Guernica Magazine

Karen Washington: It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid

The community activist pushes the food justice movement beyond raised beds, food pantries, new supermarkets, and white leadership. The post Karen Washington: It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid appeared first on Guernica.

America’s sustainable food movement has been steadily growing, challenging consumers to truly consider where our food comes from, and inspiring people to farm, eat local, and rethink our approaches to food policy. But at the same time, the movement is predominantly white, and often neglects the needs and root problems of diverse communities.

Issues of economic inequality and systemic racism permeate our national food system. The movement’s primary focus has been on finding solutions to “food deserts”—defined as areas empty of good-quality, affordable fresh food—by working to ensure that affected neighborhoods have better access. But some advocates, and studies, have argued that the proximity of a well-stocked grocery store is not enough of a solution given this country’s elaborate food problems. Farm subsidies in the United States go predominantly to white farmers, which has led a group of black farmers to sue the US government for discrimination. Food pantries, which distribute food directly to those in need, are stigmatized. Our subsidized food system, as activist and community organizer Karen Washington points out in the interview that follows, “skews the cost and value of food.”

Washington has been battling for food justice for three decades. Before taking up the cause, she worked as a physical therapist, and saw many of her patients, predominantly people of color, suffering from diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. (More than one-third of American adults, and 48 percent of African American adults, are obese.) Treatment always involved medication and surgery as opposed to prevention, and Washington knew there had to be a better way. She moved to the Bronx, in New York, in the mid-1980s and became a vocal community gardener.

Since that time, Washington has won a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, been invited to the Obama White House for her involvement with New York’s Botanical Garden, and been called “urban farming’s de facto godmother.” She’s also worked to transform the Bronx’s empty lots into spaces where food can grow, helped launch a farmers’ market, and, in relentlessly engaging her community, has remained focused on the intersections

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Guernica Magazine

Guernica Magazine19 min read
On Beauty and Violence
As a child, violence was a geography I could visualize: a slab of earth in the Minnesotan suburbs, with a rock garden and two pink azaleas, a geography from which I could flee. It spanned to the neighbor’s forked metal fence, whose sharp black tines
Guernica Magazine13 min read
The Jaws of Life
To begin again the story: Tawny had been unzipping Carson LaFell’s fly and preparing to fit her head between his stomach and the steering wheel when the big red fire engine came rising over the fogged curve of the earth. I saw it but couldn’t say any
Guernica Magazine10 min read
Black Wing Dragging Across the Sand
The next to be born was quite small, about the size of a sweet potato. The midwife said nothing to the mother at first but, upon leaving the room, warned her that the girl might not survive. No one seemed particularly concerned; after all, if she liv

Related