What Black Women Bring to Food Justice

To Bobbie Sykes, the farm-to-table movement is not new; it’s something that’s coming back around. Bobbie, a 66-year old Black woman, moved to St. Louis with her family when she was four years old and returned to her native Mississippi every summer growing up. There, on her grandmother’s farm, she grew to love fresh vegetables. She learned how to clean rabbits, squirrels, and fish for her family to cook. And when she returned to St. Louis for the year, her mother taught her how to can tomatoes, okra, and green beans to last through the winter. For sweets, they preserved apples, pears, and peaches. “Because we weren’t rich at all, but we were rich in doing alternative things,” says Bobbie.

Resenda Sykes, Bobbie’s daughter, remembers the importance of food in their household growing up. “We celebrate through food,” she says. “My mom always cooked for every holiday because we didn’t have money for toys, money for anything, so she always cooked a lot of food.” After a series of health crises in her family, Resenda started to watch what she ate, incorporating more fresh, unprocessed foods into her diet. Today, she is the president of the board of City Greens, a nonprofit organic grocery store in the Grove which was established by Bobbie and a group of neighborhood women called the Midtown Mamas in 2009. The store aims to help residents of the neighborhood, many of whom are elderly or do not have cars, to regain control over what they put in their bodies instead of depending on the highly processed foods available at corner stores. City Greens operates on a membership system; customers purchase sliding-scale memberships according to their income level and purchase produce and other goods at cost. Until 2014, City Greens operated out of the basement of Midtown Community Services, run by Catholic Charities. Now, City Greens is an independent nonprofit operating out of a storefront on Manchester Avenue, amidst an increasingly popular stretch of businesses in the Grove.

Nationwide, food insecurity disproportionately affects women; female-headed households, particularly those headed by women of color, are more likely to be food insecure. At the time of the 2010 census, 50 percent of households with children in St. Louis City were headed by women. To Bobbie and Resenda, who both have experienced single motherhood, it is no mystery why the food movement is dominated by women. “Because those are the heads of households,” says Resenda, “and they care what their kids are eating.” As a dependable form of comfort, feeding can inadvertently be weaponized. To keep children out of trouble in higher-crime neighborhoods, says Bobbie, “you keep them in and you feed ’em and feed ’em and feed ’em. And next thing you know, Sally Sue is 200 pounds.”

Today, the food available in predominantly Black communities is often highly processed and unhealthy. Historically though, Black women have derived strength from their relationships with food and feeding. In 1967, Fannie Lou Hamer founded Freedom Farms Collective in Sunflower County, Mississippi in response to discrimination and a lack of support from the state government. The cooperative included community gardens, a commercial kitchen, affordable housing, and other resources designed to create a sustainable shared Black community. When the state weaponized hunger, the collective self-sufficiency model of Freedom Farms Collective provided an alternative structure for Black survival in the deep south, all while centering agriculture as a site of resistance. Women were also at the helm of the Black Panthers Free Breakfast program, established in 1969. Creating a temporary autonomous zone around the feeding of children, the Free Breakfast Program served Black Panther chapters nationwide and put pressure on the government to ultimately increase funding for children’s food.

[pullquote]Today, the food available in predominantly Black communities is often highly-processed and unhealthy. But historically, Black women have derived strength from their foodways.[/pullquote]

There is something salient about growing social movements centered around food issues, likely because, as many of the women put it, “we all
need to eat.” Some women involved with the inception of City Greens grew up visiting their grandparents’ farms in the South, instilling in them a lifelong passion for eating and growing. Often in conversations about Black food politics, we are too quick to bring up the role of the plantation in creating a toxic, collectively remembered relationship between Black people and agriculture. It is well worth considering how autonomous Black farms in the South— and Black community food projects like City Greens—recuperate a Black sense of place in the food movement.

[pullquote]It is well worth considering how autonomous Black farms in the south– and Black community food projects like City Greens– recuperate a Black sense of place in the food movement.[/pullquote]

In the Grove, women were the ones to make their voices heard the loudest when it came to food issues. According to Nyree Thomas, a Midtown Mama and former director of the City Greens community garden, the dream of the market came to life “because the women never shut up.” Gender roles prescribe women to feed their families and communities, so it makes sense that the food activism of the last few decades has been sustained by women. Laura DeLind and Anne Ferguson picked up on this trend in their 1999 article titled, “Is This a Women’s Movement?” DeLind and Ferguson argue that the movement is indeed a women’s movement, but not necessarily a feminist movement, because women’s work in community food projects reinforces the socialization of women as caregivers. Indeed, many of the women with whom I spoke felt as if it was natural for women to be doing this kind of work. In describing the market’s early days, Nyree said, “You didn’t even have to be on the schedule. You just came in and started sweeping or stocking bins. It was instinct in the women to keep the store clean and ready.” Bobbie believes that this instinct was particularly potent in Black women. “I think Black women have had leadership roles all their lives,” she says. “They just didn’t know they had leadership roles.” What the women learned about food in this process, they would teach to each other. They used to hold cooking demonstrations, chili cook-offs, and other events that built collective enthusiasm around good food.

Community food work re-inscribes women’s roles as caretakers, but it does much more than that. It is a portal into all kinds of activism. Nyree speaks about how she went from knowing nothing about gardening to running the community garden; Pauline, another market mainstay and volunteer, became an employee of Voices of Women, City Greens’ sister organization, through her involvement with the market and is now learning how to write grants. Bobbie took her love of cooking and growing and used it to change the way her community eats; she got all the kids at Midtown to love veggie wraps. One summer camp day, she fed 97 kids. If food work acts as a conduit into these types of leadership roles for women, then it must be feminist work.

[pullquote]If food work acts as a conduit into other types of leadership roles for women, then it must be feminist work.[/pullquote]

Now, City Greens is an effort that spans gender, race, and generation. The co-directors are two men, one White and one Black. The volunteers are retirees, students, and professionals from all over the city. Over the past summer, high school and college students were paid to work at the market through an initiative called St. Louis Youth Jobs. One part-time worker’s daughter, 13, is City Greens’ youngest intern. She usually comes to the market after the school bus drops her off. And the Midtown Mamas come around to shop, volunteer, and collaborate; many of them are now involved with Voices of Women, which teaches financial literacy and women’s leadership.

But the original Midtown Mamas aren’t around as much anymore; they aren’t coming to volunteer in waves like they used to. They don’t have seats on the board. The collective, anti-capitalist, do-it-yourself energy that characterized City Greens’ early days has given way to realistic concerns about staying afloat. Instead of devoting time to reaching out to neighbors and building a stronger sense of community, market staff members need to focus on filling out grant proposals and paying rent on time. Something else to consider is that the Grove is a gentrifying neighborhood; some people of color, particularly Black women, that City Greens aims to serve, are beginning to feel crowded out by the affluent White customers who call the neighborhood their own. For small nonprofits like City Greens, gentrification is a double-edged sword; on one hand, White customers and volunteers may undermine the potential for a Black sense of place. But on the other hand, the range of incomes sustains City Greens by allowing it to continue offering subsidized memberships to people who need them.

What started as a project conceived of and sustained by Black women has evolved into a collaborative effort. Black and White men and women of all ages work to sustain City Greens. One particularly pleasant surprise was seeing how the Men’s Club, a community group of
neighborhood men, has stepped up to maintain City Greens’ community garden. But if it feels as if the store is losing touch with the community it aims to serve, I think staff and volunteers would do well to make use of the organizing tactics that brought City Greens around in the first place. The Midtown Mamas’ collectivist model of getting it done and the ways they taught and learned from each other generated an energy around good food. The unique advocacy of Black women in community food efforts can be a key to lasting change.

Sally Rifkin ‘18 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at s.rifkin@wustl.edu.