February is Black History Month. This is an important time to listen, learn, reflect, and take action. You may be wondering what this has to do with farm to school, food systems, and gardening, and the answer is-everything! Farm to school is built on the principles of food justice, guided by the idea that access to fresh, healthy food is a human right. This movement has its roots in histories of struggle, resistance, and community care that often get overlooked and erased. From Indigenous people all across Turtle Island to enslaved Africans who were forced upon it–our food system has relied upon the labor, expertise, and resources of Black and Brown communities since its inception. It is our duty to honor the knowledge and contributions of these communities, who were the original caretakers of this land and still are.
As Farm to School practitioners, it is important for us to know about these histories and those who came before us. Let’s commit to ongoing education and action, ensuring that farm to school programs and the broader food justice movement reflect the values of equity, sovereignty, and community care from which they came.
Food and land have been at the core of liberation movements throughout place and time. “If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it, but if you give him land, he will grow his own food.” This quote from Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights activist and food justice pioneer from Mississippi, exemplifies this idea. Her community was struggling, and she responded through the creation of the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Check out these two resources to learn more about her work and about other activists/groups who used food as a tool for social and economic change.
Black History Month: Food Justice is Racial Justice
Share Food Program: Black Activists Who Built the Food Justice Movement
Additional Media to Watch and Listen To
- Leah Penniman Keynote at Moses Organic Farming Conference 2020. In this video, Leah Penniman, author of “Farming While Black” and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, gives an incredible keynote speech at the 2020 Moses (renamed Marbleseed) Organic Farming Conference. Her talk covers the history of Black agriculture in the US and the importance of community and leadership in the fight for racial equity in labor, land ownership, agriculture, and society in general.
- High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. In this 4-episode docuseries, Chef and writer Stephen Satterfield traces the delicious, moving throughlines from Africa to Texas. It examines the influence of racial disparity, classism, and labor relations on African American food culture and gives viewers a deeper understanding of “America’s deep-rooted history of slavery, and the impact on American food as we know it today.”
- Just Food Podcast – Episode 2 – Black Slow Food: A Local Food Story. In the second episode of Victoria Ginzburg’s Just Food Podcast, she invites Chef Isaiah Martinez to talk about his experience being an Afro-Caribbean man embracing slow food values while cooking up multicultural meals in the Pacific Northwest. He talks about not only his background but also his business practices in his effort to be more sustainable and mindful. Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud.
- A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA – TEDTalk. Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”
Books to Dive Into
- Farming While Black by Leah Penniman
- Freedom Farmers by Monica White
- Black Rice by Judith Carney
- Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice by Editors Ashanté M. Reese and Hanna Garth
Explore these resources to help expand food systems education in your classroom