Redesigning Our Food System To Make Health Accessible For All

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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.

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Get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Veen, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy Podcast. Food is a way to empower people and create change. Unfortunately, however, our current food system is rooted in an archaic model which has created layers of social, economic, and health disparities. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy about what is needed to turn our food system around so that it supports all people. Dr. Hyman speaks with Marsha Chatlain about creating social systems that support healthy cooking, with Raj Patel and Dr. Rupa Marya about colonialism and how it has affected marginalized communities, and with Karen Washington about the reality of food apartheid and what to do about it. Let's dive in.

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 healthcare for all, free college, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, the bad choice is the easy choice.

I mean, I think that, I think that, that, you know, that the, 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. Like, how do you know that they have the heating gas and the cooking gas that they need all winter long? And I said, you know, 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? You know, 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, you know, we have to look at the structure of the society that we live in. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in Haiti and worked with Paul Farmer and he talks about this concept of structural violence, you know, 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 it 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, you know, economic success and viability and the ability to actually get ahead and get out of the circumstance that people find themselves in. Because I, 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, is 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 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 you know, 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 is 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. And so, 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 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, 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 is 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 healthcare coverage and then we're not gonna address the reason why people are going into healthcare system in the first place. and 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, look at 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 your 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, how do you sort of now, can you use.

Food assistance on, on soda? I thought there were food products that were marked as such.

Oh my God, yes.

I didn't know that.

Oh no, no. You cannot buy a rotisserie chicken in the grocery store because it's cooked. Because it's cooked. But you can buy a two liter. Yes, but you can buy a two liter bottle of soda.

But here's the thing. 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? 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 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, you know, 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. They should be regulated to the point where they have to participate in a free and fair economy and focus on what they do. 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 really afraid in this country of doing anything like that because it speaks of socialism, right? It speaks of of this idea that, you know, we're all, you know, going to become communists or something. But it really is 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. Because 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 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 that's a staggering number. So actually, if we actually had the food companies accountable for the externalities, and they're really not externalities, they're embedded in the 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 you know, 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, you know, 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.

You know, you talk about this idea that seems to be a little bit hard for people to digest and swallow, this idea of colonization, that our food system and our society has been colonized. And we're like, oh, well, you know, yeah, we were, the British had the colonies and we were colonizing America and, you know, we had India being colonized by the British and, you know, it was a huge era of colonialism, which essentially was taking and stealing all the natural resources from countries that were new and unexplored and using them for the wealthy in these nations. But in our country, we don't really think of our country being colonized that much, but it really is. If you look at the extraordinary health disparities, if you look at the challenges in certain communities where life expectancy can be anywhere from 10 to 40 years less, we have the developing world statistics right here in America. I mean, the Pima Indians, their life expectancy is, I think, 46, right? And they get diabetes at the age of at 30 years old, about 80% of them have diabetes. You know, that's a symptom of colonization. And I really didn't really fully understand this concept of structural changes that you talked about. Because I've experienced a lot about this and I want to share my experience and then sort of take off on that. And I went to Haiti after the earthquake and I met Paul Farmer who wrote a lot about this idea called structural violence. and this is really what you're talking about. What are the social, economic, and political conditions that drive disease? And he found in Haiti he could cure TB and AIDS not by better drugs or surgery, but by simply having community health workers. He called it accompaniment. We accompany each other to health. And he dealt with the structural issues of poverty and lack of water and sanitation and lack of having a watch. They don't know when to take your TB meds, which you have to be on a certain schedule. And he really showed the world that this model of addressing the structural changes really works for infectious disease. And Bill Gates and the Clinton Foundation, all these have used his model. But what occurred to me down there, and I think you clearly have outlined this in your book, Inflamed, which really has just come out, incredible book, everybody should get it. You talk about the chronic disease pandemic being also one that's related to structural violence. And it's not just infectious disease and lack of water sanitation and poverty, but it's also all these obesity related issues, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, all these things that are really breaking our system.

And.

Are causing economic Havoc and making covid so much worse. And you talk about that, you know, those are really structural issues, and that sort of got me thinking about it. And a few years ago, I was also on a on a rafting trip on the Green River with a Native American Hopi chief and a Ute chief. And the Hopi chief was very overweight. He and his wife were severely overweight, diabetic, on insulin shots, drinking Coca-Cola, and just kind of, I mean, he was the head of one of his clans and did all these incredible traditional ceremonial rituals in his culture. and I said to him, you know, Howard, you can, you can change your, your diabetes. You can reverse it. He's like, what do I have to do? And I said, well, you have to not eat sugar and all the starchy stuff you're eating. And he's like, oh, well, that's gonna be a problem. I said, why? He said, well, because we have our traditional Hopi ceremonies, and we have our traditional Hopi ceremonial foods. And I'm like, well, what are they? and he's like, well, Coke, cookies and cake and pies. And I'm like, those are not your traditional foods or the Indian fried bread, which is deep fried flour and trans fats and lard. And another woman was on that trip who was, was in the youth community. So, you know, they have a word for people who become really large on the Native American reservations. They call it Kamad Bod, meaning they've eaten all the Commodities that the government Surplus has shipped to them. So the government, all the food that is just leftover food, flour, sugar, you know, Crisco, basically trans fats. they sent to the reservations, and that's what they started eating, and they became more livable. So these are the real changes. And we cannot address our health care crisis. We cannot address our economic crisis, our social crisis, unless we address the food system issues that underlie the, the structural problems that are driving disease. So I, I can't tell you how excited I am by your book, because it really is, is the first time I've seen this laid out so clearly and so well and, and in such a simple way to understand and calling out things that really need to get called out. So thank you for writing it. Thank you. I'd like you, you know, we're going to talk about the two decades you spent studying how these social structures, these structural violence predisposes these marginalized groups to illness. And how is health and these, how are these two things connected?

Yes.

So I think you hit the nail on the head when you're looking at the Kamad Bod, but I just want to emphasize that this isn't just a problem of marginalized people, people who are suffering under the brunt of colonialism, the worst. So our indigenous friends, our undocumented community, Black community in the United States, people who are suffering the worst social oppression have the most profound expression of inflammatory disease. But in fact, Everybody in industrialized nations is subject to getting these diseases. And what we looked at in this book is really, you know, going back 600 years to where a cosmology of thought came from Europe to this land to what was, you know, was now called the United States of America. This understanding of or the misunderstanding of life as, you know, humans over here and everything that's wild in nature over here, us being separate from the web of life or man over here and woman over here or mind over here and body over here. These errors of Cartesian dualism that were part of the ways of organizing structures of power in an era of colonial conquest of the rest of the world. So it's much easier to take someone's land and take their wealth and take their resources and enslave them if they're seen as subhuman or actually they're not really doing anything with that land in the first place. So let's just go take it over. And so that error of thought really has set us up to having very shallow medicine, shallow ways of addressing how we're getting sick and why we're getting sick. So when someone who is part of the elite or wealthy or white, let's say, gets diabetes, we offer medicines, we offer insulin, we offer injections, pharmaceuticals. We don't offer an analysis of all the ways that critical relationships that support our health and well-being have been disrupted by colonial capitalism. And that is what we're looking at in this book is really the root causes of the rise of inflammatory disease around the world. And that is, you know, when you're talking about diabetes and obesity and cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's and cancer and even depression and suicide, all of these things have been tied to inflammatory phenomena in the body. And so we see that in our research and analysis, Raj and I, what we have seen is that the social structures and the environmental structures around the body are the place where the disease is. And the body's immune system is just reacting in an evolutionarily conserved way, in a proper way to damage and the threat of damage. And that response is the inflammatory response. So it's not like we're doing something that's abnormal or wrong. The body is simply trying to correct itself in the face of this damage. Whether the damage is coming from glyphosate in our cereals, whether the damage is coming from payday loans, whether the damage is coming from historical trauma of being having your land stolen, such as the Pima folks, that these toxicities in the world around the body are the damage that is provoking an inflammatory response in the body. And so usually the inflammatory response when there's damage is activated to correct the damage, to restore what we call homeostasis, the body's optimum working condition, and then it turns off. Unfortunately, in a colonial capitalist society, all of us are subject to ongoing damage. because the air is polluted and because the water, the groundwater, even if you're growing organic wine, you're pulling from groundwater that's been contaminated by glyphosate. So there's actually no way to avoid the insinuations of environmental poisoning that has happened through the corporate control of our food system and our policies. And so this is what we are we looked at very deeply in this book is the summation of exposures, whether it's police violence, whether it's breathing the air here in East Oakland, whether it's being able to afford healthy food. These kinds of things add up into a toxic combination. When you talk about the Pima folks having 80% of them having diabetes, it reminds me the impact of colonial expression in Lakota-Dakota territory where I'm working to help set up a clinic with the community there. The Mini Wiconi Health Circle is what we're calling it now. It's a clinic and a farm.

Which by the way is a radical idea. Bringing healthcare and farming together should be universal, but it's something that's really radically new.

Well, it's actually radically old. And so for these- For sure, but not in America.

Well, yeah.

Well, so these folks, you know.

When.

The Missouri River was dammed, so when that dam went up, it flooded the cottonwood forests that the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota people used to get their food and medicine from. So they used to go and have this relationship with these forests. And once they were flooded, they became completely dependent upon the commodities that were sent by the state. So they became more sedentary. They didn't go out and harvest. The Buffalo were exterminated, I think, something like 60 million Buffalo, the largest genocide on this land. And so they lost those crucial contacts with their food and medicine ways. And they always knew that medicine and food were connected. It was never separate. And so that is really an exciting, you know, that connection to see that it is actually in the literal changing of the flow of rivers. So it's not abstract, it's not metaphorical, it's the literal changing of the way rivers run has changed the way our bodies are responding and Indigenous people.

Have.

Been most impacted here in this land.

Yeah, it's so true. And you know, you talk about the idea of inflammation. I mean, the same story happened in the Hopi's where the Colorado River was damned and all their ability to grow food and their traditional food ways were all disrupted. And again, they're so obese like the guy I met on the rafting trip. Because what you're really intimating here is that as a society we have a soul sickness and that our souls have been disconnected from the origins of life, from our land, from our food, from our communities, and that we're seeing this epidemic of both mental health issues that you talked about earlier, Raj, from the suicide rates or was that you? I can't remember. And the sort of the disconnection and the isolation and the sort of the social disempowerment as really being a soul sickness that needs to be healed by finding our place in the family of things. And that's what you're talking about. And I think it's a beautiful notion, a beautiful idea. and for someone who's been working in the food system for years and thinking about it for years, the challenge to me is I don't have any argument with the framework of what you're talking about. But given the way our society has been completely dominated by this colonialist capitalist model and the way in which our populations have been so disenfranchised and aren't even aware that they're disenfranchised, they internalize racism, they internalize structural violence. how do we emerge from that? Because other than just radically changing our society and radically changing our policies and radically changing our economic structures, how do we begin to address this pandemic? Because as someone who's on the front lines of chronic disease, it's a staggering phenomenon. I can tell you, I started doing this 25 years ago and I look at my slides from 19 96 and then, and I'm like, wow, I keep having to change the slides because it's like there was, you know, 30% obese, then 40, then 50, then 60, then 75, then, you know, diabetes should be chronic disease should be like maybe three out of ten people. Then it's four out of ten, then it's five out of ten, then six out of ten. It's like every year I have to change my slides and it's getting worse and worse.

And yet we understand it more and more and somehow we're not able to bridge that gap. How do we do that? I would say, first of all, I just want to give a shout out to everybody read your book. So Jack, no, to Jack Forbes, read another book. called Columbus and Other Cannibals. He was a Native American scholar here in Cali, at UC Davis. And he talks about the spirit sickness, which is called, he calls it wetiko or windigo, which is an Algonquian word. And it's literally the spirit sickness of colonial society and societies that dominate each other. He calls it like a vampire that you're sucking the soul off of other living creatures or other entities. in a non-reciprocal, non-respectful way in order to support your own life, in order to support your own, and that this society is sick. He calls it a spirit sickness. And so the cure, Mark, is a radical re-imagining of our society. And the good news is that will address not just the rising rates of inflammatory disease that you've noticed, but also the burning of our planet. And so there is no tiny tweak we can do. There is no little, you know, just move this around. There are things we can push for right now, Medicare for all, a Green New Deal. There are large policies we can try to move with. But truly what we need to do is reimagine every way in which we relate to each other in the web of life. Because the ones that we've inherited, the ones that we have been handed to us through a colonial capitalist cosmology, are making us sick and making the planet uninhabitable for human life.

Where does the cheap, subsidized, processed food go into? They know, I mean, it's not rocket science. They know for a fact that it goes into poor neighborhoods, mostly neighborhoods of color. So, you know, let's cut the BS when it has this conversation, because everyone knows, because it's not going to their neighborhood. So everyone knows that there is a difference between what is in white affluent neighborhoods and what is in poor black and brown neighborhoods. That's number one. And, you know, I'm infuriated by that conversation because all of a sudden people act like they're dumb, like they don't know. And they know exactly the difference when it comes to food and housing and education based on color, demographics, and how much money you make. And so when the term food deserts was first brought to our attention in my community, I sort of backed off of that. I'm saying, wait a second, we live in a food desert? First of all, who coined the term that's number one?

Why is it- White people probably.

Why is being- Some woman in the UK coined it. And then of course the USDA and everyone picked up on it because when you say food desert, it sort of softens the tone of the, food disparities we see in our society. And so for me, it's a forgetful desert because people in the desert would say, wait a second, we got food.

Yeah.

And so I coined the term food apartheid only because I wanted people to, first of all, what does that mean? But also look at the food system along race, the color of one's skin, look at the food system Where does one live? And look at the food system or how much money you make, your affluence, and economics and wealth. And when you start talking about food apartheid, I wanted people to start having that conversation around these issues because.

Time.

And time again we go over and over again about this food system When we all know for a fact where does a cheap and subsidized food enter each and every day? And I'm sick and tired of having that conversation because for me, it's about action. How do we change it? How do we stop spinning our wheels talking about hunger and poverty and food deserts and pre-existing diseases and diet-related diseases? You know, at one time, you look at this country, and even to the world, it was more plant-based. And as we started to add more animals, we become more animal-based in our food. And as a result, at one time, we were 2,000 calories per capita. Now, over 3,800 calories per capita. And you can see what was happening in other countries as we've gone from plant-based to animal-based. The intake of calories And as you.

Said, mostly starchy, sugary calories, that's it.

Sugary calories, how we pay farmers to grow subsidies such as corn. Corn is a billion dollar business to turn into high fructose corn syrup. That corn that you see is not for us, it's for food and it's for feeding cows that really can't digest it.

And ethanol, which is stupid. Right.

So let's get off this bandwagon. about the food system and yeah it needs to be fixed. No one needs it doesn't need to be fixed. It's exactly what it's supposed to be doing because we know for a fact you ask any person, you know, in this country, well would you rather, you know, shop at a low income neighborhood or would you like to go to like the Whole Foods which are in Trader Joe's and see?

So, It is fascinating. I saw this clip on Instagram of a woman talking to a largely white audience, I think almost all white audience saying, how many of you in this audience would like to be treated in the way that African-Americans are in this country and have their experience and not a single person stood up, she said, stand up. I don't think you understood my question. Would anybody would like to be treated as an African-American in this country and just stand up? no one stood up. She said, well, you all know the problem, man. You're just pretending you don't know. And I think it's easy to look aside and ignore it. It's easy to blame people. And I think there's a lot of focus on personal responsibility. You know, people just aren't eating well because they don't want to. But there really are structural issues of access, structural issues of skills, of knowledge, of tradition that are just that just sort of obscured the ability for people to reclaim their health and their traditional food ways. And I think that's what you're doing in the Bronx. That's what you're doing with your farm. And I think it's interesting to hear from you what has that experience been like over the last few decades of being in those communities and trying to change the way people think about food and their health and access. How has that given you insight into maybe how to solve this problem on a bigger scale?

Well, I think for me, I see myself as an agitator as well. I've been gifted, I guess, with the ability to say what I want to say. I've never been beholden to, like, a nonprofit or a job that's sort of like, you know, Cameron, you can't say that. Or, you know, the funders are not going to like that. So I've always been a person of very independent in what been able to say and do. And so that conversation I would have with my patients was really, really mind-blowing because, you know, after a while they would sit down and say, Miss Washington, you're right. You know, I was, you know, my parents were never sick a day in their life and look at me, you know, and they would want to change. And I would bring them fresh fruits and vegetables from my farmer's market at the end of the day because I think I wanted them to to care, you have someone to care about them, but then also to take action. I mean, talk is cheap, people talk about food justice and food sovereignty, but for me, in order to do this work, you have to be actively involved in dismantling some of the social injustices that you see. And so for me, doing like the farmers market, going around and speaking at different venues, I think my biggest accomplishment has been through the BUGS conference is the impact that it has on young people. On the younger generation of Black and Brown youth. And I say that because 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 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 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 the 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 right 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 to see the overwhelming youth that want to farm is extraordinary.

You know, when you think about what happened after Reconstruction, after the Civil War, I mean, Lincoln promised the freed slaves 40 acres and a mule. and that land today would be worth $6.4 trillion. But Rutherford Hayes to get his election secured after Grant was president, who was very much against, you know, a lot of the sort of institutions of slavery. I mean, he actually created a whole movement against the Ku Klux Klan when it was on a upsurge after the Civil War. But Rutherford Hayes basically had to agree to move out the troops from the South, which allowed all the segregationists and the Jim Crow stuff to happen. And they kind of went back on the whole 40 acres and a mule deal. And that led to, you know, the farmers that were getting going, about 14% of the farms back then were African American farms, to now 1% of farmers being African American and not having access to land. And there's all the economic you know, the economic struggles around getting access, right? It's not easy to own land. It's expensive. There's an economic issue around it. So how do we sort of break through that and get people back on the farm? Because I think it seems to me with all the levels of unemployment in those communities, with all the levels of poverty, with all the levels of lack of access to, you know, food and sovereignty, wouldn't it, wouldn't it make sense for a sort of a resurgence of a farming movement? to actually happen?

They need to fix the heirs property laws that is really stifling families that have land in the South, especially those that don't have a will. I'm struggling that with my family. We have 18 acres down in South Carolina and looking for the will from my grandmother. It's hard. And so, you know, you have to go to probate. You have to so many things you have to do and they need to fix it so that People that are on the land have a way of succession, have a way of getting that land and holding onto that land that people know that's in their family without all the hurdles of trying to find a will and trying to go to probate and trying to testify that, you know, it belongs to your family. Because as we speak, Black land loss is being done each and every day. And so we need to fix that system, the heirs property system, so that Black families can maintain and maintain the legacy of the land that has been given to them. That's number one. Number two, I try to have this conversation with young people, Black and brown young people, if they have land in the South, they have land in Puerto Rico, Latin America, you name it, is to hold on to that land because a lot of times the land also is being lost for non-payment of taxes. And so getting people to understand, you know, pay those taxes, even if you live up in the north and your land is in the south or your land is in Latin America or the Caribbeans, make sure that you pay those taxes. And I think people are starting to understand the importance of land ownership. Also, we're talking about reparations now. I mean, that's something that is a conversation that's being brought up. I know whites don't like to hear that conversation, but it's going to happen anyway. There is land that people know, stolen land that people have in their family. And there's a lot of whites that understand that need of reparation and are willing to give back land ownership to people of color.

Let's talk about reparations because I think there are different concepts of it. One is, like in Nazi Germany, there were reparations paid to the the Jews in monetary compensation to each family. But it seems to me that you've talked about a different way of helping these communities by empowering them with investment, with entrepreneurship training, with helping them start businesses, with creating autonomy within their communities, and providing the services allow them to thrive and be autonomous as opposed to being dependent on social services and all these other prop-ups that don't empower these communities emerge from their situation, right? And it's a, and wouldn't reparations be better served by paying for those types of investments in those communities and empowering those communities to do it for themselves?

Well, I think it's a double-edged sword. I mean, you know, my mantra has always been economic development, fiscal responsibility, communal wealth, and social capital. I've always talked about that. I always say, you know, give us three things. Give us opportunity, give us access, to capital and give us land and people who once deemed powerless become powerful. But I think also there are people that know that they within their family that that land has been stolen. You know what I'm saying? I mean, there's a new generation that that's starting to surface again, Black Lives Matter. And so I think in the best interests of history that those people that feel that they would like to give back land or, you know, have land that they feel that they can part with, why not? Why not have that opportunity of family members, especially if there's no legacies, you know, you one person, you have no children, you know, you have no one to leave that land to, why not leave it to Black and brown people who know that they will take that land and do well with it by by farming it. And so when we talk about the reparation conversation, a lot of people are fearful, number one, is that always the monetary value, but I'm trying to look at it as, you know, get back the land, you know, get back the land. You know, there's so many people have so many acres of land. You mean to tell me if you have thousand, thousand acres of land, you can't give at least a tenth of that land?

Yeah.

Back to people who want to grow food, especially young people, or if you are the lone survivor of a family, instead of having that land go to a state, why not donate that land to young farmers, especially farmers of color that want to farm that land. So there's different ways of looking at reparations, but at the end of the day, you know, I mean, We're having this conversation about stolen land. We're having this conversation now about land equity and what that means. And we need to have those hard conversations. We need to have those hard conversations about how this country was built on, you know? And it's going to be a difficult conversation, but it's a conversation that we need to have. 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 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.

Do you think, Karen, that we can do this through grassroots efforts like yours alone, or do we need to address some of the structural problems on a policy level? Because you've got, for example, our agricultural system that is designed to do exactly what it's doing, to produce a lot of cheap, disease-causing calories in a way that's harmful to humans and harms the environment and climate. It's not broken, it actually is working exactly the way it's designed, and in order for the kind kind of thing you're talking about to take hold, it really requires a change in the financing of our agricultural system and the ways in which farmers are supported to do the right things as opposed to the wrong things, and in changing some of the sort of policies that are undermining the development of a new agricultural system that's regenerative as opposed to destructive and extractive. And how do you see that happening in a way that's sort of parallel to what you're doing?

I think it needs the grassroots voices to change policy. Look what is happening now. I mean, it took the grassroots movement for people to realize, wait a second, we need to look at the system as a whole. We need to look at race in this country and the implications race has woven itself throughout our institutions, our way of life, our history, you name it. And so in order for a policy shift to happen, you have to have the voices of the people, the people coming together and being outraged at what is happening for politicians to listen. Because listen to me, this has been for 400 years, like all of a sudden Black lives matter. And the only reason why Black lives matter is because of the fact of the outcry the outcry of grassroots people saying, Enough is enough for all of a sudden the policy and politicians is sort of, wait a second. We have this huge movement of people voicing their frustration of the system, of a political system, of an economic system. We need to start to listen. And so what you're starting to see is A shift in policy starting to listen. This is why it's so important on the grassroots level that we're trying to get people to understand the power of voting.

Yeah.

The power of voting and not only in the federal level, but also the local level. You know, the understanding, the politics, the politics around policy, and that starts with educating people, having their voices at a local level. Vote, vote, vote. Make sure that when you do vote, that you make the candidates, first of all, you have them come out and speak on their issues, and then whoever is elected, make them accountable. You know, people ask me for so long, They say, Carol, why don't you run for office? Why don't you run for office? And I say, heck no, because you need people to make politicians accountable. And so even though there's policies and laws that are set, that are made, it's the people. What we've done, we have given up our power. We've given up our power to the government, to politicians. We have given up our power. And it's time, folks, for us to take back that power. Because the only reason why they're in office, the only reason why they can do the things that they do, because we let them. We let them. We're not holding people accountable. And so what I try to educate people at a local level is that when we have people who are running for office, Go out, hear them, ask questions, and when they are in office, make sure that they are accountable for the things that they said that they were going to do for your community once they got into office. Two things that will stop any movement is silence and complacency.

Yeah.

Because just because you you voted somebody in, now you're going to just sit back and allow them to do whatever they want to do without the checks and balances that is needed to make sure that they're doing the right things. And I think that is going to change. I think people are going to be more accountable in the people that they put in office. And then if they're not doing their job, get them out.

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