First of two parts
What’s In A Social Justice Diet? Ray Levy Uyeda contributed the following article in YES! magazine (Journalism for People Building A Better World)
“Billions of dollars are spent telling individuals how to eat healthy. But even if you follow Eat-Lancet’s planet-friendly diet to a T, and your dinner plate is filled with gluten-free nutrivore fare, vegan locavore, leafy, greens, and ovo-pescatarian (wild caught!) omega-3s, it still might be missing something. The United States industrialized food production and the dire nature of our planetary health raise the question: How do we add climate and social justice to our diet?
“This year, members of the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will convene to update their recommendations. But this effort to help guide Americans toward a balanced diet is the product of lobbying by the dairy, grain, and meat industries, which long have been accused of pursuing dollars at the expense of health.
“Considering the impact of environmental racism and the number of food deserts in the United States, it’s clear that food production and consumption are not just about personal decisions. It’s about politics and systems that determine who has healthy grocery options available and who does not. Existing guidelines not only ignore the needs of the climate and rely on intensive factory farming practices, but they assign blame for poor bodily health and quality of life based on choices that, for many people, simply do not exist.
“What would it look like to be able to eat with justice—social, racial, economic, and climate, in mind?
Honor tribal treaties and food systems
“Before we talk about eating, we have to talk about the land on which our food is grown. In contrast to the American colonial prioritization of extracting resources from the ground, rivers, and oceans, indigenous food systems are built on a relationship with the land. But when Native peoples were forced to leave their lands—along with their soils and place-based expertise, they were robbed of the healthy diets they had developed over generations.
“Genocide, forced assimilation, creation of reservation territories, and continuance of anti-Native policies have dispossessed Native people of two kinds of wealth: the ability to truly self-govern and manage their land, and the ability to build capital, which would enable individuals to make choices about how to live a healthy lifestyle.
“What we’ve noticed, and what I’ve aimed to do, is promote the simple enrichment of diets through our traditional foods, because we know that eating just one traditional food meal a week changes the blood,” said Valerie Segrest, a member of the Muckleshoot tribe and a director with the Native American Agriculture Fund. According to a 2019 U.N. report, Indigenous peoples steward 80% of the world’s biodiversity, plant and animal species that are essential to climate health.
“But the U.S. government has an abysmal record of breaching treaties made with Native governments. And by replacing Native food systems with industrialized versions, Segrest said the U.S. harms the land and public health simultaneously. Native leaders, U.S. scientists, and public health officials say that chronic diseases, including diabetes, didn’t exist in Native communities until the mid-20th Century. Now, Native people have the highest rate of diabetes of any racial and ethnic group in the U.S..
“Segrest has worked with all of the tribes in Washington state to teach the importance of traditional ingredients and said that Native foods are the remedy to this health crisis: ‘What’s good for an Indian is good for everybody.’
Grow knowledge and anti-racist practices
‘Ayanna Jones is a black farmer, educator, and community organizer in Pittsburgh, Pa.. She lives in a majority-black community, which runs up against a number of institutionalized racist practices. ‘Food justice is huge for us,’ Jones said, detailing how her community’s food options are limited to local grocery stores that often sell low-quality or spoiled produce.
“The stores offering higher quality and healthier options are intentionally in the wealthy white communities, where customers are thought to be more interested in and able to pay for them. For those who can afford to travel to these neighborhoods to shop, their dollars end up leaving their own communities.
“With this in mind, Jones said she began to think about what it would look like to grow her own food, to become self-sufficient. She wanted to find a way to show young people in the community that their bodies were worthy of food that is not rotten or laden with sugar and salt.
“In 2015, Jones started the Sankofa Village Community Garden to provide anti-food-apartheid education and community programs, including gardening for seniors and Summer camps for youth. Here she teaches young people how to produce their own food and how their bodies feel when they eat food that’s good for them.
‘“I give them that mental food,’ Jones said. ‘They’re discovering the myths they’ve been given about food and food justice.’ But even when one learns that sugar-filled cereal won’t sustain a child throughout the school day, if parents aren’t paid a wage that allows them to purchase healthier options, it’s difficult to turn knowledge into action. Still, Jones believes that ‘information is power’ that knowing is better than not knowing. ‘I’m growing to educate,’ she said.”
Continued at thevoice.us/social-justice-diet-multi-dimensionally-helpful-healthy