The Dr. Hyman Show - Land, Power, and the Plate: Ending Food Apartheid with Regenerative Justice

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Many communities face an uneven food landscape: plenty of cheap junk food, but few places to buy fresh, healthy food. This pattern—often called “food apartheid”—doesn’t happen by accident; it grows from redlining, unfair rules, and corporate control. The impacts are steep: higher rates of type 2 diabetes, kidney failure, and learning problems in Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, along with unsafe conditions for farmworkers. These harms have a long history, and government subsidies and convincing marketing keep ultraprocessed foods on top. However, we take practical steps to make change including investing in regenerative and community farms, protecting and fairly paying farmworkers, and enforcing civil-rights laws so public dollars support real food, healthy soil, and communities that thrive. In this episode, Leah Penniman, Dr. Rupa Marya, Raj Patel, Karen Washington, and I discuss why food injustices exist and how we can create regenerative food systems to serve everyone. Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol educator, farmer/peyizan, 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 & 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. Leah has been farming since 1996, holds an MA in Education and a BA in Environmental Science from Clark University, and is a Manye (Queen Mother) in Vodun.  Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, mother, and composer. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where she practices and teaches Internal Medicine. Her research examines the health impacts of social systems, from agriculture to policing. She is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakota health leaders, she is currently helping to set up the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock in order to decolonize medicine and food.  Raj Patel is a Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the University’s department of nutrition, and a Research Associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A James Beard Leadership Award winner, he is the co-director of the award-winning documentary about climate change and the food system, The Ants & The Grasshopper.  Karen is a farmer, activist, and food advocate. She is the Co-owner and Farmer at Rise & Root Farm in Chester, New York. In 2010, Karen Co-Founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS), an organization supporting growers in both urban and rural settings. In 2012, Ebony magazine voted her one of the 100 most influential African Americans in the country, and in 2014 Karen was the recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award. Karen serves on the boards of the New York Botanical Gardens, SoulFire Farm, the Mary Mitchell Center, Why Hunger, and Farm School NYC. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here:Why Food Is A Social Justice Issue Food Justice: Why Our Bodies And Our Society Are Inflamed A Way Out Of Food Racism And Poverty

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. Deep medicine is understanding that health cannot be pursued on an individual level. That health can only be attained in proper relationship to each other and the entire web of life. And so those activities that we can do around our food system that reawaken, rehydrate our ancient relationships to seeds, to water, to soil, to each other are going to be a part of that practice of decolonizing our food system. modern life makes it surprisingly easy to run low on magnesium stress screens sugar they all deplete this essential mineral magnesium supports over 300 functions in your body from stress and sleep to recovery and energy that's why i take magnesium breakthrough the only supplement with all seven forms your body needs most formulas just one or two bioptimizers has increased their discount for my audience go to bioptimizers

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every episode of this podcast, add free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. You were in 2006, a long time ago, you were living with your husband in South End of Albany near, you know, the capital, New York State. And you said it was easier to get weapons and drugs than healthy food and that your neighborhood was a place of food apartheid, which is really an interesting term. We want to get into that, but there were no grocery stores, farmers markets, fast food and bodegas in every corner, just selling processed junk and alcohol. And it sort of helped you catalyze a lot of what you're thinking was and what you're doing. And why is this whole term food apartheid the right term that we should be using instead of

talking about food deserts. Sure. So there's a lot there. I mean, a food desert implies a natural ecosystem, right? It's the term the USDA uses for a high poverty neighborhood without grocery stores. But there's nothing natural about a system where certain people have, yeah, access to food opulence and others food scarcity. And I say man on purpose.

Right. So it's apartheid. It's a part side. And, you know, there's a whole history of like redlining and housing discrimination that's led to neighborhoods that don't have these resources. And I think for me, living with my children who were quite small then, Nishima was two, and it was a newborn. And as you said, there were no grocery stores, farmers markets, places to have a garden.

And so we ended up joining a CSA program, so like a subscription program that cost more than our rent and had to walk over two miles to get the vegetables, pile them onto the laps of the sleeping children in the stroller, go back down. Like that was the only way to get vegetables. And so when our neighbors found out that we knew how to farm, there was a clamor for us to create the farm for the people. And that was where the idea of a Soulfire Farm came about. Wow.

And so food apartheid really is a better way of describing sort of the intentional segregation, the deliberate policies, the redlining, which you described, which maybe you could explain, that led to this incredible disparity in access to food and also in the health disparities that result from that. Because we're seeing this tremendous increase in diseases in African American and Latino populations. It's not an accident. Yeah, absolutely. So food apartheid is the right term because as you mentioned, if you are black or brown, you know, Latinx, indigenous, you're much more likely to struggle with diabetes, heart disease, and other diet-related illnesses. Not to be clear because we don't

know how to make good food choices or know how to cook food or want those foods. It's really because of access. If you have $3 in your pocket and you live in a food apartheid zip code, you can get some hot Cheetos and blue-colored drink, but you cannot get a burrito, a sal, or anything like that. nothing. And so it's really a tragedy that is rooted in institutional racism. Because as I mentioned, in the 1930s, the federal government commissioned these maps to be made of neighborhoods that rank them from most desirable to lend down to least desirable. And the communities of color were outlined in red as too risky to lend to have a mortgage, too risky to own homes. And so the wealth disparity has grown and the property ownership disparity has grown

and with it, these neighborhood conditions. Incredible. You know, and 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 2 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, you know, 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 I called 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 school, 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 it's entirely an accident, but I do believe it's not just farmers who are responsible for the solution. It's obviously everyone in the food system. 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 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, you know,

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 foods. So it's sort of an intentional process. And the other thing that is that I'm 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, these kids are not going to be cognitively where they need to be. I mean,

I mean, even, even, you know, the exposure on farms to pesticides, these kids have lost, you know, 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. 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 Labor, a fair labor act that was in the 30s because they were excluded, mostly because at the time they were mostly African-Americans doing the work. And it's a biggest, it's a big barrier. So what do 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. 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, you know, toxic, rights are, you know, 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 Mays, 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. Intercropping, right?

Yeah, and there's many, many origin stories. But the condition was that that need to be, 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. And genetically modified, BT, terminator seed, all of this. And so you look at- Looking at maze, right, is just one example of colonization of the food system. You look at the fact that the soil has lost over 50% of its organic matter. 50% of its carbon is burned up into the atmosphere.

That was the beginning of climate change. Yeah. Was the 1800s opening of the Great Plains, you know? And so we had extractive agriculture that wasn't regenerative. And that's led to this massive climate change crisis. And I think we've talked about on the show. But, you know, our food system end-to-end is the number one cause of climate change. Absolutely.

And people don't realize that. It's about 50% whereas fossil fuels are about 30%. And it's not just the fact you're farming of cows. It's everything from deforestation to land destruction to food waste and so forth. So, you know, you don't just talk about this stuff. You got your hands in the dirt. Absolutely. And you are not just talking the talk.

You're walking the walk. And you created an extraordinary place called Soulflower Farm, which I read a lot about. I watched movies about it. I'm super impressed with what's going on there because you're helping your community and poor communities sort of understand the benefit of the land and becoming farmers and training them become farmers. And then you're doing all sorts of collateral good in the community by providing food for ex-cons who can't get food or for immigrants who can't actually afford food.

I mean, it's really amazing. So tell us what you think the role of Solfar Farm is in creating a new food system. Wow. Yeah. Sorry, I'm funny on the spot. No, it's my heart work. So Soul Fire Farm, we are a community farm. There's eight of us up on the land, up in the mountains of Grafton, New York.

I'm coming to visit. Please do. Every month we have a community day. Everyone can come. But we're dedicated to ending racism in the food system. And we're doing that in three basic ways, right? The first is to regenerate the 80 acres that we get to steward of Mohican territory. So we're using all these Afro-Indigenous technologies to heal the land, produce food,

and get that to the people who need it. most through a doorstep delivery program. That's the first thing. The second thing is to equip black and brown farmers through our training programs and mentorship, helping people get the knowledge and land and credit they need. And then the final thing is mobilizing public support, trying to change policy, get reparations for farmers, reparations for indigenous people who've lost their land and so forth. And it's been really heartening because we actually haven't had to convince people that this is worth doing. I thought I'd be all alone in the hills, but our waiting list fire programs are years long because we want to get back to the land as a people.

I mean, you know, most people aren't aware that Lincoln, when he freed the slaves, promised 40 acres in a mule, which Andrew Johnson, the president who got impeached right after him, revoked. And it's been estimated that if that was in place, that there'd be a land worth $4.6 trillion in the African American community, which has been usurped for them. And then at the turn of the century, you know, 14% of farms compared to less than 1% of farmers now were African American and they were in the South and they were threatening the existing status quo down there. And the people who are running those farms were lynched, their homes were burned, their farms destroyed, their land was taken over. And it's just, it's a legacy that people

just don't realize that this was, this is sort of an injustice that's never been talked about. It really, never been really addressed. And, and maybe we need to give back. back that $4.6 trillion of land. We absolutely do. You mentioned reparations, and I think, you know, that's what made me think about it. Yeah, because 40 acres and a mule was a broken promise. You know, all of the land that black folks got was purchased off their own dime, despite the oppressive sharecropping and convict leasing conditions.

And it wasn't just the violent lynching and terrorism that drove people off the land. It was the federal government itself. You know, the USDA in the 1962 Commission of Civil Rights report was named as the number one culprit in the decline of the black farmer. Reagan later closed that office. He didn't like their findings. But that's why black farmers sued the government. They won a settlement of $2 billion in 1999, the Pigford case, which was the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history. But by then, most of the farmers were in their 90s and 50,000 is not going to get you back your land. So it was really a symbolic victory.

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Buy Optimizers is offering my audience 15% off. Go to buyoptimizers.com slash hymen and use code Hyman to try it for yourself. So, you know, you point out that, you know, partly as a result of the broken promise of 40 acres in a mule and many other sort of deliberate and political and social injustice that happen, you talk about, um, you know, how there's been an, starting to be an increase in African-American farmers. You know, it used to be 14 percent. Now it's like maybe one or two percent. One and a half, yeah. Yeah. So, but you see that changing and I just saw this incredible graph in one of your articles where

it was this complete divergence, you know, where white farmers are going down, mostly because they're aging out of farming and no one's coming in new. And African-American farmers are going up. Well, the USDA actually just got called out. for fluffing up its numbers in the 2017 census. So we're not exactly sure if black farmers are on the rise according to the USDA count. I will say, though, that as someone who focuses on training

or returning generation of black farmers, that there is a clamor, there is an interest, and there are a number of success stories on an anecdotal level. And so we're hoping to see some legitimate shifts upward in the coming census. You know, I work a lot in Cleveland and I go through some of the poorest areas there

and see, you know, the way people live, They have the lack of access to food. And, you know, it strikes me that they're in this vicious cycle that they can't get out of and that, you know, thinking about how to bring, and I know it's not your expertise, but how to bring farming and communities agriculture back into these communities. I was at Ebenezer Baptist Church a number years ago and, you know, they had a two acre plot like right near the church in the middle of Atlanta was a massive farm where the church members were growing the food, they were eating the food, they were distributing into the communities

that needed it. I was really like, wow, this is a model that could be scaled. And so how do you see that being part of the solution? Because I, it is something I struggle with. It's like you see the problem is so tough. I mean, I'm working Cleveland. We're working with a group there, you know, really underserved African Americans who are very, you know, sick. They have diabetes. They have kidney failure. They have all these issues. And we're put them in a group together. We're using community-based solutions or going to them. We're teaching how to cook and shop and and they want it so bad but nobody ever has helped them and they're losing weight and they're feeling good and it's just it's amazing but you know like these these are just

really neglected communities and it's and it's bankrupting our country like we should care about it because the big part of our 22 trillion dollar debt is the cost of health care so how do you see intervening in these communities as well because I think how do you bring people up to say okay well you know, farming is not about slavery. It's not about working on a plantation. It's actually my salvation. It's what, you know, my ancestors did and brought to America and I should be proud of it, which is what you're trying to say. But how do you get people's mindset to change around that? Absolutely. I mean, I would say at least half of our graduates from our week-long beginning farmer training program go on to start urban farms or work on urban farms. So it's really

part of the same solution. And I think it's a false dichotomy between the rural and urban. I'd want to shout out, you know, if you look at Reverend Hebrough Browns, Baltimore, black church community food security network, he realized, you know, that black churches are actually the biggest landholders in the black community. And so is, as you, as you saw in Atlanta, you know, putting in gardens, also sourcing from rural black farmers and getting that food to urban black community. And so it's happening in Chicago. It's happening in Detroit with DTown farm, Malikini's work. So we're very excited to be collaborating and have found that it's not so much, again, that we need to convince people. I think the will is there. It's often the resources that are lacking.

So if we can make sure that folks don't have to pay a high water bill and that they have the tools and the land and, you know, institutional support, website development, whatever the thing is that they need, it emerges. And so, you know, we don't even have to evangelize. That's crazy. I mean, you know, Hebrew Brown said, the pastor in Baltimore said, you know, we're losing more people to sweets than the streets because he was, you know, ministering to his congregation and seeing how many people were dying from all the food they're eating. So I think it's an important solution to empowering people, getting them out of poverty, giving them food sovereignty in ways that, you know, there aren't a lot of solutions that people are

offering. And I think this is a powerful one. You know, I think, you know, but it's still hard for people of color to become farmers. So how do we overcome those obstacles? Yeah, absolutely. So recently, the USDA, again, we looked at their numbers. and they're still giving out a disproportionate amount of their resources to white farmers, large farmers, corporate farmers. And so we need an overhaul of the Civil Rights Commission in the USDA to address that discrimination. Is there a civil rights commission at the USDA? There is.

And they have a multi-year backlog of complaints that are unaddressed. And so we've been meeting. And is there one 75-year-old lady running the whole thing or what? Oh, it is a hot mess. But I will tell you, you know, we've been talking to Senator Sanders, Senator Warren, other politicians for the first time are interested in the play to the black farmer. So hopefully we'll get those cases addressed of discrimination so people can get their loans and crop allotments and technical assistance. I think also we need massive land reform.

You know, 98% of the rural land is owned by white people right now. That's the highest amount of land concentrated in the hands of European Americans ever in the history of this country. And so we really need to look at a patchwork of land trust and land link and land transfer to make sure that there is. 40 acres in a mule. Yeah, exactly. 40 acres in a mule in 2019, 2020. Maybe not a mule. Maybe some other tools.

Or acre's in a couple trackers. But 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. It's right thing for health. It's like it seems like too good to be true, but is that that how you see it? I do think it's all really connected. You know, some of my mentors who taught me how to farm in Ghana. They're called the queen mothers, so these elder women

who are just badass in every way. But they said, you know, a meetaday, 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 know? 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. I mean, you're so right about this because when you look at the impact of regenerative act to reverse all the wrongs

to our earth and to humans, it has so much potential. It's like a, I wouldn't say it's the entire solution, but it's a big solution if we scaled this. And I think And in doing all the things I said by producing better quality of food where the farmers are happier, they're healthier, they make more money, producing food that's good for humans, that actually reverses climate change, that actually doesn't deplete our scarce freshwater resources, that increases the biodiversity, protects our pollinators. I mean, there's all this downstream benefits. And it's like, it's like a duh, but it's still sort of this people, when you say regenerative, like, what's that, right? Yeah. I mean, regenerative ag, I think we got to give a shout out to Dr. George Washington Carver. People thought he was nuts. I mean, this is a generation and a half before Rodale. And so he's telling farmers literally to let their land rest out of cash crop for a little while, put some legumes in there because legumes, as we know, are best friends with bacteria. And they fix nitrogen instead of fertilizer. Exactly. He was getting people to go in muck out swamps to make compost piles. I mean,

he literally started quoting Bible verses to get folks convinced that. that this is what God wanted them to do because it didn't make any logical sense. How did he figure it out? Was it from his... It's from traditional African and indigenous practices, bringing them into the university. So he said, you know, whatever, you know, God says whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me, and God's talking about the earthworm. So come here over here. And his model was really neat because he would go out to the most decrepit farm in the county, do an extreme farm makeover with regenerative practices, and then invite everyone over to see the model

and then move to the next county. So that was the beginning of extension agencies in this country. And we're building on it now. Even if we have food security in America, we don't have nutrition security. And they're quite different. Food security is, I'm on food stamps. I can have, you know, a two-liter bottle of soda and a giant bag of chips of high cookies, and I'm food secure because I have enough calories. That's going to cause you to feel sick and not be functional, not work, and be depressed

and be inflamed. It's not nutrition security, which is access to real whole foods that's going to promote health and well-being and help you advance. And I think the structural changes we're seeing in our society that are from the food system and the way you describe it is really driving some of the worst challenges we see around social justice, around racism. I mean, just the life expectancy drop that we saw in the last report of three years in black and Hispanic communities. It should all be going, wait a minute, why is this happening? What's going on? What's the cause of it?

And yes, it's more than just food. It's the traumas. It's intergenerational issues. but food is such a central piece of that and it perpetuates a cycle and it seems to me one of those levers like Archimedes lever to actually change the whole dynamic of what's happening

our society from a sickness and the consequences of our food system to one that's more able to create a healthy society and we just are so far from that but I have raised up hope I see these things happening on the margins I see what you're doing Rupa and the things you've been talking about Raj and I get really inspired to to think, wow, there are a lot of people thinking about this and working on it.

And I think, you know, you're doing the hard work, which is fantastic. What is the anatomy of injustice? And what are you talking about? And how did we get the food system we got? Well, I mean, the reason we chose the idea of anatomy of injustice is because we've structured this book as a kind of anatomy. It's an introduction to the immune system, to the respiratory system, circulatory. and we, you know, we go through a number of bodily systems, as one might in one's first year of medical school.

So, you know, the idea of presenting things anatomically is something that we're sort of taking from the world of medicine, but we're transforming it. And we're along the journey trying to really delve into precisely the kinds of histories you're asking about, Mark. Oh, how do we get here? And a lot of the error comes in thinking that there's one entity of society over here, and that society was initially populated by white men who had property and the working class and women and indigenous people and enslaved people were firmly outside that alongside nature and the rest of the way we're flying. And then gradually more and more humans were sort of invited into society after having fought

for that right. But what that sets up, though, is as Rupa was saying, the possibility, of being able to exploit and take things from the land. And so really, the sort of first moments of what we understand now as the world food system were birthed in the 1400s with the island of Madeira and sugar plantations in the Atlantic. And then really, you know, the ball gets rolling in 1492

with the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in the Western Hemisphere, but then also with the clearing of, Jews, for example, from Iberia, the sort of arrival of the modern nation state and its technologies of finance and exploitation and racial purity happen in the same year and it's not an accident. And its food corporations in particular who are very interested in this rolling colonialism of a frontier of where can we find the best land, where can we find the cheapest labor, where can we find the cheapest food products. And the first products of colonialism are precisely the food that comes back. the cotton or the tobacco. It's all about agriculture. And that's important to bear in mind because when we think now of, well, of course, the United States isn't colonized. Contrere, the wealth of this country was made possible through food and agriculture. And there's still a fairly large

debt to be redressed. And again, as we mentioned earlier on, those debts are amounting every day because the corporations that now run our food system have 600 years of practice of making other people pay for the costs that they generate. It's so true. The true cost of food concept that the Rockefeller Foundation put a report on recently is staggering. It's actually how I started my book

which is talking about what is the true cost of the food we're eating in our human, in the human community and the natural resources in our economic resources. So what are the real costs into our social,

you know, our natural capital and our human capital? I mean, those are real phenomena that we're not really addressing at all in our thinking about how to solve some more biggest problems. But, you know, you talk about the inflammation and how it's actually a natural response to what's happening. And so, you know, when you cut your skin and you get back to your body sends an army of your immune system to go create inflammation and redness and swelling and tenderness, that's all a good thing to deal with an acute injury. The problem is that we're constantly injuring our bodies in the same ways we're for cutting ourselves by the food we're eating, by the stresses we're under, by the structural environments of poverty and disenfranchisement and lack of a sense of a locus of control and other traumas that are even worse, you know, sexual trauma, physical traumas. All these things get really written into our genes. They get written into our biology in ways that you're describing in your book.

So, Raj, what was sort of unique for you as you began to sort of think about this from a medical percentage? perspective, because your focus has been on, you know, capitalism and colonialism and food systems from a sort of political and structural view at a very high level. Although you talk about the health impacts, you know, how did this sort of change your thinking about what we need to be doing around our food and food systems? Well, thanks for asking, Mark. And I mean, part of the journey for me was realizing that there's, there are so many pathways to and from health.

And learning how these circuits work within the body helped to help me. to make connections between the circuits that I was seeing outside the body in terms of flows of life and flows within the economy. So, for example, you know, through the sort of work with Ruper, I was able to finally sort of wrap my arms around a statistic around debt, for example. I mean, you know, in the United States, there's a vast explosion of consumer debt. And right now, as we record, there's the end of the eviction moratorium. which means that a lot of people are going to be finding themselves either with much higher rent or on the streets and unhound.

Now, you know, the debts that come with that are an acute form of capitalist stress. And, you know, who should swoop in, but the financial, you know, the sort of robber barons of finance offering things like payday loans, for philisans who don't know, I mean, if you have a payday loan of, say, $300, you'll probably end up paying at payday loan rates about $800 back. And those kinds of loans are incredibly stressful to manage. And they manifest themselves. Isn't that called usury and illegal

and what organized crime usually does? Well, yes. But that's it. You see, in other parts of the world, it's illegal. And in the United States, it's licensed. And that's, you know, that's because we are at the apex of this kind of predatory capitalism. But what I didn't fully appreciate was how that stress works through our body,

through our microbiomes, through our guts, through our skin, and through our endocrine system, and finally, you know, drives us towards despair and stress. And so statistics that I came across when we were researching this, that certainly blew me away. I think Ruper was less surprised because you understood the mechanism. But, you know, when you, if we were to abolish payday loans, the suicide rate in the United States would drop by 1.9%. And the fatal overdose rate for narcotics were dropped by 8.9%. Now, you know, one can trot that out in an economics discussion or in a medical discussion. But when you do it in both, I think you get the full kind of span of how the bodies, our bodies, everyone's bodies, are stressed by the kinds of everyday

rough and tumble of capitalism. And we, you know, unless medicine opens its eyes to saying, you know, a good medical intervention here would be to ban payday loans, then we are, you know, stopping short of how it is that we might heal one. No, that's what we're so bad at in medicine. what Rod was just describing that an actual structural change. So we've gotten good at now noticing the structural determinants of health. But we have no training in how to understand where those structures came from, why they were put there, and then how to dismantle them. And that's what we've seen with COVID. As soon as we saw the racial disparities, everyone's talking about it. But no one has come forth and said, let's do universal basic income. So all of these folks can just stay home and ride out this wave. Instead, it's been the cattle process. of black and brown workers back to, you know, serving the interests of Jeff Bezos so he can go on a joyride. So that's the kind of grotesque lack of care for each other we're seeing manifest here. So we have the ability to notice and to describe in medicine, but we don't go that extra step at prescribing a change because modern medicine is a part of that colonial capitalist

project, that this land was colonized by medics, missionaries, and military. And so that, you know, that we have to understand that what we are a part of, so that we can actually effectively leverage and push on points of pressure to change the things that would actually bring real population-level health outcome changes. That's really true. I think we have to go back. And I know in my electronic medical record at Cleveland Clinic, you know, we now have this new feature, which is your social determinants of health and you kind of, but then it's like, well, now what? Like, what do you do?

We still are seeing one-on-one patients in the office hoping we're going to fix them when what happens in the office isn't really the main determinant of health. 80% of our health happens outside the clinic and I'm not going to cure diabetes in my office. It's cured in the farm. It's cured in the grocery store.

It's cured in the kitchen at the restaurants. That's where it's cured. And I think we don't even talk about that. And as doctor, I'm so shocked that you actually have gotten this because we basically learn the exact opposite, right? We can fix everything, we got you, just follow these instructions and go home. And it's just a farce.

And it's why we're seeing escalating costs, escalating rates of all these inflammatory diseases. And it's something we don't really talk about what to do. And I want to get into what to do about it because I think the concept of how do we solve this is really challenging because it's a big problem. But, Roger, you said something I want to sort of push back on a little bit. You talked about this idea, both of you sort of touched on it, and I just want to push back around this idea of colonialism and capitalism. One, are they the same thing?

And two, is capitalism inherently the problem or is it a corrupted capitalism that is causing the problem? Meaning it's basically rigged and geared for the wealthy, but not for everybody. And it's not really truly free market because if it was free market, then all the externalities and costs would be built into the price of the goods you're buying. So a price of Coca-Cola would be probably $100, looking at the impact on soil, on pollution, on the degradation of our water systems and air quality and climate and health. And, I mean, you know, we'd be paying for the stuff four times. That would be the price. So how do you sort of frame in a way that, you know, people are listening to, well, you know, what are we expecting communism?

Like, where, what's the answer? Well, let me take a stab at that. First by just sort of explaining, look, there are lots of different kinds of colonialism. And there's long histories in the history of human civilizations of, you know, one civilization and coming in and displacing or altering another. You see that throughout Asia. You see that even on the land that I find myself on. It used to be Tonkawa land,

and then it was invaded by the Comanche Empire, and then it became a part of, temporarily part of the Spanish Empire, then part of Mexico, and then now the United States. So there's a pallet-obsessed on the land. So colonialism is one thing, where just one power comes in and occupies and dominates another. And then capitalism is this sort of tendency not towards competition and to free markets, but actually to monopoly.

And I think that that's the important thing to remember here when we're talking about capitalism, is that, you know this well, Mark, I know that this is a kind of softball question, but you know this well through your work in your study in Food Fix, for example, and thinking about how food corporations work, the way that capitalism has worked in the food system has not been to generate an abundance of free markets and competition, and true costs being revealed, but exactly the opposite, right? If we, you know, the report came out from the Rockefeller Foundation a couple of weeks

back saying, look, the United States spends $1.1 trillion on food every year. But the damage caused by these corporations, which they've been managed to make other people pay for, is $2.3 trillion. So for every dollar we spend on food, more than $2 need to be spared cleaning up, spent cleaning up what these capitalist corporations have created. So what we're saying is, look, capitalist colonialism is a way of breaking relationships between people and between people and place and the rest of the web of life. It's a way of concentrating power in the hands of a few people rather than democratizing it. And so what we're excited about is

actually, what would it be like to have free exchange? What would it be like to have people be sovereign over their decisions in a way that pure economic theory suggests they might one day be? And we kind of like the idea, for example, of competing ideas, and that's why we like science a great deal. We like the idea of level playing fields. But unfortunately, colonial capitalism has kind of prevented those from happening. It has. And you're right. The monopolies are true.

You look at the food industry. We see all these brands, hundreds, thousands of brands, but there's nine companies that own all the brands. If you look at the chemical and seed nag companies, you know, they were 100, like 20, 30 years ago. Now there's like six, you know, that does provide all the chemicals and seeds. And we see this, the consolidation, the monopolization, the structural changes that really undermine the ability to actually start to create change. Because all of a sudden it was like there really was democratization of our food system, then new ideas could bubble up and change can happen and people will be able to sort of implement alternatives. And now it's very, very tough.

And these behemoths, you know, like Nestle and, you know, Mondalais and all these giant Pepsi co-coval, all these giant companies are. are so dominant that it's very hard to get them to shift. I mean, they're thinking about, they're looking out, they're feeling the pressure from our culture, but it's really tough. So as you guys have come to sort of understand this and understand the structural violence and understand the colonization of our society in general,

how have you understood the food colonization? Because I think it's something that's new. And these terms have been posture on like food apartheid and food colonization and the decolonization of food. food and medicine. What is that? And what does it mean? And what do we do? So I just want to take a moment to point out a couple of the things that you've said, Mark, that hit on, because I was trained in the same medical system, that hit on kind of the errors of thought that we are trying to move away from in our book. One of them was talking about the immune system as unleashing an army, right? So what we

talk about in our book is that the immune system, these metaphors that we use, use as in, you know, the invisible enemy, that's COVID, and, you know, we're fighting disease and we're off there with these, you know, these armies of white blood cells. The militaristic imagery is coming from that same time of colonial conquest. We think about self versus other, and that's an error of thought of how the immune system actually works, which is to repair damage. That is what our bodies are trying to do. We're not out there fighting an internal epic battle in our bodies. Our bodies are simply trying to restore the optimum working conditions. So that and then to posit that the opposite of the violent system of colonial capitalism is

communism. And to use the language of like red fear. I know people were thinking that. I know. I know. And that's why I want to address it. I want to address it. Because that we are, again, this is not a dichotomy. We are sophisticated, highly imaginative, amazing creatures that have a repertoire of ideas and creations and experiments and expressions that go beyond the dichotomy between, you know, an economic system that is currently destroying the planet and everything that supports human life on it. And, you know, another economic system that we've seen exist in authoritarian models that doesn't feel particularly inviting. So I just want to share that. In terms of what decolonizing medicine and food means to me,

is, it starts with the concept of deep medicine, which is what we have conceptualized as being an analogy to deep ecology. So deep ecology is the understanding of ecology beyond and outside a human-centered approach. That life around us is vital and beautiful and amazing and deserves to be respective regardless of its utility to human beings. It's not simply there to be used by us, is to move away from the Judeo-Christian framework of humans up here and life, the rest of life all down there. The word in the Bible was dominion, which means to rule over as opposed to the word, which really was in the original Hebrew was stewardship. Exactly. And what's interesting. Which is more of care and not, you don't own it. You're basically a steward of taking care of it. It's a very different

framework. Exactly, a kinship. And that's what, you know, in that beautiful book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer's book, she looks at the myths, the stories of Sky Woman, who was, uh, the Kirk, that creation story is a story full of relationship, as opposed to Eve, which is the severing of relationship and the banishment from the garden and you, you don't get to eat anymore from here. And, and now you get to menstruate and be in pain, you know? So just the whole framework is, you know, what kind of, uh, reality. What kind of story do you want to live with? And what we're saying is that, you know, deep medicine is understanding it's those relationalities that were actually interrupted through a

colonial capitalist framework. And we joined those two together because it's the way that capitalism spread. And it was the architecture of cosmology, the way of understanding who we are in relationships to things. Things needed to be severed in order to exploit them. You needed to be able to see the mountain as inanimate in order to mine it and riddle it with holes. You needed to see the river as not a person in order to pollute it. You needed to see the salmon as a commodity in order to not sing to it. So you could club it over the head and rip out its eggs, which is how they farm salmon. I mean, it's the most grotesque thing I've ever seen. And so I think that deep medicine is understanding that health cannot be pursued on an individual level,

that health can only be attained in proper relationship to each other and the entire web of life. And so those activities that we can do around our food system that reawaken, rehydrate our ancient relationships to seeds, to water, to soil, to each other are going to be a part of that practice of decolonizing our food system. And it is direct. anti-capitalist. It is saying there's no place in this for turning profits and, you know,

consolidating power and, you know, having dominion, you know, as an executive having dominion over the workers in the fields. So it's about honoring and respecting our dignity and the dignity of all the entities around us that support our health and that are vital for our health. And I feel like for me, as the doctor, nowhere is this more exciting. So this shows the gap between the practice of medicine and how we're being educated in medical schools and even the cutting edge of the science right now. There's like a 30, 40, maybe 60 year gap. So we're still being taught of the digestive system as this tube that goes from your mouth to anus and like food goes through. There's a sieve, right? But it's in fact a whole rich forest. And that forest needs to

be tended like an ecologist. And so that's, you know, deep medicine is really understanding those relationships and putting them into good practice. And it's something that... Well, it's, yeah, it's beyond... It's like the ecologies of our social ecologies, our political ecologies, our biological ecologies, and that, you know, those are ways of thinking of medicine that are so exciting. And my medical students, who are especially black, are coming up to me wanting to quit medical school because they know the science.

They're like, what we're learning in medical school is not scientifically it's not actually based in the real science that's here right now in front of us. Well, it's 20th century. It's not 21st century thinking. It's enlightenment. It's even beyond. I mean, it's so far gone. And it needs to reassert itself because the lines of power within medicine and those hierarchies are recalcitrant to change. And that's exactly what decolonizing medicine is to change them. You know, when I started growing food, I just couldn't concentrate on just growing food because so many things were happening around me, living in the Bronx for over 30-something years and being

a physical therapist, I saw the relationship between food and health. I saw the relationship between food and education and the environment and housing and how they all intercepted. And then I realized that, you know, talking to especially a lot of my patients who were older, who came from farms, and realizing that at one time that parents, And grandparents lived until they were 100 years of age. And now here they are, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, succumbing to strokes and stage renal diseases. And right then in there, sort of clicked in my head that there's something wrong with our food system. Because here were people who were healthy now all of a sudden because of what they were eating were getting these diet-related diseases.

And when I would go into their homes as a physical therapist, I was like a holistic physical therapist because I couldn't really. work and do my job unless I looked at their medication and looked at the food that they were eating. You looked at their medication cabinet. You looked at their fridge. Oh, boy. The French biopsy. The fridge and that fridge and the kitchen cabinet. And open that cabinet door and we see cookies and chips in the freezer ice cream in the refrigerator, soda.

And it was like, what the heck is going on here? Yeah. And so, because, like I said, going to my neighborhood and going to the bodeas and seeing the colors of fruits or vegetables, but yet it was potato chips, it was cookies, it was sodas. And then I got to thinking that, wait a second, there's got to be some sort of thing that is going on, especially in low-income neighborhoods. because when I would go to my white friends and go into their stores, walking in, you would see fresh vegetables and fruits, and you would never see the type of food that I would see in my neighborhood that's number one, number two on my block in my area,

you can go every block to see a fast food store. But when you go to my white neighborhoods to the suburbs, you got to take a car. Yeah. And so, you know, it just got me thinking about the food system and what it was happening, not only in my neighborhood in the Bronx, but in so many of my friends' neighborhoods that lived in Detroit and Baltimore and Philly, we were having these same conversations about what we see in our food system in low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color.

And did the people who were suffering from diabetes or patients, did they understand that what was in their fridge and what they're eating was causing them to be sick, or were they just trying to just get by and trying to eat the best they could? The thing about it is that when you're in a fixed income, you try to stretch those dollars. And so you try to spend as being somewhat proactive in what you can spend, getting, you know, a buck for your dollar. And most cheap, you know, most unhealthy food is cheap. And so, you know, I didn't want to go there and be, you know, the solid. and reprimand.

I just wanted them to see the relationship to between food and health, that's number one. But also to understand that, you know, if you're a diabetic, you know, there's a whole concept with diabetes.

You should know about that. Because you're diabetic, sugar becomes like a drug. You know, you want it more. You want it more. You want more sugar. If you're a dialysis patient,

you know, you're limited to amount of liquids, but you want more water or more. And so even though you would try to, you know, talk to the patient. And they would understand, don't get me wrong. They understood their disease and what was happening. But when depression, you know, sets in and when you trying to strip your dollars,

sometimes you just say, you know, what the heck, you know, what the heck. So you think it's a lack of education or lack of skill in college? I don't think it's a lack of education. What I think it is is. that if you gave people healthy food options, they would take it. But there's no healthy food options. You know, what I used to put in thought said is,

time and time and time and ten, people will tell our community. If you want to be healthy, all you got to do is drink water, give up soda, drink water, eat food and vegetables, plant a little garden, without looking at the systemic problems, the institutional, structural problems that reinforce racism in our society. Yeah.

And no one talks about that. No, it's true. I mean, I remember working my friend Chris Kennedy and Sheila Kennedy in Southside Chicago where they created a program called Topbox. It was a nonprofit that got to basically at wholesale from distributors, like from the meatpackers, the farms, you packaged it up and boxed it.

is fresh food. It was 35 bucks for a family of four for a week of fresh food. And they brought it into the churches in the south side of Chicago. And you could see from the church, there was no grocery store and store. But you could see literally from the church parking lot, probably five or six fast food restaurants, just circling around. And the whole parking lot was filled with people, mostly African Americans, hungry to get real food if they had access. And I think, you know, That's something you probably had witnessed in your community is when you bring these foods. There are people want it. And it's not that they're avoiding it.

It's just they don't have access. Is that parents? It's absolutely correct. Absolutely great. And I say that because you can't tell people to eat healthy, eat fresh foods and vegetables, they don't have that option. Yeah. And so for me, you know, I've been trying for years, started a, you know, a farmer's market.

Low-income Farmers Market in the Bronx, we go on our 18th year, to do just that, to provide our community with the access of fresh fruits and vegetables, and why does it always have to be in affluent neighborhoods and not in our neighborhood? Yeah, so true. You know, I think most people don't realize the extent of health disparities, and it's often, you know, passed off as genetic or whatever, but, you know, if you look, if you look even at America in the 1960s, African America, had healthier diets than whites. And if you look at pictures from back then on the marches, there were no people who were overweight of color back then. It was pretty much everybody was slim and it was not an issue. And all of a sudden, in a generation, we've seen the incredible sort of speed of these diseases ravaging these communities.

So if you're African-American, you're 80% more likely to have type 2 diabetes, four times is likely to have kidney failure, three-and-a-half times is likely to get amputations as whites. same thing if you're Latino. And in COVID-19, we're seeing incredible racial disparities where African-Americans and Latinos are three times as likely to get it and die of it as whites. And it's not just because of genetic susceptibilities. There's these structural racism issues that I think are embedded in our society,

whether it's the essential workers who are mostly brown and black who have to endure commutes and working in close quarters, whether it's food packing plants or farms, migrant farmers, they're the ones who are getting sick, or whether it's because they live in more crowded housing and can't isolate, or whether they just don't have access to the same kind of health care. They're not getting the same type of health care and testing. You're less likely for the African American, for example, to get tested for COVID. If you have symptoms, then if you're white. So there's all these embedded problems in our system. And I think that, you know, the framework that you have described is quite different than we typically think of this idea

have food deserts. We talk about food deserts as this sort of natural phenomena, like a desert is a natural thing, but it's not a natural thing. It's a design problem, and it's, you refer to it as food apartheid. So can you talk about this concept of food apartheid and how do we, how do we begin to break down this food apartheid issue? Mark, you know, I don't understand why, especially during this climate right now here in 2020, when all of a sudden people just woke up and realized Black Lives Matter, you know, say, that's number one. And people know for a fact, where does the cheap, subsidized, processed food go into?

They know, I mean, it's not rocket science. They know for a fact that it goes into poor neighborhoods, mostly neighborhoods of color. So, you know, let's cut the BS when he has this conversation because everyone knows because it's not going to end their neighborhoods. So everyone knows that there is a difference between what is in white affluent neighborhoods

or what is in poor black and brown neighborhoods. That's number one. And, you know, I'm infuriated by that conversation because all of a sudden people act like they're dumb, like they don't know. And they know exactly the difference when it comes to food, and housing and education based on color demographics

and how much money you make. And so when the term food deserts was first brought to our attention in my community, I sort of like backed off of that. I'm saying, wait a second. We live in a food desert? You know, like, first of all, who coined the term that's number one? White people, problem.

Why is being, there's some woman in the UK coined it? And then, of course, the USDA and everyone, picked up on it because when you say food desert, it's sort of like softens the tone of, of, of, of, of the food disparities we see in our society. And so for me, it says, but get food desert because people in the desert would say, well, they say, do we get food? Yeah. And so I coined the term food apart die only because I wanted people to, first of all, what does that mean? But also look at the. food system along race, the color one skin, look at the food system of a long demographic, where

does one live, and look at the food system on how much money you make, your affluence, you know, and economics and wealth. And when you start talking about food deposit, I wanted people to start having that conversation around these issues because it's time and time again, we go over and over again about this food system when we all know for a fact where does the cheap and subsidized school enter each and every day and I'm sick and tired of having that conversation because for me it's about action how do we change it how do we stop spinning our wheels talking about hunger and poverty and and and food deserts and preexisting diseases and diet-related diseases.

You know, at one time you look at this country, and even the world, it was more plant-based. And as we started to add more animals, we become more animal-based in our food. And as a result, at one time, we were 2,000 calories per capita, now over 3,800 calories per capita. And you can see what was happening in other countries

as we'd gone from plant-based to animal-based. the intake of calories. It's mostly archie, sugary calories, that's it. Sugary calories, how we pay farmers to grow subsidies such as corn. Corn is a billion dollar business to turn it to us and to sponsor. That corn that you see is that for us, it's for food and it's for feeding cows that really can't digest. And that's at all, which is stupid. Right. So let's get off this bandwagon.

about the food system and yeah it needs to be fixed no one needs it doesn't need to be dressed so exactly what it's supposed to be doing because we know for a fact you ask any person you know in this country well would you rather you know shop at a low-income neighborhood or would you like to go

to like the old foods which are in after Trader Jones and see so I'm done it's fascinating I saw this clip on Instagram of a woman talking to a largely white audience and most all white audience saying how many of you

in this audience would like to be treated in the way that African Americans are in this country and have their experience and not a single person stood up. She just stand up. She said, I don't think you understood my question. Would anybody would like to be treated as an African American in this country? Just stand up.

No one stood up. She said, well, you all know the problem. You're just pretending you don't know. And I think it's easy to look aside and ignore it. It's easy to blame people. And I think there's a lot of focus on personal responsibility. You know, people just aren't eating well because they don't want to. But there really are structural issues of access, structural issues of skills, of knowledge,

of tradition that are just sort of obscure the ability for people to reclaim their health and their traditional food waste. And I think that's what you're doing in the Bronx. That's what you're doing with your farm. And I think it's interesting to hear from you, what has that experience been like over the last few decades of being in those communities and try to change the way people think about food and their health and access? How is that giving you insight into maybe how to solve this problem on a bigger scale?

Well, I think for me, I see myself as an agitate as well. I've been gifted, I guess, with the ability to say what I want to say. I've never been beholden to like a nonprofit or a job that's sort of like, no, Karen, you can't say that or, you know, the funders are not going to like that. So I've always been a person of very independent and what I've been able to say and do. And so that conversation I would have with my patience was really, really a mind-blown. because, you know, after a while they would sit down and say, Ms. Washington, you're right. You know, I was, you know, my parents were never sick a day in their life and look at me, you know,

and they would want to change. And I would bring them fresh fruits and vegetables from our farmers market at the end of the day. Because I think I wanted them to care, you have someone to care about them. But then also to take action. I mean, talk as cheap people, talk about full justice and full sovereignty. where for me, in order to do this work, have to be actively involved in dismantling some of the social injustices that you see.

And so for me, doing like the farmer's markets, going around and speaking at different venues, I think my biggest accomplishment has been through the Bugs Conference is the impact that it has on young people. Yeah. On the younger generation, a black and brown, youth. And I say that because growing up as a youth, if I was to tell my parents that I wanted to be

a farmer or anybody, they would look at me like I was crazy. I mean, even to think about going on a farm or visiting a farm or wanting to be a farm, because for so long growing up, farming was equal to slavery. You know, you're working for the man. And so now, and that was a history that was embedded in my head, you know. But since I've been older and really been in the full world and to really understand the history of the African-American experience in this country and how African-American enslaved people built the agricultural system in this country with seeds in our hairs and knowledge around crop rotation and irrigation and medicinal herbs and tools, all the

sudden there's a resurgence of inquiry, especially from our youth, getting the history right. And once you plant that seed in their head and understand that what we've done wrong as African Americans is that we moved away from the land. And as we moved away from the land, you can see what has happened to us. Our history is that we are agrarian people. This is in our DNA. This is our blood. We are people of land and food. And so when you start talking to, that to young people and have them understand their place in history, their place in agriculture, all of a sudden a light bulb goes off. And it says, wait a second, I've been taught that farming has been slavery when in fact,

it's my people who brought farming to this country. I should embrace it. I want to embrace it. I want to understand more. And then I don't want to be like my parents, a grandparent. who are now, stroke and stage mental diseases, amputations, you name it. I want to lead a more healthier life, that's number one. But then I also want to go back to the land.

I want to go back to land because there's a history around stolen land. There's a history around wealth building that has been taken from us. And so we're trying to right that wrong and put that knowledge back into the hands of young people. So they understand the importance of growing food, the importance of growing back to the land, the importance of what it means to be a community, what social capital and communal wealth means to us. And so the whole dialogue has shifted and the concentration has been on our youth. So for me, this is an overwhelming with youth that want to farm is extraordinary.

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Hyman. So check out Dr.hyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's Dr.hyman.com. D-R-H-Y-M-A-N.com. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center,

my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

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