How connected are you to the food you purchase and consume?
Over the past century, society’s focus on the food it consumes has shifted from origins and process to the latest price increase. Many communities also face uncertainty about the availability and quality of fresh foods in their nearest store.
As a whole, North Americans have largely lost connection to their food. Lisa Tallman is working to counteract that dissolution. She is the Executive Director of Community Food Navigator, a Chicago organization promoting food sovereignty by establishing and strengthening connections at every level of the food system and helping communities wrest back control from the conglomerates that currently hold most of the power in cultivation, distribution, and consumption.
What is food sovereignty?
In our current food system, a few huge companies control around 80% of what we buy at the store. With that power comes control over what farmers grow and are paid, what we eat, what we pay for the food we eat, and whether certain foods reach grocery store shelves. They may decide whether a community has a grocery store and are often in control on the policy front, as well, funnelling their considerable funds into lobbying that influences food legislation and serves their goal: the highest possible profit at the lowest possible cost to them.
Food sovereignty aims to turn this problematic system on its head, placing that power back into the hands of the people who do the growing, stocking, and shopping. It strives to center a new goal: accessible, healthful, affordable food for everyone.
Supporting communities in achieving sovereignty
Community Food Navigator’s on-the-ground efforts help Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities—particularly historically disinvested districts with high rates of food insecurity. These communities care more about human health, the land and the soil, and what it means to steward that land than they do about profits.
Land, water, and capital are the three vital requirements of food sovereignty. Urban communities lack available open land for farming, and many of the sections large enough have soil depleted by pollution. Farmable land also requires access to fresh water for irrigation. Looming over all this is the constant need for money to start and sustain such enterprises.
Community Food Navigator builds networks that support these initiatives and ensure the value stays inside the communities creating it. They bring together growers, producers, mobilizers, and educators in some of the most heavily impacted Chicago communities, connecting the numerous pieces necessary to create a successful system.
At every turn, they encourage and incorporate groups and individuals who want to become part of the system at any level, fostering a renewed connection to our sustenance that so many have lost.
How did we lose that connection?
Lisa explains that a complex web of factors has led to our wide-spread disconnection from the food we eat. Technology is a big one, enabling us to produce and distribute more and more food, process it in different ways, and shift its cultivation from small-scale, diverse fields to huge, single-crop factory farms.
That same technology was a big part of the move to urbanization, facilitating the relocation of millions of people from rural to urban centers and reducing the amount of land being worked and the number of people working it. When so many people never see those fields, is it any wonder we no longer think about where our food comes from?
The biggest barriers to reclaiming control over our food
There are two big challenges in this long-running food fight, Lisa says. First, it’s important to remember and respect that while everyone involved shares a goal for accessible, affordable, culturally relevant food, the way they hope to contribute may vary greatly. There are those who want a small backyard garden so they can share the wealth with friends and neighbors. There are others who want to scale up and sell their produce or livestock to national institutions. Figuring out how to support these aims and still achieve the same outcome is a lot of work.
Different goals aren’t the only challenge organizations like Community Food Navigator maneuver. Keeping tabs on the sheer number of moving pieces in every food system and figuring out the best times and approaches for tackling each one is an ongoing challenge.
But it’s a challenge Lisa and other like-minded people and communities are devoted to for the long haul. Tune in to Alida’s and Lisa’s conversation to learn even more about the cultural importance of food sovereignty and the importance of seeking out volunteer and educational opportunities to help drive the spread of this essential movement.
