder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust—told a Food Culture Collective audience in 2020. Gould and the women of Sogorea Te’ have played a leading role in defining rematriation as a practice that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people and stewardship.²⁸ Unlike the legal term “repatriate,” which is defined by a transfer of ownership, “rematriate” includes a more profound practice of healing and decolonization. This work offers cultural transformation far beyond the territories of the Lisjan Ohlone people on the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay; Sogorea Te’s modeling invites us all to inhabit narratives of care and abundance to heal our soils, our communities, and our relationships with all our living relations (human and beyond)—including #LandBack to Indigenous stewardship.²⁹

Nikiko Masumoto, a third-generation Japanese-American peach farmer, queer writer, and performance artist, offers another example of a land-based food-culture practitioner cultivating transformational narratives in her work. Both Masumoto’s organic farming practice and her creative work nourish stories of belonging and wholeness alive in the Central Valley of California, which she calls home. As she shared with a Food Culture Collective audience in 2016, her food work invites others into an understanding of the “cultural landscape that is already embedded, but often erased, in the food that we eat.” The land Masumoto now farms was originally purchased by her grandfather a few years after he, like so many Japanese Americans, was incarcerated in an internment camp. Prior to World War II, Masumoto’s grandfather had worked as a farmhand; anti-Asian immigration laws had prevented many Asian Americans from owning land, and resentment of the Japanese community’s ownership stake in agricultural land directly fueled the political justification for internment and forcible removal.³⁰ As Masumoto told a reporter in 2017, she is a descendant of her grandfather’s “resilience to really claim a place of belonging.”³¹

Land-based food-culture workers like White, Gould, and Masumoto go beyond connecting us to the land; they connect us to the stories and legacies embedded in the soils we cultivate. “What does it look like to weave in the stories of the people, of the land, who feed us?” wondered Pandora Thomas, founder of EarthSEED Permaculture Center and Farm, on a phone call this winter. Founded with a powerful cultural intention, EarthSEED is a 14-acre solar-powered organic farm, orchard, and educational center in Sonoma County, California, stewarded with Afro-Indigenous permaculture principles. “We sing, we celebrate, we mourn,” she continued—“there’s all this cultural beauty that is expressed in bringing food from the ground to our lives.”

This celebration and witnessing of the cultural aspects of food, farming, and land stewardship are clearly something we’re hungering for. The last decade has seen a broader public embrace food-culture figures, from Anishinaabe botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass became a national best seller, to Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm, whose 2018 guide-meets-manifesto, Farming While Black, spoke to the work of reclaiming dignity as Black agriculturalists.³² Both works have resonated with an audience that reaches far beyond people working directly in food and farming, demonstrating a broad appetite for culturally based approaches to land and farming.

This work of renewing and healing relationships with the land is growing along with a wave of people reclaiming and reviving ancestral culinary traditions. Indigenous writers like Devon Abbott Mihesuah (Recovering Our Ancestors’ Gardens, 2005)³³ and Black writers like Jessica Harris (High on the Hog, 2012, which served as the foundation for last year’s hit Netflix series hosted by Stephen Satterfield)³⁴ and Bryant Terry (starting with Grub, in 2006, and, most recently, Black Food, in 2021)³⁵ have elevated and centered foodways that have been intentionally suppressed and erased in U.S. history. In 2015, Luz Calvo and Catriona Esquibel took up the call to Decolonize Your Diet with a cookbook reclaiming health-giving Mesoamerican foods.36 Numerous ancestral food projects have sprung up in the intervening years. Two of the best known are from Sean Sherman and team at The Sioux Chef, and Michael Twitty’s Afroculinaria;37 there are many more. These cultural food projects are not just about preserving traditional foodways—by resurfacing a relationship to food that celebrates sovereignty and reciprocity, we expand our capacity to dream into decolonized visions of the future.

At a 2019 Food Culture Collective event, Filipina-American chef, educator, and activist Aileen Suzara asked the audience, “Is it possible to recover the things that you were supposed to forget?” Suzara was called to food work as a means of reckoning with the aftershocks of colonization and military occupation she witnessed in her family. In 2017, Suzara founded Sariwa, a project celebrating the healing properties of Filipino food. Like many immigrant families, the pressure to assimilate had forcibly distanced Suzara from her ancestors’ traditional foodways and the experience of belonging embedded within them. Her longing for an ancestral connection with food resonates with many living in diaspora; food has long been weaponized as a tool of oppression, dispossession, and forced assimilation by ruling powers. For Suzara and other BIPOC food-culture workers, food is a pathway for people to collectively remember the past, to “change a painful narrative” shaped by settler colonialism that perpetuates shame, trauma, and erasure—to reclaim power and nourish narratives that honor their communities’ history and agency in authoring their futures.

Shane Bernardo, a Detroit-based culture and community organizer, echoed Suzara on a call this winter: “When we are able to talk about our stories in a less isolated way, we take our power back… The most powerful thing is that we are able to take our power back and stop being victims.” In his work as cofounder of Food As Healing, Bernardo seeks to reestablish a sacred relationship to land and food, and make explicit the connection between community health and dominant systems of harm. Bernardo, who grew up working in his Philippine family’s grocery store, “came into the knowing of this work” after his father became an ancestor in 2010. “When my father passed on,” said Bernardo, “I saw how the chronic health diseases of a person in the diaspora are connected to the displacement of my people and my ancestors. The work of reclaiming my people’s foodways has my people’s blood on it.” When we reclaim our practices, moving beyond dominant systems and white supremacist logic, we can achieve, in Bernardo’s words, the “ecosystem shift” we need to truly heal.

Renewing a Generous Story of Food

We—the writers of this essay—are women working in food and cultural strategy, one white and two mixed- race. We write from a place of longing, with gratitude for those doing culturally based food work, and with our own sense of accountability. Two of us, Jovida and Shizue, have had the privilege in our work at Food Culture Collective to facilitate, amplify, and platform farmers, organizers, healers, foodmakers, chefs, elders, and creatives. Through the personal stories these individuals shared with us, they have made it clear that a framework of “fixing our food system” does not do justice to their sense of purpose or intended impact. In addition, we—Jovida and Shizue—are based in the Bay Area, California, where the farm-to-table narrative was coined, and both of our parents were (at least tangentially) active in the white-centered back-to-the-land farming movement of the ’60s and ’70s. We have an intimate understanding of the blindspots and limitations of the food narratives we inherited and were poised to perpetuate. Our cowriter, Julie, weaves in insights from her work growing transformative cultural and economic power, her mixed Ecuadorian-

American identity, and her perspective from Michigan,

home to vibrant Black- and Indigenous-led food movements.

We do food-culture work not to change how we eat but to change how we live. We each have struggled to feel connected to our ancestral cultures—a struggle tied to a long history of forced assimilation and imperialism.

This is true for Shizue in relationship to her Japanese ancestors and for Julie in relationship to her Ecuadorian roots—it’s also true for each of us in connection to the cultural traditions of Celtic, Germanic, and English peoples in our respective family trees, and for Jovida in connection to her Ashkenazi ancestors: the living expression of our families’ cultures were lost to the flattening power of assimilation into whiteness.³⁸ In those ancestral threads lie the memories of a different relationship to food, land, and belonging. As White reminds us, the seeds of ancestral wisdom within us are waiting to be rehydrated.

At the Food Culture Collective roundtable last November, White explained how she dislikes the phrase food system because it “feels sterile, reductionist, and hollow….it was birthed out of the same forces that created the destruction of the beautifully storied cultures that we all descend from.” Instead, she seeks to affirm the powerful, expansive, intersectional role of food in our lives. White encourages us to reclaim a relationship to food that embraces our storied lineages—lineages that affirm a food culture rooted in the belief that care for all people, lands, and waters is possible.³⁹

Food-culture workers have been guiding our way; to get there, we all need to be part of shaping it. Food- culture work is dynamic and evolving, its impacts as far-reaching and diverse as its practitioners. Embracing food culture as an orientation to food transformation requires a shift in how we think about and relate to food at an elemental level, not simply in our terminology. The first step in this process is to witness and recognize food-culture work being done around us—and to center the leadership of people revitalizing and revisioning culturally based food and land practices.

Food-culture work offers a dynamic and intersectional approach to addressing the most critical issues of our time––from climate justice and global health, to policing and gun violence, to land rematriation and food sovereignty, and far beyond. In the words of Black food scholar, culture worker, and visionary thought leader Psyche Williams-Forson, “Demanding what sustains us culturally . . . in ways that will allow us to thrive and be whole, comforted, satiated and alive is not a fight from which we should shrink.”⁴⁰

To transform how we live, and ensure a healthy future on this planet, we need to shift power away from the cultures that support exploitation and destruction toward cultures that instead nourish our collective healing, liberation, and joy. For those wondering how to begin, we offer a few suggestions:

Listen: Give generous attention, while being open to learning something unexpected.

For those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and diasporic people of color: Remember that everyone has the power to embrace multiple ways of knowing, and listen to their intuition and wisdom.⁴¹ White supremacist culture has taught us not to do that, but that’s exactly what we need to do. As Rowen White reminds us, there are many ways into cultural rehydration, re-enlivening the “deep intelligences inside our bodies” to nourish our healing, joy, and visions for the future.
For people who identify as white: Remember that white people have also experienced disconnection from ancestral roots.⁴² Everyone can listen to and learn from the echoes of our ancestors. Embracing pleasure and joy as we revive and remix our own culinary traditions is essential to rehydrating the wisdom embedded in our White folks who do this inner listening might also discover grief over cultural loss or feel called to take stock of the painful, violent histories that their ancestors may have directly contributed to—or, at the very least, benefited from.⁴³ At the same time, it is vital that everyone listen to, witness, and appreciate the power and leadership of BIPOC

food-culture workers, without fetishizing, tokenizing, or appropriating their cultural stories or lineages.

Engage: Consider, as we connect with food-culture work.

For everyone: Ask the question, How might we (re)claim our power to truly nourish ourselves and our communities, to shape our everyday lives, systems, and governance around mutual nourishment and care, around solidarity and celebration? When we orient toward what we want to create in the world, we can better identify opportunities to move toward our vision.
For people working on food systems change: Follow the wisdom and leadership of BIPOC

food-culture keepers. Invest in cultural power—alongside economic and political power—as key to effective strategy. Practice naming the cultural context and power dynamics within which we work. How are we shifting power and resources to address structural harms? How are we aligning our organizational resources with values that support mutual flourishing?⁴⁴

Activate: Move with awareness and purpose.

For everyone: Strengthen the muscles of reclaiming and reimagining food culture with creativity, joy, and connection. Be open to playfully exploring the ways we grow, cook, and gather around food. White suggests, “Whether it’s seeds, or food, or in the kitchen, or art, or poetry, or whatever is your passion: you had ancestors that did that too . . . Whatever it is that your passion is, it’s the way that you stitch yourself back into that culture. And we need all of us!”⁴⁵ These inner signals can guide us in reweaving life-affirming relationships with land, water, food, and community.

For people who identify as white: Deepen and grow your understanding of how S. food systems are rooted in and shaped by a history of land theft, genocide, slavery, and imperialism. We must take active steps to rebalance power and repair past and ongoing violence and extraction. Ask questions like, How are we explicitly acting on our commitments to Black, Indigenous, and diasporic communities of color? Commit to a personal practice of accountability, reparations, and rematriation that could include paying a voluntary land tax,⁴⁶ channeling resources to BIPOC-led food-culture projects, and finding ways to follow and support BIPOC leadership without adding demands for time and attention.
For people working in nonprofit organizations: Now is the time for coalition building across issues and Join a network that embraces deep narrative and cultural strategies, or collaborate across food, arts, culture, climate, and social justice spaces (just to name a few) to deepen relationships, cross-pollinate, and forward intersectional solutions that promise long-term transformation rather than short-term wins.⁴⁷ Embrace innovative models of community wealth and economic self-determination, and resist the idea that grants are the best and only way to resource the work. As HEAL Food Alliance states clearly, “No single organization, alliance, or sector can transform the system working alone or in isolation; we need our diverse skills, resources, and bases.”⁴⁸
For people working in philanthropy: Recognize and invest in cultural power—alongside economic and political power—as key to effective strategy. Invest in authentic partnerships with BIPOC

food-culture workers and bearers who are leading, and have historically led, the work to reclaim and reimagine our relationship with food in service of our collective flourishing. (Re)Read the HEAL-led coalition open letter⁴⁹ and follow up,⁵⁰ and consider the questions posed there: How are you cultivating authentic partnership with BIPOC communities, ending inequitable grantmaking strategies, redirecting multiyear, unrestricted funding from white-led groups to BIPOC-led organizations, and examining your own endowment investments and funding trends?

There is a cultural reawakening happening all around us. We can choose to be a part of it—to nourish it in ourselves, support it in others, and honor and resource those leading the way. We all shape and create food culture. Once we recognize this, we can all work to cultivate a food culture rooted in celebration and solidarity, reorienting our collective trajectory toward a future of mutual flourishing.

Notes

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Andrea Shalal, “Meat packers’ profit margins jumped 300{d2b09b03d44633acb673e8080360919f91e60962656af8ade0305d5d8b7e4889} during pandemic—White House economics team,” Reuters, December 10, 2021, reuters.com/business/meat-packers-profit-margins-jumped-300-during-pandemic -white-house-economics-2021-12-10/; Alvin Chang et al., “The pandemic exposed the human cost of the meatpacking industry’s power: ‘It’s enormously frightening,’” The Guardian, November 16, 2021, theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/16/meatpacking-industry-covid-outbreaks-workers; and Siena Chrisman, The FoodPrint of Pork, FoodPrint, last modified September 22, 2021, foodprint.org/reports/the -foodprint-of-pork/.

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Said live in an online story-sharing event on September 23, (The language was very slightly adjusted for this quote, approved by A. Breeze Harper.)
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“An Open Letter from BIPOC Leaders in Food & Agriculture to Food Systems Funders,” HEAL Food Alliance, August 13, 2020, healfoodalliance.org/an-open-letter-from-bipoc-leaders-in-food-agriculture-to -food-systems-funders/.

HEAL Food Alliance,“Follow Up to ‘An Open Letter from BIPOC Leaders in Food & Agriculture to Food Systems Funders,’” Medium, December 11, 2020, medium.com/@HEAL_Food/follow-up-to-an-open -letter-from-bipoc-leaders-in-food-agriculture-to-food-systems-funders-45c54c5eb6da.

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