I was surveyed this morning about how the urban food movement can improve and more specifically about what the Chesapeake Urban Farming Summit could address in future gatherings. I sent the following note and I share it here hoping to provoke critical dialogue about the possibilities of the urban farming movement as it intersects with race and economic standing:
From my view, the Healthy Food Revolution must be concerned with a new social arrangement as it relates to healthy food and people of color and the poor. I believe it would be a disservice to the movement to seek to remove agri-business as the overseer of food production/delivery in under-served communities only to replace them with benevolent, White, urban farmers who will assume the role of the indispensable bridge to healthy food.
There is nothing wrong with being a benevolent, White, urban farmer.
However, there is something wrong with under-served communities being denied the right of self-determination – the process by which a community controls their own lives.
In what ways can People of Color be empowered to inform us, teach us, instruct us, lead us in this healthy food movement? In what ways can the poor inform us, teach us, instruct us, lead us in this healthy food movement? Based on what these communities teach us; how can we in the spirit of true solidarity garner the strength of our resources (financial, material, social, etc.) to support what they determine is best needed for their community? These are just a few of the types of questions that I feel need to be raised.
This approach will help produce a new social arrangement that will not only provide vitality to the healthy food movement, but will also give it greater credibility as a true revolution and not just a re-formation of an old social arrangement of control.
Thanks for simple questions, when engaged could make a world of difference. Right now I don't see a willingness to engage these concerns. I suspect this requires a level of mutual accountability and connectivity that a lot of this movement is not comfortable with — a different way of doing and being.
Thanks for the comment, David. "A different way of doing and being" – that's a great way to describe what I feel is necessary. I suspect that you're right about the hesitancy to engage such "simple questions". I plan to share them anyway at a few local settings and national conferences that I'm preparing to attend in the near future. I'll be sure to share any feedback that I receive. Thanks again.
"If we keep doing what we've been doing, we will keep getting what we've been getting": this a quote from author Derrick Bell in his book Faces at the Bottom of the Well. It is time for a change, the chaos, povery, urban blight … in the urban centers are proof of that!
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