Racialicious Crush Of The Week, Facing Race Edition: Yvonne Yen Liu

By Andrea Plaid

Yvonne Yen Liu. Photo: courtesy of the interviewee.

Like I mentioned at the Facing Race roundtable yesterday, the “No Justice, No Peas” panel left a deep impression on me because it addresses what otherwise great food-movement documentaries like Food, Inc. and Forks Over Knives sometimes touch on but tend to erase entirely: the food workers of color who do the incredible work of bringing the food–both organic and non-organic–to USians’ palettes and gullets and how deeply economic exploitation and racial injustice not only affects their lives but the lives of their families and neighborhoods. (The Storified version of the panel is here.) Pretty prescient and very relevant, considering the current fast-food workers strikes. I just had to vibe with the panel’s brilliant and passionate facilitator, Yvonne Yen Liu, who’s the outgoing Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center (the people who bring you the Facing Race conference and Colorlines) and the incoming Director of the Global Movements at WhyHunger. We chatted about not only how she found her way to food justice but also how that issue intertwines with race, racism, sexism, and labor justice, and how one journalist cluelessly said that the food movement isn’t a social justice issue. I know. I know. Read on… Food justice is your passion. How and why did you gravitate to that?

I see food as a portal to addressing a host of social ills.  I am pretty transparent about the fact that I don’t have food politics per se—obviously, I like to eat, and I think that everyone should have access to healthy and affordable food—but, I see the growing interest in local food systems, organic food, slow food, etc. as an opportunity to bring people into the fold of racial justice.  Because we all need to eat, food is something that universally touches all of us, we all enter the food chain at one point or another, whether as a consumer, a worker, or grower.  How can we shift people from a particular position to recognize that we’re all interlinked, whether we be a small family farmer, a restaurant worker, or an artisanal goat cheese maker.

The food justice movement itself is rather young, but we are informed by other struggles, as I wrote in the Good Food and Good Jobs for All[1] report published by the Applied Research Center this past summer.  The food movement has its roots in the back-to-land movement in the 1960s, the environmental justice turn with the People of Color Summit in the 1990s, and even the self-described “survival pending revolution” breakfast programs by the Black Panthers.  How can we, the nascent food movement, learn lessons from other struggles, work in conjunction within multiracial coalitions, to build power?

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