Food is a way to empower people and create change. It’s time for us to use it as a tool for changing racial injustice and helping Black, Brown, and low-income communities achieve better health, economic opportunities, and even generational legacies in the form of land ownership.
Many of us have heard the term “food desert” as a way to describe places where fresh, healthy food is not accessible within a certain distance. On this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, my guest, Karen Washington, takes this concept to a greater level with her coining of the phrase “food apartheid,” to really portray the overarching inequalities in our food system when it comes to the demographics of race, location, affluence, and economics.
Karen Washington is a farmer, activist, and food advocate. She is the Co-owner and Farmer at Rise & Root Farm in Chester, New York. In 2010, Karen Co-Founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS), an organization supporting growers in both urban and rural settings. In 2012, Ebony magazine voted her one of the 100 most influential African Americans in the country, and in 2014 Karen was the recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award. Karen serves on the boards of the New York Botanical Gardens, SoulFire Farm, the Mary Mitchell Center, Why Hunger, and Farm School NYC.
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@Mark Stick to food, no politricks please.
Amen
@Nick Baldwin May the force be with us
ET Himself whatever force that may be
@Nick Baldwin Any force u care to chose
cool. I used to work in the Bronx. Bodegas, McDonald’s, and the omni present Kennedy Fried Chicken which seems to be at every subway station.
I don’t know what it’s like in the Bronx, I do know what it is like in my area. I do live in a rural area and everyone uses the same stores. A lot of people have land but don’t make any effort to grow there own food.
Ah so food is now racist. Does that mean eating makes you a Nazi?
Thank you Michael. I couldn’t have said it any better.
Why isn’t the media focusing on how to prevent morbidity and mortality with COVID rather than just masking the situation. Exposure is inevitable in close quarters. There is a lot of noise that BLM but where is the real help for people of color and for the poor through education and access. A poor diet feeds the dis-ease…
Thank you Dr Hyman for always being on the cutting edge of community and connection; whether it is about health or humanity. Karen has brought a bigger perspective to injustice in wellness and wellbeing; there are many that are ready to support these efforts.
Preach! She’s also telling the Indigenous people’s story. Stolen land is a topic of contention, stolen from us first
The fact is junk food is found in ALL grocery stores unless you are in a “Health Food” store which most people do not consider a “grocery store”. Calling this Racism is Wrong. These companies have no problem trying to kill ALL OF US. Big Farms, Big Med & Big Pharma. The left have purposely kept the black community down by promising them what? Welfare. A way to keep them down financially, by making it more lucrative by keeping families seperated and broken. Keeping them down by always tellling them that they are being kept down. The minority communities are going to have to pick them selves up. And I don’t mean by rioting. That accomplishes nothing. I agree with your speaker, but please do not call this racism.
Would have really appreciated it if dr. Hyman pushed back on this idea that we need to have plant-based vs. Animal-based food. Plant and animal agriculture have to be done together otherwise you cannot get the nutrition back into the soil in order to fertilize the plants. Mixed agriculture is what we need. Not the industrial farming of animals nor the industrialized farming of plants. But this idea that what we all have to do is start being vegetarians or vegans is just nonsense. What is harming the black community is not that they are eating too much high quality grass-fed beef and pastured chicken for Pete’s sake. The highly processed unhealthy food she is against is all plant-based, mostly corn and soy.
Mary Kochan This could not be more spot on! Well said Mary.
Study Reveals Declining Life Expectancy Among White Americans That Defies Easy Answers
Nearly 4 years ago, Princeton economists Anne Case, PhD, and Angus Deaton, PhD, published a study on rising morbidity and mortality among whites that sent shudders through everyone from demographers to politicians. More drug overdoses, alcoholism, liver disease, and suicides—so-called “deaths of depair”—meant the steady rise in life expectancy seen for decades was no longer inevitable.
Now, a new study led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania digs more deeply into data on white mortality, including years after full implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that were not captured by Case and Deaton. Publishing in Population and Development Review, demographers Irma Elo, PhD, and Samuel Preston, PhD, and colleagues suggest that the country’s geographic divisions have become sharper and more complex. Rising white mortality has connections to education level and access to healthcare, but so far, it’s not possible to point to a single direct cause, which will make solutions equally complicated.
The authors find that for most of the 1990s, life expectancy in the United States improved. But over the past 3 decades and especially after 2010, that trend has slowed among non-Hispanic whites and women, and even reversed in some places. The opioid crisis explains part of it, but not all of it, and the bad news comes amid victories in longstanding challenges: death rates from cardiovascular causes, most cancers, and HIV are all declining.
The authors examined data from 1990 through 2016 from the National Center for Health Statistics under a data user agreement; they tabulate deaths by age, sex, race/ethnicity, cause of death, county, and year. After their initial data analysis, the researchers estimated death rates by age, year, and geographic region. Finally, they separated the data into 4 categories: large central metropolitan areas, large metro suburbs, small/medium metros, and non-metros, or rural areas.
They created 14 specific categories of deaths, including deaths of despair, as well as screenable cancers and influenza/pneumonia, which served as indicators of access to health services. A major feature of the ACA was to eliminating cost-sharing for key screenings for those with coverage; this element has been credited with closing disparities in states where low-income people can gain coverage under Medicaid expansion.
The story of declining life expectancy is a tale of those who die young, and of a divide between urban and rural America, the authors found. Rising mortality has been especially stark among 25-to-44-year-olds, largely due to the opioid crisis. Moreover, while rural areas struggled generally, in the later years of the study young adults saw rising mortality everywhere, from rural areas to large metropolitan areas.
https://www.ajmc.com/view/study-reveals-declining-life-expectancy-among-white-americans-that-defies-easy-answers
Grow your own food. Cook your own food.
Uhhh Im praying this is worth my time and not some WOKE BS.
Has the word racism in it so it IS woke bs!
Why would the owner of a juice bar possibly not want to open up in that Community? Or the owner of the vegetarian restaurant? Or the owner of a food chain that sells healthy food? How long does it take to recoup your losses on your business after it is burned down? It probably does not take that long to recoup your losses if you are the owner of a McDonald’s or a Bojangles. When you have to factor in the periodic looting and burning of your business into your business plan things become pretty complicated.
Sounds like she would be in favor of opportunity zones in inner-city neighborhoods. But she’s probably going to be voting against the president who has been spearheading that….
It is such an absolute tragedy that black people would think of farming as equating with slavery. But it is not only black people that have these bad attitudes. I grow a big garden and I keep chickens. I live in older Suburban neighborhood lower middle class. I cooperate and help my neighbors to grow as much food as they can and to keep chickens, which we are organically fed largely from our own properties for good eggs. My neighbors are Black and Hispanic and we cooperate together very well. However one Hispanic family from El Salvador lives across from me. They struggle economically but they will not put their hands in the dirt and grow anything. It is because the man was a professional in El Salvador before the Civil War and they view growing things as a low-class occupation. they have a very large yard nearly an acre and they could grow a lot of food but they will not lower themselves to the position of having to dig in the dirt. I imagine they consider me to be low class when I share tomatoes peppers and other vegetables with them. Oh well, I don’t care, I am a Christian and so being looked down upon is par for the course.
She is completely right about the need for black farmers. But it is difficult for all new Farmer’s regardless of race to get land. Corporations are buying up Farmland as farmers and get old and retire. There has been a great transfer of land into the hands of Corporations all across the country and it is harming all of us.
Access to healthy food is an economic issue, not a race issue. Poor white people generally cannot afford healthy food either. Please stop making issues that adversely affect people of all races a racism thing. I expect much more out of you, Dr. Hyman, and hope that you will stop contributing to the distraction of a racial divide that hides a very real economic divide. Otherwise, thank you for a great channel!
Great perspective! Keep up the good work! Thanks Dr & Karen.