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RACE AND HEALTH. The New Food Movement
Has a Problem with Race
By Lauren Rothman
Sep 13 2015, 11:00am
The New Food Movement
Has a Problem with Race
Natasha Bowens—farmer,
activist, and author of The Color of Food —sees something
missing in our new local, farm-to-table food culture: people of color.
When you think about
the rapidly growing food movement, what comes to mind? Backyard chicken enthusiasts
in Portland? Farm-to-table chefs plucking tender bunches of chervil from
their Berkeley restaurant gardens? Or maybe you consider a farmer out in the
Midwest, plunging her hands into the soil to harvest the potatoes growing
there.
In your mind's eye,
what color are those hands? If they're white (albeit streaked with soil),
then your thought process is likely a reflection of how agriculture—and to a
larger extent—our entire food system, tends to be portrayed: as a field
that's almost totally lacking in diversity, one that consistently pushes the
country's countless African-American, Latino, and Asian farmers, chefs, and
entrepreneurs to the margins.
That's the thesis, at
least, laid out by Natasha Bowens, a farmer and food justice advocate based
outside Washington, D.C. A former grassroots organizer whose work focused on
environmental issues, health care, and social justice, Bowens eventually made
food systems central to her work and settled in western Maryland, where she
began to grow her own food. As she crossed paths with more and more farmers
and activists, Bowens says, she realized that a huge demographic was absent
from the conversation: people of color.
"From seed to
table, the corporate-controlled food industry in this country is rife with
discrimination, oppression, and the denial of rights," she writes on her
website, The Color of Food. "Rights to healthy food, rights to land,
rights to a clean environment, and rights to an equal opportunity for success
and livelihood for farmers are not fairly attainable."
In response to the
color-washing she repeatedly saw in her chosen field, Bowens developed a
multimedia project in 2010—the centerpiece of which is her new book The Color
of Food—that seeks to show the food movement in all its diversity. Traveling
around the country and meeting with groups such as the Black Farmers and
Agriculturists Association and the Traditional Native American Farmers
Association, Bowens located the farmers that she features—in full-page, color
portraits with accompanying essays—in her new book. MUNCHIES spoke with
Bowens about the misrepresentation of the food movement.
MUNCHIES: Hi, Natasha.
So how did this become your life's work? Natasha Bowens: I was organizing in
communities, I was organizing on college campuses, I was courting student
organizations, and just really getting a broad perspective of all of these
issues that folks around the country were concerned with. I just felt like
there was one issue in particular that was tied with our health, social
justice issues, and the environment, and that was food.
I started immersing
myself in the food movement, working in urban farms and community gardens. I
started working at the local farmers' market. I started growing my own food,
attending conferences, reading tons of books. And it was then when I was
really immersing myself in the agriculture movement that I started to really
notice the inequities. I realized that it was such an exclusive movement:
this whole foods, organic, fresh food, local food thing. And I thought, Where
are the people of color being represented?
I started to connect
the dots of the inequities in what people call the food justice movement as
far as having access to fresh food, and the high rates of diabetes and other
illnesses that impact communities of color at such higher rates. I started to
see that these inequities in the representation of the food movement were
really rooted in inequities and discrimination within the system. And yet in
all of the books, at all of the conferences that I was attending, people of
color weren't being represented. Their voices weren't being heard, even
though they were being impacted the most by the broken food system.
On a very personal
level, I started to feel a little bit out of place as a woman of color,
farming, when the typical image of a farmer is a white man. I really wanted
to find solidarity, and to claim that we belong here, too. That was the
impetus for getting on the road with The Color of Food.
Can you expand a
little bit on how you think the food movement is currently portrayed? The few
times that people of color are represented when we're talking about food or
agriculture, it's about farm workers, migrant labor, food access, food
insecurity—showing communities of color lined up at the farmers market with
their food stamps. I felt like it was really doing us an injustice because
our food narrative is so much richer than that.
While raising
awareness about issues of inequities and injustice, I also wanted to
celebrate and honor farmers that are out there, right alongside the
mainstream exclusive farmer, and there are communities all over the country:
Native American communities, Asian communities, Hispanic, black communities
that are out there farming, and that have been farming. I interviewed so many
farmers that have been on their land for hundreds of years, who have growing
organically well before the word existed. Their farms have been passed down
within their families, just like our typical American family farm. One
farmer, Mr. Gary Grant in Tillery, North Carolina, said, "We're family
farmers, too—why aren't we called family farmers? We're black farmers. That's
our label. But we're family farmers, too."
You say that your work
is political in nature. Being a person of color, farming and having
sovereignty over my food and where it comes from is a political act. A
revolutionary act—being out here farming, serving the land in a way that's
environmentally friendly, running our own businesses, having our own
independence, having sovereignty over our own seeds, over our foods.
You say that our food
system is broken. How so? Farmers are losing their land and getting put out
of business because of corporations that are patenting seeds. And then we
have new farmers that can't attain land, and we have existing and veteran
farmers that are losing their land because of discrimination, and because of
barriers in the USDA system. We have injustice with folks who are harvesting
food—farm workers as well as farmers are not getting paid a fair, living
wage. And then we have things being sprayed on our food, food being
distributed being unfairly, unjustly: We have great, healthy food going to
high-income communities, and not to communities of color. From seed to table,
we have so many issues with our system. It's beyond broken. I think if you
dig deep enough, you can find the injustice. You don't even need to dig that
deep.
With your book, you're
hoping to show that our food system is much more diverse than is commonly
acknowledged. How else do you think some of these injustices can be
corrected? I think the first step is to start having these really tough
conversations. There are intentional gatherings that are happening all around
the country, called "Dismantling Racism in the Food System," and
that's where a lot of food movement activists and farmers are gathering. It
really helps everyone to get in the room and start putting together plans for
how to address these issues on a system-wide level.
And we need to start
putting folks in positions of power. There's a farmer that I interviewed,
Renard Turner, from Virginia. He was complaining about just how long it's
taken to gain leadership as a black farmer in the state of Virginia, and now,
this year, he was just elected the president of the Virginia Biological
Farming Association. Examples like that are steps in the right direction.
What do you hope
readers will gain from the book? There's a lot that I hope that comes out of
this book, and it's going to depend on the person. Someone who maybe wasn't
aware of farmers of color, or of what farmers of color contribute to
agriculture—I would love them to pick it up and kind of have the light go on
for them. I'd love to have a young person of color who might be thinking
about farming, or might be thinking about joining the food movement in some
regard, to pick up the book and really feel like, Oh, this is a place for me.
I haven't seen my face here, I haven't felt like this is a space for me, and
now I know it is. And I hope that other farmers of color that are out there
looking for solidarity and looking for power in numbers can find it here,
because often it's really hard to step up and step forward when you have so
many hoops to jump over, just to stand next to the white male farmer. I hope
the book really pushes all of these conversations in forward.
Thanks for speaking to
me, Natasha.
This post previously
appeared on MUNCHIES in May, 2015.
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National Latino
Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association
1029 Vermont
Avenue, NW, Suite 601
Washington, DC
20005
Office: (202)
628-8833
Fax No.: (202)
393-1816
Email: latinofarmers@live.com
Twitter: @NLFRTA
Website: www.NLFRTA.org 
