Freedom Farmers

White, Monica M.

doi:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643694.001.0001

Cited by 176 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The movement includes a growing body of restories like the present paper, including writings about African American ( Garth & Reese, 2020 ; Miller, 2013 ; Opie, 2008 ; Penniman, 2018 ; Reese, 2019 ; Twitty, 2017 , Wallach, 2015 , 2019 ; White, 2018 ; Williams-Forson, 2006 ; Zafar, 2019 ) and Native American foodways ( Berzok, 2005 ; LaDuke, 1999 ; Mihesuah & Hoover, 2019 ; Nelson, 2008 ; Settee & Shukla, 2020 ). This journal has published a special issue, Indigenous Food Sovereignty in North America ( Hilchey, 2019 ).…”

Section: Living Most Of Our Story (From Our Origins To the 1500s And 1619)mentioning

confidence: 99%

African and Native American foodways and resilience: From 1619 to COVID-19

Lunsford

Arthur

Porter

2021

J. Agric. Food Syst. Community Dev.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is flooding and splitting “efficiency” fault lines in today’s industrialized food system. It also exploits centuries of historical traumas, White supremacy, and systemic racism to kill non-White people at triple the rates of Whites. In 1619, an English ship landed on the shores of the Powhatan confederacy, or, as the English called it, Point Comfort, Virginia. The ship delivered stolen people onto stolen land. This was a first step in founding today’s U.S. food system. Until that time, the people of North America and West Africa had lived off the land for millennia, foraging, hunting, and cultivating food. But 400 years ago, the twin European colonial influences of invasion and enslavement entwined the lives and, to some extent, the foodways of Native Americans and West Africans in what is now the U.S. Yet, these communities are still resilient. This paper offers re-stories about how African American and Native American communities have adapted and maintained foodways to survive, thrive and renew, from 1619 to COVID-19. Methods include historical and literature reviews, interviews, and brief auto-ethnography. Even in the face of a pandemic, Native American and African American communities still leverage their foodways to survive and thrive. Some of these food system strategies also illustrate shifts that could be made in the United States food system to help everyone thrive.

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Section: Living Most Of Our Story (From Our Origins To the 1500s And 1619)mentioning

confidence: 99%

African and Native American foodways and resilience: From 1619 to COVID-19

Lunsford

Arthur

Porter

2021

J. Agric. Food Syst. Community Dev.

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“…One manifestation of this is the long-standing tradition of urban gardening as a constructive response to conditions of repression. Gardening for survival, self-reliance, resistance, and self-determination has been a part of urban Black communities for generations (White, 2018;Reese, 2019). In these instances, gardeners may be motivated to garden as part of a larger process of community resilience, healing, and liberation.…”

Section: Civic and Community Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

More Than Food: The Social Benefits of Localized Urban Food Systems

Diekmann¹,

Gray

Thai

2020

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Localized urban food systems are gaining attention from policy makers, planners, and advocates for benefits that go well beyond food production and consumption. Recognizing that agriculture, and food systems more broadly, provide multiple, integrated services, this study measures the social, educational, civic, and nutritional impacts of four common types of local food system activity in an urban setting. Specifically, we examine the outcomes of two common types of urban agricultural production (home gardens and community gardens) and two common types of direct markets (farmers' markets and Community Supported Agriculture programs or CSAs) through a survey of 424 gardeners and 450 direct market shoppers in California's San Francisco Bay Area. Our comparative analysis focuses on four commonly discussed functions of agricultural production and direct marketing in urban areas: access to high-quality, fresh produce; food and agriculture education; social connections; and civic engagement. While impacts on nutrition were consistently high, some of the largest differences between types of local food system activity were in social interaction and civic engagement. For example, gardeners had a mean score of 3.77 on the social interaction scale compared to direct market participants, who had a mean score of 3.03. These findings confirm that different types of local production and direct marketing have distinct impacts on participants. Generally, gardens, which involve more sustained engagement with other people and the natural world, were sites of greater learning, connection, and civic participation than either type of direct marketing.

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“…Domestic citizenship can be considered a part of this intellectual tradition of Black food sovereignty even as early iterations avoided threating racial hierarchies while still leveraging cooperation with federal entities. 13 It was the job of the Negro home demonstration agent to work as middle person between images of national pride and racial uplift in order to guide domestic transformation.…”

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confidence: 99%

Scenes of Domestic Citizenship in Negro Home Demonstration Work 1921–1938

Walker

2022

Gender & History

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Reading two United States Department of Agriculture propaganda films, Helping the Negro Farmer (1921) and The Negro Farmer (1939) along with Maryland narrative reports, this article considers the evolution of state-sanctioned discourse around domestic science, race and diet. The films rely on themes that construct the Negro home as a foil to a whitewashed progressive domestic front. Tasked with reforming this home, Negro female home demonstration agents participated in these films and worked as interlocutors, selling the narrative of kitchens as workshops of patriotism and civility. Yet, they also negotiated a form of domestic citizenship, crafting tactics of early Black food sovereignty despite being underfunded. This important period of African American foodways urges us to consider how agents were both framed as expert and expendable in the production of a national domestic standard.The 1921 silent film, Helping the Negroes to become Better Farmers and Homemakers, tells the story of how the Collins family improved their standard of living with the aid of eastern Alabama's white county agents. 1 Reminiscent of earlier dietary reports of rural Negro families, the film begins with 'before' images of a darkened, run-down dwelling fronted by rickety steps upon which the littlest of three children, referred to as 'Etc.' happily eats watermelon. 2 Signalling tropes of pickaninnies, this will be the first of many infantilising scenes in which the Negro community eat watermelon and dance. The latter of these activities is said to be a distraction from the agents' work helping to remodel their kitchens, improve gardening practices, beautify their homes and refine canning techniques. The film itself supplemented a larger domestic science curriculum meant to attract Negro home demonstration agents such as Marion C. Bell to work in Maryland, where the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was headquartered, to do the work of transforming 'Etc.', her family and home. 3 Specifically, Bell and other agents like her were tasked with converting the 'primitive' kitchen into a 'progressive' one, encouraging a shift from provisioning locally to the modern practices of buying foods like beans, mayonnaise and milk. In attempting to bring the old kitchen into a modern moment, agents negotiated a form of domestic citizenship.This term draws from Amy Kaplan's notion of manifest domesticity which argues that the nineteenth-century invention of American domesticity arose as the twin project of manifest destiny. The genocidal erasure brought about by westward expansion and increased immigration resulted in anxieties around racialised difference.

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Freedom Farmers

Cited by 176 publications

References 0 publications

African and Native American foodways and resilience: From 1619 to COVID-19

African and Native American foodways and resilience: From 1619 to COVID-19

More Than Food: The Social Benefits of Localized Urban Food Systems

Scenes of Domestic Citizenship in Negro Home Demonstration Work 1921–1938

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