Land, Power, and the Plate: Ending Food Apartheid with Regenerative Justice

24:15Food security is, I'm on food stamps. I can have, you know, a two-liter bottle of soda and a giant bag of chips, oh yeah, 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 that 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.

24:47I mean, just the life expectancy drop that we saw in the last report of three years in Black and Hispanic communities. We 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 in our society from sickness and the consequences of our food system to one that's more able to create a healthy society.

25:24And 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. I get really inspired to think, wow, there are a lot of people thinking about this and working on it. And I think 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.

26:00and we go through a number of bodily systems as one might in one's first year of medical school. So 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. 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 of life.

26:45And 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 possibilities 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.

27:29The 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 it's food corporations in particular who are very interested in this sort of 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 or 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, au contraire.

28:06The 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. Mm-hmm. 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 the human community and in the natural resources and our economic resources.

28:46So 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 bacteria, 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 way as if we're cutting ourselves by the food we're eating, by the stress that 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.

29:36All 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 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 are so many pathways to and from health.

30:11And learning how these circuits work within the body helped 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, through the work with Rupert, 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.

30:53Now, the debts that come with that are an acute form of capitalist stress. And who should swoop in but the robber barons of finance offering things like payday loans. For listeners who don't know, 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 no, 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 because we are at the apex of this kind of predatory capitalism.

31:39But what I didn't fully appreciate was how that stress works through our body, through our microbiome, through our guts, through our skin. and through our endocrine system, and finally, drives us towards despair and stress. And so statistics that I came across when we were researching this certainly blew me away. And I think Rupert was less surprised because she understood the mechanisms. But 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 would drop by 8.9%. Now, you know, one can trot that out in an economics discussion or in a medical discussion.

32:20But 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 stopping short of how it is that we might heal one. No, that's what we're so bad at in medicine. So what Raj 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.

32:58And that's what we see 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 prodding of black and brown workers back to 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.

33:48And 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.

34:2480 % 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 learned the exact opposite, right? We can fix everything. Just come to us. 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.

34:51And 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 that the concept of how do we solve this is really challenging because it's a big problem. But Raj, 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.

35:20And 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 this stuff four times. That would be the price. So how do you sort of frame it in a way that people are listening? Well, what are we expecting, communism? Like, what's the answer? 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 one civilization coming in and displacing or altering another.

36:07You 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 temporarily part of the Spanish Empire, then part of Mexico, and now the United States. So there's a palimpsest 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's the important thing to remember here when we're talking about capitalism is that, and you know this well, Mark, I know that this is a kind of softball question, but you know this well through your work and 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?

37:06If 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 haven't 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 spent cleaning up what these capitalist corporations have created. So what we're saying is 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.

37:42And 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.

38:15You know, if you look at the chemical and seed and ag 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 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 could happen and people would be able to sort of implement, um, alternatives. And now it's very, very tough. And these behemoths, you know, like Nestle and, you know, Mondelez and, um, all these, these, these giant Pepsi, Coke, all these giant companies are, are so dominant that, um, it's very hard to get them to shift.

39:00I mean, they're, they're thinking about, they're looking at, they're feeling the pressure from our culture, but it's, it's really tough. Um, 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 passed around like food apartheid and food colonization and the decolonization of 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.

39:46One 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 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.

40:25Our bodies are simply trying to restore the optimum working condition. 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. 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 that we are sophisticated, highly imaginative, amazing creatures that have a whole repertoire of ideas and creations and experiments and expressions that go beyond the dichotomy between, you know, So an economic system that is currently destroying the planet and everything that supports human life on it.

41:08And, 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, 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 respected regardless of its utility to human beings. It's not simply there to be used by us. It's to move away from the Judeo-Christian framework of humans up here and the rest of life all down there.

42:03The word in the Bible was dominion, which means to rule over. Exactly. As opposed to the word, which really in the original Hebrew was stewardship. Exactly. And what's interesting.

42:41And now you get to menstruate and be in pain, you know? So just the whole framework is, you know, what kind of 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.

43:24You 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 Um, so you can club it over the head and rip out its, um, and rip out its eggs, which is how they farm salmon. I mean, it's the most grotesque thing I've ever seen. Um, and so I think that, um, deep medicine is understanding that health cannot be pursued on an individual level. Um, that health can only be attained in, in proper relationship to each other and the entire web of life. Um, and so those, uh, 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.

44:14And it is directly anti-capitalist. It is saying there's no place in this for turning profits and consolidating power and having dominion, 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 a 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.

44:55um so we're still being taught of the digestive system as this tube that goes from your mouth to your 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 um and so that's you know deep medicine is really understanding those relationships and putting them into good practice and it's ecological medicine well it's yeah it's beyond it's like the ecologies of our social ecologies our political ecologies, our biological ecologies. And 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.

45:42They'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. Well, 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, 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.

46:15Living 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 intersected. 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 to their 100 years of age. And now here they are, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, succumbing to strokes, end-stage renal diseases. and right then and there sort of clicked in my head that there's something wrong with our food system because here were people who were up on farms who were healthy now all of a sudden because of what they were eating were getting these diet-related diseases.

47:06And 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. A French biopsy. 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 and vegetables, but yet it was potato chips, it was cookies, it was sodas.

47:58and 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 friend's neighborhood and go into their stores, walking in, you would see fresh vegetables and fruits and you would never see, 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 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.

48:52We 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, your 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 it as 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, be 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.

49:30And so, you know, I didn't want to go there and be, you know, the sergeant and reprimand. I just wanted them to see the relationship between food and health as 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 a diabetic. Sugar becomes like a drug. You want it more. You want it more. You want more sugar. If you're a dialysis patient, you're limited to amount of liquids, but you want more water. And so even though you would try to talk to the patient and they would understand, don't get me wrong, they understood their disease and what was happening.

50:16but 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 um so you think it's a lack of education or lack of skill 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 say is, time and time and time, 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 fruits and vegetables, plant a little garden without looking at the systemic problems, the institutional and structural problems that reinforce racism in our society.

51:13And no one talks about that. No, it's true. I mean, I remember working with my friend Chris Kennedy and Sheila Kennedy in Southside Chicago, where they created a program called Top Box. It was a nonprofit that got food basically at wholesale from distributors, like the meat packers, the farms. You package it up in boxes. It was fresh food. It was$35 for a family of four for a week of fresh food. And they brought it into the churches in the Southside Chicago. And you could see from the church, there was no grocery store in Stipe, but you could see literally from the church parking lot, probably five or six fast food restaurants just circling around.

51:50And 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 have witnessed in your community is when you bring these foods, people want it. And it's not that they're avoiding it. It's just they don't have access. Is that fair? It's absolutely correcto. Yeah. Absolutely correct. And I say that because you can't tell people to eat healthy, eat fresh fruits and vegetables if they don't have that option. Yeah. And so for me, you know, I've been trying for years, started, you know, a farmer's market, low income farmer's market in the Bronx.

52:31We 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 even at America in the 1960s, African-Americans 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.

53:11And all of a sudden, in a generation, we've seen the incredible sort of speed of these diseases ravaging this community. So if you're African-American, you're 80 % more likely to have type 2 diabetes, four times as likely to have kidney failure, three and a half times as likely to get amputations as whites. Same thing if you're Latino. You know, 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.

53:58they'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 type of health care they're not getting the same type of health care and testing you're less likely if you're African-American for example to get tested for COVID if you have symptoms than if you're white so there's all these embedded problems in our system and I think that you know the the the framework that you have described is quite different than we typically think of this idea of food deserts talk about food deserts as this sort of natural phenomena, like a desert is a natural thing, but it's not a natural thing.

54:33It's a design problem. And you refer to it as food apartheid. So can you talk about this concept of food apartheid and 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, 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 in their neighborhoods.

55:28So 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 desert 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?

56:08You know, like, first of all, who coined the term that's number one? Why is it 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 sort of like softens the tone of the food disparities we see in our society. And so for me, it's just forget food desert because people in the desert would say, well, they say, do we got food? And so I coined the term food apartheid only because i wanted people to first of all what does that mean but also look at the food system along race well because once again look at the food system of a long demographic where does one live and look at the food system or how much money you make your affluence yeah you know and economics and wealth and when you start talking about food apartheid 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 a cheap and subsidized food 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 food deserts and pre-existing diseases and diet-related diseases.

57:46You know, at one time, you look at this country, and even if the world 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 calories per capita. And you can see what was happening in other countries as we've gone from plant-based to animal-based, the intake of calories. And as you saw - It's mostly starchy, 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 into hospital sponsor.

58:32That corn that you see is not for us. It's for food and it's for feeding cows that really can't digest it. And ethanol, 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 to, doesn't need to be fixed. It doesn't say exactly what it's supposed to be doing because we know for a fact, you ask any person in this country, well, would you rather shop at a low income neighborhood or would you like to go to like the Whole Foods, which are in African-American, Trader Joe's and see. So I'm done. It was fascinating. I saw this clip on Instagram of a woman talking to a largely white audience, I think 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?

59:32And not a single person stood up. She said, stand up. She said, I don't think you understood my question. Would anybody who 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 just sort of obscured the ability for people to reclaim their health and their traditional food waste.

1:00:11And 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 trying to change the way people think about food and their health and access? How has that given you insight into maybe how to solve this problem on a bigger scale? Well, I think for me, I see myself as an agitator 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.

1:00:51Or, 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 patients was really, really a mind blowing 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 are never sick a day in their life. Look at me, you know, and they would want to change. And I would bring them fresh fruits and vegetables from my farmer's market at the end of the day, because I think I wanted them to, to, to care. You have someone to care about, about them, but then also to take action.

1:01:31I mean, talk is cheap. People talk about full justice and full sovereignty. But for me, in order to do this work, you have to be actively involved in dismantling some of the social injustices that you see. And so for me, doing like the farmer's market, 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 of 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.

1:02:19I 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 that was a history that was embedded in my head, you know. But since I've been older and really been in the food world and 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 uh tools all of a 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 And it's our blood.

1:03:30We are people of land and food. And so when you start talking 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. I want to embrace it. I want to understand more. And then I don't want to be like my parents and grandparents who are now stroke, end-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.

1:04:17I 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 naive. So for me to see the overwhelming reviews that went too far is extraordinary.

1:05:14to 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 guests' 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.

1:05:44This 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. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public.

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