Juan Williams, Fox News: Speaker Gingrich, the suggestion that you made was about a lack of work ethic and I’ve gotta tell you my email account and my Twitter account has been inundated by people of all races who are asking if your comment was not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities … you saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina by a woman who asked why you refer to Barack Obama as a “food stamp president.” it sounds like you’re trying to belittle people.

Newt Gingrich: first of all Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by barack obama than by any president in americanhistory. I know that among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable. Second, you’re the one who, earlier, raised a key point: the area that oughta be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a “corridor of shame” because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built a road, they haven’t helped the people, they haven’t done anything. One last thing … so here’s my point: I believe every American, of every background, has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.”
- Video via The Grio

The growth partly reflects an increase in need, as millions of Americans have lost income and lost jobs or remain out of work. In addition, food prices have increased, eligibility has been expanded, and the 2009 economic stimulus law temporarily increased benefits.

Before Mr. Obama took office, food stamp participation was rising, in part because of federal policies that encouraged low-income people to seek aid for which they were eligible.

Nearly half of food stamp recipients are under age 18. Nearly 30 percent of food stamp households have earned income. Only 15 percent of such households have income above the poverty level ($18,500 for a family of three in 2011).

– Robert Pear, New York Times

“Do you see how these remarks might offend people?” Williams asked.

Newt replied, “No, I don’t see that.” He then defended his position, citing anecdotal accounts of young people who prospered as janitors, or as doughnut deliverers. Gingrich went on to say that he got the idea from a Joe Klein article about New York City schools, which is true.

“Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich said. But as Benjy Sarlin points out, if you hired 30 kids for one janitor contract, those kids wouldn’t be able to form an emotional attachment to earning money, because they wouldn’t earn very much.
- Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post

- Video via Buzzfeed

The audience at the South Carolina GOP debate interrupted a question to Mitt Romney that referenced his family’s ties to Mexico with an audible boo from what sounded like several people as the question was asked.

Romney’s father was born in Mexico, where his parents were part of a Mormon enclave that had moved temporarily from the United States.
- Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo

In New Hampshire last Sunday, Romney mentioned that his father, George, was born in Mexico and came to the United States at age five. On Wednesday he took to the airwaves in Florida with a new Spanish-language ad entitled “Nosotros,” meaning “us.” The Republican National Committee got in on the act, too, announcing a beefed-up outreach effort to Hispanic voters.

But it may be too little, too late. Even before his DREAM Act comments, Romney faced an uphill battle with Latinos. A poll conducted by Latino Decisions for Univision in November found that among registered Hispanic voters in the 21 most Hispanic-heavy states, Obama held a whopping 67 percent to 24 percent lead over Romney.

While Romney could make up some ground among Latinos by selecting someone like Cuban-American Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as his eventual running mate, the GOP may have missed a golden opportunity to swing the 2012 election by earning the backing of Latino voters.
- Matthew Jaffe, ABC News

From the TV cutaways they seemed clean, well-dressed, and drug-free. And yet their reactions would scare off any sane, sensible person. In previous debates the right-wing GOP audiences booed a gay soldier. Someone shouted “Let him die!” in response to a question about an uninsured person.

But in South Carolina they took the cake. The crowd booed the mere mention of the name of the country of Mexico. Just the name. I might understand it if they booed, say, North Korea or Iran or Texas A&M—centers of evil. But Mexico? Good luck with that Latino vote in November, guys.

Then, when Ron Paul said the Golden Rule should guide our foreign policy, the crowd booed. They booed the Golden Rule. Apparently nobody told them that Jesus wrote the Golden Rule. On second thought, they’d have booed Jesus.
- Paul Begala, The Daily Beast

Originally delivered Aug. 16, 1967, at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. Transcript courtesy of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute

Dr. Abernathy, our distinguished vice president, fellow delegates to this, the tenth annual session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, my brothers and sisters from not only all over the South, but from all over the United States of America: ten years ago during the piercing chill of a January day and on the heels of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, a group of approximately one hundred Negro leaders from across the South assembled in this church and agreed on the need for an organization to be formed that could serve as a channel through which local protest organizations in the South could coordinate their protest activities. It was this meeting that gave birth to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And when our organization was formed ten years ago, racial segregation was still a structured part of the architecture of southern society. Negroes with the pangs of hunger and the anguish of thirst were denied access to the average lunch counter. The downtown restaurants were still off-limits for the black man. Negroes, burdened with the fatigue of travel, were still barred from the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. Negro boys and girls in dire need of recreational activities were not allowed to inhale the fresh air of the big city parks. Negroes in desperate need of allowing their mental buckets to sink deep into the wells of knowledge were confronted with a firm “no” when they sought to use the city libraries. Ten years ago, legislative halls of the South were still ringing loud with such words as “interposition” and “nullification.” All types of conniving methods were still being used to keep the Negro from becoming a registered voter. A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or a chauffeur. Ten years ago, all too many Negroes were still harried by day and haunted by night by a corroding sense of fear and a nagging sense of nobody-ness.

But things are different now. In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. During this era the entire edifice of segregation was profoundly shaken. This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every southern Negro in his daily life. It is no longer possible to count the number of public establishments that are open to Negroes. Ten years ago, Negroes seemed almost invisible to the larger society, and the facts of their harsh lives were unknown to the majority of the nation. But today, civil rights is a dominating issue in every state, crowding the pages of the press and the daily conversation of white Americans. In this decade of change, the Negro stood up and confronted his oppressor. He faced the bullies and the guns, and the dogs and the tear gas. He put himself squarely before the vicious mobs and moved with strength and dignity toward them and decisively defeated them.  And the courage with which he confronted enraged mobs dissolved the stereotype of the grinning, submissive Uncle Tom.  He came out of his struggle integrated only slightly in the external society, but powerfully integrated within. This was a victory that had to precede all other gains.

In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up, realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent. We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us. We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We gained manhood in the nation that had always called us “boy.” It would be hypocritical indeed if I allowed modesty to forbid my saying that SCLC stood at the forefront of all of the watershed movements that brought these monumental changes in the South. For this, we can feel a legitimate pride. But in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved. The deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.

And before discussing the awesome responsibilities that we face in the days ahead, let us take an inventory of our programmatic action and activities over the past year. Last year as we met in Jackson, Mississippi, we were painfully aware of the struggle of our brothers in Grenada, Mississippi. After living for a hundred or more years under the yoke of total segregation, the Negro citizens of this northern Delta hamlet banded together in nonviolent warfare against racial discrimination under the leadership of our affiliate chapter and organization there. The fact of this non-destructive rebellion was as spectacular as were its results. In a few short weeks the Grenada County Movement challenged every aspect of the society’s exploitative life. Stores which denied employment were boycotted; voter registration increased by thousands. We can never forget the courageous action of the people of Grenada who moved our nation and its federal courts to powerful action in behalf of school integration, giving Grenada one of the most integrated school systems in America. The battle is far from over, but the black people of Grenada have achieved forty of fifty-three demands through their persistent nonviolent efforts.

Slowly but surely, our southern affiliates continued their building and organizing. Seventy-nine counties conducted voter registration drives, while double that number carried on political education and get-out-the-vote efforts. In spite of press opinions, our staff is still overwhelmingly a southern-based staff. One hundred and five persons have worked across the South under the direction of Hosea Williams. What used to be primarily a voter registration staff is actually a multifaceted program dealing with the total life of the community, from farm cooperatives, business development, tutorials, credit unions, etcetera. Especially to be commended are those ninety-nine communities and their staffs which maintain regular mass meetings throughout the year.

Our Citizenship Education Program continues to lay the solid foundation of adult education and community organization upon which all social change must ultimately rest. This year, five hundred local leaders received training at Dorchester and ten community centers through our Citizenship Education Program. They were trained in literacy, consumer education, planned parenthood, and many other things. And this program, so ably directed by Mrs. Dorothy Cotton, Mrs. Septima Clark, and their staff of eight persons, continues to cover ten southern states. Our auxiliary feature of C.E.P. is the aid which they have given to poor communities, poor counties in receiving and establishing O.E.O. projects. With the competent professional guidance of our marvelous staff member, Miss Mew Soong-Li, Lowndes and Wilcox counties in Alabama have pioneered in developing outstanding poverty programs totally controlled and operated by residents of the area.

Perhaps the area of greatest concentration of my efforts has been in the cities of Chicago and Cleveland. Chicago has been a wonderful proving ground for our work in the North. There have been no earth-shaking victories, but neither has there been failure. Our open housing marches, which finally brought about an agreement which actually calls the power structure of Chicago to capitulate to the civil rights movement, these marches and the agreement have finally begun to pay off. After the season of delay around election periods, the Leadership Conference, organized to meet our demands for an open city, has finally begun to implement the programs agreed to last summer.

But this is not the most important aspect of our work. As a result of our tenant union organizing, we have begun a four million dollar rehabilitation project, which will renovate deteriorating buildings and allow their tenants the opportunity to own their own homes. This pilot project was the inspiration for the new home ownership bill, which Senator Percy introduced in Congress only recently.

The most dramatic success in Chicago has been Operation Breadbasket. Through Operation Breadbasket we have now achieved for the Negro community of Chicago more than twenty-two hundred new jobs with an income of approximately eighteen million dollars a year, new income to the Negro community. But not only have we gotten jobs through Operation Breadbasket in Chicago; there was another area through this economic program, and that was the development of financial institutions which were controlled by Negroes and which were sensitive to problems of economic deprivation of the Negro community. The two banks in Chicago that were interested in helping Negro businessmen were largely unable to loan much because of limited assets. Hi-Lo, one of the chain stores in Chicago, agreed to maintain substantial accounts in the two banks, thus increasing their ability to serve the needs of the Negro community. And I can say to you today that as a result of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, both of these Negro-operated banks have now more than double their assets, and this has been done in less than a year by the work of Operation Breadbasket.

In addition, the ministers learned that Negro scavengers had been deprived of significant accounts in the ghetto. Whites controlled even the garbage of Negroes. Consequently, the chain stores agreed to contract with Negro scavengers to service at least the stores in Negro areas. Negro insect and rodent exterminators, as well as janitorial services, were likewise excluded from major contracts with chain stores. The chain stores also agreed to utilize these services. It also became apparent that chain stores advertised only rarely in Negro-owned community newspapers. This area of neglect was also negotiated, giving community newspapers regular, substantial accounts. And finally, the ministers found that Negro contractors, from painters to masons, from electricians to excavators, had also been forced to remain small by the monopolies of white contractors. Breadbasket negotiated agreements on new construction and rehabilitation work for the chain stores. These several interrelated aspects of economic development, all based on the power of organized consumers, hold great possibilities for dealing with the problems of Negroes in other northern cities. The kinds of requests made by Breadbasket in Chicago can be made not only of chain stores, but of almost any major industry in any city in the country.

And so Operation Breadbasket has a very simple program, but a powerful one. It simply says, “If you respect my dollar, you must respect my person.” It simply says that we will no longer spend our money where we can not get substantial jobs.

In Cleveland, Ohio, a group of ministers have formed an Operation Breadbasket through our program there and have moved against a major dairy company. Their requests include jobs, advertising in Negro newspapers, and depositing funds in Negro financial institutions. This effort resulted in something marvelous. I went to Cleveland just last week to sign the agreement with Sealtest. We went to get the facts about their employment; we discovered that they had 442 employees and only forty-three were Negroes, yet the Negro population of Cleveland is thirty-five percent of the total population. They refused to give us all of the information that we requested, and we said in substance, “Mr. Sealtest, we’re sorry. We aren’t going to burn your store down. We aren’t going to throw any bricks in the window. But we are going to put picket signs around and we are going to put leaflets out and we are going to our pulpits and tell them not to sell Sealtest products, and not to purchase Sealtest products.”

We did that. We went through the churches. Reverend Dr. Hoover, who pastors the largest church in Cleveland, who’s here today, and all of the ministers got together and got behind this program. We went to every store in the ghetto and said, “You must take Sealtest products off of your counters. If not, we’re going to boycott your whole store.” A&P refused. We put picket lines around A&P; they have a hundred and some stores in Cleveland, and we picketed A&P and closed down eighteen of them in one day. Nobody went in A&P. The next day Mr. A&P was calling on us, and Bob Brown, who is here on our board and who is a public relations man representing a number of firms, came in. They called him in because he worked for A&P, also; and they didn’t know he worked for us, too. Bob Brown sat down with A&P, and he said, they said, “Now, Mr. Brown, what would you advise us to do.” He said, “I would advise you to take Sealtest products off of all of your counters.” A&P agreed next day not only to take Sealtest products off of the counters in the ghetto, but off of the counters of every A&P store in Cleveland, and they said to Sealtest, “If you don’t reach an agreement with SCLC and Operation Breadbasket, we will take Sealtest products off of every A&P store in the state of Ohio.”

The next day, the next day the Sealtest people were talking nice, they were very humble. And I am proud to say that I went to Cleveland just last Tuesday, and I sat down with the Sealtest people and some seventy ministers from Cleveland, and we signed the agreement. This effort resulted in a number of jobs, which will bring almost five hundred thousand dollars of new income to the Negro community a year. We also said to Sealtest, “The problem that we face is that the ghetto is a domestic colony that’s constantly drained without being replenished. And you are always telling us to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, and yet we are being robbed every day. Put something back in the ghetto.” So along with our demand for jobs, we said, “We also demand that you put money in the Negro savings and loan association and that you take ads, advertise, in the Cleveland Call & Post, the Negro newspaper.” So along with the new jobs, Sealtest has now deposited thousands of dollars in the Negro bank of Cleveland and has already started taking ads in the Negro newspaper in that city. This is the power of Operation Breadbasket.

Now, for fear that you may feel that it’s limited to Chicago and Cleveland, let me say to you that we’ve gotten even more than that. In Atlanta, Georgia, Breadbasket has been equally successful in the South. Here the emphasis has been divided between governmental employment and private industry. And while I do not have time to go into the details, I want to commend the men who have been working with it here: the Reverend Bennett, the Reverend Joe Boone, the Reverend J. C. Ward, Reverend Dorsey, Reverend Greer, and I could go on down the line, and they have stood up along with all of the other ministers. But here is the story that’s not printed in the newspapers in Atlanta: as a result of Operation Breadbasket, over the last three years, we have added about twenty-five million dollars of new income to the Negro community every year.

Now as you know, Operation Breadbasket has now gone national in the sense that we had a national conference in Chicago and agreed to launch a nationwide program, which you will hear more about.

Finally, SCLC has entered the field of housing. Under the leadership of attorney James Robinson, we have already contracted to build 152 units of low-income housing with apartments for the elderly on a choice downtown Atlanta site under the sponsorship of Ebenezer Baptist Church. This is the first project [applause], this is the first project of a proposed southwide Housing Development Corporation which we hope to develop in conjunction with SCLC, and through this corporation we hope to build housing from Mississippi to North Carolina using Negro workmen, Negro architects, Negro attorneys, and Negro financial institutions throughout. And it is our feeling that in the next two or three years, we can build right here in the South forty million dollars worth of new housing for Negroes, and with millions and millions of dollars in income coming to the Negro community.

Now there are many other things that I could tell you, but time is passing. This, in short, is an account of SCLC’s work over the last year. It is a record of which we can all be proud.

With all the struggle and all the achievements, we must face the fact, however, that the Negro still lives in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom, despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is there’s almost no room at the top. In consequence, Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascend by using their own resources. And the Negro did not do this himself; it was done to him. For more than half of his American history, he was enslaved. Yet, he built the spanning bridges and the grand mansions, the sturdy docks and stout factories of the South. His unpaid labor made cotton “King” and established America as a significant nation in international commerce. Even after his release from chattel slavery, the nation grew over him, submerging him. It became the richest, most powerful society in the history of man, but it left the Negro far behind.

And so we still have a long, long way to go before we reach the promised land of freedom. Yes, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt, and we have crossed a Red Sea that had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance, but before we reach the majestic shores of the promised land, there will still be gigantic mountains of opposition ahead and prodigious hilltops of injustice. We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand. Yes, we need a chart; we need a compass; indeed, we need some North Star to guide us into a future shrouded with impenetrable uncertainties.

Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was sixty percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share: There are twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites; and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.

In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, seventy-five percent hold menial jobs. This is where we are.

Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amid a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.

Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such words as blot, soot, grim, devil, and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep.” Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority. [applause] The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper.

To offset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation. And with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents, and now I’m not ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave.” Yes, yes, we must stand up and say, “I’m black , but I’m black and beautiful.” This, this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.

Now another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in to economic and political power. Now no one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power, both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. Now the problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power, a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now, power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say, ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.”

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.

You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love.

Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love, implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.

Now what has happened is that we’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Now we must develop progress, or rather, a program— and I can’t stay on this long— that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in the century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. And in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the, that of a taskmaster or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.

Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problem of housing, education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor, transformed into purchasers, will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife, and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.

Now, our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.

Now, let me rush on to say we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. And I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Now, yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with the causes for them. Today I want to give the other side. There is something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you perceive a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.

Occasionally, Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional anti-poverty money allotted by frightened government officials and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.

And when one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard, and finally, the army to call on, all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him and up in the hills, but he would have never overthrown the Batista regime unless he had had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people. It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves.

This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer, and explanations that don’t explain.

And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am still convinced, and I’m still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country.

And the other thing is, I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we aren’t moving wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who loves has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.

And so I say to you today, my friends, that you may be able to speak with the tongues of men and angels; you may have the eloquence of articulate speech; but if you have not love, it means nothing. Yes, you may have the gift of prophecy; you may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules; you may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights; yes, you may ascend to the heights of academic achievement so that you have all knowledge; and you may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees; but if you have not love, all of these mean absolutely nothing. You may even give your goods to feed the poor; you may bestow great gifts to charity; and you may tower high in philanthropy; but if you have not love, your charity means nothing. You may even give your body to be burned and die the death of a martyr, and your spilt blood may be a symbol of honor for generations yet unborn, and thousands may praise you as one of history’s greatest heroes; but if you have not love, your blood was spilt in vain. What I’m trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego, and his piety may feed his pride. So without love, benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?” These are words that must be said.

Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.

What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social.  And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

And if you will let me be a preacher just a little bit.  One day, one night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down on the kind of isolated approach of what you shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic: that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down on one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”

In other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.

What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”

And so, I conclude by saying today that we have a task, and let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction.

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.

Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.

Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.

Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.

Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied.

Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.

Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.

Let us be dissatisfied, and men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!” when nobody will shout, “Black Power!” but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.

And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation from the words so nobly left by that great black bard, who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way
That with tears has been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered.
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.

Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow, with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome! We have overcome! Deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

Martin Luther King – Where Do We Go From Here? (Conclusion) from MLK Speeches on Vimeo.

By Arturo R. García

You might want to keep an eye out at your local arthouse theaters around March 9, when Jiro Dreams of Sushi is scheduled for release.

As the trailer above begins, David Gelb’s documentary would seem to deal with master chef Jiro Ono, who has developed his 10-seat restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, into a $300-a-plate hot ticket. But this extended trailer clues us in on a deeper story: when will Jiro finally hang up his knife? And can his son, Yoshikazu, possibly live up to Jiro’s legacy?

“Whose food?”

Our food.

Signs of “Turn the beet around!” (an obvious nod to the fact that most beets in the US, the source of a large percentage of our granulated sugar, are genetically modified), “Zucchini Park,” and “Take back our food!” filled Wall Street as the members and supporters of the #OccupyBigFood movement made their way into Zucotti Park, with myself and the toddler in tow, bringing up the rear.

I’d made the decision to go a long time ago, when one of the supporters left a link in my comments regarding the original affair. That scheduled Saturday was also the date of the first “Big Snow” of the pending 2011-2012 disgustingly-wet-and-blisteringly-cold season, so it was ill-attended (which meant that I wound up out there among the #OWS Tent City.)

The human mic system at Zuccotti Park blasted valuable message after valuable message, meaningful morsel of info after meaningful morsel:

“Corporate entities are ensuring big subsidies for themselves while convincing Congress to cut money from programs like SNAP…”

“The Union that makes up the people that SERVE that food stand in solidarity with the people who are treated inhumanely and are made to harvest that food for pennies,”

“We want a sustainable system that ensures and guarantees access for everyone,”

All things that we stand for here, though it may not be coming from the same angles as those at the #OccupyBigFood rally.

I attended the rally because, aside from the fact that I felt some kind of solidarity to a movement that supports living la vida locavore, but I felt like it needs to be clear that the people who complain about the current food climate are not merely wealthy and white. Persons of color, women, mothers, children… we are all affected by poor decision making, favoritism, nepotism and ass kissing that takes place in Congress, and it’s important for us to do what we can do to prevent people from dismissing valuable dialogue as “elitism,” which – as we all know – is code for “privileged white people talk.”

I stood as a part of the huge human mic system and helped convey the message that we are not powerless, we are not to be dismissed as merely “foodies” and we are not going anywhere. We – according to “you” – have money and will spend it locally and support our own system. We’ve decided yours isn’t working.

That’s what I left #OccupyBigFood with – a renewed sense in the fact that not only is the current system an utter failure, but it is up to us to change it for ourselves. If the government that we elect can justify cutting the program that funnels money into small businesses in underserved areas – because, let’s face it, that’s exactly what food stamps is and exactly what it does – thereby causing the businesses in the area to suffer as well as the people who use food stamps to buy their products, then you can rest assured that it’ll be a long damn time before they do anything to secure our food supply. They don’t care like we do, and that – at least, to me, is fine.

Why? Because if we are conscious enough to know that we should buy locally, we are also conscious enough to know that there are those of us who don’t have access, and need help getting there. If we can innovate enough to turn a backwards bathrobes (also known as a Snuggie) into a million-dollar invention, surely we can innovate to create small sub communities that can enjoy produce and meat without adulteration. We can continue to educate about healthy choices and assist, as well as support, our peers in making them.

There were a few speakers at the event – the leader of a food workers’ union, a gentleman who identified himself and his wife as “One of the 1%ers you complain about, but we stand in solidarity with you!” and a certain nutritionist you might’ve heard of, but at the end of it all, I wish I had grabbed the mic and had my OWN mic check:

“In a world where any human being with a heart believes it is acceptable to cut money intended to assist the poor in staying fed as well as funding the small businesses in the area who service those poor, it is unfathomable to me that people could turn their backs on the idea of genuinely helping and supporting one another. These companies, with their lies and disregard for their customers, they don’t give a damn about you and me… they only care about what’s in our wallets… well now, they’re not getting what’s in THERE either! I’m spending my money as far away from those corrupt big names as I possibly can, and maybe THEN the Krafts, General Mills’ and Kelloggs of the world will finally change their ways!”

Alas, I didn’t. I was too busy consoling the ornery kindergartner (!) standing on my leg. My overall point is that we don’t have enough time to wait for someone else to do this for us, and our best means of supporting the movement is by trying to funnel as much money as possible into its expansion. Multinationals started out as tiny operations once, too. Money helps any-and-everything grow. You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. I think that message was conveyed well without me, anyway.

At any rate, the rally was successful. I’m interested in what coverage – if any – the rally may have received, and whether or not anyone was able to get my full ‘fro in a shot… er, I mean, whether the diverseness of the crowd was covered adequately. I also got to meet a certain awesome author and professor named Marion Nestle, and thank her for her book. If you didn’t notice, I’m a bit of a “follow the money” type, and talking to me in terms of logic and corrupt policy in regards to corporate decision making is a pretty good way to convince me that money, not health, was the reason behind so much of what we see in food today. You follow the money, you can find the reality behind anything. I wish more people thought that way.

Would I attend again? Of course. To help express the fact that there are people who live in food deserts who have no choice other than frito-lay products and lunchables; to remind us all that even in our quest for food sustainability, the issue of compromised health is plaguing those of us who either struggle with affording or struggle for access to fresh and local produce; and to help us realize that education and conscious consumerism are the best ways to affect change. No greater reminder of this exists, for me, than the fact that our community is so culturally and financially diverse. Some of us are in cow-pools; others have given up meat completely because they can’t afford the ethically grown stuff. Some of us are complete locavores; and some of us are strictly frozen-vegetarians. Some of us are wild pescetarians, and others are, well, budgetarians. We know Hippocrates was right – “let thy medicine be thy food, and let thy food be thy medicine” – and now it’s time the rest of the country learns that, as well.

PS: Okra pie, though?

Image credits: Erika Nicole Kendall

It’s hard to navigate New York City with someone who lived his whole life there, without them mentioning “gentrification” at least once.

Lucky me, I didn’t get it once. I got it at least once… a day.

While my time in Cleveland as a kid was spent in areas that could’ve seriously benefit from the privilege that the gentry (those who do the gentrifying) brings with it, my home in Indiana? Let’s just say that it’s highly unlikely that it’d ever need more money to come in. Needless to say, my experiences with gentrification are pretty non-existent.

But what is gentrification? It is, in a nutshell, when money (or perceived money, which is more important than the actual money, to me) moves in. I used to assume that it was about race, much like this guy:

“I used to think it was about race — when white people moved into a black neighborhood,” said lawyer Charles Wilson, 35, who lost to Marion Barry in the 2008 Ward 8 D.C. Council race. “Then, I looked up the word. It’s when a middle-class person moves into a poor neighborhood. And I realized: I am a gentrifier. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t like that word. It makes so many people uncomfortable.”

“Actually, I thought it was if you see a white guy in Anacostia, listening to an iPod, jogging or walking a dog!” joked Sariane Leigh, 33, who writes a blog called Anacostia Yogi, putting her hand on her hip and waving a sweet-potato fry for emphasis.

The friends fold into laughter. They agree not to use the G-word, at least for one night.

Gentrification is always a delicate topic, especially in a city where it usually has meant well-to-do whites buying up affordable houses in predominantly black neighborhoods. The trend is reflected in recent census figures that show that the District is no longer a majority-black city and by ever-whiter neighborhoods such as Shaw and H Street Northeast.

But black gentrification is increasingly redefining the G-word and changing the economics of places like Anacostia. [source]

Why am I bringing this up? After leaving Bar Sepia one night, we passed by one of the mister’s old standard bodegas (basically, a convenient store), but he did a double take… and eventually, a full stop.

“Wow, man,” was all I heard. “Gentrification is real.”

The bodega wasn’t simply a “bodega” anymore. It was, apparently, an organic produce store… with respectable prices. Hell, I can’t even get that.

Like race, money comes with its own assumptions. When money moves into a community, the police presence increases. Why? Because no one wants to bring their money into an environment where it’s bound to be stolen, and everyone knows that. When money moves into an area, businesses are quick to follow (specially if the promise of increased security is looming)… businesses providing services and products that the entrepreneurs believe would be profitable there. I mean, that’s basic capitalism. You go where the money can be found.

This has a strange effect on the availability – and quality – of food in an area. If increased presence of money means increased produce… then increased produce – by nature of trying to one-up their competitors – means increased presence of organics, which means increased presence of local produce… which eventually means decreased price. Competitors are constantly trying to one-up each other, and they do that by decreasing the price of the necessities while offering special and unique products at a premium.

This is a strange situation. Gentrification, that which has been cast off as such a dirty word (and has people, like the above, ashamed to no longer be poverty-status poor?), is actually making food cheaper. I mean, damn – never in my life have I seen an organic red pepper go for $0.99.

But is it always just the money, or was originally right? Is it who (rather, what race) is bringing the money? And furthermore, can the race element be overlooked if other “hipster/urban yuppie-ish” businesses are thriving in the area? (Let’s not play coy, here – as much as I love my yoga, seeing three yoga studios on the same block is the epitome of overkill.) A couple of weeks ago, I received the following comment from Dee, a Chicago reader:

I live in Chicago, which is a very segregated city. I do know that there are some great produce markets with good-quality, cheap produce in many of the predominantly Latin@ communities. I know that the food deserts in the city are all in predominantly African American communities — and that at least in Chicago, food access is correlated to race but not income (food deserts in poor, working class, and middle class communities.) (If you are really curious about food deserts in Chicago, there are good study reports herehttp://www.marigallagher.com/projects/ — I am a teacher and therefore I’m particular about language and citing my sources.)

…which takes you to this .pdf file, dated June 2011, that provides this not-so-awesome statistic for Chicago:

About 70% of the total Food Desert Population is African American. The remaining 30% is roughly an equal split of whites and Latinos.

There’s also a map in that .pdf and, if you know anything about Chicago and its “South Side,” well… let’s just say it’s easy to guess where those food deserts lie.

Now, I’m aware I went from New York City to Chicago in a matter of a few paragraphs, but it all – at least to me – ties into this:

It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographing “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc. … ie. the black and Hispanic and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” –

I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on.

So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards … it’s just being poor– but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something.

And YES black people on bikes and with gardens DO have an awareness of the environment. Surprisingly so! These values are in our communities and they are good values. My Grandmother was an organic gardener before it was “cool” –My mother believed in composting all waste and recycling whatever could be reused– it was a religious thing. God hates waste. [source]

Again, the focus on “choice,” something that – as we see often here on BGG2WL – not everyone is afforded. There’s also that class/race-defaulting thing going on here, too – if “poor people” (who are, assumedly, of color – and don’t we all assume poor people are people of color?) are just being poor by growing their own food (’cause, y’know, they can’t afford to pay all that money to eat garbage) and “white people” are assigned the noble position of “saving the Earth” by growing their own food… what are poor white people doing when they grow their own food? I mean, they’re poor, yes… but they’re not default poor, which is Black or “Brown.”

Excerpted from The Unbearable Whiteness of Eating: How The Food Culture War Affects Black America | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

And, to me, this also very much ties into the original reason I began writing about food deserts in the first place, and that was a posting on The Root that proclaimed that Blacks have some form of hereditary slave palate that prevents them from even wanting fresh produce and quality meat, should they choose to eat it. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a ridiculous theory, but being ridiculous has never stopped a ton of people from believing it, before. It’s only a bigger deal here because that stereotype is affecting whether or not areas that need the healthier produce actually get them.

The article I quoted above speaks of Anacostia, a DC area said to be rife with “crime and violence, now offers yoga studios and chai lattes.” On that link you’ll find a map of businesses, libraries and hospitals in the Anacostia area, with one little organic grocery claiming to be “the first organic grocery store east of the river.” I can’t help but compare that to the area of Brooklyn I called home for a week or so, and the multiple organic spots we had access to within walking distance.

So, what do I get from all this? While gentrification plays a huge part in where businesses go, the money will have a hard time overshadowing the race if it is assumed that, simply because of your race, you won’t have an interest in what’s being offered. I don’t really know how to combat that.

While gentrification absolutely has its pitfalls – “Not everyone, of course, could stay. As neighborhoods gentrify, buildings are sold, landlords raise rents, and some people are forced out. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to wait for the dual bugaboos to arrive before you get a decent grocery store or adequate police patrols.” [source] – and its shortcomings, I’m inclined to presume that one of its most peculiar shortcomings is that even the Black members of The Gentry will struggle with overcoming the stereotypes of being “default poor.”

Photo credits: Nostrand Park; BikePortland.org

So look, David: Chinese people eat weird food. There is a saying that “Chinese will eat anything with its back to the sky,” and another that says “Chinese will eat anything with legs but a table and anything with wings but an airplane.” These are Chinese sayings, I might point out — a sign that Chinese aren’t exactly unaware that the “delicacies” that send prim Westerners to their fainting couches are a little off the beaten path.

But Chinese are far from the only culture that eats weird food, and fuck, given that you’re from North Carolina, have you looked at what American Southerners traditionally eat? No? Chitlins! Possum! Muskrat! Bull testicles! Oh wait, you’re from suburban Raleigh, so probably not, given that most of the more exotic dishes in Southern cuisine, like in many culinary traditions, was the offspring of necessity — invention midwived by destitution. If you’re hungry enough, rodents will start to look tasty, as will chicken claws, stray innards and balls. And once you’ve eaten them long enough, all these things evolve into nostalgic signifiers — especially after you’ve pulled yourself out of poverty. They go from things you have to eat all the time to things you choose to eat once in a while, to remind yourself you don’t have to eat them all the time.

And this is what’s truly ugly about your piece, David: For someone who’s spent a lot of your career puncturing middle-class aspiration and self-delusion, your essay is unpleasantly blind to the fact that all of China is just a few generations removed from dire, desperate want, and that many people, like the peasant family you had such a bad experience sharing a meal with, continue to subsist on an annual income that’s a tiny fraction of what a sophisticated awesome American literary superstar like you loses in his sofa. And in a country of 1.3 billion people, even having braised pig’s stomach to occasionally go with your daily rice is a fucking luxury.

–From David Sedaris Thinks Chinese People (and Food) Are Repulsive, Which Makes Me Sad, Because I Used to Like David Sedaris

When I was about 5 or so, I used to go to my grandmother’s house during the day while my Mother went to work. I remember catching the bus and sleeping across my Mom’s lap until we got there, and then her hugging me and heading off to do whatever it was she did all day. (I was five. Clearly, I had no idea.)

Grandma was cool, but there was always a bajillion people at her house. She lived in the projects*, and spent a big portion of her day being “Mama”to everyone even though she was well into her 50s.

I remember, as a kid, how the big thing was for us to run across the street to the convenient store and get a Big Red pop and a bag of chips. All for $0.50. I mean, it was how we spent every afternoon. Because Grandma’s house was full of people, it was never hard for me to get a hold of two quarters – ahhh, two shiny, glorious quarters – so that I could be like the rest of the kids and sit in the middle of the grass and eat my funyuns or my munchos and my Big Red pop.

(I’m from the Midwest. We say pop, thank you very much.)

It wasn’t that I was Grandma’s favorite, but…. well, I was Grandma’s favorite. She invested a lot of time and effort into me. She taught me to read – she’d hand me the newspaper and make me read every page out loud – and she taught me how to be a little lady. She taught me how to love, as a young girl, because outside of that typical adoration that a young girl has for her mother, you learn that that thing that binds you to Grandma emotionally and you understand it even more so once she’s gone. That made her valuable.

However, I must admit. If there’s one thing I don’t remember, it’s going to a grocery store with Grandma. We just.. we never went together. At least, we didn’t go to a grocery store as I know a grocery store to be today. The only store I ever saw her go to was the convenient store across the street.

And now that I think about it, there’s a lot of things I don’t remember about that time with Grandma.

I don’t remember a lot of cooking going on. I don’t even know that I remember any fresh vegetables there. I mean, I remember my Great Grandma – my Grandma’s mother – having that gorgeous garden in her fenced-off backyard, but Grandma didn’t have that kind of backyard. The soil didn’t even have grass on it. It was just hard dirt. I know. I fell on it and scraped myself up a few times.

I guess that’s to be expected. It’s not like it was quality, “prime” real estate or anything. It’s not even like anyone cares to maintain the area. I guess.

I remember running to one particular house in the building in the back of the projects where the free lunch was given out. Bologna, milk, cheese, bread, and little mustard packets to dress the makeshift sandwiches. All the kids used to make a mad dash back there because they were always limited in how much they had and how many kids would be able to sit in there, and if you were last, you went hungry.

As a different woman today, I can acknowledge that that housing project community was a food desert. That even though Grandma was doing all she could to make sure I never went hungry, there was rarely a vegetable on the plate. Even though she meant very well and did the best that she could, I know I picked up a lot of bad habits from that time in my life.

In fact, it sounds a lot like this paragraph from the NYTimes blog:

Poor urban neighborhoods in America are often food deserts — places where it is difficult to find fresh food.   There are few grocery stores; people may do all their shopping at bodegas, where the only available produce and meat are canned peaches and Spam.  If they want fruits and vegetables and chicken and fish, they have to take a bus to a grocery store.   The lack of fresh food creates a vicious cycle; children grow up never seeing it or acquiring a taste for it.  It is one reason that the poor are likelier to be obese than the rich. [source]

When I hear people complain about the cost of fresh food and use this as an excuse to not eat it, it makes me think about those projects where so many people who were, actually, given money by the government to eat couldn’t even access the healthy food. My Grandma, while she might’ve been able to catch a bus to hit the grocery store, might’ve had difficulty doing this since she was the family babysitter. Her, four kids (one of them facing a mental disability), and countless bags with enough food to feed the numerous people that’d be in and out of her house to eat? On the bus? You’re joking, right?

Back to the point. All that food stamp money in the projects, and no fresh food in the area to spend it on.

Whenever we talk about problems with our food system, we often talk about access… and yeah, we might toss around the phrase “food desert,” but is that ever quantified? Are the ramifications of growing up in a food desert ever discussed? Do places like the Morris Brown projects ever come up for discussion? Or are they never mentioned because it’s assumed they don’t matter?

A while back, I wrote the following:

I can specifically remember a time when I lived in a food desert, and the only food store nearby was a gas station. My daughter was on formula at the time, and I used to purchase that in bulk and have that shipped. For myself, though, it was whatever I could get at the store. A bag of chips for breakfast, a bag of chips for lunch, a bowl of ice cream for dinner. If I wanted to go to the grocery, I had to either beg one of my girls to take me or call a taxi. I eventually called the taxi and cut back on groceries so that I could afford the ride, but… it was a lonnng time before I came to that realization.

It made perfect sense, though, that the grocery stores would be on the other side of town from me. The area where I lived was wholly college students living on that good ol’ beer and pizza diet… as evidenced by the abundance of pizza joints, sub shops and drive-thru liquor stores. The stores that a young Mom like me needed… were at least two miles away. With no car, that was quite the struggle.

But if you think about it, isn’t that how Capitalism works? When there is a demand, the promise of profit guarantees that there will always be someone willing and able to jump in and fulfill that need, right? In my neighborhood, there was a high demand for pizza joints and liquor stores. That’s what the college kids wanted. I was the random weird outlier with an infant in a college apartment complex.

Excerpted from The Myth of The Food Desert: Where The Root Went Wrong | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

The reason that food deserts exist is because it is assumed that the people in those geographic locations cannot afford the products that a fresh food-selling store would provide. This is also an automatic assumption of the projects, because the implication is “if these people had any money, they wouldn’t be living in the projects after all.”

That’s just how Capitalism works. Big C. Supply goes where the demand is located. If there’s no money, then clearly there’s no demand off which the investor can profit.

My question, really, is what do we gain from denying the realities of food deserts? How do we benefit from silencing the voices of the un-privileged? If we can identify that fresh food is expensive, why wouldn’t we want to hear from the people most affected by that? If we deny the fact that food deserts exist, you silence the input of those of us who have been affected by this problem the most. Those of us who have been on government assistance and live in still-impoverished areas offer up the critique of the system that says that the government is giving away money to be spent on the very things making us ill and preventing us from healing ourselves.

We also shoot ourselves in our collective feet when we decide to downplay food deserts because it prevents us from ever finding a solution to the problem. What about offering incentives to investors – franchise, corporate and otherwise – who build in food deserts? Why can’t we do that? Why not offer incentives up the chain – tax incentives for security measures (since a lot of these places fear theft and property damage), incentives for the space of the store dedicated solely to fresh produce? We can’t do that because we’re too busy debating their existence. Y’all know I have a problem with that.

So, it saddens me to know that the big politicians that I vote for to get the big checks are not offering up the answers that we need to solve this problem in particular, especially since they’re never walking through (or helicoptering through, even) the projects (or a trailer park, or a low-income community in general) to see what struggles people like this face. Realistically speaking, they’re facing the same struggles that “middle-class” Americans are facing. Middle-class America , for the most part, just knows how to hide it better. If anything would’ve taught us that, it would be the up-spring of foreclosure signs in our very nice, quaint neighborhoods.

Photo/Image Credits: Caitlin Quade, Tulane University; Slow Food USA

This is a public service announcement intended for journalists, news outlets, bloggers, folks in charge of creating policy, and people who have been lucky enough to have never relied on government assistance for basic necessities like food.

Just stop. Just stop the madness.

The latest in this ridiculousness? Fast Company weighing in on what people should and should not be eating on food stamps.

The writer is pulling all of these assumptions out of the air, based on what can theoretically be purchased on food stamps and an assumption that silly poor people don’t know that they will need to maximize their monthly allotment.  They also seem to ignore that some people do eat well on SNAP – there isn’t much data about what types of food are most commonly purchased using EBT cards, but national studies don’t really show much of a link between eating well or eating poorly and food stamps.  It really depends on the person.  Which is why lines like this are infuriating:

[I]f you live in cities like New York City and San Francisco, you should revel in your clean tap water, and save your food stamps for other things. [...]

If [the New York soda ban] passed, the ban would prevent people from using food stamps to buy carbonated and non-carbonated beverages that are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or sugar and have more than 10 calories per eight-ounce serving. Is this over the top? Quite likely. But it’s an interesting thought experiment: What would happen to obesity and diabetes rates if soda was taken off the food-stamp approval list? [...]

One fancy lobster would suck up a good portion of a monthly food stamp allowance–and if you can afford to do that, you should just use cash. Not that poor people shouldn’t get to enjoy lobster. They just shouldn’t use our tax dollars.

13% of Americans are on SNAP.  It’s certainly one of the highest rates of SNAP usage since the program has started but let’s be real here – if every single person on SNAP was completely healthy and fit, we wouldn’t make a dent in America’s problem.  (And, in general, when people talk about issues with America’s health, it’s really just a veiled way to say “eew, fat people.”  Measuring national health is a set of shifting goal posts, and the solutions to a lot of these problems is ending subsidies on certain products.  But its easier to pretend that a growing nation is the result of three hundred million individual failures.)

The SNAP program is also considered one of the most successful government programs there is.  Families are hungry – people get food. It’s rather simple.  The problem comes in when people try to nickel and dime the SNAP program, like the writer above, in service of…well whatever.  Small government, personal responsibility, straight up bigotry, political expediency – the SNAP program takes the hit.  It’s a popular program, but thanks to the way we demonize people on any sort of government assistance, it seen as something that we need to regulate, lest the undeserving poor get to live the high life on taxpayer dollars.

And what a high life it is. Let’s look at the numbers.

From the government’s SNAP FAQs:

In 2008, SNAP served 28.4 million people a month at an annual cost of $34.6 billion. In February 2009, SNAP served 32.6 million people, an all-time record.  SNAP participation fluctuates with the economy and with the pattern of poverty in America. As the number of persons in poverty rose, SNAP participation grows. When poverty falls, so does reliance on SNAP. Participation for the latest available month can be found on Program Data.

Here’s how broke you have to be to qualify for SNAP:

And here’s what the MAXIMUM allotment is:

(Please note, they may give you less than the maximum.)

For comparison’s sake, here’s one of my favorite financial shows, ‘Til Debt Do Us Part.

When Gail Vaz-Oxlade slashes people’s budgets, she rarely allots less than $100 a week for food – even for a two person household. The government allows for even less than that.

The SNAP program normally works in tandem with programs like Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to serve low income women who are at nutritional risk.  WIC is tightly regulated, and one can use this program to see what life would be like if we started putting similar restrictions on food stamps.

Interestingly, one of the best explorations of reversal in fortune and life on public benefits has come from MTV. I love, love, love this episode of True Life, called “I Can No Longer Afford My Lifestyle,” for a host of reasons – it really illuminates a lot of the issues with how quickly a person can go from being financially stable to financially destitute. Three people – Adam, Caitlin, and Aja -were living large right when the bubble burst, and all three start the episode in the same state: broke, jobless, and with grim employment prospects for the future.  Aja, a single mother of three, takes a trip to the grocery store to pick up supplies on WIC, starting at 10:35:

For those of you who can’t see the video, Aja hits the grocery store.  She has a lot of problems with the WIC restrictions and it takes her a long time to actually make her selections.  WIC allows Cheerios but does not allow Honey Nut Cheerios because of the added sugar content.  Aja spurns the unflavored Cheerios (and opts for the WIC-approved Frosted Mini Wheats), but still hits a problem at the register, because she selected sharp cheddar cheese and WIC only allows regular cheddar cheese. “I just got cheese checked at Von’s,” she says in disbelief. “What kind of day is this?”

I have a memory, from long ago, where I am sitting in the parking lot of a McDonalds, with my mom, trying to count out 63 pennies from the floor around the car, the change jar, and the pavement around the car in order to purchase two hamburgers from McDonalds for our evening meal. Cheap food exists for a reason. 63 cents doesn’t go far in the grocery store if you want a hot meal, and have no where for food prep. (Something that people also conveniently forget about – a lot of eating well on a budget requires prep with at least a hot plate, running water, and basic utensils. If you don’t have these things, you have to eat ready made food. Needless to say, living out of a car doesn’t provide you with consistent access to these things.) But a whole hamburger meant a lot to a seven-year-old stomach that was going to go hungry. What kind of day is that? These are broke people choices.

I’m sure that if I shared this story on the NYT Health blog, there would be people berating my mother for buying me a hamburger and not, say, an apple or something. Or maybe some dried lentils we could have soaked overnight on the carburetor using a car fluid funnel and woken up to a wonderfully healthy and cheap pinch of beans.

What many folks, in this land of endless theory, tend to forget is that just like there’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, there is also Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs.

There at the bottom is a concept: enough food.

You want to know what getting to enough food looks like? There’s an area, on the DC/Maryland border, that is the home to a lot of immigrant communities. This means a lot targeted grocery stores. I went into one, in search of jicama, and marveled at the retailer who was selling dollar bags of produce. The produce in the bags was actively rotting. I’m not talking about bruising or discoloration, which gets things bounced off grocery store shelves. I’m talking about mold. Rot. Things that most people wouldn’t want to touch, but there is enough demand in that area for affordable produce that it’s bagged up and sold along with the other wares. That’s enough food. Buying the dollar bags of rotting food that you will go home, cut around the gross parts, and put the rest in a pot since your family has to eat.

Or as Erika wrote in the “Unbearable Whiteness of Eating“:

When we make food an issue of choice, there is an underlying understanding that everyone, in fact, has that choice to make. There is an accepted belief, in conversations about choosing to eat healthily, that everyone stands between a produce section and a frozen TV dinner section and, invariably, chooses at their discretion. There’s an underlying acceptance in these conversations that food deserts do not exist. That food deserts don’t exist in inner cities… mostly populated by Black Americans. There is an acceptance that food availability doesn’t need to be discussed, because all the people involved in the conversation have access.

Is that a happenstance? A mere coincidence? I might’ve thought so before, but now? I’m not so sure.

Choice is a strange thing.  Americans demand choices, stocking our grocery stores with dozens of options for everything from orange juice to plastic bags.  And yet, people seem to have no issue stripping the right of choice from others.  Clearly, if you start talking in specifics, these “woulda, shoulda, coulda” arguments start falling to the wayside.  Would you personally deny a person a lobster, if they chose to budget for it, on their birthday? Even if the month before they bought canned goods to make sure they could afford that once a year splurge? And where does the policing stop? Soda is bad for you – but many health advocates warn against drinking fruit juice as well, noting that people should eat, rather than drink their calories.  Does that mean we ban juice too? What about Sunny D, a favorite of kids which is described as “an orange flavored drink.” Drink. I, and a lot of people I know, grew up on drink, which generally isn’t mentioned by health advocates, since it seems like they cannot conceive of adults and children drinking fruit flavored sugar water. And yet…

Considering the fact that so many kids could realistically answer “what the fuck is juice,” why don’t we just start banning all drinks that aren’t coffee, tea, and water? Oh wait, we banned bottled water (because you know, poor people can’t like sparkling). Because poor people have always been poor, and have never known otherwise, and they’ve never had nice things, like water that bubbles. And poor people don’t need to exercise choices over what food they eat and what food they prefer because poor people aren’t allowed to have preferences. We aren’t allowed to access nice things.

And access is what brings us to what’s wrong with the one “allowance” the author grants.

Instead, Use Stamps At The Farmer’s Market

The generic complaint against farmers’ markets is that the food is too expensive to serve everyone who needs food. But, lo and behold, SNAP recipients are legally allowed use their food stamps to purchase food at farmer’s markets. The practice is only now gaining popularity because paper food-stamp coupons have been replaced by special debit cards, and many farmer’s markets only accept cash. This is the kind of thing we would like to see more of: widespread access to healthy, fresh foods that are reasonably priced (on a good day). It certainly beats bottled water.

Well, gee gosh golly, why haven’t people just thought of strolling on down to the farmer’s market and buying the yummy fresh food there?

Here’s a reason – the quality of your farmer’s market varies by region, location – and what the seller’s think the market can afford. Last summer, I did an investigative piece for the American Prospect into farmer’s markets in the DC area. As a patron of the markets, and someone not currently on food stamps, I wondered exactly how far those double dollars went. I discovered:

One of the major influences on how farmers markets function is a 1999 report called “Hot Peppers and Parking Lot Peaches: Evaluating Farmer’s Markets in Low Income Communities.” In it, Andy Fisher, on behalf of the Community Food Security Coalition, provides concrete steps for both market organizers and policy-makers to consider when trying to serve low-income populations. Some of his suggestions were heeded — the United States Department of Agriculture standardization and WIC cooperation were instituted in 1992 and greatly expanded in 2009. However, some basic steps are still in need of a champion. Fisher made three very important points yet to be addressed: Markets must tailor their offerings to “focus on basic food at affordable prices”; should pay attention to the availability of transportation and the market’s location; and must involve the community to provide a sense of ownership with the market.

Recent visits to markets near the White House and Silver Spring reveal a serious problem: It would be very difficult to put together a full meal for a family of four based on the selections available. Many items were exotic, not staples. Ground bison was running at $6.25 per pound, and ham retailed at $7.95 per pound. Hunting for side dishes was also a problem. Since prices varied by vendor, it took a keen eye and comparison shopping to find the best deals. One vendor charged $4.50 for approximately four asparagus spears, while another stall sold two hefty bundles for $7. A meal for four people consisting of 2 pounds of ham, two containers of baby potatoes, and two baskets of spinach retailed close to $34. Even with double dollars, at $15 it still may prove to be a stretch.

Now, this doesn’t mean all farmer’s markets are terrible or overrpriced.  Eastern Market, one of the longest running markets in the area (which is also one of the few places in DC where you can still see butchers and fishmongers) has an amazing selection of tasty, inexpensive fruits and veggies.  There is an older woman who comes every summer, selling big bags of produce for $4 (it used to be $3 – the recession continues to harm us all).  Last week, I bought vegetables for an entire week, along with a few treats (coconut dates, some fennel, golden beets) – it still only set me back $40. Farmer’s markets, in many cases, can be cheaper than supermarkets – but it really depends on a lot of factors.

However, those type of markets don’t exist everywhere.  Markets are scarce in low income areas, and higher priced areas tend to traffic in jams and artisan bread as opposed to basic foodstuffs.  Furthermore, your region determines what type of food is at the farmer’s market, and what price that food will be.  When I went to California, I was astounded at how cheap vegetables where.  At what my friend called a “so-so” market, there were bunches of kale and swiss chard for $2, along with some of the best looking tomatoes and oranges I’ve ever seen in my life.  That kind of produce just doesn’t make it all the way to the East Coast in the same shape (and definably not for the same prices.)  So access here is vital. This is something easy to overlook if you generally have enough money to buy the food you want to eat most months.  But for people on limited budgets, or in areas with limited to no access, expecting farmer’s markets to magically replace a missing food infrastructure is an pipe dream.

Luckily, some bloggers and writers truly get some of the issues with eating well on a restricted budget, in areas of limited access.  Erika of A Black Girl’s Guide to Weight Loss has a whole series about eating well on a budget and clean eating on food stamps. Stephanie Quilao of Noshtopia/One Mile, One Meal/Back in Skinny Jeans, started by doing food comparisons to show why Whole Foods wasn’t necessarily more expensive than a trip to the regular grocery store.  More recently, she’s started a campaign to eat well at WalMart, to showcase healthy eating options for all budgets and access levels.

Instead of trying to regulate government policy (particularly programs that have never been used by the authors of these pieces, particularly not in situations that were longer than a month long “experiment”), how about we all try to meet people where they are to create a healthier nation?

–

By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said

Over the course of six decades, some six million black Southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban American and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally lay aside a feudal cast system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheet weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.

During this time, a good portion of all Black Americans alive picked up and left the tobacco farms of Virginia, the rice plantations of South Carolina, cotton fields in East Texas and Mississippi, and the villages and backwoods of the remaining Southern states–Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and, by some measures, Oklahoma. They set out for cities they had whispered about among themselves or had seen in a mail order catalogue. Some came straight from the fields with their King James Bibles and old twelve-string guitars. Still more were townspeople looking to be their fuller selves, tradesmen following their customers, pastors trailing their flocks.

– The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Reading The Warmth of Other Suns, I am reminded again that I am a member of a soon-to-disappear group–children and grandchildren of The Great Migration.

I was trying to explain to a friend–a 40-year-old white guy–how I really want to travel with my nieces and nephews to Mississippi, so they can experience going “down South” in the summertime, something they have never done. He replied, “Yeah, my family used to head down to the beach in Florida all the time, when I was a kid.” And I had a hard time articulating that what I am speaking of is different. Here in Central Indiana, it seems every white family clears out of town to the Florida beaches come Spring Break or summertime. But what I’m talking about is different.

For Midwestern families of The Great Migrations–African American families–pointing the family car South wasn’t about seeking sand and sun and maybe a visit to Disney World. It was about returning, as my father would say, “down home.” It was, I imagine, for the adults, about reconnecting with cultural roots; showing off children to relatives rarely seen. It was about introducing offspring to roots that were foreign to them. For me, It was about coolers packed with fried chicken, potato salad and drinks for lunch at tired-looking rest stops. It was about palettes of blankets in the “way back” of the station wagon, crayons melting in the sun and jockeying with my brother and sister for seat space. It was about looking out of a hot car window with awe as the roads turned to red clay and the pines grew taller and taller–a world away from my Northern Rust Belt city. It was about the dark; it gets so dark in the country that the stars seem to multiply a thousandfold.

It was about “supper,” a meal that didn’t exist for me north of the Mason Dixon line, served around 4 p.m. with fresh greens, black-eyed peas and homemade corn bread and other good stuff; and melon that I actually liked–honeydew and watermelon from some nearby field. It was about the sound of rain on a tin roof and squeaky screen doors surrounded by chickens and farm cats and “dirt dobber” nests. It was about front porch swings and being regaled with stories of country life–mules and picking cotton. It was about aunts with warm arms and sweet, Southern accents. It was about thinking you were going to be bored–out in the middle of nowhere with a sketchy TV signal–but always finding something exciting to explore. (My maternal grandfather, who immigrated from Alabama, once traveled with us to visit my paternal grandparents in rural Mississippi. He taught me how to keep a grasshopper on a “leash.”) It was about trips “to town,” which turned out not to have a mall or anything like it, just a Ben Franklin 5 and Dime and a theater showing last year’s movies. That was my experience. And millions of Northern black kids had some variation of that. My husband has Southern relatives in the country and town, so his stories differ a bit, but at heart they are the same.

I was speaking of this to a girlfriend of mine — a black woman of my age — as if she would understand. And she reminded me that she grew up in the South. My experience is uniquely African American, but it is also uniquely Northern–maybe uniquely Northeastern. I don’t know whether the people who migrated West could as easily pack their kids in the car and drive home to, say, Louisiana. I don’t know about the culture the migrations created in places like California.

At any rate, my father came north on the tail end of the second migration, in the 60s. (My maternal grandparents came north in the 20s and 30s.) By the time I was born in the final days of 1969, the migration trend had reversed. And so, mine truly is the last generation, I think, to experience this raised in the New World/tied to the Old World thing. (One of the things I like about Suns is the way Wilkerson compares the migrations to other immigrant experiences and highlights their commonalities.)

I think I wrote here last year about losing a connection to some Southern black foodways. Not just the collards and sweet potato pies, but the neck bones, souse meat and pig’s feet that were occasional treats in my home growing up. It doesn’t occur to me to make those things now. And there is no chance I could whip up souse from scratch like my Great Aunt Lee used to, even if I wanted to. My nieces and nephews may never eat this food. And they have never set foot in Kentucky or Mississippi or Alabama, where their grandfather and great-grandparents came from. They needn’t head “down South” to visit extended family. Their parents’ roots are Northern. All of us first- and second-generation Northerners have this shorthand to describe our unique cultural experiences, but that is slipping away. I suppose this is so for all immigrants and their children and grandchildren. As the generations move on, descendants become unmoored from “the old country.” Still makes me melancholy, though.

Maybe the new experience will be that of the reverse migration. As more and more blacks return South to cities like Houston and Atlanta, perhaps their children will share stories of traveling north to visit family in chilly, old industrial centers along the Great Lakes. They’ll be amazed at the mounds of snow and speak fondly about eating Italian Beef, Maxwell Street polishes and Chicago deep dish pizza.

Image courtesy of Chicago Man

By Sunah, cross-posted from Thick Dumpling Skin

I often jokingly say that I decided to live in the States because I fit into an Extra Small size here whereas I couldn’t wear anything but Large in Korea. My American friends find it hilarious. Well, to be honest, it’s not a joke. It’s half of the truth.

Growing up in Korea, I had always been one of the big girls. I was athletic and loved physical activities. I jogged in my neighborhood, where no one else ran unless he or she had to chase somebody. I rode in-line skates when people didn’t even know what they were. I played tennis in college, and practiced martial arts. I was fit, but not slim in Korean standards.

There were hardly any female TV personalities who weighed more than 100 pounds. One time in a game show, the show host made a famous female singer step on a scale. She was one of the few “chubby” ones on TV in that era. She was reluctant, almost horrified, but everyone urged her to do it just for laughs. She finally did and broke down in tears on camera. She was my size. After the show, she disappeared from the TV for a few months and came back 25 pounds lighter. She was very talented and had a voice that nobody could imitate. But it was her lighter body that gave her the total self-confidence. That’s the way it was and it most likely still is in Korea.

Nobody called me “fat” or “chubby” in my face. People called me “big” and “healthy-looking.” One of my friends, however, once called me an “elephant.” She was a size 44, which doesn’t exist in America. It’s more like size minus 2.

I experimented with all sorts of diets, but was never good with calculating calories. I preferred fasting since it was simpler and produced better results in a shorter period. I’d fast for 5 days and lose 10 pounds. I’d be happy for a week or two. Then the weight would bounce back. I went through this fasting ritual at least a few times a year. I was very healthy, could play tennis for hours and guys couldn’t keep up with me. But I wasn’t happy with my body.

I came to the States for ESL program after graduating college. All of the sudden people started calling me “petite.” I had to look up a dictionary to find the meaning since the word was so unfamiliar to me. I shopped at the ‘Petite’ section in a department store and sometimes even Petite Small was too big for me. I was happy. For the first time in my life, I stopped watching my weight. My program fee included three meals a day in the school cafeteria, so I ate like Americans did – thick slices of pizza, spaghetti with meatballs, steaks and burgers, soda and juice. I stared wearing tank tops, mini-skirts and leggings. I continued to work out since physical exercises are one of my favorite things to do anyway, but I started gaining weight and I didn’t know it.

Six months later, back in Seoul, my younger sister described the moment she saw me coming out of the airport terminal gate as such: “A big black hog rolling through the gate.” Yes, that’s the family for you. Brutally honest and forever judgmental. But you love them to death anyway. Well, I was tanned to the degree it was unfashionable, and gained 20 pounds. But I was in a tight tank top and a black mini-skirt. “A Black Hog,” I truly was.

But there was another thing I gained in America. Self-confidence about my body. And it didn’t go away despite the teasing and criticisms from my family and friends.

I learned that our body size existed in the realm of relativity, and whether I wore Large or Small didn’t really matter. There’s a big world out there where I’m considered “petite.” So why should I be bothered by the opinions of people in this tiny peninsula that is even smaller than one quarter of California State?

So I didn’t go back to my usual fasting ritual. I didn’t feel the necessity. Those extra 20 pounds were shed naturally several months after I got back on my usual Korean diet and exercise routine.

Now I try to maintain my weight. It’s by no means skinny, but over the years I realized that it is where my body feels most comfortable and energetic. I dance and exercise regularly and put down my spoon the moment I feel full. It sounds easy but it takes a lot of discipline. I’m sure the readers of this blog understand it better than anyone. So, when many of my non-Asian American friends tell me that I have it easy since I’m Asian, I’m inclined to protest. “Come on, give us a credit. We work really hard to look the way we look!”

I lost my father and a younger sister to cancer. We don’t have to go through such heartbreaking events to realize what matters most is our health. Every morning when we wake up without feeling any kind of physical pain nailing us down onto the bed, we should get up and celebrate. Dance, exercise, play! Then healthy appetite and body will come as a matter of course.

By Guest Contributor Yvonne Yen Liu, cross-posted from Colorlines

Juan Baten came to this country from Guatemala seven years ago in search of a better life. A bus in Cabral, Guatemala, hit his father so Baten left home at the age of 15, to make the journey north. He made his way to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he found work in a tortilla factory in an industrial corridor along the Brooklyn-Queens border. He worked six days a week, nine hours a day, from five in the evening until two in the morning, operating the machines that churned out tortillas. The $7.25 per hour he earned was sent back to his family in Guatemala, supporting his four brothers.

Baten also found love. Seven months ago, his common law wife Rosario Ramirez gave birth to daughter, Daisy Stefanie. They dreamed of a day when they could move their family back to Guatemala.

However, one Sunday, Baten’s arm got stuck in the blades of a dough-mixing machine and he was crushed to death. The 22-year-old dad’s story splashed across the pages of the New York tabloids, and his death led to investigations by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and state Department of Labor. The Workers Compensation Board discovered that the factory owner was not offering worker’s compensation to his employees and issued a stop-work order. The factory is now closed, pending payment of insurance and fines by the owner, according to news reports.

Daniel Gross, executive director of Brandworkers International, noted in response to the case that the workers at the tortilla factory were not organized into a union. Neither had the facilities ever been inspected by OSHA prior to Baten’s tragic death. Many more questions remain unanswered: Were Baten and his colleagues adequately trained to use the dangerous food machines safely? Were they given breaks during their graveyard shift? What access to health care did Baten have to ease the fatigue he undoubtedly experienced from working six days a week?

But what we do know is that Baten’s workplace wasn’t unique. Workers suffer from low wages and hazardous working conditions throughout the food chain.

Rinku Sen wrote this week about a series of studies released on Valentine’s Day by the Restaurant Opportunities Center United. The studies describe the conditions for restaurant workers in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Miami. The service and retail sector of the food system pays the lowest wages; restaurant workers earn an average of $15,000 a year and nine out of ten workers lack employer-sponsored health insurance, according to the studies. And workers are forced to labor when sick, therefore further endangering their health and that of the food consumers, too.

The studies reinforce findings from new research by the Applied Research Center, Colorlines.com’s publisher. We recently embarked on a broad survey of the food system, to map out the race, gender and class of workers along the supply chain. Our findings, detailed in the new report “The Color of Food,” were sadly not surprising.

People of color typically make less than whites working in the food chain. Half of white food workers earn $25,024 a year, while workers of color make $5,675 less than that. This wage gap plays out in all four sectors of the food system—production, processing, distribution and service—with largest income divides occurring in the food processing and distribution sectors. Women working in the food chain draw further penalties in wages, especially women of color. For every dollar a white male worker earns, women of color earn almost half of that.

Few people of color hold management positions in the food system. Whites dominate high-wage professional and management occupations; three out of every four managers in the food system are white. Almost half of white men working in the food chain were employed as managers, while less than 10 percent of workers of color held comparable positions.

People of color are concentrated in low-wage jobs in the food chain. According to the 2008 Census, people of color make up 34.6 percent of the population (that percentage is expected to rise as 2010 Census data becomes available). But workers of color are represented at a level almost one and a half times that in sectors of the food chain. For instance, 50 percent of food production workers are people of color. This includes farm workers, 65 percent of whom are Latino.

Great advances have been made to ensure that our food is locally sourced and sustainably grown. Communities of color across the nation are taking food production in their hands, by converting abandoned lots in urban deserts into fertile, urban farms and gardens. But a movement for food justice must also encompass the food workers that currently toil in sweatshop-like conditions, the often-invisible labor that help bring our food to the table.

By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said

Respecting and honoring all persons and their cultures is hard work in a society that privileges the majority culture. It requires honest acknowledgement that privilege allows some Americans to be knowledgeable and care only about their own beliefs and rituals. It requires dedication to learning about traditions beyond your own. And it requires resisting the temptation to see other cultures only within the context of your own. (i.e. believing Hanukkah is Jewish Christmas)

This all takes work. And, frankly, I don’t think most Americans wish to work hard at understanding other cultures. This time of year, the War on Christmasers balk at “Happy Holidays”–just a gentle acknowledgement that some Americans celebrate winter holidays other than or in addition to Christmas. But even the more evolved among us stumble, because rather than learning, say, what Winter Solstice or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa really are and what they mean to those who celebrate them, we prefer to simply be “inclusive.” And by “inclusive” I mean folks throw in a mention of these holidays from time to time during the season, usually conflating them with Christmas. Shove a Kinara or Menorah in the background of a talk show set or on a holiday graphic. Include other winter holidays in the consumerist frenzy that Christmas has become. And indiscriminately shout “Happy Kwanzaa” long before December 26.

I give you semi-homemade goddess Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa Cake:

There. Are you happy Kwanzaa-celebrating black folks? You have been “included” in a holiday baking segment on a popular cooking show. Never mind that Kwanzaa is not traditionally celebrated with loads of baking and that there is no such thing as a Kwanzaa Cake. Never mind that Kwanzaa was specifically designed to celebrate African American culture and that nothing about this cake , save the red, black and green candles, has anything to do with the traditions of the African diaspora. What exactly does this cake have to do with Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba or Imani? And lastly, never mind that the cake looks hella nasty. Inclusiveness, baby!

Controversy surrounding the Kwanzaa cake was reignited on Dec. 16, when recipe-writer Denise Vivaldo disavowed the dreaded thing and claimed on Huffington Post that she was strong armed into creating the recipe for it. (The post has since been removed.) Vivaldo’s post prompted Salon to ask “Just how offensive is Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa cake?” Of course that question prompted Salon’s usual parade of hideous commenters to chime in, including cib, who offered:

Kwanzaa was made up out of thin air. So I suppose you could make up anything and say it’s a Kwanzaa cake. Sandra Lee is annoying but at least she made an effort to acknowledge this fake “holiday”.

When will we ever be happy? (Read Spark in Darkness’ great post on this sentiment at Womanist Musings.)

Sigh.

First, someone needs to do some reading up on the origins of Christmas. Second, note the implication that those who celebrate Kwanzaa should be happy to have their (lesser) holiday included. Sandra Lee’s cake isn’t so much offensive as silly, but this idea–that being included is enough and that being asked to do more is mere “political correctness”–is problematic.

“Inclusive” has become the mantra of people wishing to be sensitive to people of all races, ethnicities, religions, etc. (And even some, like cib, who really don’t give a damn.) But being inclusive, I think, is the wrong object of focus. Or, at least, it is not enough of a focus on its own. It is not enough to include. Indeed, inclusiveness without thought or knowledge demonstrates a lack of caring and a display of privilege that is offensive.

Photo courtesy of Pete Campbell

By Guest Contributor Konju Oruwari, cross-posted from Vegans Of Color

What follows is the last letter traded in an exchange between a couple of 26 year-old black dudes regarding my last post on “Liberation Veganism.” My comrade is not vegan, and is concerned about “the problem with the displacement of bread and butter struggle with raw foodisms,” etc, due to my attempt to mix veganism with human liberation, or in our case black liberation.

It is an important concern for all of us, whether or not thinking about or bringing up veganism in a context like African liberation discourse is appropriate. Or the problem with making something like going vegan or trumpeting ecological awareness THE issue or THE revolution, rather than just an aspect of it. And the problem of having advocacy of those causes which are “on the periphery for me, masking as if it is at the core,” as my friend challenged. He stated that to bring up veganism at a hypothetical “cop watch” meeting and try to make the meeting about veganism would be problematic, from which I gathered that something like “cop watch” to him was a “bread and butter” ‘hood issue (as opposed to, given the tenor of our exchanges, dietary, environmental, lifestyle, quality of life, sanitation, etc. issues, which to him are more associated with white liberal green/ vegan activists for whom those things are THE issue).

Lastly we had a disagreement on this point, and I quote my brotha: “one day you said to me the first responsibility of a revolutionary is to be healthy. That was the crucial difference for me, i thought you were wrong. Our health is not the priority, the people are, when the struggle becomes for our own person health (or morality) we are distant from the people.” In subsequent retorts from myself (because I believe the exact opposite of what he asserts) I struggled with this contradiction until he later stated, “a revolutionaries health is not an end to me, it is a means to the end which is revolution.” I play with this idea as well down below.

Without further ado, then, here’s my letter to my good brother comrade in struggle, on the “bread and butter” issues of liberation struggle as pertain to defining health, priorities of concern, “revolution” and so on.

Bro,

In between running ’round town, meeting folks, preparing food, listening to the radio and other daily bizness, I wondered about how we might define “health” anyway. And that how we define health may determine our relationship with whatever that commodity is. And if there are elements in contemplating health that we may not exactly see eye to eye on, it may be because we haven’t gotten around to building a consensus – a definition to begin with – of what that concept means.

But I also came upon the thought that revolution, which is another notion we may have to define more concretely, nonetheless is fundamentally about health. No? I mean, it seems people like us would only come to acquire and espouse our deep discord, alienation and criticism of the world because there’s an element of it that is so odiously sick and unhealthy, to us and people who look like us. If economic systems are preventing our people from excelling, those economic systems are killing them, ruining their economic and by extension personal health, ruining their sense of self-worth and thus compromising their mental health. If occupational labor standards where they work are consistently dangerous but that danger goes un-remedied by profit-hungry bosses, i.e. undocumented Mexican migrant farm laborers in California or Michigan constantly exposed directly to heavy overflight pesticide spraying with no protective gear, or conditions in meat-packing plants in Chicago where lots of poor black folks once worked and now many more Latinos, etc – then those capitalist labor conditions are ruining their health.

If our schools indoctrinate ignorance and fear and division, and our mass media propagate the same, and our youth imbibe a bitter hopelessness and “act out” against one another, our whole social system is preventing us from being healthy. Same for exposure to high concentrations of lead and other toxic fine particulates, leading to higher asthma rates, in parts of the Bronx and Harlem where MTA’s bus depots are, and where the sanitation transfer stations are, such that the straight filth of our infrastructure kills us.

If one’s housing conditions promote insecurity and pest infestation while being exorbitantly priced so as to suck up half a person’s income, that person has that much bigger a hurdle towards being healthy, including psychological anxieties and stress which increase stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine levels which compromise metabolism and immunity to disease.

If Daewoo and other Korean and wealthy Persian Gulf corporations can sign 99-year leases for land in places like Madagascar or Ethiopia to grow food explicitly for their own populations and not the indigenous African populations who live where the food is grown, that type of neo-colonialism is going to decrease food security for people at home, thus ensuring more malnutrition, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and other stark miseries which prevent effective and productive living of a life, or just health said succinctly. Even indigenous regimes of patriarchy, machismo, etc. compromise women’s health, and by extension that of the children, elderly, and whole families.

I mean, that’s one way I tend to see it. I don’t like seeing the misery and desperation out there – it’s disgusting and unhealthy. My innate disgust with this crap is why I’m like this, even why I’m vegan. I don’t like cruelty. I think human beings are capable of far more than what we’ve got here. That’s why I keep striving.

So in terms of this other undefined concept – “bread and butter” issues, no one of us will see exactly eye to eye as to what’s number one or whatever. As for me, and this is a fluctuating, ever changing bunch of things that most frequently preoccupy a person like me, but education of the youth, health, quality of life, labor and cooperative economics/ black business (business doesn’t have to mean capitalist acquisitive stuff, just organizing our own economics internally), domestic violence and black on black crime, the environment, access to land/ housing/ ownership of where we live and even grow food, food security – these might be just some of my top five concerns, and I think I named more than five things here.

What’s interesting (and not I hope a point of conflict but just worth contemplating for the both of us) is that something like “cop watch” is not on my top five, and just might barely make my top ten, of “bread and butter” issues. This is because, as I hinted at in the last message, there is a hell of a lot more domestic violence and black on black crime than there is police on black crime. Said another way, which effects how I prioritize either concern in my thoughts – someone living in an oppressed and crime-ridden community is far more likely to suffer physical strife from someone who looks like them and lives near them than by the police – in for instance Newark, NJ. So a lot more of my attention is grabbed by “stop the violence” and anti-rape, anti-domestic violence “take back the night”-type work than anti-police brutality work. Just because rape and horizontal violence are a much greater existential threat to everyday people than police violence.

And this point may be controversial, even between you and me, but it is something I take issue with at times and with some groups and individuals, who decry every instance of police brutality, but are a little more muted regarding when we do brutality to each other, senselessly, even as children. This is not a “blame the victim” statement. This is not a statement decrying some innate tendency for irrational violence towards one another in our community. It just acknowledges a statistic, whose generation is due to the lack of resources by which to survive which promotes dangerous and destructive attitudes, lifestyles and practices, which leaves us only with some warped sense of dignity over which we might kill because someone disses us. That’s horizontal violence 101, ala Frantz Fanon or Omali Yeshitela. And I tend to have a lot more affinity with that problem than with vertical violence/ state violence, at least as pertains to those of us in North America for the moment.

And I could be wrong, all wrong in my priorities.

So we should think about what “bread and butter” means very carefully and self-critically before we attempt to declare what ought and what ought not be put on the table. Also, regarding the table, and the fear of things like vegan issues crowding out the more “salient” points of discussion and work: to me that fear is unnecessary and almost irrational. I said it before and I’ll say it again: there’s a time and place for every discussion.

And to the extent that to me health is an upfront “bread and butter” issue, when many black folk think about why there’s so much obesity and diabetes in the community, they look at the food system and the food culture we have to deal with. There are many among those who then look at what’s in the kitchen, and analyze the hormone and antibiotics-infused meats, the empty calorie fattening soda and junk food, and so on, and how they eat corporate-controlled food-like substances mostly, and not really nourishing whole foods. And among folks with that analysis, many, many of them might bring up the ‘v’ word, or the vegetarian/ vegan question. By that line of thought and action, veganism of all things could come straight to the table, the “bread and butter” table.

And it would be very dismissive and paranoid to act like all those voices with those questions and thoughts on their minds are bringing up a parochial, peripheral issue. It is not peripheral to them. It becomes a hood issue to them, a “bread and butter” (or maybe “bananas and avocados”) issue. Their voice is just as valid and ought to be just as welcome to the table as your voice, which might never bring up such a question. If you were the master of the table, when they start to think about health, and then diet, and then nutrition, and then maybe veganism, would you just say “shut up?” I don’t think so.

Please don’t leave this conversation still thinking that of all things “veganism,” and I really mean diet and lifestyle and consumer and quality of life questions and concerns which may inevitably and likely lead to things like veganism being brought up, should be hushed away from conversation, due to fear that to converse or contemplate that takes away from, well, “bananas and avocados” issues. Vegans are less than 1 percent of black folk, but that still makes for a vast multitude. Let them be heard.

If the table of discourse is managed well and with discipline, discussions of veganism won’t manage to drown out other and broader concerns and objectives. Don’t fear and hate any aspect of the discourse, however it may seem like minutia to you.

Anyway, back to thinking about health. If depression is now an epidemic in the US including our communities, if obesity, if heart attack, if premature death or disability are now so monumentally epidemic in the US including our communities, it would behoove us to very aggressively question all that.

Another reason that, if I reverse roll-play your critique of me onto you, I think something like “cop watch” isn’t necessarily as priority “bread and butter” as health, is that more than cops, even more than violent strangers or spouses, what we are eating and where we are living are negatively affecting our outcome as a people.

Let’s break it down to be really clear: years of eating unhealthy food, sedentary living, exposure to toxic materials in the home and workplace, and the stresses of making ends meet in an unstable community – these things very very much are killing us far faster and more unforgivingly than any police.

Yet I think some folks think so much about police-brutality because of how visible that is. All the dietary, environmental and other aspects of our lives which are committing literal genocide on our people – that stuff tends to be more invisible and, to use a little medical terminology, of insidious onset. It’s what’s part of the ambiance, what’s mundane, what’s habitual, that is filling more graves with black bodies in America than anything else. This includes young people like us.

So, study food. Study environment. Study capitalism. Study industries. Study geography. Study sociology. Study it all. It’s all on the table. It’s all bread and butter. Even when subsets of those studies lead to considerations, in any given space or time, of such a rarified topic as veganism.

Everything on the table. “Bread and butter” can be “bananas and avocados” to some, and it’s still valid, still worth respecting of the ideas they may share. Don’t fear ideas.

Lastly, regarding the quote “a revolutionaries health is not an end to me, it is a means to the end which is revolution.” I said that I basically agree with this before. But to make things a little more interesting, I will declare that I do think, as a human being (I know we are not revolutionaries either of us, but even if we were, we’d have to be human beings before being revolutionaries), it is perfectly acceptable to take health as an end. Full stop. Take health as a fundamental goal. We all have but limited time here, and none of us are getting out of this gig alive, and moreover, we may not see the broader changes we want to see in our community happen in our lifetimes.

Might as well at least try to be healthy. Taking one’s health as an end means simply striving to have healthy relationships, live and eat healthily, and have outlets for what interests us, including the act of pursuing revolution or a revolutionary ethos. In other words, one might be able to say “revolution is a means to a revolutionary’s health” because by practicing revolution we get psychological, emotional, mental, physical, social etc. fulfillment and well-being.

So, I’ve problematized that one for ya. Remember, bro, it all depends on how we define “health”! And how we define “revolution”! The two could be one and the same for some of us!

Revolutions,

Konju

By Guest Contributor quadmoniker, cross-posted from PostBourgie

Top Chef’s contributions to the reality show genre don’t come from exciting cliff-hangers or the evil machinations of those who would only win by cheating: the ingredients that make it work best are good chefs cooking food that looks pretty and makes you want to eat it. Occasionally, there’s a key rivalry or a chef you want to hate. The two chefs everyone hated are now gone: possible-pea thief Alex left last week, and Amanda, the overly-intense, scatterbrained former addict who never seemed to get anything right, was finally voted off last night. But before that, another source of drama this season ended prematurely when Kenny Gilbert, whose long-simmering rivalry with Angelo made him seem more talented than he probably was, was voted off after the Restaurant Wars episode. (Restaurant Wars is the show’s bread and butter: two groups of chefs start restaurants and compete to win.)

Kenny inspired a lot of inappropriately racist, pimpish nicknames, like chocolate bear and big daddy, and, when he was kicked off, an unfortunate number of outdated South Park  jokes (I think you know the one). But mostly he was a gregarious, lovable self-promoter; fans believed he was the big cheese because he said he was every week. In truth, his cooking skill seemed uneven. But whether you think he deserved to go or not, his absence highlights a longstanding problem with the show:  there hasn’t been enough diversity, and it is particularly problematic in the way it portrays its black chefs. Diversity on a reality TV show might not seem the most important topic, ever, but it evidences two things: one, the dearth of people of color at the top of many fields extends to reality contests that purport to propel novices to the top of those fields; and two, shows like this in which contestants are judged subjectively still often pick white male winners.

First, some by-the-numbers history. The premiere season wasn’t bad: of 11 chefs, two were Asian, two were black and one was Latino. Only one, Lee Anne Wong, made it close to the top. The second season was worse: of 15, only three were of color. Cliff, a black chef from New York City, finished fifth, but his finish is the important part: he was the only person ever kicked off the show for becoming physical with another contestant. That season, all the chefs picked on a scrawny, whiny kid named Marcel, and on one of the last nights Cliff and the other finalists decided they were going to shave Marcel’s head. In fairness, head judge Tom Colicchio wanted to kick off all the other conspirators, too, who were just as mean to Marcel that night, and make Marcel the winner by default. But Cliff actually wrestled Marcel down to the floor, and was the only person to explicitly break the rules against physically fighting another contestant.

In the third season, the only black chef, Tre, a favorite in the beginning, was voted off after the Restaurant Wars episode because he didn’t lead his team well enough. (A Vietnam-born chef named Hung won that season). The next season, the only black chef was out so early I don’t even remember her, though, in a bright spot, a woman won for the first time that year. The fifth season marked the first Indian American chef, Radhika, and Carla, a black woman from D.C. who made it to the finale and who has had a real career-boost since the show. Season 6 brought us another Indian American and a chef from Haiti, both of whom were out in the middle of the competition. Of the six winners, five have been white and all but one was a man.

That brings us to the current season and its surprising diversity buffet. When it started, Kenny had three fellow black chefs, two Latinos and one Asian chef, which means that nearly half its contestants were people of color. It could be that the show’s producers, who chose to film in D.C. this season after the arrival of the Obamas gave the city a short-lived sizzle, became more cognizant of its diversity needs, or it could be that it’s been on so long now that it’s luring a more diverse applicant pool. Either way, Kenny’s timer wasn’t the first to go off early: Kevin, Angelo and Tiffany are the only chefs of color left.

So, what’s the problem? When a woman won for the first time in the fourth season, Colicchio wrote pretty elegantly about the problems women face in professional kitchens, which aren’t too different from the problems women face in many careers. The balance of work and life falls squarely on women’s shoulders, and a lot of sacrifice is demanded of top chefs. I don’t think anyone’s surprised to know that the challenge of overcoming discrimination in high cuisine is similar to the challenges people of color overcome in other fields.

But that doesn’t mean those problems have to be replicated on a reality TV show. Of course, the judges always say they pick the best dish, but we all know how the idea of “merit” mostly benefits white men. To a great extent, judging food is a subjective enterprise, and cultural expectations and prejudices play into what we think of food. It’s probably completely fair that Cliff was kicked off for being, admittedly, an a-hole to Marcel: it’s true that Tre seemed to bite off more than he could chew when he led his team; and it’s likely just as true that Kenny wasn’t the cream of the crop. But when the judges talked about, say, Kenny’s dishes, they said they were “unsophisticated” and “unedited.” When Tre was kicked off, he was regarded a good technician but not a good thinker and organizer. Again, Cliff, a former football player, was kicked off for getting physical. All of those fit uncomfortably into stereotypes about black men, no matter how true it could be in any individual situation. To raise suspicions even more, Colicchio even compared Kenny to Tre in his blog post about the episode in which Kenny got kicked off. They both took on leadership roles and failed, but other chefs have been kicked off for that reason in different years, too. The thing Kenny and Tre most have in common is that they’re both black. Because we don’t taste the food, we have to trust the judges aren’t bringing stereotypes about the chefs to the tasting table.

There are bright spots, though. Tiffany Derry, a black woman from Texas, has surged late in the game to win just about every contest, and is now positioned as a favorite, especially as Angelo’s work has fallen off. And in Top Chef’s sister show, Top Chef Masters, this year, an Ethiopian chef raised in Sweden, Marcus Samuelsson, won. In the finale, his dishes carried the judges through his life: his first food memory of smoky salmon, and the first meal he cooked, which was another Swedish dish. His final course had to be a vision of where he wanted to go as a chef, and he went back to his roots, cooking a classic Ethiopian fish dish. The fish was soft, and the meal, overall, was heavy, the judges said. Samuselsson told them, in just about so many words, that he didn’t care. That’s the way the food was meant to be cooked, and he knew the judges wouldn’t be used to it. But Americans have developed a palate for Chinese food, for South American food, and for all other kinds of cuisines, he said. He felt it was his job to bring African cuisine to higher regard in America, and it was their job to get used to it. He didn’t have to conform the cuisine to their liking; they had to learn to like something new.

So, it’s not that I think all of these contestants are losing because they’re not white. It’s that, as in most other fields, the inability of people of color to rise has a lot to do with subtle, complex interactions between prejudice and expectation that few have the power to wrest control over. We just often misunderstand who’s job it is to overcome that.

When asked to name the heroes of food reform and sustainable agriculture, who comes to mind? Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer, Alice Waters maybe? Notice any patterns? The food reform movement is predicated on rather shaky foundations with regards to how it deals with race and other issues of identity, with its focus on a largely white and privileged American dream.

Still, what could be better than a return to family farms and home-cooking, which many of these gurus champion? The images are powerfully nostalgic and idyllic: cows grazing on sweet alfalfa, kids’ mouths stained red with fresh heirloom tomato juice, and mom in the kitchen rolling out dough for homegrown-apple pie. But this is not an equal-access trip down memory lane. While we would like to think the American dream of social communion around food is a universal one, this assumption glosses over the very real differentials in gender, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality that were enabled and exacerbated by specific communities (white plantation owners, for example) through the use of food.

This is not to say that activists in the sustainable food movement are unconcerned with issues of identity, but that their rhetoric tends to disallow discussions on race, history, and food in a number of ways. First, Pollan and others situate the current state of American consumption in a patriarchal paradigm. These writers speak about a disappearance of food culture that for the most part accompanies male privilege. For example, Pollan, in an article for the New York Times on cooking and entertainment aptly titled “Out of the Kitchens, Onto the Couch,” explores the relationship between second-wave feminism and the gender politics of cooking. He argues that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique convinced women to regard their housework, specifically cooking, as drudgery. Friedan did not, in fact, construct this sentiment herself; she merely observed the existent trends in white women’s attitudes about food and housewifery. Pollan goes on to describe how Julia Child inspired his mother and other women like her, empowering them to channel their creativity into the kitchen. This is apt praise for the lively and engaging cook, but can Pollan not drive home the point that Americans need to cook more often without guilting American feminists?

Second, the emphasis on the local food economy, though admirable, has certain anti-global and overly nationalist undertones. Let us take the example of Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farms, featured in many of Pollan’s books, as well as the movies Food Inc. and Fresh!. Salatin is an ex-lawyer, of considerable means, who moves to the countryside, establishes a dynamic, organic, solar-powered farm, and sells top-quality animal products at top-quality dollar. If the nation is truly to scale up sustainable foods, we cannot fixate on the early image of the American farmer as white, male, and conservative. Instead, we must acknowledge (as USDA statistics tell us) that the face of farming is changing, and women and people of color will continue to grow in number as stewards of sustainable agriculture. Furthermore, we need to consider the real impact of foods we purchase, rather than mindlessly buying produce labeled “local” and “organic.” The United States supports a lot of global agriculture through its food purchases, and this is a relationship we should not break off entirely. True, we can do more to support efficient, environmentally friendly purchasing, but we should also not be too hasty to reject globalization.

Finally, the major voices in food are not talking about race and class as often as they should. Food justice is fundamentally a race and class issue. Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation elucidates labor practices that disproportionately affect people of color, but does not engage the issue of race specifically. Partly, this stagnancy is a matter of perception: after all, activists of color like Bryant Terry and Winona La Duke do brilliant work in their communities with regards to food justice. For some reason, however, their work goes largely underappreciated.

All social movements need a variety of voices, but I argue that food reform requires this diversity even more urgently because it is so universal in its reach. And if we can reach all those voices, then think of all the activists we will have as allies—feminists, anti-racists, interfaith leaders, and so on—interested and involved because food justice speaks to the needs of their communities and their call for action (activists: this is on you too—get on board!). As consumers of this kind of liberal rhetoric, we need to demand that the powers and big hitters in the food world diversify their representations. The food movement can only grow more powerful for it.

It seems like some people are constantly wringing their hands about how poor people eat (to wit: badly.) And the most popularly proposed solution is to teach them (“them”) more about nutrition! Or educate them in general.

Because obviously they just don’t know what they’re doing. And that’s why they eat so badly, and hence, why their health tends to be poorer!

And eureka! — you have a tidy solution that not only absolves financial and economic guilt, but, as a bonus, allows richer, more-edumacated people to assume the role of benevolent experts.

Here comes the part where I bust up that nice, warm bubble bath.

The reality is that people who don’t have enough money (or the utilities and storage) to buy and prepare decent food in decent quantities, cannot (and should not) be arsed to worry about the finer nuances of nutrition.

Because getting enough to eat is always our first priority.

That’s why Ellyn Satter (yes, her again) created the Hierarchy of Food Needs. Which looks like this:

The idea is that, before we worry about nutrition (i.e., “instrumental food”) we’ve first got to HAVE food. Enough of it. Consistently. And it’s got to be acceptable to us (which, for some people, might mean not coming from the garbage, or meeting certain standards of preparation) and it’s got to taste reasonably good. A little variety is nice, too.

—Excerpted from “If only poor people understood nutrition!,” at The Fat Nutiritionist

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García

Hmm HR?
- caption for this image, as posted by Questlove, drummer for The Roots, on Twitpic, Feb. 5

When i saw the sign i have to admit….i was DYING. like literally LMAO!!! maybe it was juxtaposition of the words: collard & history, jalapeno & honor, fried, black and nbc?? maybe it was the acculturative stress of having 28 days for this food that represents you but come march…pot roast for life kid!

Whatever the case, I found this funny and when I find something funny I like to let the world in on the joke (twitpic anyone??). in NO way did i ever think that this was some cruel insensitive joke on behalf of jeff zucker and his comrades at nbc (the cafeteria isn’t even owned or operated by nbc).

I kinda get where leslie calhoun (our culinary rosa parks) was coming from; fried chicken as a fragrant, tasty, honorable metaphor for the struggles and accomplishments of america’s black masses.

The problem is..in the blogosphere, things can take on a life of their own….. my twitpic was just me poking fun, a Questlove still life that was clearly intended as a joke. What’s even funnier: race issues in post racial America. Potluck anyone?????
- Questlove, as quoted in a release, Feb. 7

Actually, a bigger problem in just about any online forum isn’t taking things out of context – it’s not giving them one to begin with. With just a few more tweets, Quest might have been able to save his network and a well-intentioned woman a lot of grief.

To recap the saga: the image going up Friday afternoon stirred up even more bad buzz for NBC, which already showed a clumsy hand in the Jay Leno/ Conan O’Brien debacle. And as far as diversity issues … well, we’ve talked about Heroes enough on this site.

But it turned out the source of the menu was a black woman: chef Leslie Calhoun said she had been pushing to serve these dishes for years as part of a weekly special during February. According to The New York Post, her menu was approved and served without incident last year. Enter Questlove. As Calhoun told The Post:

“Questlove, who I serve every day and who enjoys my food, requested the neck bone [cooked in] the black-eyed peas and fried chicken, then got off the line, saying, ‘This is racist.’ The next thing you know, people were taking pictures of the sign and asking all the other black people in the cafeteria if this was racist. They said that it wasn’t.”

That quote isn’t included in The Post’s video for the story, but her reaction doesn’t seem to match up with the joking tone Quest presents in his statement. Nor did this post from him, issued shortly after the image went up:

i think i need a twitter break. i done started something. and now i must put out fire.

And this is where Quest lost his chance to set the record straight: At no point in his twitter feed – before or after posting the picture – does he mention that Calhoun is black, that the menu was her idea, or that it had already been well-received by other patrons.

They might not have stopped the image from generating discussion, but as The R’s Andrea Plaid pointed out when she sent me the link to The Post’s story, those facts could have led to some more well-rounded discussions:

* Could Calhoun have thought of something else besides fried chicken and greens to commemorate Black History Month?
* Has Questlove considered from whom in the blogosphere the criticism came?
* Does he himself really believe in “post-racial” America?

Discussing any of these questions, one would think, would be preferable to speculation about a joke that, at the time, only Quest was in on. So at that point, that lack of context or people “not getting it” is his bad. Twitter might be fun, but if you tweet the punchline without the set-up, the LOLZ end up on you.

Or, in Quest’s case, on the people who air his band’s show; NBC moved quickly to remove the sign as debate picked up during Quest’s “break,” but still couldn’t save itself from becoming a punchline: on The Jay Leno Show, Wanda Sykes said, “That’s how [NBC] celebrates. Oh, no, no, ya’ll don’t need to know about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Here’s some fried chicken.”

At least the story has a happy ending, as Quest also documented: he gave Calhoun a spa certificate and flowers for her trouble. And, presumably, everyone can eat lunch safely at NBC again. Unless Leno decides he wants the cafeteria, too.

News came today that Condé Nast–publisher of The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired among other notable magazine titles–is closing Gourmet magazine.  The powerhouse title has been published since 1940 and is a veritable icon in food magazine publishing.

The loss will affect more than just the legions of foodies who won’t be able to read about the latest in cuisine and cocktail.  Over the years, Gourmet had also established itself as a regular and oftentimes leading voice in the realm of food politics.  Take a look at just some of the stories they have run in the recent past.   From the failures of federal regulations, to outright labor abuses and the rise of de facto slavery, Gourmet’s “Politics of the Plate” section has given dynamic and in-depth coverage of issues rarely covered at all in the so-called “mainstream” media.  To these important issues of human rights, global environmental sustainability,  and health, they have lent their journalistic integrity and commitment to social justice, creating something that was consistently readable, important, and ethical in its role as advocate for something better.

I, for one, will miss it.

Up until last fall, I lived in Bed-Stuy, and the only supermarket near me was so far away that I would just do my food-shopping on the way back from my gym — which happens to be in a completely different neighborhood.  The bodegas on either end of the block where I lived only sold white bread; fresh fruit and vegetables were completely out of the question. Fast food restaurants abounded. After 10 p.m., you had to stand outside the bodega and tell the store employee what you wanted through bullet-proof glass; they handed you your goods via a rotating carousel. If you were hungry at that hour — and I usually was, since I work evenings — there was no place to get food, except Papa John’s. (Ugh.)

Then my lease ran out and I stumbled into an apartment for slightly less than I was paying — in Park Slope, that notorious bastion of upper middle class liberalism and helicopter parenting. My mind was blown. It’s just two miles away, but the demographic chasms are ginormous. This is the whitest, most affluent place I’ve ever lived, and the nutritional options border on the cartoonish. There are supermarkets two blocks in every direction, a surfeit of top-shelf restaurants, the famous Food Co-Op, and the 24-hour bodega on the corner sells fresh herbs and organic kale. As dope this is for me now, I had to move to a completely different neighborhood in order to have regular access to fat-free milk.

The larger public health implications of these kinds of disparities  are obvious. The lack of access to a decent-sized supermarket is a growing problem here in the city, though it’s worse in other places:  there are just four chain supermarkets in all of Newark, New Jersey’s largest city; Detroit, a city with a population of just under a million, doesn’t have any.

When we talk about obesity and the way it correlates is poverty, we spend most of our time talking about pushing low-income consumers into making healthier choices and probably not enough time discussing how we can get food retailers to sell healthy food them in the first place.

Suffice it to say, I’m a big fan of this idea by Mayor Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg administration, in its ever-expanding campaign to make New Yorkers eat better, has already clamped down on trans fats, deployed fruit vendors to produce-poor neighborhoods and prodded corner bodegas to sell leafy green vegetables and low-fat milk.

Now, in a city known more for hot dogs and egg creams than the apple of its nickname, officials want to establish an even bigger beachhead for healthy food — new supermarkets in areas where fresh produce is scarce and where poverty, obesity and diabetes run high.

Under a proposal the City Planning Commission unanimously approved on Wednesday, the city would offer zoning and tax incentives to spur the development of full-service grocery stores that devote a certain amount of space to fresh produce, meats, dairy and other perishables.

The plan — which has broad support among food policy experts, supermarket executives and City Council members, whose approval is needed — would permit developers to construct larger buildings than existing zoning would ordinarily allow, and give tax abatements and exemptions for approved stores in large swaths of northern Manhattan, central Brooklyn and the South Bronx, as well as downtown Jamaica in Queens.

This is just one of the myriad (market-based!) ways that government can improve food options for the poor. A food program in Detroit is trying to set up a system where buyers using food stamps can spend twice as much on food if they purchase it from one of urban farms sprouting up throughout that depopulated city. And the White House is trying to make it easier for people to use food stamps at farmer’s markets. Even  junk food taxes could help, but we can’t just make unhealthy food purchases more onerous. We also have to make good, healthy food much, much more convenient.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

This week, popular food blog Serious Eats put up a Flickr photo of a popular Taiwanese dessert hongdoubing, or shaved ice with condensed milk, red beans and flan. It was meant to be taken as food porn, but to a couple of the commenters it was anything but: “That looks terrible to me,” said one. “Looks like someone had a bad bowel movement … if that ever came out of my [ass], I’d head straight to the emergency room,” said another.

I didn’t grow up on sweet red beans and shaved ice, so the dessert looks a little intense to even me, but at what point does someone’s objections to food start getting offensive? Another commenter put it best: “There’s an interesting dichotomy in the comments. This stuff is delicious, but I kind of feel like I do when they use ‘weird and crazy’ Asian food on Fear Factor after reading [these] comments.” Balut, anyone?