Jul 24 · 11 min read
Farmer Nell & Doc Cheatham: Freedom Fighters for Food Sovereignty photo from The Afro
This piece is a part of Stories to Support.
During the first week of pandemic induced “shelter in place,” people across the U.S. panic-bought flour, canned goods, and frozen vegetables; emptying the shelves in grocery stores. Americans were scared, threatened by the possibility of an unstable food supply coupled with an inability to go on weekly grocery trips. For middle and upper-class Americans, this fear was in response to a government-sanctioned quarantine. However, for low-income Americans, lacking access to healthy food can be a daily reality.
COVID-19 compounded the conditions that create food insecurity, especially for those who weren’t able to stock up on months’ worth of food. Many in Baltimore City have come face-to-face with what it means to be food insecure during a pandemic.
Twenty-three and a half percent of Baltimoreans live in a Healthy Food Priority Area, and Black residents are the most likely to live in one. Baltimore City defines living in a Healthy Food Priority Area (formerly known as a food desert) by four factors:
an area where the average Healthy Food Availability Index score for all food stores is low
the median household income is at or below 185 percent of the Federal Poverty Level
over 30 percent of households have no vehicle available
the distance to a supermarket is more than 1/4 mile.
Thirty-one and a half percent of Black residents in Baltimore live in a Healthy Food Priority Area, compared to only 8.9% of white residents living in food compromised areas. The CDC lists Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people under “racial and ethnic minority groups” that need to take “extra precaution” against COVID, citing living conditions due to racial segregation, imprisonment, being an essential worker, distrust in the health care system, and underlying health conditions as reasons why — these patterns are all the result of systemic and institutional racism.
These are all factors of mobility: economic, physical, and social.
COVID-19 limits mobility in unique ways: it is determined not just by what type of vehicle one owns or doesn’t own, but whether their body is older, immunosuppressed, or already sick.
COVID-19 has, in short, made food insecurity worse for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. It furthers the conditions of food apartheid, a term that accurately describes the history of redlining, segregation, and racial oppression that created the pattern of the Healthy Food Priority Areas we see today.
In compromising situations, human resilience inevitably creates solutions.
Warren and Lavette Blue at The Greener Garden. (Photo by Jesse James DeConto)
BIPOC activists have been expanding food access both prior to, and in response to, COVID-19. Inaccessibility to a reliable supply of healthy, affordable food has gotten worse since the pandemic, and we can find the answers of how to solve it through the works of BIPOC activists towards food sovereignty.
Food sovereignty establishes food as a right, and emphasizes control over the production and distribution of food in the hands of those who cultivate the land and eat food, as explained in the robust framework from the peasant farmers of Via Campesina.
Food sovereignty establishes food as a right.
In Baltimore, we are living on the land of Paskestikweya people who took care of this part of Earth before settler-colonizers committed genocide against the Indigenous peoples of this land. Simultaneous with atrocities being committed against Native people, European settlers then enslaved and relied on the labor of Black people to grow their food, along with being forced to produce labor for major industries of tobacco, cotton, sugar, iron, and more. In resistance to centuries-long displacement from food sovereignty, Black people have been doing the work of creating community-based systems to care for themselves and their family. In Baltimore, we turn to the leadership of Black activists who have been leading this work of creating a self-reliant, alternative food system. Black people have been cultivating this land for centuries, and Native Americans working with the land since time immemorial, however are most marginalized by the modern food system.
These leaders have been studying, practicing, actively planting seeds, preserving their land, and reclaiming ancestral practices — even as state violence has ripped away land and food access. Food Justice leaders have demonstrated that when we fight for healthy food access, we support each other through our basic needs in community. We can determine the trajectory of our own lives; we don’t have to be dependent on the systems and people that hurt us.
Growing Food
Most stories of chattel slavery reduce enslaved Black folks down to bodies used for labor, Judith A. Carney, along with other scholars, counters such dehumanization with a theory that Africans were responsible for the cultivation of rice. Having carried it with them from West Africa, Africans who were trafficked to the Americas used their agricultural knowledge to establish rice as a crop. In addition to this prized crop, European settlers also took advantage of the agricultural knowledge of Indigenous nations across the continent for their own survival. Today many agriculturists are looking to Indigenous practices on ways to restore the land and grow food sustainably.
The Greener Garden 5623 McClean Blvd, Baltimore, MD 21214
Acknowledging the history of how enslaved Black people were forced to tend to land, yet historically excluded from owning it, is necessary in modern conversations about food justice. This fact inherently ties into land justice and reparations, a history that Soul Fire Farm and co-director Leah Penniman use to center the call for reparations. Supporting resources for this call included a reparations map, and a book on what it means to farm while Black.
In Baltimore, we are blessed to be in a community with many farmers who have cultivated vacant lots into urban gardens and harvest the fruits of their labor to share at farmstands, markets, and community supported agriculture shares. The Farm Alliance has compiled a list of all Black-owned and operated farms in the city, as well as created a fund to support education for Black farmers.
Nationally, Civil Eats has compiled a list of organizations working towards food sovereignty and justice.
Distributing Food
Cooperatives have been an alternative means of creating food access through mutual investment and support. Some of the first cooperatives were founded by Black people as a necessary work towards liberation. Fannie Lou Hamer, most famous for her Civil Rights work around registering voters, saw establishing sustainable food access as a necessity for Black liberation and created the Freedom Farms Cooperative. Families that participated got a pig they had to care for, with the promise that they would bring bag two piglets the next year, among receiving housing, employment, and education.
“The time has come now when we are going to have to get what we need ourselves. We may get a little help, here and there, but in the main we’re going to have to do it ourselves.” Fannie Lou Hamer
The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union (CAFCU), founded in the 1880s, brought Black farmers together to establish leadership in Southern agriculture. At its peak, the CFACU had one million members, who benefited from newsletters to share agricultural practices, raised mutual aid funds to support the sick and elderly, and allied farmers to be an active voice in local and regional politics.
Fannie Lou Hamer
W.E.B DuBois archived the history of cooperatives in Black communities in his piece, “Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans”, noting how Black people pooled resources in church congregations, worker-owned businesses, fraternal societies, and mutual aid groups. Published in 1907, he counted 154 Black-owned cooperatives.
The Black Panther Party started the Free Breakfast Program in 1969, distributing breakfast to Black children. They recognized the need for community services and created the program to serve kids (especially since many of them weren’t able to focus or learn in school for a variety of reasons — not having access to meals was one of them). They worked with local churches, grocery stores, and mothers, to bring free breakfast in at least 36 cities around the US. They notably pioneered this effort before 1975, when federally-funded free breakfast was expanded.
Arabbers in Baltimore have been since the end of the Civil War, and while only a few of these horse-cart mobile markets still market on the streets of Baltimore today, the Arabber Preservation Society maintains the history and value of their work in expanding food access in Black neighborhoods.
Arabber in the 20th century
Today, the No Boundaries Coalition runs a program called Fresh at the Avenue, connecting residents of Sandtown to affordable produce at the Avenue Market. During COVID-19, they’ve been distributing food via home deliveries to their neighbors.
The Black Church Food Security Network promotes growing and distributing food on the land of historically Black churches. They connect Black farmers and producers to churches and are running a Faith, Food, and Freedom Summer Campaign to encourage gardening, working with Black farmers, and food storage. Normally, they also run a Soil to Sanctuary Market at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church.
Many Black farmers and food businesses are continuing to vend at a physically distant Wednesday Druid Hill Farmers’ Market this summer. The Cherry Hill Food Cooperative is currently building to create a grocery store that would be owned, operated, and benefiting Cherry Hill residents.
Preparing and Eating Food
Food is the manifestation of ancestral dreams; serving as a creation of physical and spiritual nourishment. For many, food is one of the facets of culture that has remained resilient through journeys of immigration, and the terrors of enslavement and land robbery. The preparation and cooking of food is a practice that has been historically gendered, especially in commercial settings, and often relies on the labor of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.
Enslaved people were responsible for cooking meals for the families of their enslavers. Through both adaptation and forced labor, Black people have indelibly shaped what we think of as Southern food today. However there are few Black chefs in the ranks of a mostly white male-dominated culinary field. Edna Lewis brought Black southern cooking into the spotlight when she wrote The Taste of Country Cooking, a cookbook and memoir about her life growing up in rural Virginia. Today, chef-activists like Tunde Wey are calling attention to the economic ownership white folks have over Southern food, though it originated in the hands of enslaved Black women and men.
Dr. Christopher Carter, a professor at University of California, San Diego, has focused his studies on what it means to eat soulfully, a question that is rooted in his theological lens on food. He discusses the racialization of food, and how eating soulfully should embody the three virtues of “embracing our soul, justice for food workers, and care of the earth.”
Today in Baltimore, the Black Vegetarian Society of Maryland, Thrive Baltimore, and Holistic Wellness and Health are all Black-led organizations and businesses that focus on promoting healthy, plant-based diets within the Black community by way of increasing access to nutritional education, affordability of plant-based foods, and supporting Black-owned businesses. Gregory Brown, Kimberly Ellis, Krystal Mack, Catina Smith aka Chef Cat, and David Thomas are just a few of the Black chefs and food creatives that are claiming space for eating soulfully within the culinary arts and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
We can foster Black ownership within the food system by eating at Black-owned restaurants in Baltimore. Many of these Black-owned restaurants serve not just as a place to support the economic growth, but as a grounds for convening to work on other forms of justice.
Healing Land
Regenerating soil and healing the land that food is grown, harvested, and consumed on is both the end and the beginning of the food system.
A collaboration between leaders within the food and land justice movements became Land Justice, an anthology of essays that called for the food justice movement to come together to secure land access.
The first Community Land Trust, was founded by Black Civil Rights activists in 1970, called New Communities, Inc, a 5000 acre plot in Georgia. The founders bought the land on a loan, and struggled to maintain it all under a segregationist governor and the debt they carried. Despite systemic struggles, the organization still remains today, resilient and active as a 501(c)(4) organization.
The community land trust is a model that United Workers used as a foundation to establish the Affordable Housing Trust Fund through organizing a ballot initiative in Baltimore. United Workers, among the Energy Justice Network and the Institute for Local Self Reliance, also fights for a zero-waste future to ultimately shut down the incinerators and landfills that pollute the air and the earth, intentionally placed in majority-Black communities.
In alignment with zero-waste goals, the Baltimore Compost Collective increases composting in South Baltimore and regenerates food scraps into life-giving soil, or Black gold as founder Marvin Hayes calls it. Baltimore City Office of Sustainability runs free, public food scraps drop off sites at farmers’ markets — in Waverly on 32nd St on Saturdays 8–12pm and the Baltimore Farmers’ Market and Bazaar downtown from 7–12pm.
Looking at the past work of Black, Indigenous, and people of color is a practice that allows us to recognize the roots of where food sovereignty work has come from. This is a de-colonial and “unsettling” practice. Within this context, we are encourages by Black organizations in Baltimore that are on the front-lines of fighting food insecurity during COVID-19 today. These same communities have been responsible for the success and growth of our food system for centuries.
This week, we encourage you to take action by learning. As our gears continue to turn and make connections that bring us to cultivating justice in our practices, honor your own journey of uncovering truth in your mind, and honor the work that has been paved by revolutionary BIPOC folks.
Generations of farmers, cultivators, revolutionaries have laid a pathway, sowed the seeds, and grown a flourishing environment that is a safe space for us to do the work of educating ourselves to ultimately liberate our mindsets. Give thanks, cherish, and absorb it all.
For our next Stories to Support, we will be featuring the work of the Black Yield Institute in Cherry Hill, with more hands-on action items that Baltimore can support and learn about their work.
Organizations in Baltimore working on food access in response to COVID-19
Resources referenced throughout the article can be found here.
Resources on BIPOC food sovereignty, as referenced throughout the article.
Thank you to the Stories to Support team for contributing to this piece.
Written by Clarissa Chen
Research by Clarissa Chen and Hannah Correlli
Edited by Hannah Correlli, Shawn Gunaratne, Kate Lynch, Jasir Qiydaar, and Hess Stinson
Ideation by Clarissa Chen, Hannah Correlli, Colby Sangree