Left to right: Hank Herrera, HOPE Collaborative (moderator); Kimi Watkins-Tartt, Alameda County Public Health Department_; Eric Holt-Gimenez, Food First; Brahm Ahmadi, People’s Grocery; Josh Viertel, Slow Food USA, Yale Sustainable Food Project

_{© Mike Kahn/Green Stock Media}  

Introduction to session, Hank Herrera, HOPE Collaborative:

How does the Slow Food frame act as a boundary? Who is included and excluded? What is included is wonderful, but it excludes some things too. We need to look behind and beside the frame, not just ahead; Slow Food needs to include some new communities. There are three additional frames we should keep in mind. One: Indigenous local food – not just heirloom tomatoes, but also beans and tortillas, acorn meal, and many others. Two: The red line – boundaries of policy that exclude poor people (mortgage lending, food access redlining); we need to help make new local food systems because most poor have little or no access to real food. Three: The victory garden at city hall – it is separated from the public by a chain link fence, and recently by a row of dinner tables as well; these frames create spaces of inclusion and exclusion. We need to remove the barriers between those who eat well and those who do not eat.

Kimi Watkins-Tartt, Alameda County Public Health Department

Public health has been reframing its discussions of how to minimize health inequities in urban neighborhoods in the U.S. Rather than speaking of health disparities people are now saying inequities; these are preventable, systematic injustices. Alameda County Public Health wants to put the public back in public health. The data shows stark health disparities between groups; some groups are always left behind. In Alameda County it is primarily the African American community.

The leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer, stroke, and injuries; studying data back to 1960 shows that the overall health of the entire population is improving, but the gaps between groups are getting worse. Life expectancies are tied to neighborhood of residence, not just race. In Oakland, the divide is between the flatlands and the hills. In the flatlands, we see low graduation rates, low homeownership, high disease rates, high poverty rates, high violence rates, and a low concentration of food (of all types, not just healthy food). In Alameda County, there are three places with particularly poor health outcomes: West Oakland, parts of East Oakland, and the Eden Area near San Lorenzo and Hayward.

The Public Health Department is making an effort to stop looking at health disease by disease, but instead looking at issues that cut across all heath problems. Instead of just monitoring health problems, they want to create change. Moving away from the medical model of public health is a contentious move. Good health is 15 percent genetics, 15 percent access to care, and 70 percent economics, education, housing, transportation, and other environmental and socioeconomic factors. We need to address that 70 percent. In fact the PHD’s mandate (Title 17) specifies that the health department shall offer services directed to the social factors affecting health.

 Healthy People 2010 Objectives are aimed at health, education, housing, labor, justice, transportation, agriculture, and environment. To meet these objectives, The Alameda County Public Health Department is working to expand beyond its traditional school and hospital partnerships to develop partnerships with planning, agriculture, transportation, economic redevelopment, and housing groups. Partnerships with schools are expanding to address achievement gaps; a person without a high school diploma is likely to have poor health outcomes. The PHD is also working on community capacity building and advocating for new policies.

Hank Herrera, HOPE Collaborative                                                

HOPE collects data on Oakland not only from published statistics, but by talking to people and through design charrettes.  HOPE has found that Oakland is divided by the 580 freeway: the hills are wealthy and white, and the flatlands are poor and home to people of color. The 300,000 people living in the flatlands (75 percent of Oakland’s population) spend $0.5 billion on food each year, but there is only one supermarket serving this population.  Focus groups have found that residents in the flatlands want to cook at home, and want fresh food. This explodes some myths about low-income consumers.

Most flatland food sources are corner stores, selling manufactured edible substances: M.E.S.S. There are structural barriers to food access: neighborhoods are redlined in a number of ways, including by supermarkets that choose not to locate in these neighborhoods. Sometimes these areas are called food deserts, but that implies that barriers to food access are a natural phenomenon. Instead this should be called apartheid through food. There is structural violence taking place; reading Farmer’s Pathologies of Power is quite enlightening on this subject.

We need preferential options for the poor; we need to allocate resources to underserved neighborhoods, and help these neighborhoods build their own food systems, especially by emphasizing local business ownership.

Eric Holt-Giménez, Food First

The world food crisis is not a silent tsunami, not an accident. The crisis has been manufactured. In the last two years there have been record harvests, record hunger, record poverty, and record profits for agribusinesses like Cargill, which made a 1200 percent profit on their fertilizer Mosaic. Food prices are not up because of scarcity; 150 percent of the food needed is on the planet, but people cannot afford it. Today 1 billion people cannot afford their food, but from 900 million. There are several myths about the cause of the food crisis: droughts in Australia, Asia eating more meat, growing biofuels instead of fuel. These are proximate causes, not the underlying causes. The root cause is the domination of the market by a small group of big corporations.

Eric lived in Mexico for a few years, and later his godson came to the U.S. Farmers in Mexico had been run over by the Green Revolution, and switched to sustainable agriculture. But then after the actions of NAFTA and the WTO, they were unable to sell their corn at prices that covered their production costs. Eric’s godson couldn’t take over the family farm, so he came to the U.S. He had to pay $2000 for a coyote (a smuggler of human beings), and was then held for ransom for another $2000. He worked in the fields for the same companies that destroyed his living in Mexico. He was exposed to pesticides, paid slave wages, and ate cheap unhealthy food. Whenever he would send some money home, his family would go to Walmart and buy cheap bad food. Land, labor, diet, and family have all been colonized by big business; lives and health have been sacrificed for the sake of profits for these businesses. Another 100,000 people were just sacrificed so that Monsanto can get GMOs into more third world countries.

We are living in townships of the food system; people are denied access to the value of the food system. If the money spent in each community could be reinvested, not sent to corporations, we could reinvent the system and dismantle the townships of the food system. Food sovereignty means taking back control, democratizing the food system in favor of the poor, similar to what was done at the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín in 1972, which changed Latin America profoundly. When there is change in favor of the poor, then everyone wins.

To create conditions for food democracy, we must dismantle food apartheid. The problem is poverty; the food system produces an inordinate amount of wealth for a few. Need to change to local economic development. Farmers’ movements and social movements are already working toward this goal; Slow Food does not need to invent anything new, but simply lend a shoulder to these struggles.

Brahm Ahmadi, People’s Grocery

Slow Food has raised consciousness about food nationally and internationally.  The successes of the food and farmer movements over the past decades have not helped the poor communities; these large movements were leaving people out, and that’s where organizations like People’s Grocery come in. Most people in West Oakland don’t know Slow Food exists; change must come from within neighborhoods like this, since the larger movement is not bringing them along.

There are two parallel food systems: the sustainable, organic, and more expensive system, and the industrialized system of cheap processed foods with hidden costs. The food justice movement asserts that healthy food is a human right: a right not just to food, but to healthy food. The poor have been failed by the system, as have farm and food workers.

Seeing the capacity at events like Slow Food Nation is frustrating for organizations that must struggle so hard for capacity. Slow Food can do in weeks or months what poorer organizations need years to accomplish, because of politics and money. The environmental, social, and food justice movements grew out the environmentalist movements, responding to a need for a wider focus than forests and animals. Slow Food shouldn’t take over leadership of the food justice movement, but rather be an ally to food justice, and help communities lead their own struggles. If Slow Food moves into the food justice space, they may usurp the financial supports for the food justice movement.

Small players must scramble for resources, while large players get most of the political space and access to media and funders. A movement meant to solve a particular problem may start to struggle with itself, trying to keep big players from pushing out the smaller player. Infighting for scarce resources leads to fragmentation. Slow Food must be careful not to consume the political space that needs to be shared among many small organizations. We need not just a few spokespeople, but room for many to articulate their dreams.

It is exciting and terrifying that Slow Food is thinking about food justice. Slow Food should not push people out, but make partnerships. If Slow Food wants to make a food justice agenda, they will need to included food justice organizations in the discussion, not do it behind closed doors.

Josh Viertel, Slow Food USA, Yale Sustainable Food Project

Slow Food wants to serve this movement, not take the lead on it. If you walk into a neighborhood like West Oakland or Fairhaven (in New Haven, CT) and say a nonprofit has ended the domination of the common turkey and saved an artisan turkey, you are not going to get people to sign up for membership. This is not the type of food sovereignty the poor are worried about. Should Slow Food do the type of work that Via Campesina and People’s Grocery are doing? Maybe not. The intention of Slow Food is to serve the food justice movement, but they don’t know how, and think that’s fine: Slow Food needs guidance on this question.

Good, clean, fair, pleasurable food should be a right. We need to address structural racism and classism. Slow Food can have a powerful voice, and make space with this voice for others who have trouble getting a voice. Slow Food could bring community leaders along to big meetings in D.C., and let them do the talking. Would like to figure out how organizations can use Slow Food’s tools to serve the social and food justice movements.

Questions and Comments

Question: Since we know that biodiversity is the key to health, why don’t we see more of it?

Eric: We would have biodiversity and food justice but for some structural obstacles. Industry has undermined the food systems of southern countries; the Green Revolution, IMF, World Bank, WTO and the U.S. Farm Bill have all caused damage. We need to remove these obstacles by organizing and forming alliances at the national, state, and local levels.

Comment: Existing anti-hunger and anti-poverty organizations working on these issues suggest that Slow Food should ally with them to expand federal assistance programs, making these programs more sustainable and de-linking them from corporations. There is an alliance in California with a ten-point plan to make these changes happen.

Question: Many people in the food justice movement have anger toward Slow Food. Has anyone in these organizations reached out to work with local Slow Food leaders, not the national movement?

Brahm: Slow Food needs these food justice organizations, not the other way around. Slow Food should approach them, not the other way around. The anger is about access to power and resources.

Josh: For 300,000 people, these questions are a matter of life and death. People at the level of Chez Panisse need to understand what it is like emotionally to be powerless.

Question: How can small farmers make themselves allies to the food justice movement?

Hank: By analyzing how to get fresh local food to poor neighborhoods. How many acres would it take to feed a neighborhood? 15,000 acres for 15,000 people (and lots of pasture). Small farmers can come to us, or we’ll go to them, to work out production demand contracts. Guaranteed market, guaranteed supply.

Comment: Slow Food wasn’t relevant to food access activism for a long time. Taste, pleasure, not just access for all. The fundamental identify of Slow Food should resonate with food justice.

Question: Nonprofits like Slow Food have money, political clout, and the ability to create public awareness. What does the food justice movement want? What is a good starting point?

Hank: The anger is about low experience with community food security movements. We need people to not just listen, but to act and create new practices. I am sad now, not angry. Gigantic gaps between groups of people are hard to talk about; we need ways to bridge these gaps. A pledge in my organization is “I will be gentle and tender with my colleagues”; things will be said in the conversation about food justice that are not liked, we must be able to hear each other and say “stop” if needed, and be gentle with one another.

TrackBack URI for this entry

1 Comments

Haney Armstrong October 19, 2008 76.245.235.94 Votes: -1	Thanks for taking these notes! report abuse vote down vote up