Thank you again for celebrating National Farm to School Month with our weekly themes of Go Outside!, Get Cooking!, Food Stories, and our Trick and Treat finale! While National Farm to School Month is a wonderful way to draw attention to the many resources and efforts happening around the country, Farm to School happens all year long.
Food Stories was chosen as a theme to highlight and uplift underrepresented and oppressed voices and foodways in our food system. This theme will include multiple posts exploring different social identity groups, including Indigenous First Nations, Black people, fat people, and women and gender non-conforming people.
We ask that all our readers keep an open mind when grappling with “new” or previously unexplored concepts such as the ones we chose to include in this series. We believe it is important to get in the habit of distinguishing between your personal “truth” and universal “Truth,” especially as you expand your understanding of power and systems of oppression. Continue researching and having conversations with people in your community and make space for deep reflection. Five minutes of purposeful thinking, journaling, or a conversation can go a long way!
Please continue reading and expanding this concept of Food Stories with us as we share further blog posts and resources!
Food Stories: Black Foodways
If you are new to concepts about racial justice in the food system, we encourage you to read on and keep asking questions! Many of the inequities in the food system we see today are due to long histories of structural racism. In many ways, the justice of Indigenous First Nations people and Black people is intricately tied.
Check out the list of organizations devoted to food and racial justice in this Civil Eats article “Want to See Food and Land Justice for Black Americans? Support These Groups.”
An organization that often inspires us is Soul Fire Farm! They are listed in the organizations in the article above, but we wanted to draw special attention to their mission and massive ripples throughout food justice conversations and Farm to School work. Read more about their work on their website, and if you are an educator, we highly recommend exploring their Youth Program resources as well! What are some ways you center racial justice in your curriculum? If you have not addressed racial justice in your classroom ever before, what is stopping you? We encourage you to reflect on these challenges and make action steps for addressing them.
This recording highlights different presenters at the 2019 Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG) Conference, including Leah Penniman from Soul Fire Farm: Food Justice is About Everything We Do: Leah Penniman.
This video teaches us that Food Justice is linked to structural oppression that disproportionately affects poor people, gender minorities, and people of color. Do you know where your food is sourced from? Are you aware of how the workers are treated? Do you have a say in what food gets produced, bought, and sold?
This September research brief from Duke Sanford’s World Food Policy Center highlights some of the common misconceptions and beliefs that contribute to white supremacy in the food system: White Supremacy Culture Narratives in the Food System Did you learn any new terms? What myths around access, education, and sovereignty of food systems did you believe in?
Here is a reading list for learning about anti-Black racism and food to explore this topic further.
We encourage you to take these resources and expand your knowledge of foodways and culture throughout the Black diaspora.
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Stay tuned for the final week of National Farm to School Month content on our blog and social media!
Do you have any ideas for content you’d like to see? Contact us!