Food for Thought This MLK Day
By Allie Goldstein
Despite the snow and sub-freezing temperatures on Monday, Dr. Dorceta Taylor delivered SNRE’s annual MLK Lecture to a full house of faculty, students, and community members. The talk, entitled “Race, Poverty, and Access to Food in America: Resistance, Survival, and Sustainability,” followed the trajectory of much of Dr. Taylor’s environmental justice scholarship and teaching, using history as a lens to understanding present food disparities. (WATCH VIDEO OF PRESENTATION | VIEW IMAGES ON FLICKR)
Fulfilling her promise to Dean Marie Lynn Miranda that her talk would be “subversive,” Taylor began by dispelling the popular myth that African slaves in America were illiterate and ignorant. In fact, slave-catchers often targeted captives based on particular agricultural skills, Taylor said, and slaves taught their owners how to grow rice and herd cattle in the early United States. For those who managed to escape slavery, an intimacy with the natural world was essential to survival. Runaways had to live for weeks in the woods on edible fruits and berries, navigate waterways and swamps at night, and keep course by tracing the north star and, when it was cloudy, feeling for tree moss, which grows thicker on the northern side of trunks. Some slaves escaped by hiding in wagons with false bottoms and covering themselves with the very agricultural products they bent their backs to pick.
“Slaves used the very system that was subjugating them and used that to get out of the system,” Taylor said. “They understood how to use ecology as a form of resistance.”
Despite the agricultural expertise of early generations of African Americans, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the decline of black farming has been pronounced in the United States and, according to Taylor, is “one of the untold stories of black relationships to the land.” In 1920, African Americans made up 14.3 percent of all American farmers; by 2007, the proportion fell to 1.4 percent. Taylor drew back the curtain to reveal the story of institutionalized injustice behind these statistics, invoking the USDA’s little known history of denying credit and loan assistance to black farmers. In 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to President John F. Kennedy about this very issue.
The consequences of this disenfranchisement show up on American dinner plates today. In the last segment of her talk, Taylor brought the audience up to the present situation of food and race in America. Of the 49 million Americans living in food-insecure homes, 25.1 percent are black and 26.2 percent are Hispanic, she said. In Michigan, 14.7 percent of households are food insecure. Taylor is now the principle investigator in a 5-year, $4-million study financed by USDA (the irony is not lost on her) to look at food access in 18 small Michigan cities. The research is a collaboration among six universities and six community groups and aims to go beyond past research by questioning the idea of “food deserts” to consider not just food availability, but access to food that is healthy and culturally desirable.
“When you look at a space that might seem like a desert or seem empty, there is something going on in that space,” Taylor said. “Most food access studies in the past have looked at large supermarkets or not. We’re looking at gas stations, restaurants, liquor stores, you name it. Anywhere people buy food.”
Taylor ended her talk by projecting a few maps with preliminary data from the study. The first showed the distribution of large supermarkets—the Meijers and the Krogers and the Whole Foods—in southeastern Michigan, which indeed reinforced the common notion that metropolitan Detroit is a “food desert” with no major supermarket within its borders. Subsequent maps showed a more nuanced picture. Convenience stores were speckled everywhere, with clusters inside Detroit’s borders.
“What if you want to get liquor?” Taylor asked the audience. She clicked to the final map, and liquor stores emerged on the landscape like a quickly spreading case of the chicken pox. “Knock yourself out.”
Though the lecture ended with a laugh, Taylor’s final question echoed back to an earlier one she posed: Will the poorest people buy organic food if it is provided for them? Citing a study that followed food stamp spending at four farmers markets and one mobile fresh food truck in Michigan, Taylor concluded, “The answer is really yes.”