This year’s 11th annual Food Almanac: Food Equity & Access in a Post-COVID Era took place online and featured an invigorating, in-depth panel discussion moderated by Adrian Lipscombe, chef-owner of Uptowne Cafe and Bakery and founder of the 40 Acres Project.
Lipscombe spoke with Nate Mook (CEO, World Central Kitchen), Lisa Held (Senior Policy Reporter, Civil Eats) and Tanya Denise Fields (Founder and Executive Director, The Black Feminist Project and Mama Tanya’s Kitchen), who each offered valuable perspectives on pivoting during the pandemic, root causes of food inequity, and food policy solutions.
For those who weren’t able to attend on the day, don’t fret—the event was recorded and can be viewed at your leisure.
On Pivoting During the Pandemic
The ongoing Covid-19 crisis has highlighted and exacerbated the disparities and inequities of our food system. As Mook, of World Central Kitchen, put it while describing the role food plays in moments of disaster, “It’s the communities that are already marginalized and vulnerable that end up taking most of the impact.” During the coronavirus pandemic, the organization was forced to shift their focus away from disaster relief with a narrow geographic area to a disaster that was everywhere—reinventing the way they operate. Beginning with a new model in the South Bronx, the organization has expanded their efforts to serve 36 million meals nationwide since the start of the pandemic, produced in large part by local restaurants. Over 150 million dollars has been put into the hands of these small businesses to cook for their communities. In addition to this work, the organization will also aim to support policies that address food challenges in the United States.
Civil Eats is a daily news source for critical thought about the American food system and while the pandemic didn’t shift their broader mission, it did surface an opportunity to contextualize the issues, challenges and disparities being highlighted. Lisa Held noted that the pandemic “brought all of the issues that we’ve been covering every day for many, many years to the forefront. Topics like the vulnerability of farm workers, conditions in meatpacking plants, the importance of school meals for kids who are in families who can’t put food on the table, [and] how supply chains work and why that matters.”
On Root Causes
Tanya Denise Fields described the scenario in the South Bronx where urban planning, policy, food distribution failures, and anti-Black racism have long conspired to marginalize the community well before the arrival of Covid-19. Explaining how she came to organizing, Fields said, “I don’t do this work from a place of altruism or a place of charity. I do this work because I was called to it because I wanted to save my life. I wanted to save the lives of people in my community.”
She began her work in 2006 with Mothers on the Move, organizing around air quality in response to her own child’s asthma in the Bronx, where childhood asthma emergency room visit rates are double and triple the city average. The Bronx has historically been carved up by highways and parkways in the name of urban planning, which has resulted in tremendous negative environmental impacts. Highlighting the inequity of food distribution in this city, Fields said of this community with elevated asthma rates, “We coincidentally exist right up against one of the largest food distribution centers in the country, one of the largest food distribution centers in the world, and that food rarely makes its first stop in our community. But what we get is all the negative impacts of housing a food distribution center. The 19,000 truck trips a day.”
Fields cautioned against nostalgia for a food system that was once functional and fair: “People talk about returning to some wholesome food system. I’m the descendant of enslaved Africans. There was never a wholesome food system for us.” Fields went on to say that there are currently 45 thousand Black farmers out of 3.4 million farmers in the United States. That figure is down from a million one century ago. This is due to what Fields described as “an intentional system to disenfranchise Black farmers from land.” Pointing to the Pigford case settlement and Reconstruction as just two examples, Fields noted that “This country literally played keepaway with land that was promised to people whose labor had been stolen.”
Lisa Held put her view simply: “Economic inequality is the root cause of food insecurity. We need the social safety net right now, but it’s never going to get better if we don’t change economic inequality.” Held writes often about corporate power and governance and noted that “A lot of the stories that I do involve corporate power and consolidation and concentration. The federal government is basically unwilling to confront corporate power, confront consolidation. That makes it really hard for all the issues that it causes—like exploitation of workers and environmental degradation—to ever be addressed.”
All the panelists agreed on the importance of the social safety net, but cautioned that the underlying causes must not be ignored. Mook, commenting on cyclical entrenched systems of reliance, asked, “Why are these families needing to go to the food banks in the first place?” Mook described a cycle where families working at places like Walmart, “are not getting paid enough money, so they have to rely on federal programs, and they get their benefits and spend those benefits back at Walmart, and then Walmart supports the food banks that keep the system rolling.” He concluded, “There’s a hesitation to change anything because everyone is kind of reliant on the system and the status quo.”
On Policy Solutions
For Mook, “Food in the United States is too often an afterthought.” He went on to say, ”Oftentimes decisions around food are made by those that are very distanced and disconnected from it on the day-to-day basis and on the local level.” Mook pointed out, “We have a Department of Agriculture that prioritizes farming subsidies and all of these issues...we do not have a Department of Food in the United States. Therefore we do not look holistically at food and food issues in our country.” Mook highlighted the need for prioritization of federal funding. He estimated that “we could rebuild school kitchens in our country and support our schools cooking fresh meals for our children probably for about eight to ten billion dollars...when you think about the two trillion dollars that are coming out of these stimulus bills, eight to ten billion dollars is actually not a lot of money for the impact that it can have.” Mook called for a holistic and prioritized approach to food in this country that recognizes the importance of food, puts it front and center, and recognizes the role of food in areas outside of agriculture, like education, aging and labor.
Held described the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan and some of the impacts we could expect. Increases in Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) benefits and a modernizing of the program, school programs for children missing meals, and a new focus on “nutrition security” instead of just “food insecurity”. The USDA has released new funds to specialty crop producers, some programs will increase SNAP and WIC benefits and access at local markets. Held, who shared that she is rarely optimistic about federal policy, finds herself optimistic about a bill providing a real pathway to citizenship for undocumented farm workers. She said, “some version of that has a real chance of moving forward sometime soon.” She sees this as a crucial step since these workers have been putting food on our tables for decades and have no legal rights nor eligibility for any pandemic assistance. A lot is happening, but Held noted, “Even with all of this activity, we’re only a couple months in and there’s pretty much gridlock in Washington in terms of Congress still. ... [It’s] a long road ahead.“
For Fields, equity in food will require more than policy solutions: “If we want an equitable food system then you need to be committed to dismantling anti-Black racism; if you want an equitable and local food system then we need to be committed to dismantling misogyny; if you want an equitable and local food system then you need to be very, very committed to doing the hard and uncomfortable work to acknowledging what your privilege is and your complicity in such a system, and then dismantling that.” Fields said, “The policies are reflective of the dominant culture in which we live. And the dominant culture in which we live hates Black people and it hates women, and it especially hates Black women.” Fields explained there is work to be done before policy can be effective, saying, “This food system has always been rooted in policies that support land grabs and theft, genocide of indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Black bodies. Until we take a really good look at that...there are going to be no policy solutions that will save us.”
Fields called for two actions. The first is increasing the safety net in the short term, that is the next two or three decades she estimates it would take to get to equity. “We talk about how the Founding Fathers created this experiment called the United States of America but it’s an experiment that’s inherently founded on inequity. So the real experiment is can America become a more equitable place.” This means equitable amounts of money for people to be able to care for themselves. As she put it, “When we talk about cutting safety net programs what we are literally talking about is starving children. Because the recipients of safety net programs, the highest demographic, are children.” The second action she called for was a national reparations policy and a return of Black folks to the land. She called on the federal government to come to terms with its debt to Black people by investing in reparations owed to the descendants of enslaved Africans plus inflation. She said, “We have been deeply disenfranchised on land that we cultivated, whose very roots have been watered by the blood of our ancestors.”
The Future
Held hopes that by telling bigger, better stories, she and other reporters can continue to inform communities and drive policy: “Waking up every day and continuing to try to communicate the real impact of policies that are being made on people and the environment. Also communicating the real work on the ground of food innovators, and farmers and people struggling with food access. I really believe in the power of stories and good reporting to get the word out about what’s happening and hopefully drive better policy in the future.”
Mook believes that New York could be an example for the rest of the country, but cautions against the top-down approach that has led to a disconnect in the pandemic response. Rather than being strictly a logistical challenge, food distribution is a question of empowering communities to feed themselves. In the coming years, Mook says that WCK and José Andrés can be a voice and an agent of disruption at the national level: “We’re going to dive deeper into the food system in this country. We’re going to try to do what we can to help uplift voices that right now aren’t being heard that are so critical at the local level and start to shift some of these policies and change some of the ways we look at this.”
Fields called for equity and access to diverse and nutritious food in all communities. Though some effort has been made to improve the quality of food offerings in food swamps by proliferating farmers markets, culturally insensitive educational efforts combine with gentrification to prevent real community empowerment. In New York City, community needs for green space, playgrounds, and agricultural space are consistently pitted against housing interests in the debate over land use. Fields, in the next years, will focus on building the Black Feminist Project into an institution and is exploring opportunities to develop a regional food hub that bridges the gap between urban communities and Black rural growers. “The food pantries, I think they’re critical, but they’re critical because we don’t have an equitable food system, and we don’t have an equitable food system because we don’t have an equitable society. So, I don’t know what the short term answer to that question is. The long term answer for me is doubling down on what I started with: Dismantling these unequal systems and creating something that is actually a reflection of equity.”
Final Question
How scared should we be about the impact of climate change on food and agriculture?
Fields responded, “We should be terrified, honey.” She continued, “We’re not talking enough about the intersections of how food is making such a deep impact on our environmental health. We have to completely dismantle this food system. And I know that Is scary for a lot of us because I want to get avocados in January too. But if I have to think about getting avocados in January and leaving a planet that is not hotter and more dangerous and inhospitable for human beings when my grandchildren come up, I will forego the avocados in January.”
Mook added, “Many of us in this country are so privileged that we don’t even see the effects of climate change, and we need to wake up because everything is going to be burning around us.” He continued “We need to recognize all of the impacts on the rest of the world that our consumption and our methods are having because it doesn't just stay here.”
Fields reminded us “If for no other reason, we want to take care of this planet for the preservation of the human species. Because Mother Earth has shown us, if you do not take care of me, I will not take care of you and you will go extinct. And then I [Mother Earth] will do whatever it is I got to do, and some other species will become dominant, but I will still be here.”
Thank you to all who attended and contributed to the 2021 iteration of Food Almanac—and we look forward to seeing you at our next event. Keep an eye out at slowfoodnyc.org/events for upcoming community happenings.
Written by James Mather, Slow Food NYC Volunteer