Striving for Black Food Sovereignty – Stewards for the Land The Leading Voices in Food

Today, we're talking to Dr. Jasmine Ratliff, who goes by Dr. Jas, and is an applied food systems research and policy specialist, and co-executive director of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. She believes that your zip code should not determine your life expectancy and that building relationships are essential to creating a sustainable and just food system.
Interview Summary
 
So let's begin with this. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about The National Black Food and Justice Alliance and some about your work there?
 
Yes. The National Black Food and Justice Alliance is a coalition of organizations. So we're not just one organizations. We represent multiple others, about 50 now, and we are committed to building Black leadership and Black food sovereignty.
 
Those are really important goals, and not easy ones to reach for sure. So let's dig in a little bit about how you go about doing that. Let's start with kind of your vision. How do you envision food justice and how do you think about the term food sovereignty?
 
I work at the Alliance. And at the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, we focus on Black food sovereignty and self-determining food economies, and specifically land justice. And we approach these through a lens of healing and organizing and resistance against anti-Blackness. And all of the work that we do is in pursuit of food justice. So I have a couple definitions. Founding executive director Dara Cooper defined food justice as a process whereby communities most impacted and exploited by our current corporate-controlled, extractive agricultural system shift power to reshape, redefine, and provide indigenous, community-based solutions to accessing and controlling food. And that includes the means to produce food that it is humanizing, fair, healthy, accessible, racially equitable, environmentally sound, and just. That's how I feel about food justice and it leads us right into food sovereignty. So I know you mentioned it's an overall long goal, and we borrow this one from La Via Campesina, but food sovereignty is the right for peoples to define their own food and agricultural systems, instead of food being subject to international market forces - as we all know food is so globalized. So sovereignty is absolutely our ultimate goal and it can't be achieved without confronting actual governance. So we work to ensure that Black people not only have the right, but the ability to control our food.
 
It really helps to have those definitions. And let's talk just a little bit more about this. So you talked about decision making, needing to reside in the community where the issues are occurring and you mentioned power transfer. Can you just give us some examples of where the system doesn't support these kind of things? Like how is the current system not empower people, and how does it strip people of decision making about their own food systems?
 
Yes! I didn't actually plan to share this one, but I will. A lot of people refer to your geographic location, and I know in my bio you mentioned this, but your zip code shouldn't determine your life expectancy. And right now that does. We don't have the autonomy to create the environment around us. It's so saturated with capitalism and other things that don't put people first. So I think food apartheid instead of the food desert reference is a real way that people are disenfranchised and not in power. And that's also a definition from Dara Cooper, that it's the systemic destruction of Black self-determination to control our food. This includes land, resource stuff, and discrimination, hypersaturation of destructive foods and predatory marketing in a blatantly discriminatory, corporate-controlled food system that results in our communities suffering from some of the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes of all time. Many, like I said, use the term food desert, but food apartheid is a much more accurate representation of the struc