How Food, Farming, And Health Disparities Are Interconnected

When I started growing food, I just couldn't concentrate on just growing food because so many things were happening around me, living in the Bronx for over 30 something years and being a physical therapist, I saw the relationship between food and health. I saw the relationship between food and education and the environment and housing and how they all intersected.

Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy. Our modern day food system is the biggest driver of our chronic disease epidemic. It is not only making us sick, but it leads to massive economic burden on both the individual and societal level. And in the United States, people of color are at a disproportionate risk of developing chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, stroke, heart disease, and cancer. Racial and ethnic disparities also exist when it comes to land ownership and how food is grown in the US. So how are all of these things interconnected? Dr. Hyman explored this topic with farmer, activist, and food advocate, Karen Washington.

Karen, you've been doing this work a long time. And I know your story starts with you eating a tomato and how it woke you up to the fact that most of the stuff that we eat isn't really food. It's some kind of industrial product that resembles food, but actually isn't full of the juicy nutrition and taste that we are lacking. And so what happened with that tomato and tell us that story, how that got you connected to from girl who grew up in the projects in the Bronx, to being an urban farmer and a farmer.

Yes, I always tell that story because my parents weren't farmers, my grandparents weren't farmers, nobody in my family were farmers. And my relationship to food was that my mom was a good cook. Oh my goodness, she could slam three meals a day. And the fact that food came from a grocery store, duh. And so when I moved to the Bronx, I had a big backyard and had three options, either to cement it, put a lawn on it, or grow food. And I said, what the heck? Let me grow some food. So there's four things that I want to grow. I had to grow some collard greens because that's a staple in the African-American history cuisine. I wanted to grow eggplant because it was funky eggplant, really?

Yeah.

Green peppers and tomato. And so I put the seed in the ground, nurtured it, watered it, and to my amazement, it grew in a vine.

Who knew?

First of all, it grew in a vine.

What?

A tomato on a vine. And it was red.

And it didn't come in a box.

It came in a box wrapped in cellophane. And when I bit into it, it just changed my world. There was a taste that I've never tasted before. And it really got me growing everything from trying to grow pineapples to avocados, you name it.

Yeah, probably that pineapple growing didn't go so well in Bronx, right? No.

But it gave me that inspiration to try and grow more things. So that's how I got started. Growing up as a youth, If I was to tell my parents that I wanted to be a farmer or anybody, they would look at me like I was crazy. I mean, even to think about going on a farm or visiting a farm or wanting to be a farm, because for so long growing up, farming was equal to slavery. You know, you're working for the man, this and that. And so now, and that was a history that was embedded in my head, you know? but since I've been older and really been in the food world and to really understand the history of the African American experience in this country and how African American enslaved people built the agricultural system in this country with season our hairs and knowledge around crop rotation and irrigation and medicinal herbs and tools all of a sudden there's a resurgence of inquiry, especially from our youth, getting the history right. And once you plant that seed in their head and understand that what we've done wrong as African Americans is that we moved away from the land. And as we moved away from the land, you can see what has happened to us. Our history is that we are agrarian people. This is in our DNA, this is our blood. We are We are people of land and food. And so when you start talking to that, to young people and have them understand their place in history, their place in agriculture, all of a sudden a light bulb goes off. And it says, wait a second. I've been taught that farming has been slavery, when in fact it's my people who brought farming to this country. I should embrace it. I want to embrace it. I want to understand more. And then I don't want to be like my parents and grandparents who are now stroke, end-stage renal diseases, amputations, you name it. I want to lead a more healthier life. That's number one. But then I also want to go back to the land. I want to go back to land because there's a history around stolen land. There's a history around wealth building that has been taken from us. And so we're trying to write that wrong and put that knowledge back into the hands of young people so they understand the importance of growing food, the importance of growing back to the land, the importance of what it means to be in community, what social capital and communal wealth means to us. And so the whole dialogue has shifted and the concentration has been on our youth. So for me, this is even overwhelming. Youth that want to farm is extraordinary. And right now we're in the midst of taking back the history that for so long has been taught in our schools that have been drilled into our minds about attitudes around land and racism and wealth and getting people to understand that the history of this country was built on the backs of indigenous enslaved people. It's a difficult conversation. conversations to have, but we must have that conversation because we have to write a wrong that for so long has been going on with false narratives. When I started growing food, I just couldn't concentrate on just growing food because so many things were happening around me, living in the Bronx for over 30 something years and being a physical therapist, I saw the relationship between food and health. I saw the relationship between food and education and the environment and housing and how they all intersected. And then I realized that, you know, talking to especially a lot of my patients who were older, who came from farms, and realizing that at one time their parents and grandparents lived till they were 100 years of age, and now here they are, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, succumbing to strokes, end-stage renal diseases, and right then and there sort of clicked in my head, that there's something wrong with our food system because here were people who grew up on farms who were healthy. Now all of a sudden, because of what they were eating, we're getting these diet related diseases.

Dr. Hyman further explored these topics with Leah Penniman, a Black Creole educator, farmer, author and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm.

We've sort of had our entire country built on the backs of slavery and the agrarian wisdom of the Africans who were involuntarily brought over here to grow food for Americans and to literally build the US economy. And so a lot of African Americans see farming as a reversion to slavery, plantation life. There's a sort of negative connotation about it, but somehow you've really reframed that and are bringing back the original wisdom that has sort of long been in that culture.

Can you talk about that? I mean, it's so true. I think there's a lot of agricultural practices that we take for granted as a historical or European that actually have African roots. So things like regenerative agriculture, you know, that comes out of the work of Dr. George Washington Carver in the late 1800s at Tuskegee University. Yeah. Black professor who started extension agencies, started, you know, cover cropping and crop rotation in this country. You look all the way back to Cleopatra, who came up with composting and, you know, raised beds from the Ojibwe people. So there's, there's so many Technologies. And I think that, well, I certainly don't blame people for feeling triggered by the land. The land was the scene of the crime, as Chris Bolden-Newsom would say. But we can actually reach back beyond that to reclaim a noble and dignified relationship to land, and I'm part of.

A returning generation that's excited to do that. Well, now, you were in 2006, a long time ago. You were living with your husband in South End of Albany near the capital, New York State. And you said it was easier to get weapons and drugs than healthy food, and that your neighborhood was a place of food apartheid, which is Really an interesting term, I want to get into that, but there were no grocery stores, farmers markets, fast food, and bodegas in every corner, just selling processed junk and alcohol.

As you said, there were no grocery stores, farmers markets, places to have a garden. And so we ended up joining a CSA program, so like a subscription program that cost more than our rent and had to walk over two miles to get the vegetables, pile them onto the laps of the sleeping children in the stroller, go back down. Like that was the only way to get vegetables. You know, there's a whole history of like redlining and housing discrimination that's led to, neighborhoods that don't have these resources.

And so food apartheid really is a better way of describing sort of the intentional segregation, the deliberate policies, the redlining, which you described, which maybe you could explain, that led to this incredible disparity in access to food and also in the health disparities that result from that. Because we're seeing this tremendous increase in diseases in African American and Latino populations It's not an accident.

Yeah, absolutely. So food apartheid is the right term because as you mentioned, if you are black or brown, you know, Latinx, indigenous, you're much more likely to struggle with diabetes, heart disease and other diet related illnesses. Not to be clear because we don't know how to make good food choices or know how to cook food or want those foods. It's really because of access. If you have $3 in your pocket and you live in a food apartheid zip code, you can get some hot Cheetos and blue colored drink, but you cannot get a burrito, a salad or anything like that.

Nothing.

And so it's really a tragedy that is rooted in institutional racism. Because, because, as I mentioned, in the 1930s, the federal government commissioned these maps to be made of neighborhoods that ranked them from most desirable to lend down to least desirable. And the communities of color were outlined in red as too risky to lend, too risky to have a mortgage, too risky to own homes. And so the wealth disparity has and the property ownership disparity has grown and with it these neighborhood conditions.

And you created an extraordinary place called Soul Fire Farm, which I read a lot about, I watched movies about it. I'm super impressed with what's going on there because you're helping your community and poor communities understand the benefit of the land and becoming farmers and training them to become farmers. Tell us what you think the role of Soul Fire Farm is in creating a new food system.

We are dedicated to ending racism in the food system. We're doing that in three basic ways, right? The first is to regenerate the 80 acres that we get to steward of Mohican territory. So we're using all these Afro-Indigenous technologies to heal the land, produce food, and get that to the people who need it most through a doorstep delivery program. That's the first thing. The second thing is to equip black and brown farmers through our training programs and mentorship, helping people get the knowledge and land and credit they need. And then the final thing is mobilizing public support, trying to change policy, get reparations for farmers, reparations for indigenous people who've lost their land and so forth.

And most people aren't aware that Lincoln, when he freed the slaves, promised 40 acres and a mule, which Andrew Johnson, the president who got impeached right after him, revoked. And it's been estimated that if that was in place, that there'd be a land worth $4.6 trillion in the African American community, which has been usurped for them. And then at the turn of the century, 14% of farms compared to less than 1% of farmers now were African American. And they were in the South and they were threatening the existing status quo down there. And the people who were running those farms were lynched, their homes were burned, their farms destroyed, their land was taken over. And it's a legacy that people just don't realize that this was sort of an injustice that's never been talked about, that really never been really addressed. and maybe we need to give back that $4.6 trillion of land. We absolutely do. Because you mentioned reparations and I think that's what made me think about it.

Yeah, because 40 acres and a mule was a broken promise. All of the land that black folks got was purchased off their own dime despite the oppressive sharecropping and convict leasing conditions. And it wasn't just the violent lynching and terrorism that drove people off the land, it was the federal government itself. The USDA in the 1962 Commission of Civil Rights Report was named as the number one culprit in the decline of the black farmer. Reagan later closed that office. He didn't like their findings, but that's why black farmers sued the government. They won a settlement of $2 billion in 1999, the Pigford case, which was the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history. But by then, most of the farmers were in their 90s and 50, 000 is not going to get you back your land.

So it was really a symbolic Victory. So, so, you know, you, you point out that, you know, partly as a result of the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule and many other sort of deliberate and political and social injustices that happened. You talk about how there's starting to be an increase in African-American farmers. It used to be 14%, now it's like maybe 1 or 2%.

Yeah, yeah.

But you see that changing and I just saw this incredible graph in one of the articles where there was this complete divergence where white farmers are going down mostly because they're aging out of farming and no one's coming in new and African American farmers are going up.

Well, the USDA actually just got called out for fluffing up its numbers in the 2017 census. So we're not exactly sure if black farmers are on the rise according to the USDA account. I will say, though, that as someone who focuses on training a returning generation of black farmers, that there is a clamor, there is an interest, and there are a number of success stories on an anecdotal level. And so we're hoping to see some legitimate shifts upward in the coming census. The USDA is responsible for the food system, for helping take care of farmers. And there's all of these programs from land grant universities to credit, crop insurance, disaster relief that are supposed to go to farmers. And right now they're going almost entirely to white farmers and to commodity crop farmers. So we need to restructure the way all of those subsidies work to make sure it's equitable that those of us who are growing healthy foods like vegetables and fruits aren't just relegated to this tiny little sliver called specialty crops. You know, where it's like, you know, corn and soy are getting all the money. And so we have to flip it. You know, even the fact that to be organic you have to go through a certification process and pay money, but to trash the planet you can just do it. You know, I think it's a fundamental.

Frame shift on how we think about regulation and subsidies. We know that your zip code is more important than your genetic code in determining your risk of disease and death. and that 70% of deaths are caused by chronic disease, mostly the result of our toxic food system. Lack of access to land and fresh food is a form of oppression that sets communities up for generational illness and strife. Food is a way to empower people and create change. It can be used as a tool for creating a just society and improving health, economic opportunities, and even generational legacies in the form of land ownership. If you'd like to learn more about any of these topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full length conversations with Karen Washington and Leah Penniman. If you enjoyed this conversation, please also consider sharing it and leaving us a comment below. Until next time.