Karen Washington is a food justice activist and community organiser best known for helping to start food gardens in New York City’s Bronx neighbourhood. She coined the term ‘food apartheid’ to describe neighbourhoods – like many in South Africa – ...
I got my start in New York City in the 1980s. The city had practically no money and at one time – if you can believe it – it had more than 50,000 vacant lots, mostly in low-income neighbourhoods or areas people left because of “white flight” – white people leaving the city for the suburbs.Now, I didn’t have a white picket fence then but I did move into a brand-new housing development. But right across the street from my brand-new house was an empty lot full of garbage.
Because while I was in that garden, tending to it and making it so beautiful, I realised that within my community there were so many social issues: Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, childhood obesity, cancer, heart disease… Next is food sovereignty – that’s the ability to control your own food, to govern what you eat and how you live.Many communities in Gauteng are food deserts’. Should we be talking about food apartheid in South Africa?
To own land is a capitalistic way of thinking of land – land for extraction and exploitation. Sometimes it’s the government who thinks along this capitalistic system. We’ll say we want land because we want to care for it, to grow fruits and vegetables and medicine on it to make us whole as human beings.But when people want to grow food on land, they say no.
Because by being a caretaker of the land, I know that land will be in the hands of generation after generation.The food system doesn’t need to be fixed – it needs to changeBut they are wrong. The food system doesn’t need to be fixed,– and that change comes with putting the power back in the hands of a community.
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