Practical

What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This lens holds two things: the food system, where the theme’s question gets asked three times a day, and the organizing, where people who were answered built the thing they had been refused.

The order matters. The food material makes the argument; the Panthers and the Freedom Farms close it. If the counter-histories come first they read as uplift and let the argument off the hook. They belong last, and framed exactly one way: they fed themselves and treated themselves because the state had already told them what their bodies were worth.

Anchor questions

• Karen Washington says a food desert is an outsider’s word for a place that is full of life. What does the word desert do, and who does it do it for?
• What conditions are attached to being fed in this country? What are the conditions for?
• Crop workers die of heat at roughly twenty times the rate of other workers. Is that a tragedy or a price?
• If the cheapest calories are engineered to be cheap and then aimed at your children, whose fault is your body?
• ACT UP made the FDA move. What did they have that made that possible, and can it be done again?
• The Panthers ran free clinics and the first mass sickle cell screening in the country. What does it mean that they had to?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise.

Food apartheid, not food deserts

• Karen Washington with Anna Brones (2018). The interview that changed the vocabulary. Washington, a farmer and organizer, refuses the word desert because it makes a decision sound like weather, and offers food apartheid instead: the absence was built, and a supermarket will not repair it. Start here. Free: guernicamag.com
• Jerry Shannon, From Food Deserts to Supermarket Redlining (2018). The scholarship under Washington’s naming: the chains left, on a map, on purpose. Free: atlantastudies.org

Fed on conditions

• Parker L. Gilkesson, SNAP Program Integrity: How Racialized Fraud Provisions Criminalize Hunger (2022). Twenty-six pages on what surrounds food assistance: an apparatus of suspicion, and where it lands. Being fed is conditional; the conditions are a judgment about who deserves to eat. Free: clasp.org
• Rachel V. Vernon, A Native Perspective: Food Is More Than Consumption (2015). Rations, commodity foods, and the diabetes that followed; the phrase commod bod for a body produced by what the government handed over. A Native author in the first person, and the direct link to Settler Colonialism, Land, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Free: foodsystemsjournal.org

What the food costs the people who grow it

The organizing is in the labor theme. This is what the work does to the body.

• CDC, Heat-Related Deaths Among Crop Workers (2008). Sixty-eight of 423 US heat deaths in fifteen years were crop workers: roughly twenty times the general rate. Free: cdc.gov (blocks automated checks; live)
• CHAMACOS study (2010). Prenatal pesticide exposure in Salinas Valley farmworker families, and attention deficits in their children. The exposure is inherited. Free: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Leonard Nadel, Bracero workers being fumigated (1956). Naked men sprayed with DDT at the border. The labor was wanted; the bodies were suspect. Free: nlm.nih.gov

Cheap calories, aimed

Assign these two together or neither. The first on its own is a story about corn subsidies that would read identically if every affected body were white; it becomes part of this theme only when the second one shows where the calories were pointed.

• Do and colleagues (2020). Eating from the subsidized commodity stream tracks with cardiometabolic risk, at population scale. Free: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Rudd Center, Increasing disparities in unhealthy food advertising targeted to Hispanic and Black youth (2019). Fast food, candy, sugary drinks, and snacks were 86 percent of food advertising spend on Black-targeted television and 82 percent on Spanish-language television. Healthier categories: about one percent, and zero. This is the receipt. Read it directly before Harrison and Strings in the theoretical lens, because it is the not-controlling that they say people are blamed for. Free: uconnruddcenter.org

The movement that made medicine move

• Denver Principles (1983). One page, written by people with AIDS, and the first line refuses the word victim. Everything in patient self-determination descends from this, and it was written by patients about themselves rather than by anyone about them. Free: actupny.org
• ACT UP Oral History Project. 187 interviews, free, transcribed. How a movement of dying people learned the pharmacology, occupied the FDA, and made it move. Free: actuporalhistory.org
• How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012, 109 min). Built from ACT UP’s own footage of itself. Free with ads on Tubi: tubitv.com. Its companion, United in Anger (Hubbard and Schulman, 2012), is drawn from the oral history project itself, so the archive and the film are one standpoint at two scales: unitedinanger.com

They built it because they had been answered

• Black Panther Party, Ten Point Platform and Program (1972 revision). Point 6 demands completely free health care. From the Party’s own alumni network. Free: bppaln.org
• Black Panther Party’s Free Medical Clinics (1969 to 1975). Clinics in thirteen cities, and the first mass sickle cell screening in the United States, for a disease American medicine had left alone because it was Black. Free: blackpast.org
• Black Panther Party, To Feed Our Children (1969). The Party’s own editorial on Free Breakfast: children need to eat before they can learn. Free: blackpast.org
• Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers (2018). Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative and the Black agricultural cooperatives, recovered as resistance rather than as coping. Paywalled: uncpress.org (blocks automated checks; live). Her free interview carries it: edgeeffects.net

A note on method

Put the counter-histories last and frame them. The Panthers and the Freedom Farms are the most cheering material in this theme, and that is the danger: a room can leave feeling that communities are resilient and forget that resilience was the bill for a decision someone made. They fed and treated themselves because the question had already been answered. Framed that way they close the argument. Framed as inspiration they replace it.

ACT UP is the hardest case in the theme, and worth the argument. It is the great victory: a movement of sick people who learned the science, forced the FDA, and got the drugs. It is also the case that most tempts a room into thinking the system can be moved by sufficiently brilliant organizing. Ask what ACT UP had that a fat Black woman in an examining room does not.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Elizabeth Eisenhauer, In poor health: Supermarket redlining and urban nutrition (2001). The paper that put supermarket redlining into circulation. Canonical and paywalled; Shannon above is the honest free companion. Academic geography, about the affected rather than by them. Not free: link.springer.com

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Named gaps. Nothing food-specific on waste and contamination cleared the bar: the fish-advisory material is thin, and Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie is already in the ecology theme, so this lens points there rather than duplicating. Contemporary health organizing beyond ACT UP is thin: no Medicare for All campaign material, no nurses’ union material, nothing on the current abortion-access infrastructure. Contributions welcome, especially from people running clinics, food programmes, or campaigns now.