Mathews, who lives in Round Lake on the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota, came to understand digging in the soil as not just an agricultural mechanism but also a therapeutic one — what she calls a “tactical healing tool.” It led her to leave a 30-year career in sales in 2017 to found FullCircle26, Inc., a hydroponic gardening nonprofit that teaches children and adults about growing their own food through partnerships in schools and communities. The program exists in more than 1,000 schools across the country. Mathews says she was drawn to hydroponics “as a way to offer an opportunity for the underserved people in our communities — kids through adults — to be able to learn how to grow their own food.”
Yet it wasn’t always like that. Nyra Jordan, social impact investment director at the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, says. Jordan leads a partnership with Route 1, a farming organization in Minnesota with a mission to facilitate food access and decrease the racial hunger divide by supporting Black farmers and educating young people in “the culture and the fulfillment of growing in providing food,” Jordan says. “We educate and arm communities with the knowledge to grow their own food, to sell their own food, to feed their families and feed their communities.” According to the USDA, in the early 1900s, Black farmers owned between 16 and 19 million acres of land in the U.S. “A century later, we have 98% of America’s Black farmers that have been dispossessed of their farms,” Jordan says. “You had federal homestead acts that offered mostly
“The systemic racism in the food system and the vestiges of slavery still very much predominate and prevent Black farmers and other Black individuals in the food system from being able to have the same access to resources as white farmers,” says Laurie Beyranevand, the director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and a professor of law at Vermont Law School.
In recent years, food-justice activists have made an effort to move away from top-down food distribution to a community-based approach. That led organizations like Food For Others, a Fairfax County, Virginia, food pantry and distribution program, to recalibrate and consider the specific needs of the communities they serve. Around 70% of Food For Others’ clients are Spanish- speaking, and
Often, Beyranevand says, Black farmers struggle to access land and capital to purchase land, and it’s part of a broader struggle among marginalized groups
that’s led the pantry to adjust what types of food they offer — including
white sellers deeply subsidized land, which entrenched white- held titles in our American agricultural systems.”
in the food economy. “When you think about discrimination in the context of food-system workers, a lot of food- system workers — whether we’re talking about farm workers or even workers that happen to be in slaughterhouses or other places like that — are often employees of color and very rarely make decent wages and don’t have the same workplace protections,” she says. “Food justice matters because without food justice, we have no justice,” says Erika Allen, the CEO and cofounder of the Urban Growers Collective, a Chicago-based nonprofit that works to develop community-based food systems. It currently runs eight urban farms around Chicago’s South Side. Allen believes food justice is about “having a shared value system of equity and fairness and justice so that we’re not taking advantage of those resources for the benefit of one individual or one group of people.” A big part of her work is reframing the “historic trauma” of the U.S. food and farming industry that’s present for so many of her clients. For Allen, it’s about “reimagining and seeing the food” differently. “I love growing food from all over the world,” she continues, giving the example of how people who speak different languages can “look at the same plant and have 10 different names for that plant.” Allen adds that learning about the lineage of a particular plant you’ve never seen or tried before can “completely” change your perception of “how we’ve been conditioned around food and agriculture.”
Many of the schools Mathews works with are in low-income urban areas where access to fresh food is limited — and where, she says, “you can’t walk to a store like I did as a child to get fresh fruit or anything, but you have a convenience store with packaged goods that are filled with sugar and salt and all the rest.” Working with hydroponics, she continues, “has been such a wide eye-opener for me, of number one, how blessed I’ve been,” and “number two, that if you offer people resources that they may not have known about, they can make life changes, and that’s how we change the whole paradigm and the narrative and teach people, especially people of color.“
According to the 2022 U.S. agricultural census, Black farmers own just 4.3 million acres, or around 0.5% of all farmland in the country.
cornmeal as a staple, for instance — and hire bilingual
volunteers. Food For Others is “trying to be really person-centered and asking the right questions and listening to the people that we’re serving,”
says Deb Haynes, the organization’s executive director. “Nonprofits can be very patriarchal in how we make our decisions about how we serve people,” she adds. “So we’re figuring out better ways to make those decisions so that we’re doing a better job of serving them and treating them with dignity.”
Mathews believes that “if we have generations of kids that are growing up and don’t know how to grow their own food, we’ll always have food deserts.” She wants people to eat healthily, but she’s also deeply familiar with the roadblocks that prevent people from accessing fresh food — the obvious financial and geographic problems, and the less obvious. For example, people who have to take public transportation to and from a faraway grocery store may be unable to carry heavier vegetables like potatoes or carrots.
Many within the food-justice movement are hopeful about what farming and food access might look like in the future. “To understand the truth of the wealth in this country and the roots of it and how it was acquired through labor, there’s no way to ever compensate folks or to repair that,” Allen says, speaking of the agriculture industry’s historic reliance on enslaved people. But she believes that the work she’s doing to provide fresh food and teach people how to grow their own produce is a start. “To be able to have agency and autonomy and grow food that you love at a pace that is not an exploitive pace,” she says, “is incredible, healing, and powerful.” Mathews says she’s seen similar results: “People change their lives by just us giving this knowledge and then being able to plant a seed.”
Mathews said that many Black Americans are wary of the farming industry, given the history of slavery in the agricultural system, and that it’s kept them from pursuing agriculture as a career.
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ISSUE 01
THE JUSTICE LEAGUE
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