[Applause]
in a recent interview the Pulitzer
prize-winning journalist and author
Isabel Wilkerson said we need what she
calls radical empathy empathy isn’t pity
it’s not looking down on someone and
feeling sorry for them it’s getting
inside one another and learning to
understand their reality and in order to
do that she says we need to understand
one another circumstances radical
empathy is looking at their situation
and saying not what would I do if I were
in their position but what are they
doing why are they doing what they’re
doing from the perspective of what
they’ve endured I’m a sociologist who
writes and teaches about the ways that
we feed ourselves and about how food can
have such a deeply meaningful impact on
all of our lives and what I’d like to
talk to you about today is how food can
be a way to build that radical empathy
so why food well food is one thing we
all have in common like air and water we
all need food to survive but unlike air
and water
humans are active in the process of food
provisioning we decide which species to
cultivate which animals to raise and
kill how to prepare various ingredients
and when and with whom we take them into
our bodies but food is more than
sustenance it’s also deeply a part of
who we are food is a part of many of our
religious traditions like the Christian
communion wafer or Buddhist food
offerings or matzo ball soup on Jewish
holidays food is tied to many of our
secular traditions as well think for
example of eating cake on birthdays or
turkey on Thanksgiving food can play a
symbolic role in many of our most
important social movements both the
Boston Tea Party and the
Arab Spring were incited by conflicts
over food a less well-known example is
that of Georgia Gilmore a civil rights
activist who organized black women in
Alabama to cook and sell food and use
the proceeds to fund the alternative
transportation system that made the
Montgomery bus boycott possible later
she was fired for her activism and she
opened an underground restaurant in her
house and dr. Martin Luther King jr. and
many of the other movement leaders were
able to gather and relax and plan
strategy over her delicious meals food
can bring us together across the country
we’re seeing the rise in migrant supper
clubs in which immigrants and refugees
are able to earn money and build
community through sharing cultural foods
and I’ll never forget hearing food
justice activist Anna Marie Carter who
plants gardens all over her South
Central Los Angeles neighborhood talk
about inviting rival gang members to
come together over a cup of tea brewed
with herbs that she grew so food has
this tremendous potential to bring us
together to allow us to get inside one
another’s realities and create radical
empathy but this is not always the case
food can also break us apart Hasan
Minhaj talks about this dynamic in his
recent stand-up special he was a
comedian and a correspondent on The
Daily Show and their office was down the
block from Fox News and he talks about
occasionally seeing Fox News superstars
like Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter take a
break from whipping up anti-muslim
propaganda to go out for halal chicken
and rice from the food cart so common to
lower Manhattan he said it’s like your
brain can be racist but your body will
just betray you
but of course no meal no matter how
delicious has yet managed to change that
networks politics food can be a source
of social exclusion
children of immigrants often tell
stories of bringing unfamiliar foods to
school lunch and being teased
mercilessly by their native-born peers
foods can often serve as an insult
through which we demean various
communities think for example of calling
Germans Krauts or Mexicans beaners or
the recent assertion that if we don’t
address immigration we’ll have a taco
truck on every corner the food industry
is often rife with violence there have
been allegations of sexual harassment
and assault made against many chefs
including some of our most beloved
celebrity chefs a less well-known
example is a recent study by Human
Rights Watch that found that over 80% of
women farmworkers experience sexual
harassment or assault on the job when it
comes to consumption were often too
judgemental about what in what one
another eat those who eat healthy food
are often presumed to be more moral or
more self discipline than those who do
not even as our definitions of which
foods are healthy change over time this
isn’t new food historians have long
chronicled the ways that middle class
food reformers have sought to change the
eating habits of working-class
communities and new immigrant groups
rather than working to improve their
circumstances and the insults we hear a
levy that people of larger body sizes
are often among the cruelest and most
vicious ones we can imagine this is
neither radical nor empathetic even when
it’s Finley disguised as concern for an
individual’s health and well-being and
it creates growing rates of anxiety in
people of many body sizes so food has
this tremendous potential to let us
learn one in other stories get inside
one another’s realities and create
radical empathy but in order to do that
we need to understand one another
circumstances and that means engaging
with the totality of
food system a system so complex it
encompasses everything from the smallest
microorganism burrowing beneath the soil
to our own bodies and ways of thinking
about them to the largest industry in
the largest economy in the world the
stories of what people eat how we obtain
our food and what it means to us our
stories of politics and economies and
Ecology’s of culture and agriculture of
soul and soil in the past century we’ve
moved from a nation of food producers to
a nation of food processors and
processed foods over three-quarters of a
million farms have gone under since the
1980s alone leaving widespread rural
poverty in their wake in their place
we’ve seen the rise of agribusiness a
technology and market oriented industry
comprised of creators of pesticides
fertilizers and food additives makers of
machinery designers of the millions of
colors of brightly colored boxes that
line our grocery store shelves and of
marketers who convinced us to take them
into our bodies in response an array of
citizen consumers have decided that
their form of radical empathy means
meeting and getting to know and
celebrating the family farmers who
continue to grow our food on a small
scale and without toxic pesticides this
movement is in part responsible for the
growing numbers of farmers markets urban
farms community gardens and
farm-to-table restaurants but as
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told us in her
spectacular 2009 TED talk there’s danger
in telling a single story and the food
movements relationship to radical
empathy is more complicated than it may
appear because while the food movement
has told us many things about the ills
associated with the industrial food
system too often it has
to talk about racism and yet racism is
integral to every aspect of the food
system from who can be a farmer to who
has access to the kinds of food they
prefer to who’s likely to be found doing
what kinds of jobs within the food
industry for example the food movement
often trades on a kind of nostalgia for
the family farm that too often fails to
recognize that historically in this
country while white people who
cultivated the land were called farmers
african-americans were farming to first
as enslaved people and later as
sharecroppers and food historians like
Michael Twitty have told us that without
the immense agricultural knowledge of
enslaved people many if not all of the
early American colonists would have
starved Asian immigrants have been
legally prohibited from owning land and
in California’s Central Valley white
farmers were among the staunchest
proponents of Japanese internment
because they wanted to expel their new
neighbors who had only just managed to
gain a foothold in the region Latino
immigrants have been welcomed into this
country during periods of labor
shortages and then deported and expelled
when those labor shortages are over we
see a similar dynamic happening today
with the rise in fierce anti-immigrant
rhetoric and rising levels of
deportations alongside calls to increase
the h-2a visa program in which workers
are allowed in temporarily but without
the right to organize or quit an abusive
job and without any path to citizenship
we tend to think of family farmers as
plucky and independent as rugged
individuals but this narrative ignores
the fact that those farms who manage to
maintain their farm ownership during the
industrialization of Agriculture often
did so with the help of loans and
subsidies from the US Department of
Agriculture this assistance was
regularly denied
two black farmers two Native American
farmers two Latino farmers and two women
farmers and all four of those groups are
at various stages of suing the USDA for
redress today there’s a generation of
young people who want to get involved in
the sustainable food industry but those
who are more privileged are more likely
to be able to raise start-up funds to
begin their food businesses either
through friends and family their access
to venture capitalists or if they need
to buy land because they’re more likely
to be offered standard rate mortgages
where people of color are often funneled
into subprime loans or rent to own
schemes and it’s these young white
farmers who have often become the face
of the sustainable food movement for
example a few years back New York
Magazine did this really beautiful cover
story called what an urban farmer looks
like but despite the incredible
diversity of gardeners in New York City
six of the seven individuals they
profiled were white we see similar
dynamics playing out with regard to the
role of race in terms of food
consumption in the past few years it’s
become well-known that low-income
communities and communities of color are
often unlikely to have access to healthy
food either through supermarkets or
there alternatives like farmer’s markets
or health food stores some analysts even
call this retail redlining hearkening
back to the history of racist lending
processes that denied loans for
mortgages to segregated african-american
neighborhoods this isn’t just an
economic process middle-class
communities of color who could well
afford the groceries are often ignored
by the grocery industry as well but of
course economics are fundamentally
important to our food system and it’s
the economics of our food system along
with government subsidies that ensure
that processed foods are often more
expensive than their fresh food
counterparts this is why for example a
few ears of corn
often cost more than corn chips or
chicken nuggets are cheaper than chicken
this leaves many families with a choice
between having enough to eat and eating
healthy food not much of a choice is it
and it’s for this reason that many food
advocates say that in addition to
creating alternatives to industrial
agriculture and in addition to curbing
agribusinesses worst and most egregious
practices we also need to raise wages so
that people can afford to have access to
healthy food so food has this tremendous
potential to help us tell our stories to
understand who we are and to relate to
one another building this radical
empathy and in order to do that we need
to understand one another circumstances
by learning about the nature of the food
system that surrounds us so once we’ve
done that what do we do I believe we
need to start by eating one another’s
cultural foods and in our attempts to
expand and please our palates we need to
learn to engage with the stories of all
those people involved in their
provisioning the chefs and cooks the
server’s the specialty grocers the farm
workers and the farmers sometimes this
can be done face-to-face if you’re
feeling a sense of connection and the
mood is right but it can also be done
through the explosive increase in food
literature narrative cookbooks food
journalism food blogs and it’s up to all
of us in the food world to ensure that
diverse stories are being told and
diverse individuals get to do the
telling of them I also believe we need
to learn to see one another’s lived
experiences in their social and
historical context too often what seems
to be the result of individual
decision-making or individual abilities
are often influenced by hundreds of
years
history and in order to better
understand that history we need to learn
new kinds of stories not just the
simplified America first version that
too often passes for high school
textbooks but stories of enslavement and
oppressions of privileges passed across
generations and of social movements that
have worked to make all of our lives
better which brings me to the third
thing I believe we need to do which is
to get involved so many of the most
pressing social issues of our time are
in some way or another connected to food
anyone who eats and who understands the
vital role that immigrants play in our
food system can stand with them as they
struggle to be treated with dignity and
respect anyone who eats and who knows
that food workers are among the most
lowly paid members of our society has a
role to play in their campaigns for
better wages increased working
conditions freedom from sexual
harassment and assault and access to
paid sick leave anyone who eats and who
knows that over 40 million people
struggle with hunger in the United
States alone not to mention the rest of
the world should be outraged when our
government threatens to cut even the
meager food assistance they provide and
anyone who eats and who understands that
black communities are often completely
lacking in access to healthy food can
understand that this is just one of the
myriad ways that people are told that
their lives do not matter and can work
with them as they struggle to reassert
that they do the black feminist poet
Audrey Lauren once said it’s not our
differences that divide us
it’s our inability to recognize accept
and celebrate these differences through
food we can create the kind of radical
empathy that allows us to do just that
and inspires us to work towards our
collective
liberation thank you
[Applause]
[Music] you
in a recent interview the Pulitzer
prize-winning journalist and author
Isabel Wilkerson said we need what she
calls radical empathy empathy isn’t pity
it’s not looking down on someone and
feeling sorry for them it’s getting
inside one another and learning to
understand their reality and in order to
do that she says we need to understand
one another circumstances radical
empathy is looking at their situation
and saying not what would I do if I were
in their position but what are they
doing why are they doing what they’re
doing from the perspective of what
they’ve endured I’m a sociologist who
writes and teaches about the ways that
we feed ourselves and about how food can
have such a deeply meaningful impact on
all of our lives and what I’d like to
talk to you about today is how food can
be a way to build that radical empathy
so why food well food is one thing we
all have in common like air and water we
all need food to survive but unlike air
and water
humans are active in the process of food
provisioning we decide which species to
cultivate which animals to raise and
kill how to prepare various ingredients
and when and with whom we take them into
our bodies but food is more than
sustenance it’s also deeply a part of
who we are food is a part of many of our
religious traditions like the Christian
communion wafer or Buddhist food
offerings or matzo ball soup on Jewish
holidays food is tied to many of our
secular traditions as well think for
example of eating cake on birthdays or
turkey on Thanksgiving food can play a
symbolic role in many of our most
important social movements both the
Boston Tea Party and the
Arab Spring were incited by conflicts
over food a less well-known example is
that of Georgia Gilmore a civil rights
activist who organized black women in
Alabama to cook and sell food and use
the proceeds to fund the alternative
transportation system that made the
Montgomery bus boycott possible later
she was fired for her activism and she
opened an underground restaurant in her
house and dr. Martin Luther King jr. and
many of the other movement leaders were
able to gather and relax and plan
strategy over her delicious meals food
can bring us together across the country
we’re seeing the rise in migrant supper
clubs in which immigrants and refugees
are able to earn money and build
community through sharing cultural foods
and I’ll never forget hearing food
justice activist Anna Marie Carter who
plants gardens all over her South
Central Los Angeles neighborhood talk
about inviting rival gang members to
come together over a cup of tea brewed
with herbs that she grew so food has
this tremendous potential to bring us
together to allow us to get inside one
another’s realities and create radical
empathy but this is not always the case
food can also break us apart Hasan
Minhaj talks about this dynamic in his
recent stand-up special he was a
comedian and a correspondent on The
Daily Show and their office was down the
block from Fox News and he talks about
occasionally seeing Fox News superstars
like Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter take a
break from whipping up anti-muslim
propaganda to go out for halal chicken
and rice from the food cart so common to
lower Manhattan he said it’s like your
brain can be racist but your body will
just betray you
but of course no meal no matter how
delicious has yet managed to change that
networks politics food can be a source
of social exclusion
children of immigrants often tell
stories of bringing unfamiliar foods to
school lunch and being teased
mercilessly by their native-born peers
foods can often serve as an insult
through which we demean various
communities think for example of calling
Germans Krauts or Mexicans beaners or
the recent assertion that if we don’t
address immigration we’ll have a taco
truck on every corner the food industry
is often rife with violence there have
been allegations of sexual harassment
and assault made against many chefs
including some of our most beloved
celebrity chefs a less well-known
example is a recent study by Human
Rights Watch that found that over 80% of
women farmworkers experience sexual
harassment or assault on the job when it
comes to consumption were often too
judgemental about what in what one
another eat those who eat healthy food
are often presumed to be more moral or
more self discipline than those who do
not even as our definitions of which
foods are healthy change over time this
isn’t new food historians have long
chronicled the ways that middle class
food reformers have sought to change the
eating habits of working-class
communities and new immigrant groups
rather than working to improve their
circumstances and the insults we hear a
levy that people of larger body sizes
are often among the cruelest and most
vicious ones we can imagine this is
neither radical nor empathetic even when
it’s Finley disguised as concern for an
individual’s health and well-being and
it creates growing rates of anxiety in
people of many body sizes so food has
this tremendous potential to let us
learn one in other stories get inside
one another’s realities and create
radical empathy but in order to do that
we need to understand one another
circumstances and that means engaging
with the totality of
food system a system so complex it
encompasses everything from the smallest
microorganism burrowing beneath the soil
to our own bodies and ways of thinking
about them to the largest industry in
the largest economy in the world the
stories of what people eat how we obtain
our food and what it means to us our
stories of politics and economies and
Ecology’s of culture and agriculture of
soul and soil in the past century we’ve
moved from a nation of food producers to
a nation of food processors and
processed foods over three-quarters of a
million farms have gone under since the
1980s alone leaving widespread rural
poverty in their wake in their place
we’ve seen the rise of agribusiness a
technology and market oriented industry
comprised of creators of pesticides
fertilizers and food additives makers of
machinery designers of the millions of
colors of brightly colored boxes that
line our grocery store shelves and of
marketers who convinced us to take them
into our bodies in response an array of
citizen consumers have decided that
their form of radical empathy means
meeting and getting to know and
celebrating the family farmers who
continue to grow our food on a small
scale and without toxic pesticides this
movement is in part responsible for the
growing numbers of farmers markets urban
farms community gardens and
farm-to-table restaurants but as
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told us in her
spectacular 2009 TED talk there’s danger
in telling a single story and the food
movements relationship to radical
empathy is more complicated than it may
appear because while the food movement
has told us many things about the ills
associated with the industrial food
system too often it has
to talk about racism and yet racism is
integral to every aspect of the food
system from who can be a farmer to who
has access to the kinds of food they
prefer to who’s likely to be found doing
what kinds of jobs within the food
industry for example the food movement
often trades on a kind of nostalgia for
the family farm that too often fails to
recognize that historically in this
country while white people who
cultivated the land were called farmers
african-americans were farming to first
as enslaved people and later as
sharecroppers and food historians like
Michael Twitty have told us that without
the immense agricultural knowledge of
enslaved people many if not all of the
early American colonists would have
starved Asian immigrants have been
legally prohibited from owning land and
in California’s Central Valley white
farmers were among the staunchest
proponents of Japanese internment
because they wanted to expel their new
neighbors who had only just managed to
gain a foothold in the region Latino
immigrants have been welcomed into this
country during periods of labor
shortages and then deported and expelled
when those labor shortages are over we
see a similar dynamic happening today
with the rise in fierce anti-immigrant
rhetoric and rising levels of
deportations alongside calls to increase
the h-2a visa program in which workers
are allowed in temporarily but without
the right to organize or quit an abusive
job and without any path to citizenship
we tend to think of family farmers as
plucky and independent as rugged
individuals but this narrative ignores
the fact that those farms who manage to
maintain their farm ownership during the
industrialization of Agriculture often
did so with the help of loans and
subsidies from the US Department of
Agriculture this assistance was
regularly denied
two black farmers two Native American
farmers two Latino farmers and two women
farmers and all four of those groups are
at various stages of suing the USDA for
redress today there’s a generation of
young people who want to get involved in
the sustainable food industry but those
who are more privileged are more likely
to be able to raise start-up funds to
begin their food businesses either
through friends and family their access
to venture capitalists or if they need
to buy land because they’re more likely
to be offered standard rate mortgages
where people of color are often funneled
into subprime loans or rent to own
schemes and it’s these young white
farmers who have often become the face
of the sustainable food movement for
example a few years back New York
Magazine did this really beautiful cover
story called what an urban farmer looks
like but despite the incredible
diversity of gardeners in New York City
six of the seven individuals they
profiled were white we see similar
dynamics playing out with regard to the
role of race in terms of food
consumption in the past few years it’s
become well-known that low-income
communities and communities of color are
often unlikely to have access to healthy
food either through supermarkets or
there alternatives like farmer’s markets
or health food stores some analysts even
call this retail redlining hearkening
back to the history of racist lending
processes that denied loans for
mortgages to segregated african-american
neighborhoods this isn’t just an
economic process middle-class
communities of color who could well
afford the groceries are often ignored
by the grocery industry as well but of
course economics are fundamentally
important to our food system and it’s
the economics of our food system along
with government subsidies that ensure
that processed foods are often more
expensive than their fresh food
counterparts this is why for example a
few ears of corn
often cost more than corn chips or
chicken nuggets are cheaper than chicken
this leaves many families with a choice
between having enough to eat and eating
healthy food not much of a choice is it
and it’s for this reason that many food
advocates say that in addition to
creating alternatives to industrial
agriculture and in addition to curbing
agribusinesses worst and most egregious
practices we also need to raise wages so
that people can afford to have access to
healthy food so food has this tremendous
potential to help us tell our stories to
understand who we are and to relate to
one another building this radical
empathy and in order to do that we need
to understand one another circumstances
by learning about the nature of the food
system that surrounds us so once we’ve
done that what do we do I believe we
need to start by eating one another’s
cultural foods and in our attempts to
expand and please our palates we need to
learn to engage with the stories of all
those people involved in their
provisioning the chefs and cooks the
server’s the specialty grocers the farm
workers and the farmers sometimes this
can be done face-to-face if you’re
feeling a sense of connection and the
mood is right but it can also be done
through the explosive increase in food
literature narrative cookbooks food
journalism food blogs and it’s up to all
of us in the food world to ensure that
diverse stories are being told and
diverse individuals get to do the
telling of them I also believe we need
to learn to see one another’s lived
experiences in their social and
historical context too often what seems
to be the result of individual
decision-making or individual abilities
are often influenced by hundreds of
years
history and in order to better
understand that history we need to learn
new kinds of stories not just the
simplified America first version that
too often passes for high school
textbooks but stories of enslavement and
oppressions of privileges passed across
generations and of social movements that
have worked to make all of our lives
better which brings me to the third
thing I believe we need to do which is
to get involved so many of the most
pressing social issues of our time are
in some way or another connected to food
anyone who eats and who understands the
vital role that immigrants play in our
food system can stand with them as they
struggle to be treated with dignity and
respect anyone who eats and who knows
that food workers are among the most
lowly paid members of our society has a
role to play in their campaigns for
better wages increased working
conditions freedom from sexual
harassment and assault and access to
paid sick leave anyone who eats and who
knows that over 40 million people
struggle with hunger in the United
States alone not to mention the rest of
the world should be outraged when our
government threatens to cut even the
meager food assistance they provide and
anyone who eats and who understands that
black communities are often completely
lacking in access to healthy food can
understand that this is just one of the
myriad ways that people are told that
their lives do not matter and can work
with them as they struggle to reassert
that they do the black feminist poet
Audrey Lauren once said it’s not our
differences that divide us
it’s our inability to recognize accept
and celebrate these differences through
food we can create the kind of radical
empathy that allows us to do just that
and inspires us to work towards our
collective
liberation thank you
[Applause]
[Music] you
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