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New York City food justice activist Karen Washington lectures on urban farming, equal access to healthy meals
By Kirsty Warren ’18
February 18, 2016
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“How many of you are farmers?” asked food justice activist Karen Washington during her Tuesday lecture in the Red Pit. One person raised a hand. “All right, how many of you eat food?”
Washington, who has spent more than 30 years promoting urban farming as a source of healthy food for all New Yorkers, spoke about the interconnectedness of food equality, racism and socioeconomic inequality. “I am a farmer; I grow food; I feed people body and mind,” she introduced herself. “The topic today is the power of food. When you place value on food, it becomes powerful.”
Washington is a board member of the New York Botanical Gardens, board member and former president of the New York City Community Garden Coalition, member of La Familia Verde Community Garden Coalition and co-founder of the Black Urban Growers organization. The lecture was the third in the Environmental Studies Program’s lecture series.
Her lecture focused on the ways food intersects with health, housing, jobs and education, particularly along social, economic and racial lines. “How many of you are willing to stand up for a just and equitable food system?” Washington asked, sharing statistics about urban poverty, hunger and the rise of diet related illnesses, all of which disproportionately affect communities of color. According to Washington, in 2013, 45.3 million Americans lived in poverty, and 19.9 percent of children lived below the poverty line.
Washington criticized the prioritization of treatment over prevention, saying this emphasis stems from the influence of pharmaceutical companies who benefit from selling expensive medicine.
“I live in the Bronx, where there are more fast food restaurants and bodegas than healthy food and hospitals,” she said, pointing out that food distribution giant Hunts Point is located in the Bronx, “but those trucks are going downtown.”
She then transitioned to discussing how people have lost all connection to where their food comes from. “We used let nature and seasonality be our guides, we used to eat a diet that was plant-based, not animal-based. The overabundance in our food system has led to a population that is overweight and obese.”
“A few control the food of many,” Washington said. “What has happened to our food system? Do you think you control what you eat?”
She went on to explain that no one controls what they eat: even the layout of supermarket is planned and controlled. She passed out foods like Honey Buns and a packaged blueberry muffins, asking audience members to read the impossible-to-pronounce, chemical ingredients. The primary target of advertising for highly processed unhealthy foods, she said, is children.
“They co-opt our words, like ‘organic’ and ‘all-natural,’” she said. “This apathy is not a conscious one, but we have given up control of our food.”
“When a child is asked where tomatoes come from and they say the supermarket, something is wrong. When a person has to rely on soup kitchens longterm, something is wrong,” Washington said. “We have lost our minds because we have lost our palates. We only taste sugar and salt.”
“There is a movement of people who want to take back their food system,” Washington said, recounting the “guerrilla gardening” of the late ’80s and ’90s, when activists would throw seeds over the walls of vacant lots they couldn’t access.
Washington had everyone in the room say the phrase “food desert,” and then say it again. “That’s the last time you’ll ever use that term. It’s not a ‘food desert’ it’s ‘food apartheid.’ We have a lot of food. It’s just not healthy food. There is already enough food being grown, the question is how do you get it to people.”
In her words, the focus should be not only on the food but on the process “from the seed to the plate and fill in the dots along the way.” Asking “where do we go from here?” she outlined challenges faced by urban farmers: access to land, gentrification, lack of connection between rural and urban farmers and an aging farming population whose average age is 57.9 (70-80 for urban growers). “Who is going to be our next generation?” she asked.
Another challenge, Washington noted, is the need for more people of color in farming. “There’s no voice [for people of color] in the food movement when they are the most affected. I haven’t heard any of the presidential candidates talk about food. Do away with the rhetoric and have the candidates talk about issues of hunger and poverty.”
“Everyone knows the lingo — I’m not interested in whether they can say what people want to hear, if there’s no action that means nothing to me,” Washington said.
Washington critiqued volunteerism, saying “it was all well and good but it’s time for people to get paid.” She emphasized the importance of having people who are most affected in the room, and structuring movements so that they can be included. To include people working 10-12 hours a day, Washington said “you just can’t have a meeting at 2 p.m.” Meetings should be after the work day, should provide food, childcare, transportation and translation for non-English speakers.
Her five “action steps” were 1) the “power of ask” (“I’m here giving this talk because somebody asked me,” she said), 2) sharing stories, 3) “breaking bread and sharing a meal” with people from different backgrounds to “feel uncomfortable to be comfortable,” 4) sharing resources and 5) building resources within communities, and building youth leadership.
She concluded with “marching orders,” laying out basic human rights such as access to food as well as water that is healthy and safe and living wages and health care benefits for farmers and other food workers.
Showing beautiful photos of community gardens in her neighborhood, Washington said, “To grow food gives you power. You know how and why you grew it for you and your family.”
Washington’s lecture was sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program, the Days-Massolo Center and the departments of Africana Studies, Government and Women’s Studies.