Between them, Anahid Brakke, of the San Diego Hunger Coalition, and Rachel Oporto, of the San Diego Food System Alliance, have personally experienced the ways in which the food systems in the country intersect with race, the economy, and the environment.
“To see the degree to which people are not able to connect with available resources, to see the degree to which that actually perpetuates the inequity and racial injustices of our country, I believe that solving safety net issues is the most challenging and it’s where the most innovation is needed,” says Brakke, CEO of the San Diego Hunger Coalition. “As a community and as a nation, we’ve made a lot of advances in trying to make program access more equitable, but we still have a really long way to go.”
Part of addressing the needs in a more equitable food system comes in the form of “(Eco)Exchange 32—Food Equity in San Diego,” an event organized by the Sister Cities Project, a local nonprofit that was created to build partnerships between marginalized communities and affluent communities in the goal of ending racial inequality. From noon to 2 p.m. today at The Hive at Leichtag Commons in Encinitas, guests will be able to take part in conversations around food equity, meet food entrepreneurs, become involved in networking and fundraising, and learn about resources for sustainable food systems. (Tickets are available for up to $20.)
Brakke and Oporto, who is director of community building and partnerships at the San Diego Food System Alliance, are part of the of female speakers discussing issues connected to food equity and racial justice. They took some time to talk about their work and the potential solutions to hunger they’re working toward with communities of color. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: Can you talk a bit about your involvement, role, and focus in this Sister Cities Project event?
Brakke: I think what I can add is some validation of what people are experiencing, with the information and data to back that up. I always try to use data because this is not a collection of personal failures, this is a national economic problem, so I’ve tried to bring the economics of the issues into the forefront of these discussions so that we can destigmatize and also better understand what people are going through. We really want people to be able to know what programs are out there and how to apply and where to go if you have challenges. We need more livable wage jobs here in San Diego County, and being a food entrepreneur is a really promising field, but people need food assistance as they’re pursuing training and education. At the same time, you have to work so much that you don’t have time to take these different opportunities, so I want to make sure that all of these food entrepreneurs, if they are eligible for any food assistance, that they know about it, that they have easy access to it so that it’s not something that they also have to worry about as they’re getting their business off the ground. When you’re a small business, it’s a real scramble and hustle, so something I would love to see is just making sure that when we look at the suite of services available for entrepreneurs, that part of that has to do with their personal ability to thrive and have all the resources they need.
Oporto: My role, I think, is really to provide a regional lens to the work that is happening to transform our food system. Coming from the Alliance’s perspective and that regional level is what are doing, as a region, to transform our food system and really address the deep inequities that are impacting the way we grow food and share food? Hopefully, I’ll be able to really tie some of the pieces together in of where we go from here. What is the ultimate vision and how are we, right now, as a region, moving this forward?
Q: The San Diego Hunger Coalition’s research on the “State of Hunger in San Diego County” notes that Black, Indigenous, and people of color are disproportionately impacted by hunger and food insecurity, at rates of 39 percent for Latinx San Diegans, 37 percent of Black people, and 29 percent of Native Americans. I realize that this is a big question, but can you help us understand a brief history of the connection between food insecurity and racial injustice?
Brakke: Food insecurity is an economic issue and there’s so much structural racism in our economic system. It’s the historical, structural racism that put households of color at a disadvantage when White households were building wealth and opportunities over the last hundreds of years in our country. There is no level playing field in our country because these injustices started so long ago in our unequal access to wealth and opportunity. That meant that families, especially White families in our country, have more generational wealth. What does generational wealth mean? It means that your parents give you money so that you can buy your first home; your parents help you pay for college, so when you graduate, you don’t owe $50,000. Those things can make or break some people, so we’ve got that access issue.
We have a preponderance, in different communities, of food deserts where the stores that are there don’t have a lot of different healthy options. There are a lot of misnomers that continue in Western medicine about people making poor nutrition choices, people making poor health choices, in general, without considering the limited choices that people have. Those are, to me, the bigger issues.
Our wages, right? It is so much harder to make it with the lower end of the wage spectrum than it used to be. Even thinking about what is $15 an hour now; it’s just not enough to make it today. When we see the Federal Reserve taking actions to curb inflation that are just pummeling lower income households, raising the interest rates, so that now everybody who went into debt during the pandemic, or into worse debt during the pandemic, now their interest rates are up. A series of all of these factors are happening and because of the lack of opportunity and the barriers to wealth accumulation—that all results in less opportunity, less lower income voices in the system. How is someone going to advocate for themselves and their family when they’re working three jobs? It’s a very complicated issue and while, obviously, providing enough food for each household doesn’t solve all of the other issues, it does remove such a huge barrier to people’s ability to solve or pursue other paths or opportunities.
Oporto: It’s a big question, but I appreciate it being asked because people don’t know what they don’t know. If you’re not thinking about that, you don’t know what’s in front of you. In the food system, we see pretty clearly in the data, that division along racial lines. When we talk about healthy food access, we can see the history of redlining where Black communities, communities of color, have been physically divided away from other communities — away from wealthier, White communities—and put into spaces that don’t have access to healthy food. We can see these very direct ties between massive redlining and access to food, and food insecurity rates, and so forth. So, it’s pretty clear from the data that these challenges and inequities that we’re seeing today in the way that people access food, are not a coincidence. They were the result of intentional policies that divided communities along racial lines.
We see this in food and farm labor — the majority of farm workers that are feeding our communities are Latinx, are coming from outside of the U.S., are immigrants with extremely low wages, very few labor protections, working under really compromised conditions. These are some of the things that are pretty clear, in our face, and we can see them very easily. Some things are a little bit more hidden. The challenges for communities of color to access capital to open businesses, to own farmland, to go into farming, to go into these areas of business and be the leaders in the food system. These opportunities are limited, so there are things that are pretty visible. During COVID and after COVID, especially, showed the fault lines, challenges, the inequities; they’ve been there for decades and they aren’t just coincidence. They were by design, in most cases. [COVID] really just elevated and put a spotlight onto the existing inequities. Now, it’s our role to continue to show those inequities and actually fight for some changes. It’s going to take time, but it requires these conversations. Over the last five-plus years, we have very intentionally chosen to focus our work on achieving racial justice in the food system. We did that because we have the data, we have an understanding of who is actually experiencing the inequities in the food system, and they are the same people that make up the food system and are feeding us every day. We need to center those voices in the movement in order to actually make that change, and that’s our approach to how we’re going to move forward.
Q: In your focusing in on racial justice in the food system, what are you hearing most often from these marginalized communities about what would bring greater equity?
Oporto: Yeah, that’s a big question, too. I think it’s two-pronged. We have this vision for 2030 that lays out a very comprehensive plan for achieving a vision that the community wants [San Diego County Food Vision 2030]. That is a community-centered vision that was developed over two years and, over 50 percent of the input and voices that make up that vision, are priority communities and stakeholders in the food system. That’s a very clear, concise plan that has a whole bunch of information in it and objectives and strategies on how we are going to transform the food system.
Zooming out, my heart kind of goes to achieving food sovereignty. This is when we (when I say “we” it’s always the collective community, not the Alliance) talk about our vision for racial justice in the food system. Our vision is, ultimately, about achieving food sovereignty, which is the right over how your own food is produced, the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, the right to define your own food system and to decide how it’s produced and consumed. That is really at the heart of the movement and at the heart of food justice, is achieving food sovereignty. We need to shift that back to the community because the community holds the solution in our food system and in order to achieve the big vision for food sovereignty, you’re going to have to make some really big changes in of who has power in our food system, who is feeding us, who is making decisions about food, who’s making policy about food, and how do we shift that back to communities and how do we put the people who are producing and distributing and consuming food really at the heart of this?
Q: What is an example of what that kind of food sovereignty would look like here?
Oporto: I immediately think about Project New Village, which has been around for decades, working to achieve a vision of food sovereignty for their community. What it looks like in that case, and is a great example, is talking about community ownership. Opening a co-op, a cooperative grocery store that’s owned by the community, is a huge shift in power in of who is deciding what foods you have access to. In the case of a community-owned grocery store, community-owned food distribution or food market, the community’s deciding what food is there, how they have access to food, what kinds of food, who they’re ing. I think that is one of the best examples of how we achieve this, is literally moving ownership to the community and we are doing that in San Diego County, and Project New Village is just one example of many that are working toward how we move ownership to the community, how do we move ownership to farmers and farm workers, to be the ones who are making decisions, and how we’re feeding the community. I think we can really make big changes when we start with that approach.
Q: Part of the work of the San Diego Hunger Coalition includes educating the public about the circumstances involving hunger and food insecurity. Can you share an example of a social, an economic, and an environmental factor that contribute to hunger in San Diego?
Brakke: I can talk about demographics. There are so many hunger relief organizations that only have information available in English. We’ve got a lot of Spanish translation, but we have such an incredibly diverse community that there are not materials available in all of the languages that are spoken here. For example, San Diego County has a language translation line, so if you’re calling and trying to get CalFresh [a program for low-income Californians, known federally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP] and you don’t speak English, there is a way to get a translator, but if you don’t speak English, it’s pretty hard to navigate to be able to get that translator. Also, that language translation line is inadequate and people are often left on hold for an hour. A working person trying to make ends meet, to do everything right and is eligible for CalFresh, took time off from work or used their half-hour lunch, plus an additional half hour on the phone where they didn’t get through, when is the next time they’re going to be able to call? Another barrier, on the social side, is the stigma. It is the message, the rhetoric at the national level, about how there’s something wrong with you if you’re not able to stretch your paycheck. That’s a lot of people. It creates a lot of stress, a lot of shame, and it keeps people from seeking assistance.
On the economic side, we have a lot of people who are not earning enough to make ends meet, but they earn too much for the federal nutrition program. If our country really wanted to see people succeed, they would increase the income threshold so that people don’t face this cliff. Basically, we put people in this position. We put them in a position where if they take a promotion, if they accept a raise, they will still not have enough money to make ends meet, but they also just lost the benefits that were helping them.
Q: You’ve also talked about identifying local inequities in the food system. What are some of those local inequities?
Oporto: I think what I said broadly about the history of redlining. In southeastern San Diego, City Heights, this area of San Diego that was historically redlined has a lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the community today, meaning there’s no traditional, big-box grocery store. There are a lot of corner stores and markets, and there’s programs to try to put fruits and vegetables into those places. There are some markets popping up to try to increase access to fruits and vegetables, but when you don’t have a large grocery store that is providing that access to healthy foods, like many other communities in San Diego have, you’re really lacking access to food like everyone else. That’s a huge inequity that is really clear in San Diego today. Something that a community member in National City told me was, “Why can’t we have what La Jolla has? Why are we any different?” I always think back to that because it can also say to other more affluent communities who are listening, ‘Well, why can’t City Heights and National City have what we have? Why don’t they have a Sprouts? Why don’t they have access to healthy fruits and vegetables every single day?’ We know that there’s a history of redlining there, and racial disparities. We know that some of these big-box stores, or businesses that are serving some of these more affluent communities are choosing not to open in these other communities of color, communities that are historically marginalized or disinvested in. It’s a big issue, so there are people who are working to increase access there, but there are deep, historical, racial inequities that have created this pathway to this food apartheid, these food deserts that don’t have access to healthy, fresh food.
Q: Why aren’t those big box stores in the community now?
Oporto: I don’t know if I’m the expert to answer this for sure, but what I can tell you is that these are decisions from corporate entities that are based in capitalism. Whether the assumption they’re making is true or false, they’re making the decision to not open or provide access to their products in communities of color, into disinvested communities, because of a variety of reasons. We can imagine it’s because they don’t think that they’re going to make enough money there because the community has a lower average household income, so I think these decisions are based in capitalism and profit, and not based on what the community needs. That’s why we’re looking toward models of community ownership where you can open a cooperative grocery store, something that’s locally owned, because the values of those cooperative grocery stores and locally-owned businesses are rooted in the community and they’re there for the community and not, necessarily, for profit or capitalism.
