Leah Penniman: We’ve been ready for 400 years. Courtesy Soul Fire Farm
Tired of low quality junk food staples stocked in black neighbourhood shops, Leah Penniman decided to do something about it. She was a pioneer among many coloured US city dwellers who are fighting back by growing their own veg in urban nooks and crannies across the nation. By Thin Lei Win.
New York, US. July 2020. Living in the Bronx in the mid-1980s, Karen Washington started thinking about the huge difference between the quality of food available to her in stores in her mainly black neighbourhood compared to what was on sale to white friends elsewhere in New York City.
"We got the junk food, the processed food, not the healthy food," said Washington. Working as a physiotherapist at the time, she saw firsthand how poor diet affects health - regularly treating patients with conditions such as diabetes, strokes and heart disease. She went on to coin the term "food apartheid" to describe the long-standing dietary inequity in the United States.
"Racism and white supremacy are really built into the DNA of the U.S. food system," said Leah Penniman, author of a book called "Farming While Black". She argues the same thinking that justified the theft of indigenous lands and the use of slaves as farm labour has morphed into new forms of racial discrimination in the country's food production chain.
Indeed, data reveals that in the US, many supermarket chains have been reluctant to set up shop in black neighbourhoods, leaving inner cities with smaller stores that often do not sell fresh fruits, vegetables or meat. Additionally, government policies are largely responsible for fomenting such racial separation, critics say, for example through home-buying schemes that have encouraged white people with access to mortgages to move to the suburbs.
Today, Penniman is co-director of Soul Fire Farm, an urban growing collective based in Petersburg, New York state. She explained that the sharp decline in the number of black farmers in the US has reflected decades of discrimination and a backlash over the estimated 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) of land that small black farmers owned in the early 1900s. Practices such as convict leasing, in which states were allowed to sell - mainly black - prison labour to farms, sharecropping, state-sanctioned segregation and the Jim Crow laws all made land ownership difficult and conspired against black farmers, Penniman asserted.
“You know, if you’re white in this country, you’re four times more likely to have a healthy supermarket in your neighborhood,” she said. “And that’s why we work so hard on that … on the tangible grassroots level where we’re literally growing food and delivering it at low and no cost to the doorsteps of people under food apartheid, growing community gardens in urban spaces.”
Penniman recalls how difficult it used to be to find fruit and vegetables to buy for her young family. She did not own a car and there was no bus service in the neighbourhood, so the only option was to buy a subscription to a local farm about three kilometers away through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. That cost more than the family's rent. This situation spurred Penniman and her husband, both of whom had more than a decade of farming experience, to set up their own community garden.
Grant Park urban garden in New York. Courtesy Grant Park.
Her Soul Fire Farm now offers low-cost doorstep delivery of fruits and vegetables to residents of New York’s Albany-Troy area and runs training programs including their "Uprooting Racism in the Food System" programme.
Although the USDA uses the term "food desert" to describe areas with limited supplies of fresh, affordable foods, the description is rejected by community farming activists like Washington and Penniman. They say the lack of good food available in these poverty-afflicted areas is a reflection of entrenched discrimination, rather than unfavourable geography.
"In this country, your zip code is a very high predictor of your life expectancy," said Penniman. "There's a concentration of hunger and diet-related illness in certain zip codes, and that correlates with where black and brown communities live. And although previously this might have been seen as a non-virtuous spiral, today, Soul Fire Farm trains between 1,800 and 3,000 people a year in basic small-holding techniques, many of them African Americans.
Dozens of other grassroots initiatives challenging the agricultural status quo are close to fruition in other parts of the US too, although the coronavirus pandemic has forced the suspension of services such as farmers markets and on-site training courses.
Black urban farming at Dreaming Out Loud co-op. Courtesy DoL.
In Chicago, Allen's Urban Growers Collective, which uses converted city buses as mobile markets for its farm produce, plans to start work on a facility to turn food waste into compost in the next few months.
Lockdown restrictions have also helped forge some new partnerships; when critically acclaimed Burmese restaurant Thamee in Washington D.C. looked at ways to stay afloat during the crisis, it teamed up with non-profit food supply outfit Dreaming Out Loud to offer customers a selection of products sourced from black farmers.
"In this indefinite interim we're ... a little bit of a restaurant, a little bit of a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), a kind of a grocery store with a pantry,” said Thamee co-owner Simone Jacobson. “I felt it was really important to have POC (people of color) farmers helping us," she added. That approach is becoming more common.
"We now have a multi-year waiting list for our training programs, so nobody can tell me black folks don't want to farm," said Penniman. She says it is important to recognise that systemic change to food supply chains will not happen if it remains under the control of existing mechanisms.
"(We have to) move on and let somebody else take the leadership position. People can't always say, 'I'm waiting for you to get ready.' We've been ready for 400 years."