LISA: The thing we worry about when we go to the store is how much does it cost? What we don’t necessarily think about is what did it take to get it to our shelf and what practices, good and bad, allowed it to get to our shelf. We still don’t think enough about the nutritional value of the food that we’re eating. We eat lots of highly processed food and as a result we have this disconnection with the food that we eat.
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ALIDA: Welcome to Care Work, a podcast about what it means to offer care for a living. I’m your host, Alida Miranda-Wolff. For most of my career, I’ve been a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging practitioner focused on teaching, love, healing harm, and scaling belonging. In my books, Cultures Of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last and The First Time Manager: DEI I explored what care inside of organizations means. Join me as I continue this journey with guests who take meeting the needs of others on as their callings, both inside of organizations and in any other way.
How connected are you to the food you purchase and consume? If you’re like most North Americans, you might find this a hard question to answer. That’s why people like Lisa Tallman do the work that they do. As the Executive Director of Community Food Navigator, an organization focused on promoting food sovereignty by establishing and strengthening connections at every level of the food system, she is helping communities wrest back control from the conglomerates that currently hold most of the power in cultivation, distribution and consumption.
This is a really interesting episode, especially because while the topic seems really niche, it affects every single human being and you are no exception. I hope that you will listen to learn more about our current food system and what you can do to ultimately understand how your food is grown, how the farmers who grow it are paid, and what is going in your bodies.
Hi Lisa, welcome to the show.
LISA: Hi Alida, how are you doing?
ALIDA: I’m doing well. I’m really excited about this conversation.
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One of the reasons I reached out to you is because I’ve been really thinking about this definition of caring labor from Nancy Folbre about ultimately what it means, which is taking care of the needs of others. And I can’t think of a greater need than feeding people.
So I wanted to talk with you about what food and care mean together, especially given the work that you do at Community Food Navigator where you’re focused on promoting food sovereignty. So not just helping feed communities, but actually helping the growers who are providing that food. And I’m wondering if maybe the place we start this conversation is to talk about what food sovereignty is.
LISA: Yes, that is an excellent place to start, because if you’re not in the food system, that may be a term that’s unfamiliar to you. So food sovereignty is a food system in which people that produce, distribute and consume that food are also in control of the production, control of the distribution, control of the governance of the food.
So what does that really mean? If we think about the US, there are a handful of powerful companies that control almost 80% of what we buy in the grocery store. Think about that, 80%. As a result, they have tremendous influence on what farmers grow, how much farmers get paid, what we eat as consumers, how much our groceries cost. And frankly, if we even have access to groceries on the shelves at our communities. Do we even have a grocery store in our community? Lots of influence controlling our food system.
As well as with regulation. Right? Lobbying influence on food regulation. So farmers, growers, food producers, and we as consumers are at the mercy of large corporations, and their main objectives are highest profit at the lowest cost. So food sovereignty is really about how do we wrestle back that control.
ALIDA: And when you talk about who is wrestling back that control, I think that that might be an interesting place to go. So we have these big conglomerates who control much of the system itself, and then we also have big regulatory bodies, governmentally. But when we think about the community level, who are the folks who really want food sovereignty to happen?
LISA: Yeah. So the people that I work with are people that care deeply about their communities. And in particular, I’m working in black, brown and Indigenous communities that have been, you know, deeply and historically disinvested in. And they have lack of access to food. There’s high rates of food insecurity. And they are your neighbors, they are the pastor, they are people who have grown up in food and farming, and there are people who have newly entered this space because they’ve seen a need.
So the who, is really diverse in terms of who comes into this space, but I think the commonality between all of them is they care about humans and putting human health first, and they also care about the land, the soil, and what it means to come back to the land and to steward the land as well.
ALIDA: And what is the support that they need? So, we can think about it, obviously, in terms of what Community Food Navigator provides. But in order to do this, what do they need?
LISA: I think the simple answer is land, capital and water. Access to water, right? Those are the simple things. Like, I work primarily in Chicago and in an urban city. We need access to land in order to grow that food I think the other issue there is that often that soil is contaminated because commercial enterprises have been allowed to ruin the land and the soil. So there are these extra resources that are needed to cultivate the land or to mitigate the soil contamination. Access to water, to actually irrigate and grow. And then the capital, right, the money to actually start all of this and to sustain it.
So those are the sort of simple answers to what people need. I think where we, as the Community Food Navigator, come in, in supporting this work, in food sovereignty is really the network that supports all of that, the actual people behind all of that work. So our role is to engage individuals and organizations and communities that have the greatest food inequities. We connect food growers, producers, mobilizers, educators to increase system coordination.
So if you think about our food system, it’s really vast. There are lots of parts in our food system to think about how we go from what actually gets grown in the ground to what makes it to your grocery store, what makes it to your table. There’s a lot of pieces along that food system chain. And so our role is really to connect growers, all those pieces in that food system chain, but with a focus on growers and help some coordination around that, and with the real goal of creating value and keeping value in the communities in which the food is grown and in ways that benefit the community.
So we’re looking to facilitate just relationships, to funding, to information, to infrastructure and other types of resources. And I think the other things that, uh, we do is strengthen that connection. So we want to spark collaboration between partners. We want to make sure that there’s opportunity for everyone in our food system.
So we want to create on ramps for people, we want to connect them to whatever part of the food system that they might be called to, that might be growing food, that might be around policy, that might be around food waste, that might be around learning about the medicinal properties of herbs. Like all of that is part of our food system. And our goal is to make sure that everyone can find their space or place in that food system and connecting people to those places that they want to be.
ALIDA: It’s a really interesting model, in part because when I think about agribusiness in the US, it’s all about vertical integration. So these huge organizations that do control almost every part and the parts that they don’t control, they’re really exercising power over, specifically those who are in the growing space as middlemen.
And so I’m wondering, when you’re building these connections, what are the biggest barriers to bringing together so many people who are essentially weaving together a system instead of creating one that’s all within one entity.
LISA: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. You know, there’s challenges, there’s opportunities. When I think about bringing all these individuals, organizations together, I think of two things. One is that they may have different goals, right? And so there might be someone who wants to grow food, and it’s literally just to give it away to feed their neighbors. And then you might have someone who has a goal of selling their produce to institutions, right?
So those are two very different things, but they’re all, at the end of the day, wanting to make accessible, local, healthy, culturally relevant food. And so it’s really, how do we match those different goals together so that we all come to that same outcome of, locally grown, healthy, culturally relevant food?
So I think of that, and then the other thing I think of is, as I’ve mentioned before, our food system just has so many parts. It’s so vast. Most people don’t stop and think about our food system, but there is a lot that happens from the ground to the table. And it’s what parts of that food system do you tackle at any point in time? Right? And so all of those things create some challenges or obstacles. But I think what’s really important is the groups that I work with, the growers, the organizations, we all have that same common focus, that at the end, that food is accessible and that it is healthy and that people can afford to put it on their tables.
ALIDA: And what drew you to that particular mission?
LISA: So I think back to, as a child, my grandparents were share-croppers. They were tenant farmers. So I have fond memories of just wandering around acres and acres of farm. I think my dad’s memories may not be as fun. He had to work it when he was a kid. But I enjoyed wandering around my grandparents, you know, again, to me as a child, it was massive, massive acres of farmland.
And then my dad has carried that with him. I always had fresh vegetables and fruits as a child. My dad, to this day, he’s in his seventies. He still has a garden. That garden is his baby. He takes extreme care of it. And as a result, like, I always had access. I will admit that I probably did not appreciate it as a child, as much as I should have, but I certainly do as an adult today, appreciate what that meant. Appreciate the fact that I could literally go out in my backyard and pick a strawberry, or pick an ear of corn, or whatever it might be that my dad decided to grow.
And we always had some to give to our neighbors, like, we always had enough that we could give to someone else. And that was really important to me to find in an organization that’s aligned with my personal values, right, of giving to others and helping society be a better place. So this particular work with the Community Food Navigator really brings me back home. It brings me back to my childhood, and I want everyone, every child, to be able to eat the produce that I grew up with.
ALIDA: Well, that’s a beautiful story, and I think it helps to connect the dots, because with this particular space that you’re in, it’s in some ways both the biggest space and the most niche. There’s a huge process component to the work that you’re talking about. And so I wonder if we can talk a little bit about how we became disconnected from this food system.
LISA: Yeah, sure. As I mentioned, as you know, our food system is complex, and there have been many factors throughout history that have led to the disconnection that we experience today. I’ll take, for example, technology, right? Technology has allowed us to produce more food, right? And distribute that food around the globe, and also to receive food from around the globe as well, and to process food in different ways.
But the sort of effect of that is we went from smaller scale farms that grew a wide variety of crops and animals to these large scale farms, idea factory farming, where a farmer might concentrate on a single crop even, and profit really became that dominant driver in agriculture. So with industrialization, Americans moved into cities, the suburbs grew, farmland disappeared. And so we are no longer working on farms, right? We were no longer employed by farms. And our society has evolved so that we don’t actually think about where our food comes from anymore. We don’t talk about where our food comes from, right? We just go to the grocery store and we pick it up, but we don’t take the time to think about how it actually got there.
So as a society, we don’t talk about food enough, we don’t talk about agriculture enough, and the sources of our food. And society has really taught us to value the price of food, right? The thing we worry about when we go to the store is how much does it cost? What we don’t necessarily think about is what did it take to get it to our shelf and what practices, good and bad, allowed it to get to our shelf. We don’t think about as, you know, perhaps this is changing, but we still don’t think enough about the nutritional value of the food that we’re eating. We eat lots of highly processed food.
So what becomes the most important thing we think about is price, rather than all these other factors about our food. And as a result, we have this disconnection with the food that we eat.
ALIDA: And something that you’re saying brings me back to this point of the locally grown and really plant based trend that we’ve seen over the last 20 years, this push towards reclaiming some of that connection to food. But it seems to be talked about in the media and in public spaces as really a middle class and above phenomenon.
It’s something that you associate with white women influencers and avocado toast and homebrewed kombucha, not necessarily with the folks who actually are doing the growing and have been doing the growing for some time. I wonder if we can talk about what the locally grown movement is and who is really involved in it.
LISA: Sure. And I like the way you put the context around it, because locally grown, I think, has become a bit of this buzzword, right? And it’s become trendy. But for black and brown communities, it’s not a buzzword, it’s not a trend. It really is about our agency and ownership of the food system. And it really is essentially food sovereignty, right? Locally grown food is food sovereignty. It means our ability to feed our communities, to combat food insecurity, to deal with the lack of grocery stores and black and brown communities.
I like to think of locally grown food as this form of resistance against this vastly inequitable food system. So it is trendy. It’s become a buzzword. But for many people, like me, like my dad, right, who has his garden to this day, locally grown is just what we do, right? It’s how we’ve grown up. It’s how we look at food and how it’s part of our lives. And for us, it also goes back to thinking about, you know, how our ancestors created food and the foods that they eat.
I’ve been on a couple of farms recently where there are particularly young people, a couple of young farmers, who are purposely and intentionally going back to the way that food was grown from their cultures hundreds of years ago, right? And they want to bring that back. And they’re learning about it, they’re being taught about it, they’re doing research, and they’re growing their own food on these farms, that bring them back to the way food has been grown for centuries, by their ancestors.
So it’s not something that’s new, right. For many, many farmers, for many individuals, it really is about bringing our culture back and honoring that culture and honoring the land and the stewardship of the land as we attempt to feed ourselves and our neighbors.
ALIDA: What is an example of changing the way that we grow something to be culturally aligned? So we’re thinking about some of these farms that you visited. What are they doing differently from how that crop would normally be grown in our modern system?
LISA: Yeah, I mean, I think the easiest things to think about are the types of Pesticides that we use, not using them. Right? People, quote unquote, might label some of these practices Organic, but again, they are ways that many cultures have just grown food for centuries.
So, how do we control for bugs and things like that in ways that don’t harm the environment? How do we rotate our crops in ways that nourish and feed the soil? How do we, in my head right now, I’m picturing these, like, very clean rows of one specific crop. But what we’ve done in former cultures is you’ll see many different types of plants all grown together, right? Because they provide nutrients, they provide barriers against certain bugs when you grow different types of plants and crops together. So it’s those types of practices that are really how we think about really bringing in what our ancestors did, but also how do we do things that protect the land and protect the soil?
ALIDA: Based on what you’re seeing in the Chicago Food Shed specifically, what are some of those personal and social values that show up for growers? I know it’s a really disparate community. There are folks coming at this at all different levels. Some of the folks you’re working with are trying to start a farm. Some of them already have a farm. Some are just trying to cultivate some crops in their backyard and share with their neighbors. So there’s a wide variety of different forms of growing in this community you serve. But I wonder if there are certain values that you’re seeing reflected across these different people participating in this approach to a different kind of food system.
LISA: Yeah, I think the first thing that comes to mind is really the value of this recognition that our food system is just unequal, that there are a lot of inequities in our food system. And all of these individuals, whatever they may be doing, however they’re entering into or participating in the food system, they’re all trying to combat these inequities.
It might be combating the inequity of the accessibility of food and food insecurity, the fact that many of the neighborhoods in Chicago that the Community Food Navigator works with are in disinvested communities. It might be economic wealth, right? How do we break into selling to institutions? Right? How do we create economic wealth and generational wealth that I can then pass on to my family?
I was on a farm Saturday doing some volunteer work, and it was just so heartwarming to see this entire family. So, we have the father and the mother, they’ve got three kids. Their parents were there, so the grandparents were on the farm, too. And at one point, the father, his name is Steve, it’s only the second year of this farm, so they’re moving into their second season. And so they’re, you know, just trying to build some of the infrastructure of the farm. And he wanted to have sort of a gateway, you know, an opening, right? To kind of announce, you’re entering our farm and use the materials that he’s already got at hand. And he’s like, I’m not sure how I’m going to do this, but I’ve got three really smart kids, [LAUGHTER] and this is now their job and brainpower to figure this out.
And, you know, I say this story just to say that I think one of the things in this community is generational wealth, and how do we get new generations also involved in this? I think that’s a lot of what we also hear is how do we get the youth, how do we get the younger generation to just realize how special this space really is? There’s a lot of self care in caring for the land and in caring for community, as well, right?
So when you’re out there and farm work is hard, but it provides this sense of joy, sense of connection to land and to nature and to the others that you’re working with that is really hard to replicate in other places, I think, and in other types of spaces, it’s something that is unique to working the land. And we really do want to bring that to the next generation as well.
ALIDA: For folks listening who might not be part of the food sovereignty movement or who might not be growers themselves, what’s one thing that you recommend they do to offer care to this community?
LISA: Well, I’m going to actually recommend two. One is just learn about our food system. We talked about it. We talked about the fact that people are disconnected from our food system. They don’t really know how food gets to our table. So one is just educate yourself. There’s lots of things, lots of resources for educating yourself about the food system.
The second thing I would say is, go volunteer somewhere. You know, if you come to the Community Food Navigator site, you sign up for our newsletter. We will invite you to volunteer days. If you’re here in Chicago, get connected to someone in your local community who may be growing food. There’s always some place that is looking for extra hands, whether it be a community garden, whether it be a school, whether it be a farm. There’s always all sorts of places that you can get connected to our food system, and they will be happy to have you volunteer and get your hands in the soil to help them.
And I think you’ll find if you do that, again, this connection that we all don’t have right now, right? That I won’t say all, many of us don’t have right now to the land, to the soil, and to our food, and you’ll find it refreshing and reinvigorating and frankly, inspiring to go out there and get your hands in the soil and actually touch food, um, and have a hand in its growth.
ALIDA: On the flip side, what do you tell folks who are in the space to do in terms of receiving care, whether it’s asking for something or being willing just to receive something?
LISA: It’s rest. You know, at The Navigator, we did a winter book club, and the book was Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance, and it really talks about our grind culture, a culture that values constant productivity. We just don’t understand what rest is anymore. And so we were really thinking about, how do we find ways to rest?
And I think what was really important is it could just be ten minutes, right? It could be ten minutes of staring into the blue sky. It could be ten minutes of daydreaming. Many people have not daydreamed since they were children, right? So, have a daydreaming practice. It could be napping. So I think, for me, find some ways to rest, even if it’s just ten minutes here and there. But make it intentional and make it purposeful. Make it a daily part of your routine.
ALIDA: Well, thank you so much for all of that wisdom. Where can folks find you after this episode?
LISA: So the best place to find me is LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. And of course, you can connect with the Community Food Navigator through our website and sign up for our newsletter and stay connected to all the stuff that we’re doing.
ALIDA: Thank you so much, Lisa.
LISA: Thank you, Alida. This has been a wonderful conversation. I enjoyed it.
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ALIDA: Thank you for listening to Care Work. Please share this podcast with your community to help uplift and advocate for more caring cultures everywhere. This podcast is a collaboration between Ethos and me, Alida Miranda-Wolff, I’m also your host. Theme music vibing introspectively was written and recorded by Logan Snodgrass. Audio editing and post-production assistance was provided by Organized Sound Productions. If you want more of me, be sure to order my books Cultures Of Belonging and The First Time Manager: DEI.
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