This is a YouTube video titled "Systemic Racism In Our Food System" containing a recorded conversation from August 23, 2018. The discussion involves multiple speakers including Ask AI Mark, focusing on the historical and systemic issues of racism in the U.S. food system, its impact on African American, Native American, and Hispanic communities, and the resulting health disparities such as obesity and diabetes.
If you think about the whole history of our country, our country was essentially founded with slavery, which was about producing enough food and obviously was having some people be superior owning slaves and some people being slaves. And that was basically divided as white people owned slaves and black people were slaves. And we never recovered from that. as is the short way to say it. And so our communities from all of the different, you know, what's happened since then and even, even with civil rights, the way that our cities were divided when highways were made left some parts of the cities blocked off and excluded from good schools, excluded from good supermarkets, you know, from, from everything, access to food. And so now we say, you know, and, and a lot of what I believe in is, is the health problems that we are having that's associated with food is a system problem. It's a problem of our food supply. It's not a problem of the, it's a problem for the individuals that have the health problems. But it's not to blame them. It's actually we should be looking at it as a system problem. And so- It's not people's personal responsibility.
As we're taught, right?
It's your fault.
Exactly. Exactly. Just calories in, calories out. If you just have the willpower and exercise more and don't eat as much.
You'Re gonna be fine. It's just not that simple. It's definitely not that simple. And so if we think about it that way and we think about the system that we have set up for Africans Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics who have the highest rates of obesity and all the chronic diseases in our country. It's because of the communities that they have been allowed to live in. And that's essentially how it's happened. So we have to start talking about that.
I mean, the sovereignty of the native food system is an interesting topic.
Exactly.
You've got reservations where they were all basically herded to. and they basically usurp their traditional food systems and then they shipped in government commodities of flour, sugar and Crisco basically, the shortening, which are all deadly and now they're enormously overweight. 80% get diabetes by the time they're 30. So it's a massive problem. It's almost like the second genocide of the Native Americans.
That's exactly right. So we essentially, we as the white people took away their very ecologically sustainable and health, public health wise, sustainable way of producing food, separated it all out, took that away, and then brought them in the food that nobody, you know, that was essentially the leftovers that gets people sick and you get the commodities. And now it's like, well, they have health problems.
You know, it was a word for, I hung out with some Native Americans a couple of summers ago and they said they call people who eat the government commodities, Kamad Bod.
