The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Food Is A Social Justice Issue with Leah Penniman
Episode Date: December 11, 2019There’s a part of our food system that’s not being talked about: racial inequality. The division of land, government subsidies, and financial resources that are available favor white farmers. Mean...while, many of our sustainable farming practices actually stem from African and indigenous roots. Since 1920 African-American farmers have lost over 14 million acres of land. Combine this with the fact that Black communities are also at a higher risk of illnesses due to a lack of access to fresh, nutritious food. It’s food apartheid. This week on The Doctor’s Farmacy I was joined by Leah Penniman to dig into the racial injustice that continues to smolder in our current food system. 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. This episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is brought to you by Joovv and Thrive Market. I always love checking out the latest science for anti-aging and recently I discovered Joovv, a red light therapy device. Red light therapy is a super gentle non-invasive treatment where a device with medical-grade LEDs delivers concentrated light to your skin. It actually helps your cells produce collagen so it improves skin tone and complexion, diminishes signs of aging like wrinkles, and speeds the healing of wounds and scars. To check out the Joovv products for yourself head over to joovv.com/farmacy. Once you’re there, you’ll see a special bonus the Joovv team is giving away to my listeners. Use the code FARMACY at checkout. Make sure to also check out Joovv's website for some special holiday deals while supplies last! Thrive Market has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. Not only does Thrive offer 25 to 50% off all of my favorite brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchased, they give a membership to a family in need, and they make it easy to find the right membership for you and your family. You can choose from 1-month, 3-month, or 12-month plans. And right now, Thrive is offering all Doctor's Farmacy listeners a great deal, you’ll get up to $20 in shopping credit when you sign up, to spend on all your own favorite natural food, body, and household items. And any time you spend more than $49 you’ll get free carbon-neutral shipping. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com/Hyman. Here are more of the details from the interview: -How Leah got into farming (5:53) -Why the term “food apartheid” is more accurate than “food desert” (11:44) -Soul Fire Farm and how it is working to create a new food and farm system (19:43) -Overcoming the obstacles that keep people of color from becoming farmers (27:35) -The potential benefits of regenerative agriculture (29:55) -Leah’s work getting community-supported agriculture paid for with funds from The Farm Bill (34:34) -The Fairness for Farm Workers Act and why labor protection laws historically excluded farmers (36:22) -Costa Rica’s ecosystem services model (42:13) -Internalized racism and the food system (45:20) -The role of the land in the civil rights movement (53:13) Learn more about and order Leah’s book, Farming While Black, at https://www.farmingwhileblack.org/. Follow on Facebook @farmingwhileblack, on Instagram @farmingwhileblack, and on Twitter @blkfarmer. Learn more about the work of Soul Fire Farm at http://www.soulfirefarm.org/ and follow on Facebook @soulfirefarm, on Instagram @soulfirefarm, and on Twitter @soulfirefarm. Follow Leah on Facebook @leah.penniman and on Instagram @leahpenniman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.
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with an F, a place for conversations that matter. If you care about your food, this conversation is going to matter to you
because it's with an extraordinary woman who's really revolutionizing how we think about food,
how we grow it and who we grow it for and addressing issues around food injustice and
food apartheid, which not many people are actually talking about, surprisingly, because it's such a big problem. She is an educator, farmer, Paysan. She's Creole. Her family's from Haiti. And she's an author, an activist from
Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. She co-founded the farm in 2010 with the mission to end racism
in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to the 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 distribution program
for communities living under food apartheid,
and domestic and international organizing
toward equity in the food system.
Thank God for that.
Leah has been farming since 1996.
She has a master's in education and BA in environmental
science from Clark University. Her work has been recognized and the work of Soul Fire Farm by the
Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Grist 50, the James Beard Award, and on and on.
And her book, which everybody should get, is called Farming While Black, Soul Fire Farm's
Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land.
And it's a love song for land and her people.
Thank you for being here, Leah.
Thank you so much for having me.
Of course.
So you're doing an extraordinary thing, which is changing the conversation about food, farming,
and race, and the injustice in our food system.
Everybody talks about eating healthy and addressing chronic disease through food. Not many people are talking about food injustice
or food oppression or food racism. And you are. How did you figure this out? Like what was the
thing that got you into farming? It was sort of an accident. Talk about how that all got connected.
Wow.
Well, I mean, there's a lot of beginnings to every story.
But part of my beginning was growing up in a small, rural, working class, mostly white town.
And to be really frank, the kids at school were not kind to my siblings and I.
We were the only brown family in the school and had a hard time making friends, experienced
a lot of bullying.
And it was the
forest. It was the land that was really a solace for me. I considered the trees my closest and
best friends, worked hard to defend them from a young age. They do actually talk back.
They don't bully you.
They don't, but they offer a lot of support and guidance about right relationship. And so
I think it was my connection to land that drove me to eventually look for a job,
a career that was related to land stewardship.
And so I found farming as a teenager and I haven't looked back.
Amazing.
And you were working at something called the Food Project when you were 16.
How did that affect your future and the work you're doing today?
Absolutely.
So I spent summers in Boston with my mom.
I spent the school years with my dad in rural Ashburnham. And the food project was
generous enough to give me a summer job at 16, planting carrots, hoeing rows,
running a farmer's market. And it was really transformative for me because at a time when
the teenage years are tumultuous, there's lots of questions around identity and belonging,
and farming is undeniably good. You have the opportunity to put a seed in the ground, harvest, feed the community, and no one can deny that that
is a noble contribution to society. And so that beautiful nexus between environmental care and
social care was deeply healing and meaningful for me. And so I went on to work at several other
farms throughout my teenage years. But you know, it's interesting, you know, we've sort of had our entire country
built on the backs of slavery
and the agrarian wisdom of the Africans
who were involuntarily brought over here
to grow food for Americans
and to literally build the US economy.
And so a lot of African-Americans see farming as a reversion of slavery,
plantation life. There's a sort of negative connotation about it. But somehow you've
really reframed that and are bringing back the original wisdom that has sort of long been in
that culture. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, it's so true. I think there's a lot of
agricultural practices that we take for granted as a historical or
European that actually have African roots.
So things like regenerative agriculture, you know, that comes out of the work of Dr. George
Washington Carver in the late 1800s at Tuskegee University.
Black professor who started extension agencies, started, you know, cover cropping and crop
rotation in this country.
You look all the way back to Cleopatra, who came up with composting and,
you know, raised beds from the Ovambo people. So there's so many technologies. And I think that,
well, I certainly don't blame our people for feeling triggered by the land. You know,
the land was a scene of the crime, as Chris Bolden Newsom would say. But we can actually
reach back beyond that to reclaim a noble and dignified relationship to land. And I'm part
of a returning generation that's excited to do that.
Yeah I mean because you know in a way part of the solution to poverty and
injustice in our food system is bringing everybody back into right relationship
with our food and our land and that you know that's a very novel concept right?
Yeah absolutely you know Fannie Lou Ham said, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup
canned for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to do, which I think is brilliant.
Because if you think about that, you know, if they, if you don't have anything canned for the
winter, you don't have a farm or anything, if they put chains around that supermarket,
you're going to put down your protest sign, put down your ballot and, you know,
crawl through the dust to get food for your children. And so fundamentally, whoever controls
the food and the land really controls the population. And we're seeing that now with
power outages and grocery stores shuttering, you know, the way that it wreaks havoc in society.
So part of our collective survival is to reclaim an agrarian tradition and our relationship to
land. So powerful. Now you were in 2006, a long time ago, you were living with your husband in South
End of Albany near 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. I want to get into that, but there were no grocery stores,
farmer's 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 your 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 access to food opulence
and others food scarcity. And I say man on purpose.
Right. So it's apartheid. It's apartheid. 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, Emmett 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 for
Soul Fire 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 salad, 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,
too risky 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.
You 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.
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 a farmer shifting this systemic violence,
these biological weapons of mass destruction, as I 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 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, 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,
they're migrant workers, they're not protected by the farm,
I mean, the 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 big barrier.
So 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.
Hmm, yeah, absolutely.
I know, sorry, 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.
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. 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, was the 1800s opening of the Great Plains.
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 it on the show, but our food system
end to end is the number one cause of climate change.
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 Soul Flower 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 to 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 Soul Fire Farm is
in creating a new food system.
Wow.
Yeah, so-
Sorry, I'm putting you 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, you know, 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 for our 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 uh andrew johnson the president who got impeached right
after him um revoked and it's been estimated that if that was in place that there'd be a land worth
4.6 trillion dollars 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 were 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 sort of an injustice
that's never been talked about,
that really never been really addressed.
And maybe we need to give back that $4.6 trillion of land.
As you mentioned reparations.
And I think 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 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. So, you know, you point out that, you know, partly as a result
of the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule and many other
sort of deliberate and political and social injustice that happened,
you talk about,
you know, how there's been starting to be an increase in African-American farmers.
You know, it used to be 14%.
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 there 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 a 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,
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 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 community agriculture back
into these communities. I was at Ebenezer Baptist Church a number of 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 it to 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 it is something I struggle with.
It's like you see the problem is so tough.
I mean, I'm working in Cleveland, working with a, uh, a group there, uh, uh, you know,
really underserved African Americans who are very, um, you know, sick,
they have diabetes, they have kidney failure, they have all these issues. And,
and we're, we're put them in a group together.
We're using community-based solutions. We're going to them,
we're teaching them how to cook and shop and, and they want it so bad,
but nobody ever has helped them
and and they're losing weight and they're feeling good and it just it's amazing but you know like
these these are just really neglected communities and it's in and it's bankrupting our country like
we should care about it because a 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 wanna shout out, you know,
if you look at Reverend Heber Brown's 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 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 D-Town Farm, Malik Akini'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,
Heber 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
are dying from all the food they're eating. So it's a, it's an, 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
and 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, we've been talking to Senator Sanders,
Senator Warren, other politicians for the first time are interested in the plight of the black
farmer. And 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 and a mule.
Yeah, exactly. 40 acres and a mule in 2019, 2020, right?
Maybe not a mule, maybe some other tool.
40 acres and a couple tractors.
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. 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. You know, 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, Amitade, is it true?
Leah, is it true that if you want to plant a seed
on your farm in the United States,
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.
I mean, you're so right about this because when you look at the impact of regenerative
ag 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 scale
this and i think and in doing all the things i said by producing better quality food where the
farmers are happier they're healthier they make more money producing food that's good for humans
that's 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 and it's like it's like a duh but uh
it's still sort of this people when you say regenerative like what's that right
yeah i mean regenerative
ag i 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
uh 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. Fix nitrogen. So they're meeting fertilizer.
Exactly.
He was getting people to go and muck out swamps to make compost piles.
I mean, he literally started quoting Bible verses to get folks convinced 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 earthworms.
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.
So great. I mean, it's so great.
And, you know, I remember reading a story about this guy who came up from the city
with his Air Jordans and didn't want to get out of the car.
Oh, DeJore Carter. Yeah, I can tell you that story.
He didn't want to get his sneakers dirty.
And he went to underwent quite a transformation.
Can you just tell a story?
Absolutely.
Because I think it's so cool.
So hi, Dijon.
So Dijon Carter is now a grown person.
But as a young, as a teenager, he did come out of the farm.
He was afraid a bear would eat him.
So he didn't want to get out of the van.
And somebody who's never been out of the city.
Yeah, he had not ever been to a farm before.
And so when we all went on the tour, that was even scarier.
Because if we're leaving him alone, we eventually convinced him to get out of the van. And in order to protect
his sneakers from getting dirty, he took them off and went barefoot. And he had an experience where
once his barefoot touched the ground, you know, a memory of his grandmother entered through his
foot up to his heart. And she had once gardened with him in the city, put worms in his hand.
And so he, you know, softened at that moment and ended up telling the whole group the story like in tears about you know miss i never thought this place had anything
to do with me but it sure does you know it sure does and um that's just one of the thousands of
stories of of the land just calling us home we don't even have to do anything you just touch it
it's so true i mean i you know i kind of came into this in college where i 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 you know women's rights you know various injustices and you know
one of the courses i took was biological agriculture they didn't call it regenerative
back then it was all about intercropping, cover crops, you know, natural pest control through, you know, various plants that you
can use like marigolds to repel pests. It was fascinating. I learned so much and, you know,
we made compost. It was like... And I began studying these books like Soil and Health and
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, all that was in there.
It was all sort of underneath 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.
And one of the most exciting thing is
you're not just sort of making compost
and building communities for agriculture
and training people, but you're politically active.
You actually helped get, I think it passed,
but a provision in the farm bill, which is a monster bill,
to get community supported agriculture paid for with farm bill funds.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, exactly.
How did you do that?
I think I was-
Nothing is done in Washington.
I had the audacious boldness to stand up.
Then the director of the FSA was speaking at a conference I was at.
FSA is?
Farm Service Administration.
And I got in line for the comment period and said something about how it was impossible
for farmers to accept SNAP the way that it was set up, which is the, you know, formerly
known as food stamps.
And she actually followed up with me.
And so we ended up getting a petition going.
You know, we got some allies who were lobbyists to support us.
And in the last farm bill, got a provision passed that makes it a bit easier for farmers
to be able to accept SNAP for their CSAs.
You can do advanced payments and vouchers and so forth.
Again, very, very small drop in the bucket of everything that needs to be changed in
the food system.
But it did embolden us to create a policy platform and ask for more changes.
So as someone who's literally doing this, not just talking about it like me.
It sounds like you're doing a few things i'm working on the doctor stuff but uh you know we're in people in communities
trying to deal with these issues um you know what would be the kinds of big changes in policy
in in around food and agriculture that you think are going to have the biggest impact
things that we have so much trouble answering that question because I have about 100
things that need to change in terms of policy.
Start with the first 50.
I mean, from your end, I really think that taxing, quote, junk food companies for their
health impacts the way that cigarette companies are taxed and held accountable would be a good
step.
You know, from the farmer end of things, we need to pass the Fairness for Farm Workers Act
because we still haven't updated our labor laws and farm workers don't have overtime
protections, minimum wage, right to a day off in seven, right to unionize, some very,
very basic things in this country farm workers do not have.
Yeah, just pause there for a sec because I just want to put in context.
So there was a lot of labor abuses in this country at the early part of the 1900s.
That's right.
And there was a law passed there was a couple laws
the fair labor act and another one that they were designed to protect workers minimum wage
fair working conditions you know removing abuse and so forth but the exclusion within that was
and this was like 1938 okay so we're talking like i don't know how many it's like what is that 80
years ago uh it has not been addressed
that the people who are working on farms and the food system were not protected by those laws.
Exactly. Because they were black. Because the Southern Democrats would not vote for the bill.
It was introduced originally as including everyone, but the Southern Democrats,
parties were switched then, would not vote for it if it included black people.
And we've, you know, we updated social security security but we haven't updated the labor laws to include everybody and so and
they are the one and there's more people in the food and farm system as laborers as workers than
any other industry in the united states and they are the poorest the most at risk for disease the
most likely to be harmed by farming chemicals, the most in need of aid.
So we're actually as taxpayers paying for their Medicare
and all the services that they need.
And we're also helping to support the food system as it is
by using the tipping system,
which was sort of designed also as a part of this whole
legacy of racism in the food system, right?
So can you talk more about that?
Exactly, exactly. You're probably surprised that can you talk more about that? Exactly.
You're probably surprised that a doctor is talking about all this stuff.
I can see that look on your face. Well, it's definitely all, it's absolutely all connected.
And, you know, it wasn't until this year, 2019, that the Fairness for Farm Workers Act
was introduced to actually address some of those things.
It's been mostly addressed to this, to date at the state level.
So, you know, California and New York have some labor protections or through corporations.
If you look at what the Immokalee workers did
or the Milk with Dignity campaign,
they essentially tried to hold
the corporate buyers accountable,
Wendy's, Taco Bell, Ben & Jerry's,
by saying you should pay more
for your milk, your tomatoes,
and then we'll make sure
that that gets to the farmers
as a extra on their wages
as well as farm worker education.
But it shouldn't be a law.
I'm going to pass, not let that pass.
You talked about the Immokalee food workers,
which basically were poor migrant farmers who rose up together, created a coalition,
and demanded that the fast food companies
pay more for tomatoes.
Exactly.
And what?
A dollar a bushel.
A dollar a bushel more.
And the way they got them to do that was through massive campaigns and protests
embarrassing these companies.
Exactly.
And they agreed to do it except for a couple of them.
And I think that to me is such a hopeful example because it means a bunch of
people with no power, with no rights, with no money can change the system.
Absolutely.
And I thought that was the best. Anyway, sorry to interrupt you. Keep going about the food policies.
No, that's fine. I think that's fine.
We got another 98 to go.
Okay. Well, I'll just mention one more. And I briefly touched on this about how
the USDA is responsible for the food system for helping take care of farmers. And there's
all of these programs from land grant universities to credit, crop insurance, disaster relief,
that are supposed to go to farmers. And right now they're going almost entirely to white farmers
and to commodity crop farmers. So we need to restructure the way all of those subsidies work
to make sure it's equitable, that those of us who are growing, quote, healthy foods like vegetables and fruits
aren't just relegated to this tiny little sliver called specialty crops, you know, where it's like,
you know, corn and soy are getting all the money. And so we have to flip it, you know,
even the fact that to be organic, you have to go through a certification process and pay money,
but to trash the planet, you can just do it. You know, I think it's a fundamental frame shift on how we think about
regulation and subsidies. Yeah, it's really putting the true cost of what we're doing into it, right?
True cost of drinking a can of soda isn't probably a dollar, it's probably a hundred dollars when
you account all the effects of how it affected the land to farm the corn syrup and the processing and
how it affects
people's health.
And, you know, it's just, it's all, it's all one big story.
You know, I think we, you know, we, we have a moment, I think in history where things
are starting to shift, you know, people like you are giving voice to these issues.
There's, you know, traditional white, you know, Republican farmers in North Dakota who
are raising these issues and changing the way they're doing things. There's on both sides, I see this as sort of awareness about how
we start to address this. Cause if we don't, we're literally robbing our future and our children's
future. And I don't think people understand the urgency of this. Cause it's like, what do you
mean? Farming, food, whatever, there's plenty of food, but we're actually in a massive crisis. I
mean, the way we farm and the fact that we don't have
supports, agricultural supports for transitioning
to regenerative agriculture means that we're
perpetuating the same system, we're incentivizing
the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides,
which are damaging the soil and causing runoff
and like you mentioned, creating dead zones
that kill 212,000 metric tons of fish every year
in the Gulf of Mexico it's just like this whole ripple effect and so unless we start to sort of
think about this holistically we're not going to solve it and I think I'm hopeful because I'm
seeing big companies that are being pushed into this by this consumer activism like I just met
with the guy who runs the Danone sort of regenerative ag program now maybe I'll talk but I
think they are serious because they see one how their supply chain is going to go away.
Like if we have 60 years of soil left,
like we're screwed unless we fix this, right?
Absolutely.
And there are some countries that are starting to figure it out.
You know, Costa Rica pays its farmers for ecosystem services.
So if you're creating pollinator habitat,
you know, aquifer recharge services,
sequestering carbon in your soil.
You actually get paid a monthly stipend according to the measurements and the metrics that they've
set up.
And I think we as a nation can learn from that, study that, and figure out how to compensate
our farmers for stewarding the public trust.
OK, you just hit on a massive idea that I don't think people understand, which is ecosystem
services and why they're important. So just a little background for people. We use up about $124
trillion a year of ecosystem services, meaning we're extracting resources from the earth.
We're damaging the earth in ways that cost $124 trillion. That's more than the economy of the
entire world, right?
And so I've never heard this idea before.
I mean, I thought of how can we do it?
I never heard that Costa Rica's actually doing it.
So here we have a model for redressing the injustices
that we're doing to nature by actually paying
for restoration of all the things you mentioned, right?
How can we sort we push that more?
I mean, I think we need to get political will behind it and develop those proposals. But there
really is no other way, you know, because right now, farmers are aging out. It is nearly impossible
to make a living selling vegetables on a small scale. You know, 95% of small farmers are relying
on second, third jobs. And so we have
to, as a public, figure out how to stop subsidizing the stuff that's trashing the plant and our health
and start, quote, subsidizing the things that are bringing life. And so if you could get,
you know, $200 an acre a year for increasing your organic matter by 1% or $200 an acre for
bringing back a pollinator species and we have a peer audit system,
that becomes an income stream
that's actually incentivizing the behaviors
that we want to have on our land.
Yeah, I mean, if you add 1% organic matter to your soil,
you add 25,000 gallons of water per acre.
54,000 pounds of carbon per acre.
What?
Well, some people say know we could draw down carbon
in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels if we scale this up and I was talking I was talking
before about this farmer from North Dakota Gabe Brown that I was chatting with this morning
and I said listen you know people love the idea of regenerative ag but like they also criticize
it as just not scalable that we need it to feed the world we need industrial agriculture he's like
on the contrary I produce far more food
with far more side effects that are beneficial
instead of harmful.
And I make 20 times as much money.
So it sounds like a win-win-win for everybody.
Wow, that's powerful.
I had seen a statistic that if you grow corn, beans,
and squash together in a meal by three sisters,
you get 40% higher yield than if you grow things side by side because you have these synergistic effects between, you know, the nitrogen fixing
legumes supporting the nitrogen hungry maize and so forth. And so there is some data to back that up.
So exciting. So I want to ask you a hard question. You may not have the answer to it, but
it's something I struggle with because I think, you know, in the poor communities and African
American Latino communities, there's a level of internalized racism
that I don't think people are aware of.
And for example, I have a friend who's an African American
guy and he went to visit his family in the South.
He says, why are you eating white people's food?
Why are you eating healthy food?
And I think, I gave a talk in this community in Cleveland,
this woman said, know like i said
you know you shouldn't drink sugar sweetened beverages it's the biggest driver of weight gain
and she's like well what else am i going to drink what is there to drink and i'm like
water you know and i was just like there was there was really a lack of awareness that this is being
done to them i mean people understand through black lives matter that you know the police and
the judicial system targets african-americans more African-Americans in prisons today than there were slaves in America.
But they don't get this food injustice, racism, food oppression idea.
What do you think about that?
Am I off?
No, that's a really good question.
I mean, internalized racism, for maybe folks who don't know, is when the ideological white
supremacy, the idea that white folks are inherently more worthy,
deserving of life, smarter, capable, is actually internalized by people of color to believe those
messages, to believe that we're not worthy of life, that we're not intelligent, that we're not,
you know, sort of why bother, right? Because there can be a fatalism around what's possible
in our own lives. And so I do think that that is a tragedy that we in our
communities need to heal from, really saying, you know, we believe that we will have tomorrow,
that we will have grandchildren. And so let's think long term instead of thinking about survival
day to day. But fundamentally, we can't blame folks when you're literally living paycheck to
paycheck. If you even get a paycheck, it's hard to think long term. I do think as far as, you know,
what foods we eat and white people food, there is a challenge
in the quote good food movement around evangelizing certain types of food in a way that's not
culturally sensitive. Like we do not need kale salad. Greens are actually the foundation
of a traditional African diet, but it might be different greens and they might be cooked
with a turkey neck and it's amaranth or callaloo or whatnot. And so I think that I want to shout out the Old Ways folks
and the African Heritage Food Pyramid
and some of the work that they're doing
around reclaiming our traditional diets
that are culturally relevant,
as opposed to thinking we have to adopt,
you know, someone else's ways of eating.
Sure, I was, you know, I was on a rafting trip
to sort of address the tar sands mining
that was going to destroy the Green River in Utah
and the headwaters of the Colorado River.
And Robert F. Kennedy was there with Water Keepers Alliance,
and there were a number of Native Americans there.
There was a Hopi chief and his wife who were extremely overweight, diabetic, and really unhealthy.
And he was throwing up just walking down to the boat because he was just so sick. And I'm like, hey, you know, you can fix this. And he says, yeah,
what do I have to do? I said, well, you have to sort of give up a lot of starch and sugar because
that's what's causing this problem. And I said, oh, that's going to be very hard. I'm like, why?
He said, because, you know, we won't have our traditional ceremonial Hopi foods during our ceremonies. I'm like, what are those? He's like, cake, cookies, and pie. And I'm like,
I don't think those were your traditional foods, you know? And he didn't, he just,
even though he was a Hopi elder, even though he was, you know, a Hopi chief and living in Arabi,
which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the United States. It was like, it was news to him.
And I was like, wow, that level of, you know, they call it Indian fry bread.
It's just basically-
It's commodity foods.
It's the government dumping all of this crap food on communities and then supplanting our
traditional ways.
And there is a really powerful movement right now.
The I Collective, the Indigenous Collective is part of it.
Chef Sean Sherman is part of it, of really reclaiming indigenous diets you know localized foraged game rich diets and it's been powerful
um i remember there was a documentary that just came out i'll find you the title later but yeah
no i see it and i mean i met this guy once uh i was visiting my daughter who was in utah
and uh we went sort of canyoneering and on and there was this
native american guy on our on our little group and we literally there was like a instant flood
like there was like a flash rain and like you know all of a sudden you went from these dry
canyons to like waterfalls as you're rappelling down and we got stranded and we were stuck sitting
there talking to this like cliff somewhere and we started chatting and he's like, you know, I was really overweight.
I was diabetic. I was so unhealthy. And he's a, he's an obstetrician who's working in a remote
area in Vancouver. I mean, in British Columbia off on an Island. And he was like, well, you know,
I started thinking about what were my, you know, grandfathers eat and what, what were they doing?
And I started eating that way and I lost all the weight and my diabetes went away and I feel great,
you know, I think, but it's, and he was a fairly educated guy, I lost all the weight, and my diabetes went away, and I feel great. You know, and I think, but it's,
and he was a fairly educated guy,
but like for the average African American,
or Latino, or Native American,
it's just, there's no awareness of this
as far as I can see in this level of internalized racism.
And how do we break that?
Like how do you approach these communities effectively
to have that conversation?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that-
I know it's a big question.
It is a huge question and it's really important.
And I fundamentally think internalized racism cannot be addressed from the outside.
It's addressed within the community.
So if you look at the work that I mentioned of iCollective or Sean Sherman or Brian Terry
in the black community, a lot of this work is under-resourced, underfunded.
And there are black leaders and indigenous leaders who are trying to do that work of
uprooting internalized racism and promoting traditional diets who don't even have a staff,
right?
They don't even have, they don't have a social media person.
And so finding ways to support what they're doing rather than thinking that folks who
aren't from those communities need to like go change things for them.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think, you know think I had this fantasy.
I'm speaking on Tuesday to a group of community pastors in Cleveland.
And I have a fantasy saying, hey, this is the next civil rights issue.
I said, I would love for every pastor in America to get up and say, how about we all boycott
the people who are hurting us and killing our communities and stop drinking sugar sweetened
beverages and soda like i don't know that's a dumb fantasy but it's kind of like i just feel
like if if and i you know i as interesting as i i went and i talked to bernice king and she's like
yeah you know non-violence also means non-violence to yourself but the sad thing is that these
communities are often you know co-opted by big food.
And, you know, the NAACP and Hispanic Federation oppose soda taxes.
Why?
Because they're funded by these companies.
Coca-Cola provides $2.5 million or $2.1 million to the NAACP.
And because it punishes the wrong person.
You know, the soda tax punishes the consumer who doesn't have access.
It doesn't actually punish the soda company. And so, you know, it's very regressive. It's a regressive
tax. Exactly. And so really thinking about, well, if we do want to address the harm, how do we tax
that company for its harm and use those dollars to support these community based initiatives?
And I think incentives work better, too. So actually providing, you know, instead of your SNAP dollars,
you know, being a dollar, you know, equal for vegetables, you maybe make it a dollar 50 or two
dollars for every dollar you spend on vegetables, but maybe only it's worth 50 cents when you buy
soda. You know, does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, I think that it's really important to
make sure that communities who are struggling with poverty because of institutional racism are not subject to lack of choice. Because then what you have
is you have a situation where people who have wealth get to choose whatever they want to do,
including self-harm. And then people who are poor, not because it's their fault,
right, but because of history of institutional racism, are regulated and constricted in their
choice. And so I really think that it's about holding the corporations accountable rather than
focusing so much on consumer behavior down okay so um you know in your book uh farming while black
you you had a photo in your book and the caption read to free ourselves we must feed ourselves so
why is this such an important thing why is the land so important for liberation of oppressed peoples? 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, you know, 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
Atlanta's 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, Bob Halfkin, 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. Well, you are an inspiration. You are an extraordinary woman
who's doing extraordinary things. And I think lessons that you have learned and the things that you're sharing
about how we got here and how we can get out of here are just amazing. So thank you for being
on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the great questions.
All right. You've been listening to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I encourage you to get Leah's book,
Farming While Black.
It's an extraordinary testament to what she's doing
and the story of how we can get out of where we are.
And if you really loved it, please leave a comment,
share with your friends and family,
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts,
and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.
Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
It's Dr. Mark Hyman.
So two quick things.
Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast.
It really means a lot to me.
If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family.
Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks.
Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things
that I've been using to take my own health to the next level.
This could be books, podcasts, research that I found,
supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets.
I use a few of those.
And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list,
all you have to do is visit drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's drhyman.com
forward slash pics. I'll only email you once a week, I promise, and I'll never send you anything
else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com forward slash pics, that's P-I-C-K-S,
to sign up free today. Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.
Just a reminder that this podcast
is for educational purposes only.
This podcast is not a substitute
for professional care by a doctor
or other qualified medical professional.
This podcast is provided on the 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.