Morning Forum: LaDonna Redmond’s Speech

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on May 11, 2009

I like to start off my talk by remembering who we come here for. Who prayed for us to be here? Whose shoulders do we stand on? If you had a cup of coffee this morning or you had a piece of fruit or some oatmeal, or if you stopped by McDonald’s on the way here. (Let’s not fake like you didn’t. Some of y’all went by McDonald’s this morning.) Somebody prepared that food. Somebody was in the field about that food.

So we want to thank the creator this morning for the hands that prepared that food for us, the hands that carried that food, the minds that planted that food. We want to thank our ancestors for their struggles, because without those struggles we certainly would not be here. I stand strong because I stand on the shoulders of those people who have gone before me—in my family, in my culture. Certainly in this work there are many who have gone before me. So I’m here today because of them, and I thank them and I’m very grateful for them.

So I just came back to tell you that we are in a crisis. We are in a health crisis. Raj just talked about that. We’re still in an economic crisis. I don’t have to tell anybody in New York about the economic crisis, I don’t think. We are in an environmental crisis. And we are in a food crisis.

But I have to tell you that I did not come to this work with that understanding. I did not come to become a food activist because I gave a damn about trees. I didn’t. I worked in my community to improve it in every way I can think of. I ran halfway houses. I have helped people who are developmentally disabled find better housing. I have worked to improve youth by getting them connected to jobs and getting them off the streets. I’ve done gang intervention. I’ve done all kinds of things in community.

But I really didn’t care about the trees. I read all kinds of things. I call myself intelligent, well read and articulate, but I didn’t know where my food came from until my son was born. (I have some slides and you can run those slides while I’m talking. I’m not going to explain them. You can just look at them and do your thing.) But there was nothing in my community that allowed me to think about myself in relationship to the environment, let alone the food supply, until my son was born.

You know, when you’re pregnant and you’re having a baby, you’re doing all this stuff to make sure that your child comes here healthy. You get your prenatal care and you do all these really wonderful, wonderful things. But I thought that that was my job for him and that as an infant he was helpless. He was just there, and my job was to take care of him. But what he brung with him when he came to this earth was these food allergies. He brought these food allergies with him. To some they could be considered a burden, but for me they really weren’t. They were an opportunity for me to see myself as in connection to the world really different from ever before. My son brought me a gift when he came here allergic to peanuts and shellfish and dairy products and eggs. (Somebody laughing. You feel me.)

What does a baby in this country eat? I did breastfeed. I was Earth Mother, African clothes down. (I breastfed both of my babies. My youngest baby, I had to kick her off the breast. She was going to be 10 years old. You know I wasn’t having that.) But baby food in this country ten years ago was filled with cheese or milk or peanuts or whatever else in it that my son couldn’t eat. As I began to understand that I had to do something about my son’s food allergies I really had to understand what I had to do about food, because I didn’t have time to come to a conference. I didn’t have time to read about my son’s food allergy, I really had to understand what I had to do about food.

Ten years ago it wasn’t that obvious where to find the right food that I wanted. So I had to go to the internet. I don’t know how many of y’all remember the internet ten years ago. It was real different. But on the internet 10 years ago there was a lot of information. So I started to research food. You know I don’t want to pick on anybody that’s a doctor, but I just want to say that doctors weren’t really the most helpful people that I had ran into. They didn’t have a lot of nutrition information. More or less, they couldn’t tell me how to feed my son.

So I went to the internet. I just put in the word “food.” I don’t think I could Google it then. I don’t know what I did or how I did research. I remember looking at the New York Times. It had this picture on the cover. [See the picture. Scroll to bottom] It had this dump truck, and the caption read, “Greenpeace dumps ten tons of genetically modified US corn on Tony Blair’s driveway.”

I’m like, “Dang, how are they going to clean that up?” But I was also like, “Why would they do that? What’s wrong with genetically modified corn? What is a GMO?” As I started to probe more into that I discovered that GMOs, particularly in corn and soy, were 80% to 90% genetically modified at that point, and that corn and/or soy is in almost every processed food in our supermarket.

But I didn’t get the news flash. Nobody sent me the memo that said that this was the shift in the food system that was happening.

But I didn’t want that for my baby. I’m still looking for the right kind of food. My search also introduced me to how food is grown-fertilizers, pesticides. Well, research on pesticides is really clear. I didn’t really want food that had pesticides in it because my son is so young. I didn’t want that pesticide load in his system. This is just a mother love thing going on. We don’t know the breadth of this stuff and how one thing leads to another, but it don’t feel good on the inside so you don’t do it.

I wanted to know more about how food was grown or how do we even get it. I ran across another article. The Seattle Times had done an exposé [Fear in the Fields, July 17, 1997] on sewer sludge and its application to farming in Seattle. It talked about how they applied this sewer sludge to lettuce farms and tomatoes.

I’m like, “Well, what is sewer sludge?” For those who don’t know it’s municipal waste. But this article also talked about the workers who were in the treatment facilities and how sick they were becoming just from processing municipal waste and its application on farmland. I’m not a scientist by any means, but I didn’t want that on my food. The question became “Well, as a mother, what do I want?”

I started looking for this food that was organic, that didn’t have all of this stuff on it. There was no organic movement at this time so that meant food that was grown without the stuff that was genetically modified, without the chemical fertilizers—grown by somebody I could identify, that I could call maybe by name. So I started looking for this food, and I found a few here and there at the farmers markets all over the city of Chicago. I could go up to the north side. I could go to Whole Foods (and I apologize up front if anybody’s into Whole Foods. I don’t mean no harm. But Whole Foods wasn’t in my neighborhood.) There was a place called Stanley’s I could go.

It wasn’t a problem until the day that I called my sister. My brother-in-law answered the phone and said, “Val will be back in about five minutes. She ran to the grocery store.”

I’m like, “What?! Five minutes?”

It would take me all day to go grocery shopping. Where is it that she’s going in five minutes to get groceries? I couldn’t go five minutes from my house on the west side of Chicago and do any kind of grocery shopping for my family. I can shop, but I can’t get the things that I need for my son. This is a quote that people have heard me say many times. I switch it up and do a remix, so I don’t know how it’s going to come out, but I’m going to give it to you. I’m going to start with the chicken.

I can go and buy every variety of fried chicken imaginable on the west side of Chicago. I can get it in great variety. I can buy cigarettes. I didn’t know there were so many kinds of cigarettes. I can get liquor. I can get designer clothes. I can get heroin, I can get crack.  I can get a gun, but I can’t get an organic tomato. I can’t get a cup of yogurt. I can’t get romaine lettuce. (I can’t get iceberg lettuce. Let’s just keep it simple.) I can’t get a banana or an apple. But I can get every variety of potato chip there is.

So there’s something wrong with that, and we got to get this right because it’s not that people are choosing between buying potato chips and buying coconut. That’s not the choice. The choice is people are buying cheap food or no food: cheap food, white bread, hot dogs. “I’m going to fry me some French fries. I’m going to get me some oil–some Crisco–and some white bread and I’m going to feed my babies with my last $15.”

I’m not going to take my last $15 and go and get me a big bag of potato chips and put some ketchup on them and hand them out to my kids. That’s not the choice.

People know the difference between going to McDonald’s and eating a healthy meal. They know the difference. They don’t know the difference between an orange juice and an orange drink. That’s the choice.

It’s not even that people don’t have the resources. Because even if you are on food stamps, if you receive EBT, you have some money. That’s money. That’s currency. But a lot of times the lives of poor people are disrespected because we can overanalyze things. See, I don’t know what white men are buying when they go to the grocery store because don’t nobody collect all that data on them. But I bet you that there are many of you in here who can tell me what a black single woman does with two kids because she’s on food stamps. Am I lying to you?

I don’t hear you.

When we start to talk about a food system that’s just, we got to talk about a food system that’s just for everybody, not just just for the people we think who don’t have resources. See, we think we can go to Wal-Mart and get our groove on. We think we can go to Whole Foods and get our groove on. And we think one is better than the other.

I’m going to tell you today that it ain’t. The policies that we create around the food system, we have to stop. See, we have to begin to understand that the miracles that we tell ourselves about this food system has to change. We are not seeking to create an alternative food system. Nor are we seeking to go back to a food system that we had. We have never had a food system in the United States that was just. I’m going to tell you that today if you have choice it’s because somebody else don’t have choice.

Raj and I was just down in Florida a few weeks ago with the Immokalee farm workers. They are picking our tomatoes for 50 cents a bucket. Thirty-two pounds of tomatoes in that bucket, and they have to pick that bucket 150 times to get 50 dollars so that y’all can shop at Whole Foods. So you got to get clear about this. Where is your food coming from?

We have to ask a deeper question. Who grew this? How did it get here? You can’t just rely on the fact that you can go someplace and purchase food. An unjust food system hides the face of those that you’re too uncomfortable to see, like those farm workers down in Florida. An unjust food system doesn’t allow a farmer that’s actually growing food for his or her family to eat it. It enslaves them. That farmer becomes a slave to the corporation, which exploits his legwork, his knowledge and his or her commitment to the farm. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not just talking about the farmers, we’re talking about the farmer who doesn’t have a choice. An unjust food system is built on the backs of people.

We never had a sun-driven food system. We have a food system driven by the blood, sweat and tears of Africans who were captured and brung to this country and of Native Americans who were annihilated. Those were the people who built this food system.

It’s never been just, never been just. An unjust food system has no idea about its impact on the environment. We think that we can just take a pulse and look at food models. Where does that food come from? That’s good. That’s a beginning but that’s only part of the problem. Because an unjust food system don’t really have a face. It doesn’t have a community. It only exploits.

Raj just said a whole lot, but I don’t think you really understand. People who really want change in the food system— “I’d like that hot steaming change.” We’re going to sit back and we’re going to order it.

“Hello, President Obama, What’s up?”

If you’ve been disappointed, I wonder what he thinks about us. See, I happen to have had some conversations with President Obama long before he was President Obama, and I’m going to tell you if he gets elected another time and he serves eight years and you roll up on him and you say, “We didn’t get a chance to change the food system because you didn’t do this that or the other,” he’s going to look at you and say, “You know what, I was the first African American president of the US and you couldn’t figure out how to make change?”

It’s not his problem to tell us where the food system fits into the green jobs movement. That’s our problem. You tell me where the food system fits into the green jobs system. Where? Because, see, a green job has a career path. A green job pays a living wage. A green job protects the environment. By definition, agriculture don’t do that in this country. It’s up to us to figure this out. What does a whole-carbon food system look like? What does a food system that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels look like?

Y’all looked stunned. See, y’all going to be cute? “Sustainable agriculture.” “My organic coop. ” Beautiful. “I’m going shopping down here at the farmers’ market. I got my CSA box. I’m going over to Dan’s and he’s going to cook some food.”

We have to get into recovery on that. We have to get him to understand what the “food system” has to mean. And if we’re going to talk about a sustainable food system, we talk about an organic food system. Today we’re talking about a system that’s in an urban environment and we’re also talking localizing food systems.

We’re talking about a living food system as well. We’re also talking about a S-O-U-L food system. We’re talking about a soul food system and that is the system that finds value in its people and its culture.

So what are we really talking about?

We’re talking about ending food apartheid. Let me give you some language. If you say “food desert” to me, I might take your head off your shoulders. (I never did say I was nonviolent.) Because the person that gets to name gets to write the miracle. The person that gets to say what obesity is or who is obese gets to write the miracle.

Let me tell you, I lost 120 pounds. I know what I’m talking about when I talk about losing weight and food systems. But as a 300-pound activist in the food system I have to get about half a million dollars worth of information to be able to implement a change like that—$500 million worth of expertise. I sit with some of the best minds in the food system.

What’s it going to take for the people of Brooklyn to make that kind of change? We’ve got to change this language. We have to make this language the language that makes sense to us. We need to talk about food apartheid. We need to talk about the systemic isolation of people from a vibrant and healthy food system. The solution, of course, is to create a resilient system, but that solution relies not in the hands of people .It lies in the soil. It lies in our DNA and it lies in the people who suffer in this system. Those solutions are in this room. You and I. We know that this solution is ours.

I would love to tell you what you should do. I would love to, but I can’t. I can tell you that it’s up to you. It’s your solution. This is a vision. You have to dream big. We can’t just sit asking questions.

“Well, why ain’t President Obama…?” Why aren’t we telling him what the food system should look like in so many words? We haven’t done it properly. We have to speak louder.

I’m going to close with this piece called Reclaiming, Recovery and Release. It’s a sort of a benediction that I share to wrap up.

If the truth be told I dropped the ball. I admit it’s my fault for not paying attention to the details in my community.

And I admit it’s my fault for not calling into question things that are obviously going wrong in my community.

I admit that I have too often turned my head when I should have looked squarely at some ridiculous activity in my community.

I admit that I have driven faster when going east down Madison in Chicago where there are too many of “those” people running back and forth across the street.

I admit that I shake my head in disgust when I’m approached by somebody that asks me for a quarter.

I admit that I would rather sometimes forget the ‘hood than remember the ‘hood.

I admit that I looked at somebody who had a cigarette in one hand and an inhaler in another and said absolutely nothing, and I had a full-fledged riot going on in the inside.

But you know that’s just the first step of recovery—acceptance. So I have to accept that I have been paying half attention to (actually I’m going to say it like I wrote it down here: half-assed attention) I have been paying half-assed attention to my community.

I have to leave y’all with that.

About LaDonna Redmond
LaDonna Redmond is the founder and president of the Institute for Community Resource Development, a grassroots, community-based organization located in Chicago. Interested in feeding her children healthy and high-quality food, LaDonna has worked to build a farmers’ market, an Illinois food council and various urban farms. Her organization is currently working to form a co-operative grocery store. LaDonna writes and speaks extensively on food production and urban agriculture, with an eye toward using agriculture to sustain economically disadvantaged communities, communities of color and urban communities.

About Reclaiming, Recovery and Release
Written by LaDonna Redmond. What she read to close her morning speech is only the beginning of a longer piece that she read in the Closing Forum.  You can find Reclaiming, Recovery and Release in its entirety on her blog, Graffiti and Grub.

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