Reclaiming food sovereignty.
Don’t call it a food desert. “Food apartheid” is closer to the truth.
Describing a place as a food desert, says food sovereignty activist Sophi Wilmore, “implies that this is a natural phenomenon—that the lack of healthy, fresh, nutritious foods in certain neighborhoods is par for the course, normal, organic.”
On the contrary, says Wilmore: The real issue is structural racism, and unjust systems that keep people impoverished, hungry, and positioned for incarceration.
Wilmore is the co-executive director of Feed Black Futures, a community-based, Black, queer-led food sovereignty organization in California that connects Black and brown farmers with Black mamas and caregivers whose lives and families have been impacted by incarceration and the criminal legal system.
“It’s all part of the systems of oppression and how they function,” they say. “Getting us further away from the places that have the highest food distribution intersects with food apartheid. These are the places where there is limited-to-no access to fresh foods and vegetables.”
Food apartheid, a term coined by the farmer and advocate Karen Washington, has real impacts. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, among the more than 54 million Americans who lack access to healthy food, formerly incarcerated people and their children are at least twice as likely to suffer from food insecurity. People with felony drug convictions, for example, are permanently banned from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, though many states, including California, have opted out of this ban.
But even joining, or re-joining, government food programs can be difficult for formerly incarcerated people, who often lack the information, resources, and support they need to restart their lives. This makes the lack of healthy food an “often overlooked consequence of incarceration” that is connected to other societal injustices, such as homelessness and unemployment.
This type of structural racism hinders the well-being of Black women and caregivers who have been impacted by the justice system, Wilmore said, and who are owed reparations.
“We were promised land after the abolition of slavery and never received that land,” they said.
In response, Feed Black Futures pursues reparations through a teach them to fish strategy of food justice, food education, and farmer training to decrease dependency on industrial and capitalist food systems that put profit over people and the planet.
Ali Anderson, FBF’s founder and co-executive director, jumpstarted Feed Black Futures with a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 and feed 20 families that benefited from the annual Black Mamas Day Bail Out at the start of the pandemic. She collaborated with the Essie Justice Group, a women-led membership organization that supports Black and Latinx women and families affected by incarceration. A month later, Anderson had surpassed the initial goal to raise about $90,000.
That initial effort motivated Anderson, an experienced community organizer who holds a masters degree in public health from Emory University, to start Feed Black Futures.
Today, the organization, grounded in principles of abolition, liberation, and self empowerment, connects Black women and their families and caregivers with nutritious foods and fresh produce purchased from Black and brown farmers—what Anderson calls “building pathways of food and land sovereignty in California.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, a community organizer and civil-rights activist who died in 1977, once said:
“Down where we are, food is used as a political weapon. But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family and nobody can push you around.”
Feed Black Futures breathes life into Hamer’s words by training participants to start and nurture backyard, apartment, and community gardens — and to advocate for food sovereignty policies and practices that enable marginalized communities to gain access to fresh food production and equitable food distribution.
In practice, Wilmore and Anderson’s organization has made more than 5,000 food deliveries to over 215 individuals, trained over 166 people in agricultural practices, and invested $120,000 in Black-and brown-owned farms in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Feed Black Futures considers all of the people they help as members. That includes people who have received food services and gone through garden and farmer training. Participation replaces dues or any other type of remuneration. Wilmore’s hope is FBF’s investment in members will create a larger base of people advocating for food sovereignty. She also sees a future expanded platform that includes Black and brown farmers too.
Oakland resident Joymara Coleman, who has loved ones in the prison system, has been a Feed Black Futures member for the past two years. She says that knowing where her food comes from has had a positive impact on her emotional, mental, and physical health.
“Anybody can get a community food bank box of non-perishables full of GMOs,” she said, but Feed Black Futures “gives us something more, like being intentional about the quality of food, the energy that went into growing that food, knowing that this is a symbiotic relationship between the grower and the consumer. That for me is the ultimate self-care.”
By partnering with groups such as the Essie Justice Group, Agroecology Commons, and others in California and across the country, Wilmore said she hopes one day Feed Black Futures will become irrelevant, as more BIPOC women and families give up unhealthy food systems, support ecologically sound Black and brown farmers, and no longer go hungry because they or people they love were once incarcerated.
“A great way to keep people impoverished is to keep them reliant on a system they cannot control,” Wilmore said. “Their choices are limited as to where they can get their food from. So we’re talking about food sovereignty as a mechanism for liberation.”