How Fast Food Companies Coopted Black America | Marcia Chatelain & Mark Hyman

Anytime we have a conversation in America about inequality and we're serious about looking at the history of it and the roots of it, this is racial reckoning.

You know, when you look at the data from the 60s, you know, African Americans were among the healthiest groups of the population. In fact, far healthier than whites. And now it's the opposite. And do you think this sort of effort among the fast food companies and not just fast food, but also big food companies, targeting minority populations, African Americans, Hispanics is to blame for that?

Well, I think it's multilayered. I mean, the first thing I would say is that one thing that I really kind of, you know, push back on a little bit is, you know, when we talk about African American food cultures prior to the immersion of fast food and Black communities, we always have the problem of nutrition. So African Americans may have had lower body weight. There was a moment where the life expectancy differentials between whites and blacks were slowly closing, but the access to good quality foods that were highly nutritious, that were varied, had always been a challenge, whether a person was a farmer in the Jim Crow South and they're harvesting all sorts of agricultural goods, but their families are subsisting on beans. to people in places like Chicago, New York City, where a lot of the activism was about the quality of food in the local grocery stores. And so all of this is to say that what we see is a tradition of not being able to access the foods that people need, a tradition of not being able to get the health care people need, a tradition of joblessness, and they're all compounding, you know, one on top of you, the other. And then there's this thing called fast food that is providing a job, even if it's incredibly low wage, that does provide the opportunity to eat food, even though it isn't nutritious and well-rounded and is also, you know, becoming part of the larger culture of the, of the, of the community.

Yeah. On any given day, about a third of Americans eat at fast food restaurants. And, and yet, fast food isn't really the same in terms of its meaning and its place in our culture among different parts of our society, for example, in suburban areas versus lower socioeconomic areas. And for some, owning a franchise can be a pathway to wealth. And it's been that in part through some very focused efforts of the food industry to bring African Americans and others into ownership around fast food franchise as a path to wealth. But it also is a source of disease and suffering and a burden for many of these communities. And there's these fast food restaurants are hyper concentrated in segregated areas and low socioeconomic areas. And it's part of why we see, for example, African Americans be far more likely to have diabetes, heart disease, obesity. And according to the CDC, African Americans eat more fast food than any other group of the population. So the question is really how did we get there? How did this happen? And tell us more about the history of how we ended up where we are, where we're seeing just this massive, massive concentration of fast food restaurants in places where people are struggling with their health and with poverty and with challenges.

Well, one of the things that I discovered in my research is that there is a direct line between this transitional moment in the mid to late 1960s in America in terms of the fight for racial justice, the question of the role of the government in responding to people's lived realities, and the pivot in the civil rights movement with the rise of fast food. And so essentially what happens in the 1960s is that after there is a wave of very important legislation around the issue of schools, public accommodations, voting rights, there's this huge gap in terms of economic opportunity. And as we saw in the George Floyd summer of 2020, throughout the 1960s, there were these uprisings and rebellions that people said, why are people so distanced from the American dream? What's happening? And one of the conclusions was that there weren't enough business opportunities. There were not enough of an array of retailers that were really responding to African American markets. And that got interpreted as a growth opportunity. for fast food. So after Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, months later, you have the opening of the first African American franchise McDonald's. And that's not a coincidence. This was a moment in which big business was supposed to be the solution to the problem of racial justice.

But Ralph Abernathy, who was the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after Martin Luther King, said he didn't really believe in black capitalism. He believed in black socialism. And yet he ended up in some ways being co-opted by receiving money from McDonald's. So can you talk about the challenges that this community faces and the idea that, you know, there was, there was benefit in the idea that there could be salvation in economic opportunity and creating entrepreneurship in the African-American community, but It kind of backfired in a way, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's not designed to do that, right? So, you know, I don't go to my local, you know, shoe store to try to, you know, see a doctor, right? It's not made for that. The shoe store is supposed to provide shoes. And I think in many ways, you know, the idea that business could solve these complex problems of housing, of education, of jobs, of healthcare. And so the weight that a lot of these, early African American franchise owners had to carry was enormous. And they were doing their best in the context of having businesses that were community serving, that were community facing, that were trying to respond to local needs, but also the bottom line. And I think that, you know, the fast food industry understood. I don't know if desperation is the right word, but they understood that the window of opportunity was incredibly narrow and very few people were going to pass through it. And through these businesses, they start co-opting and aligning themselves with this idea of civil rights as being delivered by big business.

So the notion was that through improved economic opportunity and by empowerment of African American entrepreneurs, that it would raise the boat for everyone. That didn't really happen.

No, I mean, I think it's, you know, this is a period in the late 60s, early 70s that is, you know, the nation is being primed for the Reagan era of trickle-down economics, you know, the glorification of the small business owner as being the job creator, you know, all of these things that were still with us in many ways when we talk about the problem of poverty and we talk about the role of business. that was kind of what was happening in, I think, its most unobscured form. And so, you know, people believed and people wanted to see if it was possible.

Yeah, I mean, right. I mean, you know, it was interesting when the first McDonald's were actually in suburban white neighborhoods and were serving sort of a more affluent white community. And actually, there was segregation in the Jim Crow South. local populations are African-American couldn't eat at McDonald's, right? They were sort of excluded from there. And how did that all shift? Was it because of this awareness that there was a business opportunity to access a new market share from the fast food companies and they were sort of perniciously targeting them? Is that fair to say?

I think that's fair to say. I think you've got a number of things happening. So in the deep south, you have the student activists of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights organizations that are trying to dismantle segregation everywhere. So they're targeting McDonald's in places like Arkansas and Tennessee and North Carolina. And then, you know, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, businesses are now told you have to serve everybody. And there is a growing awareness of a growing affluent African-American community. So there's greater segment, um, tation of markets. And people are saying, okay, we can, We can pivot towards a new broader audience that can afford our goods, that wants to celebrate access to these experiences in the marketplace that they didn't have before. And so it was just kind of coming together of the fact that so much about the civil rights movement was about the relationship of the consumer and consumer goods. So whether it's trying to end desegregation in restaurants, whether it's trying to test the boundaries of integrated travel or, you know, ensuring that department stores would serve people on an equal basis. So much of it was about consumer power. And in the late 60s, people really, you know, they really, really honed in on that.

And you think, you know, you talked about this sort of intersection of fast food companies, black capitalists and civil rights leaders. who sort of thought that maybe opening up these opportunities would help racial inequality. But it kind of did that for a bunch of families, but not for everybody else. And it actually led to, in my view, a worsening of the plight of the African American community because it led to rampant obesity, diabetes, and chronic illness. And also, you know, because of the, these areas where food deserts and there wasn't access to their food, it was sort of often the only place people could go, the only place that was safe, the only place that, you know, was clean. And they had, maybe had now has services like Wi-Fi or where people could gather. So it provided a service to the community, but also has, has created such Devastation. When I, when I look at it from the outside as a doctor, you know, I'm thinking from a health lens, what, what happened when, when we expanded the fast food industry, when we expanded the heavy marketing of industrial processed food to these communities, it's really in a sense, it's a sense of food injustice or food racism or I don't know what the right term is, but there's some phenomena that's happened in this culture. And guys like Kelly Brownell and others who was from the Rudd Center at Yale and looked at food policy, you know, have really documented how the food industry has literally targeted these communities specifically to increase their consumption. of these foods and, and, and has focused on, for example, African-American Hispanic communities in the kids see way more ads for fast food, way more ads for junk food. They're far more exposed to it. They're more likely to consume these foods in larger amounts. And, and the, you know, I mean, I mean, you see the little kids with two, three, three or four years old with type 2 diabetes, which we used to call adult onset diabetes. And now we're seeing these communities at disproportionate rates. So I feel like there's been this sort of phenomena that sort of happen almost underneath the radar, people's awareness, where this whole phenomenon of food injustice has been going on and is accounting for so much of the challenges that I believe are facing these communities in terms of education and cognitive development. I mean, just developmentally, when you eat these foods, your brain isn't functioning, it's not developing. When you're obese, your life expectancy as a kid, if you're obese as a kid, it goes down 13 years, you're less likely to have a successful job and be economically viable. So there's so many layers to the problem. And the question is really, you know, how do we get, how do we kind of navigate this now? Because, you know, what started out as maybe a hopeful idea that by empowering these communities with businesses that it would help them, it's sort of done the opposite, in my view.

Well, I think that there, you know, there are a number of ways to look at this. I think the first one is that we have to get serious about the public sector responding to the needs of the public good. Businesses are not in any position to determine the fates of people. And I think that all of the issues that you, you know, you touch upon, I think it's about quality of life. And so if someone says, well, what do we do? And I said, well, what if we have health care for all, free college, a living wage, and some type of paid family leave and childcare? And someone says, well, what does that have to do with food? And I said, well, the expectation that people could live in a food system that is varied, that is robust and productive, where's the time, where's the money, where's the ability to do it? You know, a lot of, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not a medical doctor, so I try to stay in my lane. So, you know, I don't, I read, you know, a lot of conflicting things about all sorts of health comes and, you know, social determinants of health and public health. But this is what I do know. When people have the financial resources, when they have the security and stability of housing, when they know that their kids are going to a good school where they're safe, they're able to make the best possible choices. And so I think that it isn't just about the food, it's about all of the stressors in a society that allows injustice to continue and benefits from it that exacerbates the problem. You know, I can cook every night because I'm a college professor. I have plenty of money and I have a giant kitchen and if I feel like eating something, I can cook it. The implications, right, are different for me because of the position I have. Well, everyone should have that ability. Everyone should have an hour or two to make something if they want it. But, you know, in the communities in which fast food has thrived, I would say that fast food is a sensible choice for people who are constrained with work and responsibilities and don't have the freedom to have choice and to have a quality of life where things can be equally prioritized.

I think that's true. And I also think that, I've had some experiences in the South and other places and underserved communities. And what strikes me in Cleveland Clinic where I work, we work a lot with the African American communities around their chronic health issues, around the food issues. And, you know, one, it seems like there's a couple things. One is just a lack of awareness and education about the importance of nutrition. in terms of determining health outcomes and determining, you know, your ability to actually function in, in life. And two is, is the obviously lack of access. And, and, and three is just the, the sort of embedded beliefs and experiences that prevent them from actually even knowing what to do. So you're saying you can cook a meal because you know what to do. But, you know, if you don't have the education, if you don't have the family background, if you don't have the exposure, you don't know what to do with the food. So, you know, in Cleveland, I taught a cooking class for 300, we thought a few people would show up, 300 African-American women showed up for this cooking class to make kale smoothies, you know? And I was sort of shocked because I thought, wow, you know, they really have not gotten access to the right information and they're just exposed to a food culture that's driving poor choices where the healthy choices, really hard choice or they don't even know what the healthy choice is. And the bad choice is the easy choice.

I mean, I think that, you know, that the individual relationship to food is so complicated. And I think that, you know, there's all sorts of influences on what we eat and what we consume. I think that, you know, from my perspective, the the food is often an indicator. The food that is available to us in our most proximate locations is an indicator of what society has determined is right for us or good for us or what we're allowed to have. And so, you know, I think that there are people who, you know, they would love an opportunity for food to be something they can engage with in a kind of fullness, right? You know, I've talked to a lot of, you know, young professionals who are in the space of food justice and, you know, we talk about things like community gardens, nutrition and cooking classes and education. And I say, you know, I think all of these are great opportunities. I said, but let me ask you this. How many of the people that you're working with, how do you know if they have electricity to keep their foods stored in a fresh place. How do you know that they have the heating gas and the cooking gas that they need all winter long? And I said, the information about food, I think, is key. And then we take a step back and say, what are the conditions in which people are living and fighting for? I'm a Midwesterner. When it gets very cold, the gas company won't cut off your gas, but once the weather gets to 60 degrees, they will. And so if we have people who are in arrears on their utilities, we could tell them to make all sorts of stuff, but we have to make sure that those needs can actually be met.

Absolutely. You know, I want to kind of loop back to something you said that I think is pretty important, and I don't want to pass over it, which is the idea that, you know, that business can solve social problems. And from listening to it, it sounds like you're not a big fan of Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand trickle down economics. and the idea that we have to look at the structure of the society we live in. And I spent a lot of time in Haiti and worked with Paul Farmer and he talks about this concept of structural violence. What are the social, economic, and political conditions that drive disease? We talk now about the social determinants of health. They're the primary drivers of chronic disease. And a lot of that has to do with the issues you're discussing in your book and the disenfranchisement through the franchising of all these fast food restaurants everywhere. And I think it's a very important point because we have a pretty strong cultural view that capitalism and innovation and business will solve all of our problems and that social problems can be solved through business solutions. And you're challenging that orthodoxy And I'd love you to unpack that a little bit because from your perspective, looking into the details of this, what needs to change in terms of our social policies and our government policies that actually can actually change the trajectory of the ill health and the consequence of that health on everything from childhood development to economic success and viability and the ability to actually get ahead and get out of the circumstance that people find themselves in. I do think, and I do believe, given what I've seen in the research, that the ongoing sort of plight of underserved communities, whether they're poor white communities or African American communities or Hispanic communities, is really driven off of the underlying inability to actually get good nutrition. and that food sort of is the center of the beginning of building a healthy human who is functional and capable. And I'll just give you a quick example of what I mean by that. In juvenile detention centers, when they swap out healthy food for bad food that the kids are eating, there's over a 91% reduction in violence in the juvenile detention centers, a 75% reduction in restraints, 100% reduction in suicides, which affects their behavior. And so people's thoughts, feelings, behaviors, actions, capacity to function, it's really inhibited by the toxic nutritional landscape that we live in. And so I'm curious from your perspective, looking at this and the history of fast food and its intersectionality with racism and civil rights, how do we get out of this? Because you've done a great job of explaining what happened. How do we sort of move through to what we actually need to do to reclaim the health of our communities and society?

Living wage, free college, free childcare, Medicare for all. I mean, you know, it's all of these things, right? Get in the way of people being able to take a beat and make wide decisions about their lives, right? So, I don't have very strong positions on, you know, we also have to care about the supply chain because I mean, this is also an environmental issue that I don't get into in the book, but if I had endless pages to write, I mean, this is incredible to me. And I tell my students this and they say, okay, Professor Chatlin, we hear this all the time. When I was a kid, you couldn't get food everywhere. And now food is everywhere. There weren't food bookstores. There wasn't food everywhere. There wasn't prepared food everywhere. There was a landscape that I am troubled by, not just by our ability to make choices in a varied diet, but someone has to produce and harvest all of this food that we are either consuming or wasting or using to transform into chemical products to put back into food. This is not good. We should not, I shouldn't be able to get a pineapple at my local grocery right now. It's January, but I can, right? And so all of this is to say that we have to kind of make different choices about investments in people's lives. So, you know, whether, you know, it could be the corn subsidies or it could be military spending, you know, everything needs to be on the table to say, what are we going to do to improve the quality of people's lives? Because, yeah. Food isn't just about fuel. Food is about emotion. Food is about love and affection. I try to have a very kind of nuanced, non-judgmental view of how people use food in their lives, but the reality is that food can become a low priority when you are under the stress and under the gun of so many of these other concerns. So, once we have a strong social safety net that actually is geared towards caring for people, I think these other issues will slowly start to fade in our view because it isn't just the toxic foods, right? It isn't just the things that may make a person ill. It's about the stress that they live under and the inability to do anything else but consume and work and worry about your livelihood. So, I mean, it's expensive, but I think we've seen that the cost of ignoring these issues is also quite expensive. So the question is, on what end are we going to pay?

I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it seems like it's a cost driver to do these things, free education, free healthcare, you know, basic living wage. But I think it's actually a bargain when you look at the downstream benefits of doing these things. The only thing I'd say to challenge this a little bit is that, you know, when you say Medicare for all, healthcare for all, that only works if we can figure out how to stop the population from being so sick. And it speaks to the issue of the supply chain. which is all the food that's being produced that's driving this. So 60% of the calories Americans eat are processed foods, 67% of the calories that kids eat are ultra processed food. And that is being produced by a food system that's incentivized by our current policies that really prevent the ability to actually choose and get the right food. So if we do, what I worry about with Medicare for All particularly is that we're just gonna like create health care coverage and then we're not going to address the reason why people are going into health care system in the first place. And, and we're just gonna, we're just gonna be crushed. And I think that's sort of the challenge. You have to fix all of it at the same time. I mean, you'll get food stamps, which is great at, you know, safety net. But, you know, we, we say with the dietary guidelines, stop eating sugar and don't drink yours calories and, you know, don't eat processed food. And yet 75 of the food stamps are spent on processed food and 10% on soda. So, and how do you sort of now, can you use food assistance on, on soda?

I thought there were food stamps. Oh, my God.

Yes. I didn't know that.

Oh, no.

You, you can, you can, you cannot buy a rotisserie chicken in the grocery store because it's cooked. But you can buy a two liter.

Yeah.

Yes. But you can buy a two liter bottle of soda.

But here's the thing. I, I don't know if I, I don't know if I object to the purchasing of the soda. so much as because that probably was the work of some type of lobbyist who was working for the corn industry.

Of course.

For the corn lobby, right? And so, I mean, I think that this is, again, like people can have choices, I guess, in these markets. That's the choice is not what vexes me so much. It's the mechanism that makes the call on the choices, right? It's the no household products, but you can, you know, certain foods. It's deciding that, you know, ketchup is a vegetable. So, When we're playing with these types of kind of upside down thinking, it really does speak to the heart of the imbalance and influence. And this is why businesses should not be in the game of uplifting people's lives. I mean, they should be regulated to the point where they have to participate in a free and fair economy and focus on what they do, right? They make products and we as a society are tasked with taking care of each other.

Yeah, I mean, you look at countries that actually have these strong social safety nets, that have healthcare, that have free education that provide economic opportunity, their numbers are dramatically better all across the board in terms of obesity, the health of the population, and much more. So it's pretty interesting to see that and I feel like we're we're really afraid in this country of doing anything like that because it speaks of socialism, right? It speaks of this idea that we're all going to become communists or something. But it really, I don't see a way out unless we actually create a true fair market where the true costs of the food and the food system and everything else are embedded in the price. Right now, the price you pay at checkout is not the true cost of the food. The Rockefeller Foundation produced a report recently about the true cost of food that showed that basically it was basically three times the cost of the actual price that you pay at the checkout counter for the food in terms of its effect on health, on the economy, on climate, on social justice issues. And, and that's, you know, a staggering number. So actually, if, if we actually had the food companies accountable for the externalities and that they're really not externalities, they're embedded in the very way that we have the food system, then, you know, if we don't do that, we're really kind of not going to be able to solve the crisis we have now of chronic disease and obesity and all, and I think which is all linked to injustice across the board, economic injustice, racial injustice, it's all like one intersecting problem, right?

And I think, you know, I think that it's a shift in focus, I think that what the past 50 years has done is created a space in which the lines between public and private are so blurred that we actually imagine a world where we go to companies to solve these problems. And we forget that people actually have power. And I think that one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book was to talk about the fact that none of these things that we see are inevitable. There is a period of time where corporations are grooming people, they're ingratiating themselves, they're finding people at their most desperate moments, and they're capitalizing on that. And so in that process, when we see it happening, perhaps we have the tools to make sure it doesn't, that we aren't living in the United States of Coca-Cola or McDonald's, that we're actually in our position as people who advocate for each other and can actually push back against the corporations.

Okay, so, you know, Marsh, you talked about the ways in which these food companies aren't really held accountable and they're actually influencing our communities in ways that are often invisible. And I think, you know, talk about in the book, for example, how McDonald's, you know, gives money to the NAACP or, you know, I know Coca-Cola does that and they fund the King Center in Atlanta and they provide a lot of support for social programs and they do it as their corporate social responsibility activities. But there's a dark side to it, which actually creates indebtedness in these communities to these food companies that are actually killing them. So it's like, how do you navigate that? And how do you educate the communities to say, hey, how do we sort of thread that needle? Because yes, they need the services and the support. who else is going to give it to them? The government isn't, right? So they're turning to these food corporations to actually support their communities, but on the other hand, they're also killing them.

Well, I mean, I think that it requires two things. One, I think in trying to engage the conversation about the relationship between corporations and community, the first thing that I hope I did in this book was to come from a place of empathy to say, these are tough choices. if presented with a million dollars in order for your organization to achieve its goals, I think it's a really hard thing to turn down. And what power do we unlock in turning down? What does it mean for us to say no? We are not comfortable with the way that this money is made and we're going to make a different choice. And I think that, you know, the tough sell isn't just don't take money from this corporate entity, But rather, why does this corporate entity have so much power in the first place? Why if we want to memorialize Dr. King that we need Coca-Cola to help us do that? Why is it when we need these resources that this is the place where the resources come? And so I think that, you know, this is not about telling people who have constrained choices, you made the wrong choice, but rather to say, okay, How can we create a vision of a world where you're not in this bind anymore? And who do we need to talk to and how do we need to come together to imagine a different way of proceeding in the future?

And that requires massive policy change, right? And policy change in this country is primarily driven by large corporations and huge lobbying budgets. And the food and ag industry, you know, dwarfs all other industries in terms of their lobbying efforts. and their opposition to any Progressive changes in food policies that might promote health or change your agricultural systems or, you know, allows ketchup to be a vegetable and french fries to be a vegetable. That's just crazy, right? And it's both on the Democrat and Republican side. I mean, you know, we saw in Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar is from Minnesota, and she lobbied for pizza to be a vegetable because Swanson pizza is the largest supplier of pizza to schools in America and that had to be considered a vegetable in order for it to be served in schools. So that kind of stuff just really is discouraging to me and I just, you know, other than figuring out how to get some bunch of billionaires to spend billions of dollars in lobbying to do the right thing, how do we get out of this? Because these these education of the lawmakers is so limited. And I've been working on a campaign called the Food Fix campaign, which is essentially a, an education and advocacy group to educate lawmakers and change policies around exactly these issues that we're talking about. And when we go to talk to them, they're just so unaware, and all their education has come from industry and, and not from real science. And, and so we're sort of battling this problem, and then we've obviously got the you've got these lawmakers who are often funded in large part by these corporate interests that actually affect their ability to have independent thought. I don't know other than really raising up a populist that is conscious and is able to elect leaders who are addressing the issues of how we're going to change this.

Well, I think one of the things that we've seen in our electoral process is that that grassroots intervention is possible. That we have an array of elected officials who have no business serving in Congress as far as I'm concerned, but they were able to touch a nerve, galvanize enough grassroots support, and compel their parties to put them forward for good and for bad. And so I think that in the future, I can imagine a world in which we are running food justice candidates from communities that have been underserved and harmed by our food system as agricultural workers, as people and processing plants. I think as we see what is happening with grocery workers and their vulnerability to COVID, I think that there is a potential political movement based on a broadly defined idea of food justice that isn't just about what we consume, but the conditions under which we consume and who is producing the foods that we consume, I think it could be incredibly powerful. But, you know, this is where we need to kind of put some of our energies as well.

I think you're absolutely right. You know, when you look at the, you know, the legacy of racism in this country and slavery, it was embedded in the Fair Labor Standards Act, which under the New Deal of Roosevelt set Labor standards that provide safe working conditions and a fair wage and, you know, reasonable working hours and vacation and sick leave and all these benefits that we sort of take for granted. The only way he could get that law passed and fight the Southern Dixie Democrats, who are all racist, was to exclude food and farm workers, which were primarily black. and that legacy still continues today. It's why we see tipping in restaurants, it's why we see, you know, farm workers not have the same labor protections as other workers, and it perpetuates this whole vicious cycle. So you're right, it's a much bigger problem than just the food people eat from the grocery store or in a fast food restaurant. It's really the whole embedded racism within the entire food supply chain.

And I think that this is, you know, we're having this conversation on January 6th, And there's that. I'm in a PPS documentary about January 6th that airs later tonight. And these things are not unrelated. And I think that for us to get to a place where we are adequately addressing all of these disparities, we also have to be in a place where we are willing to acknowledge the persistent and kind of relentlessness of racism in shaping policy decisions, in framing the ways people live and the ways that they are told they should live or allowed to live. All of this is a racial reckoning. We often think of racial reckoning as dramatic events, dramatic confrontations, uprisings. But anytime we have a conversation in America about inequality and we're serious about looking at the history of it and the roots of it, this is racial reckoning in talking about our food system. And so, you know, I think, and at the same time, as much as we can point to the many things that are wrong, I think that we can also, you know, be confident in the fact that every day people are growing and learning, and they're pushing back and challenging a lot of hegemonic ideas about society, about food, about food production, you know, a group of Starbucks workers in, you know, in New York were able to unionize their store because they're saying no more. I mean, what we're seeing right now with the intersection of COVID the great resignation, these battles about reopening, this is, this can be an incredible moment for labor and for raising consciousness about what it really costs, the human toll of our current food system. And I'm incredibly optimistic that as we move toward an understanding of what COVID has done, that we're going to get people who are going to fight for justice in ways that we had never imagined before.

I think that's really true. I think there is sort of an awakening. And I think, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement is really important. And I think it raises awareness about just racism in general and police and gun violence is a real problem, right? And it's accountable for 1.3% of all deaths in America, which is real and it needs to end. And we're very aware of it. We've got George Floyd. We've got so many people who really.

Know.

The names of the people who are have been victims of this, Tamir Rice and so forth. But what we really don't think about is that the food system and the food we're eating is responsible for 70% of the deaths. So it kills far more people than gun violence. And yet there's a lack of sort of a framing of the problem as a social justice or as a food justice issue. And I think you sort of bring that out in your book. But it's to me, unless we sort of name it and call it out, it's like Black Lives Matter, but Black Health Matters too. And I think that we're not going to kind of get to connect the dots for people to go, wow, maybe this is part of the reason why these communities are so burdened and unable to emerge from the conditions in which they live. And I think you know, I've seen this over and over again where, where you look at, you know, when you start to sort of create awareness in these communities, they, there's like a level of internalized racism around food. Like, this is our food.

Right.

And I, you know, I tell a story in my book food fix about a Native American man, a Hopi chief. I was on a rafting trip with him to raise awareness about the tar sands mining in the tabus plateau in Utah and how that would affect the Colorado River Basin and so forth. And we were on, he was very overweight, and he was he was diabetic and he was throwing up on his way down because the exercise just about killed him. And we were in the boat and I said, Howard, you can fix this. He said, what do I have to do? I said, well, you have to sort of cut out all the sugar and the soda and all the starchy foods and the flour. And, you can fix this. He says, oh wow. I don't know if I can do that. I'm like, why? He says, well, we have our traditional Hopi ceremonies. And I'm like, yeah. And he says, well, we have our traditional Hopi ceremonial foods. I'm like, okay, well, what are those foods? He says, well, cookies, cakes, and pies. You know what I'm like? That was sort of eye-opening to me because it sort of highlighted the fact that in these cultures, there's a lot of identification with the food as being their cultural food.

And yet, I don't think that's distinct to communities of color, though.

No, but, but, but, you know, the love, like, you know, particularly you know, I think there has been a, you know, if you look at the history, and I think Leah Penniman talks about this, I don't know if you know her work, but there's been this sort of evolution of, you know, the African-American food culture from slavery to the present that has sort of led them to believe that these are their foods, right?

All the, yeah, but I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push back on this. I think every group has, I mean, I know, I mean, I think, like, I think, I think you're right. Every group has their foods. the question is the opportunity and the desire to vary, to, to depart from one's foods.

Right.

So, because I think that, like, if, you know, because we have holidays, we have, you know, every group has something that is a celebration food, a special occasion food, an everyday food. So, I mean, I, I don't think those two ideas are necessarily in opposition that a person can have a a varied and complex diet, and there can be a set of foods that have value and meaning.

You want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and the link below. My point is that the Hope in Traditional Foods is not cookies, cakes, and pies. That's not what their ancestors were eating 500 years ago. But I think this is an.

But I think the point you make is really interesting because we are in an era with the popularity of 23 and Me and all of this kind of finding your roots about what we understand is traditionally ours. And so yes, I'm sure within a thousand year frame, what we consider a traditional food is radically different than a pie or a cake. But I think that story is really illustrative though, about this whole conversation we're having. Well, pies and cakes are introduced by, right, the forces of colonialism, of processed food coming to reservations, about broken treaties and sovereignty. And so, you know, so you can say, well, you know, I want you to think about expanding maybe the variety of foods that you know, that, that you engage with. But, you know, for this guy, that is a traditional food. And I think that that's important.

I guess so. But, but, you know, that culture is so oppressed, and it's, to me, it's a second genocide. You know, we, we killed them all with guns and killed all their food supply and took away their food sovereignty and gave them food Commodities from the government, basically, flour, sugar and trans fats. And then we sort of are seeing this massive epidemic of disease in this population that's worse than any other in their culture. So we see 80% of Native Americans, like the Pima Indians, are diabetic by the time they're 30. Their life expectancy is 46. And this is really the third world in America. And I think a lot of it is driven by the loss of food sovereignty and the loss of their traditional foods. and their ability to actually have the ability to grow and create and make the foods that actually are designed for their biology. And I think African Americans are the same way. I think there's a food culture that has been foisted on them by the food industry that has been internalized and is leading to this massive pandemic of chronic disease. It's what we're seeing with COVID It's we're seeing just in general. I mean, you're African American, you're I think about 80% were likely to get diabetes, four times as likely to have kidney failure, three and a half times more likely to suffer amputations. I mean, the data is pretty compelling from a medical perspective of how.

The.

Inequities in our food system are driving a lot of these chronic health issues and all the downstream consequences that affect people's ability to have a happy, healthy, vibrant life. You think so or am I getting, am I missing the mark?

No, I think that health disparity, life expectancy, chronic disease is absolutely important to think about. But I guess what I would offer is on the level of interventions and engagement, right? Where do you meet people?

Yeah.

You know, do you meet people in a place and saying, well, you know, everything that you're eating is garbage and you enjoy it and that's not going to work. No one wants to hear that. Nor no one needs to be treated that way. The question is, what are, you know, what are the opportunities in community? What are the opportunities in family? What are the opportunities in everyday life to create a variety of experiences around food? because I think that, and I think that, you know, this is about the context we're coming from, you know, as a medical professional, you have to get people to change behaviors. And as a historian, my job is to contextualize human behavior, right? To put it in a place in the setting. And I think that, you know, in the middle of that are ways for us to kind of think about You know, there are histories that are tied to food that are sources of pride and sources of places in which people point to say, this is something I'm proud of, or this is something that is part of a legacy. And I think what I'm reacting to is the possibility that comes in recognizing that even as there is a desire to change that relationship?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm Jewish and certainly some of the stuff that we is not that healthy. But it's part of our cultural tradition and we do it, but on no special holidays, it's not an everyday thing. And I think the challenge is that we really have to change the structural conditions from a policy level down. And we also sort of name the problem. And I think you did a great job of sort of bringing these issues out in your book franchise. the golden arches in Black America because very few people in my perspective are talking about this. There are very few people are actually talking about, you know, food racism or food apartheid or, or the, the inequity in our food system that's driving and perpetuating inequality across our society. And I think that that's what kind of really drives me to start to think about these things, which is what are the steps we need to take? And you mentioned, obviously, things like the basic social safety net, healthcare, education, and a basic living wage. But those things are really challenging to put forth in our current political environment. And I'm wondering from your perspective, from a historical context, one of the things we can start to do as individuals, as families, as communities, as business owners, if we own businesses, as voters and citizens, what can we do to start to move this in the right direction? 'Cause we, from my view, this is just getting worse and worse. We're seeing worsening rates of all these diseases despite the best medical care. And I think it's because we haven't dealt with the fundamental causes which you.

Elicit, I mean, elucidate in your book. Yeah, I mean, I think it's about changing relationships to systems so that people could actually trust systems and believe that there's something there for them. I was having an interesting conversation with my husband about vaccine hesitancy. and there's all sorts of theories about why people don't want to get vaccinated, why they do want to get vaccinated. I mean, there's a lot there and I'm actually not that interested in that conversation. But he said something that was interesting. He said, you know, one of the things that medical professionals and people from the CDC keep saying is, if you have any questions about the vaccine, go talk to your doctor. And I said, but I said, you know, I said, who has a doctor? I mean, I'm a professional in my early 40s. I don't really have a good primary care doctor where if I had a medical concern, this person is who I trust. Occasionally, I've gotten good doctors here and there. They move, something happens. My dermatologist, I see every six months. But a doctor that I have a good relationship with that I feel like I could, I don't know who does. And so just that framing that there are institutions and that there are people you can turn to when you are in a moment of kind of indecision or hesitation, I thought, who is this, I mean, who is this advice for? You know, I have excellent healthcare. I don't have that. So who are, you know, who is this imagined doctor? And so in the same way that, you know, it's like, you know, who, who do you trust to make important life decisions with? I think we are a society where we don't have that on so many levels. And so strengthening our institutions, strengthening the care that our institutions provide, I think will transform the ways that people walk into the world. And if they feel like there's actually a human that they can get good information from. And I think it's, so I think it's in all these places, you know, there's something going on with my kid. My kid's teacher might be good this year, the next year the teacher may be checked out, or the school might be running really well this year and the next year something happens. This, you know, it's the inconsistency. And so what happens is media starts to fill that gap. and depending on what part of the internet you're living on, it could be real good or it can be real bad. So I think, you know, it's about trying to create trusting structures on the local level within our communities that are down the street that we can actually believe in. And I think it's, you know, it's a crisis of community in many ways.

I think you're right. I mean, I think this is a community issue. And I think it's sort of one of the closing questions that really I had for you, which is that you know, we are, we are in a sense, in this unique moment in history where there's an increasing awareness of racism and structural racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. But, but you say in your book that fast food now more than ever before is a battle field in the fight for racial Injustice. So how do you connect the dots on that for us? And, and how do we, how do we start to bring that into the discourse because to me, unless we name the problem and create awareness of it, we can't solve it.

Absolutely. I think what happened in the same ways that in the 1960s, the fast food industry co-opted the ideas of civil rights to implant themselves as the extension of Dr. King's dreams. We are now in an era because of so many reactive responses to talking about racial injustice that the racism is now just embedded It's a, it's a hidden part of how the structure operates, the rules that are made, the people who are engaged, the people who are left out. And so I think that, you know, at its most basic level, wherever I am and whoever I'm talking to, I ask people, what do you want for yourself? What would you want for yourself? Most people want long life. They want a place to, you know, live. They want opportunities for their family and community. Most people want that. And so if you can say, if you want that, if someone else wants that, how does that make you feel? And someone's like, I don't care if someone else wants that. Okay, well, how are you going to want that together? Because this idea that we can innovate, we can earn, we can privatize our way out of social problems, it's not going to happen. You know, trust me, there's been a deep attempt with COVID to try to buy your way out of, you know, this problem. But at the end of the day, it's on everyone. And so I think that, you know, we have this incredible opportunity, I think, especially with the pandemic, to get people into a place of healing and empathy to say, if this is what you want for yourself, how do you get it for yourself and how do you get it for your neighbor and your neighbor's neighbor?

I think that's a beautiful closing thought. I mean, really we have to work in community to solve our collective problems. And I think the overemphasis in America on individualism has prevented a lot of the thinking that actually is needed to solve our social issues. and the idea of trickle-down economics, of the invisible hand, of entrepreneurship and innovation solving all our problems. It's good for a lot of stuff, but it ain't good for things like this, which really, to me, the whole idea of a free market and free market capitalism as what we have is a joke. We really don't. We have a whole bunch of incentives and policies that support corporations to do the wrong thing and people to not be able to access the right thing. And so part of the story is how do we sort of make the right choice, the healthy choice, the easy choice, the healthy choice, and the unhealthy choice, the hard choice? That's really the question. And it's, and like you said, it's really embedded in a much larger context of the entire supply chain of the food system, all the policies and everything else that's embedded in it. And of course, all the other issues around racism. This is just one sliver of it, but I think it's an important one. And I think my hope is that this is going to become more of an awareness within these communities and that they're going to stand up and go, hell no. Like, no. There's a really great book, I don't know if you saw called Join the Club by Tina Rosenberg, who's a New York Times reporter. And essentially it's about how change happens through the power of community.

Yeah.

And, you know, she talked about, you know, all across the world where this happened. She talked about, for example, kids, where they, they woke up to the fact that the tobacco industry was manipulating them and targeting them through things like Joe Camel, and they created a campaign called rage against the Haze. And they actually were anti-smoking where, you know, a lot of kids are kind of into smoking. So how do we create that kind of a movement, almost like akin to the Civil Rights movement? that includes this conversation about food. That's what I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

I think it's happening. I think in small ways, Oakland Food Collective, I think DC Greens here in DC, I think it's happening in the small scale. I think that there are groups that especially again with COVID are creating mutual aid networks that are thinking about food and doing the work. I think it's hard to scale up, but I think that when you have a community where there's multiple models of how people are getting their needs met, You can draw people in to one that is responsive and thoughtful. And, you know, I think that I think that the future has a lot of hope in it because I think that there's a lot of people who are really bringing their creativity and saying that you don't have to do it, you know, any one way.

Yeah, I agree with you. I actually feel hopeful. I see, I see a rising tide of consciousness and awareness and conversations and, and in pockets of innovation, like you mentioned, like Karen Washington in New York City and gardens and farms and the Oakland Food Collective you mentioned and many, many other, many other groups that are starting to try to bring this like, like Ron Finley in LA with his, you know, gangsta gardener and, you know, Urban Food Forest. So there's definitely things happening that are raising awareness. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. You know, in my patients, I'm struck by how motivated how much they want to get better, how much effort they put into doing the thing that will help them be healthier. And yet.