The Dr. Hyman Show - Decolonizing Our Food System

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Decolonizing Our Food System | This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley Many of our sustainable farming practices actually stem from African and indigenous roots. However, the division of land, government subsidies, and financial resources that are available favor white farmers. In fact, since 1920 African-American farmers have lost over 14 million acres of land. This decline of Black, Brown, and Native farmers has had far-reaching negative impacts. It means a decline of wealth and continued generational financial hardship. It means a disconnection from history and cultural practices that connect people to the land. It also means that these communities don’t have access to the same fresh, healthy foods as predominantly white communities In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman discusses these topics with Leah Penniman. Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol educator, farmer, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2010 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land.  As Co-Executive Director, Leah is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs—including farmer training for Black and Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. Her book, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land is a love song for the land and her people.   Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Leah Penniman: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/LeahPenniman This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley. Paleovalley is offering my listener's 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. I definitely recommend trying the Grass-Fed Beef Sticks, Bone Broth Protein, and the Organ Complex.

Coming up on this mini episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I do think that the reverence that we have for the earth, by extension the way we treat the land, is going to be mirrored in the way we treat ourselves and our human communities. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. So many of my patients ask me how I manage to work multiple jobs, travel frequently,

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paleo valley is offering my listeners 15 off your entire first order just go to paleovalley.com forward slash hyman to check out all their clean paleo products and take advantage of this deal. That's paleovalley.com forward slash hymen. I definitely recommend trying the grass-fed beef sticks, bone broth protein, and the organ complex. All right, let's get back to this week's episode. Hi, I'm Kea Perowit, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Many of our sustainable farming practices stem from African and indigenous roots, yet racial and ethnic disparities are sadly alive and well when it comes to how food is grown in the U.S. This has not only led to the decline of the Black, Brown, and Native farmers, but contributes

to the racial health disparities we see in this country as well. Dr. Hyman sat down with Leah Penniman at the end of last year to discuss these topics. Leah is a black Creole educator, farmer, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. Now, I think people don't realize the magnitude of the health disparities that exist out there. I know diabetes, heart disease, chronic illnesses, kidney failure, hypertension that affect black and indigenous people, Native Americans, Latinos, far more than whites. If you're African American, you're 80% more likely to be diagnosed with type two diabetes. You're four times as likely to have kidney failure. You're three and a half times more likely to have amputations from diabetes as whites. And it also somehow connects to sort of

how our whole system is operating. It's almost like a weapon that is used against these populations, not necessarily intentionally always, but it sort of has been the unintended result of our food policies, of our ag policies. And the way I think about it is we're facing an unprecedented proliferation of biological weapons of mass destruction, our processed food,

which kills literally 40 to 50 million people a year globally from hypertension. So how do you see the role of the farmer shifting this systemic violence, these biological weapons of mass destruction, as they call them? And how do we do that? I mean, what you said is so powerful because food has intentionally been used as a weapon. I mean, you look at the Greenwood food blockades that were used to punish civil rights activity, literally cutting off food supplies to black communities in the 1960s for the audacity to try to register to vote. And so I actually don't think it's an accident that our schools, our urban schools, our prisons

are filled with these highly processed foods because a population that's not well is not going to resist. You know, if I'm not feeling well and I'm dealing with diabetes, kidney issues, I'm not going to show up for a town hall and tell my senator what they should be doing. Right. And so I don't think I don't think it's entirely an accident. But I do I do believe it's not just farmers who are responsible for the solution. It's obviously everyone in the food system. Yeah. But farmers do have a unique role to play because we have an opportunity, one,

to see where our food's going and to do what we can to make sure there's equitable distribution. We have the opportunity to make sure that our farm workers are treated fairly, you know, signing on to programs like the Food Justice Certified. And we have a unique voice where we can really get bipartisan ear. Farming is considered a like everybody kind of issue. So we can be telling policymakers about the shifts that need to happen on a systemic level. Exactly. And I think, you know, we are seeing, you know, a farm system that also, you know, sort of has sort of generated out of a series of policies that have led to the overproduction of these highly processed foods. And the poor and minorities are targeted by the food industry with extra marketing for these foods. When SNAP or food stamps come on with your monthly stipend, it's usually at the beginning of the month. And that's when there's maximum advertising in all these bodegas and local stores for more soda and more junk food. So it's a sort of an intentional process. And the other thing that is that I've not well understood I think my most is that

your cognitive development depends on your nutrition. So if you're growing up in a poor community with lack of access to nutritious food, with lack of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and all the things you need to create your healthy brain, community with lack of access to nutritious food, with lack of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and all the things you need to create your healthy brain, these kids are not going to be cognitively where they need to be. I mean, even the exposure on farms to pesticides, these kids have lost 41 million IQ points in farm and food workers, which are among the most dangerous occupations in this country because of the use of these industrial agricultural chemicals. So, you know, we have both the issue of, you know,

food justice, but we also have like the environmental racism and environmental justice that's connected to the food system because most of the workers on farms today are brown, mostly Latino workers or migrant workers. They're not protected by the farm. I mean, the, uh, the labor, a fair labor act that was in the thirties, cause they were excluded mostly because at the time they were mostly African-Americans doing the work. And, uh, and it's, it's a biggest, it's a big barrier. So what, what are the biggest barriers you see to what you describe as decolonizing farming? And can you just take a minute to describe what is the colonization of our food system?

Because I think people don't understand that we have a colonization of our food system. Yeah, absolutely. That was a lot. That was a lot. Environmental justice, I agree, is absolutely a huge issue. First of all, because we're talking about who's getting environmental benefits and who's suffering from environmental harms. Pesticide exposure, extreme heat, from climate chaos. We're talking about the effluent from hog farms and toxic emissions. And the rights are abused, sexual abuse

and all sorts of, yeah. So I'm glad that you mentioned because those issues are certainly linked. I mean, the colonization of the food system is the imposition of European control, power, and European norms over our food system. And it's quite pervasive. I'll tell a quick story just to illustrate one example of it.

You take maize, 9,000-year-old staple crop. It was a gift from Sky Woman to the indigenous people of Turtle Island of this continent. It was given to prevent starvation in combination with her sisters, beans and squash, to be grown together, right? You all heard of the three sisters. Beans and Squash, to be grown together. Right. You all heard of the three sisters. Of course, intercropping, right? Yeah. And there's many, many origin stories. But the condition was that the gift of maize needed to be shared freely. So the colonizers got some too, right, as a gift. That's how they stayed alive. But look what they did with maize. Tore her away from the sisters, monocrop,

laden with chemicals, pesticides leading to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, turned into corn syrup, pumped into the veins of our children, driving the diabetes epidemic, right? And genetically modified, Bt, terminator seed, all of this. And so you look at- And we could go on and on. Looking at maize, right, is just one example of colonization of the food system. What's really fascinating about this conversation is that if you do the right thing for the

land, you do the right thing for humans, you do the right thing for climate, you do the right thing for biodiversity, do the right thing for our scarce water resources, right? You do the right thing for all the things that matter. You do the right thing for injustice. You do the right thing for our economy. You do the right thing for health. It's like, thing for our economy. You do the right thing for health. It's like, it seems like too good to be true, but is that how you see it?

I do think it's all really connected. Some of my mentors have taught me how to farm in Ghana. They're called the queen mothers, these elder women who are just badass in every way. But they said, you know, Amita Day, is it true? Leah, is it true that if you have, want to plant a seed on your farm in the United States, like you don't pray over it or sing or dance or say thank you to the ground, right?

You expect the seed to grow. I admitted that was true. And they said, that's why you're all sick. You're all sick because you treat the earth like a commodity and not like a family member. And so I do think that the reverence that we have for the earth, by extension, the way we treat the land is going to be mirrored in the way we treat ourselves and our human communities. So true. I mean, I, you know, I kind of came into this in college where I ended up going to this summer program called the Institute for Social Ecology, which was all about sort of understanding the challenge we're facing environmentally to our land, women's rights, various injustices. And one of the courses I took was biological agriculture.

They didn't call it regenerative back then. It was all about intercropping, cover crops, natural pest control through various plants that you can use like marigolds to repel pests. It was fascinating. I learned so much. And we made compost. It was like, and I began studying these books

like Soil and Health, which was from Sir Albert Howard, who was a British guy who helped start the organic agriculture movement. And One Straw Revolution, and all these books, Wendell Berry's Unsettling America. And it just really shaped my thinking. So as I became a doctor, like all that was like in there, right? It was all sort of the underneath, you know, my thinking about how we need to be in relation

to the land. But what's really occurred to me now, you know, on the other end of 30 years of that is seeing all these chronically ill patients that are sick from the food they're eating. And then I realized that I can't stay in my office treating patients because it's going to be a never ending stream unless we go upstream and fix the food system and fix farming and everything coming from that. Yeah. I mean, we've talked a lot today about the role of the land in providing food and sustenance. Something I didn't know until maybe five years ago is the role of land in all civil rights.

If you look at the civil rights movement, it was black farmers who were really the backbone. They provided all of the land for meetings, for people gathering to live and stay while they were doing voter registration campaigns. They provided the armed protection. They leveraged the land as collateral for bail money to get people out of jail when they were locked up. And so quite literally, you know, it's not like you could rent the Sheraton for your NAACP convention in Mississippi. So the black farmers were the ones who provided the material sustenance for that movement. As one of my elders, Baba Hafkini, would say, without black farmers, there would be no civil

rights movement. And so I think about owning our own land, our own businesses as really the basis, not just for our material health, but also our capacity to resist and our capacity to make ourselves free. Today, black people make up only 2% of our farmers and 1% of our rural landowners. This is largely the result of discriminatory government laws and funding, as well as lack of legal and financial resources due to systemic racism. This decline of black, brown, and native farmers has had far-reaching negative impacts. It means a decline of wealth and continued generational financial hardship.

It means a disconnection from history and cultural practices that connect people to the land. It also means that these communities don't have access to the same fresh, healthy foods as predominantly white communities. We know that your zip code is more important than your genetic code in determining your risk of disease and death, and that 70% of deaths are caused by chronic disease, mostly the result of our toxic food system. Lack of access to land and fresh food is a form of oppression, and it has set up communities for generational illness and strife. You can learn more about these topics in Dr. Hyman's full-length conversation with Leah Penniman. If you enjoyed this mini episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy, please consider sharing it with a friend or leaving us a comment below. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you. understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search

their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.