IN A COUNTRY as wealthy as the U.S., people shouldn’t have to go hungry. Yet according to a 2023 report from the Department of Agriculture, 44.2 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2022. Food insecurity continues to be a problem for many, particularly those living in rural areas who must travel 10 miles or more to visit a grocery store, leaving people to rely on fast-food restaurants and corner stores for sustenance. Indigenous communities and people of color disproportionately struggle with food insecurity. Poverty and systemic racism have kept communities from healthy food options for decades. Enter the food-justice movement, a coalition of organizations and agricultural institutions working to make nutritious food more accessible and empower communities of color to engage in the food- production system.
Civil rights activists saw it as a way to suppress voters
and push Black families — many of whom had been subsisting as sharecroppers for generations — out of
the area.
Activists a national campaign to bring food to low- income families in the region, and in 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee about the board’s discontinuation of the program, prompting the federal government to open an investigation into Leflore County. The courts eventually reinstated the FSCP, but widespread resistance to the program among white Southerners continued. organized
The modern food-justice movement has its roots in a battle over food access in the Mississippi Delta region in the 1960s. For years, poor Black communities in the area were able to benefit from the government-backed Federal Surplus
Commodities program, which offered access to staples like cheese, meat, and peanut butter. But during the winter of 1962-1963, the all- white Leflore County Board of Supervisors in Leflore County, Mississippi, voted to discontinue the program.
A decade after that campaign, 900 miles away in rural Wisconsin, Shelley Mathews was gardening with her grandparents. As a child, she had no idea how rare it was to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables that she could pick straight out of the ground.
Thousands of Black families were immediately cut off from a steady food supply, exacerbating hunger and malnutrition in the region.
“To be able to walk out there and get a tomato or strawberries or even see — which was amazing — how peanuts grew,” she says, changed how she viewed food.
Before that point, Mathews adds, “There was no connection between the food in the grocery store and how food was grown.”
by Julie Gerstein illustrations by Keith Negley
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ISSUE 01
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