By Jessica Scott-Reid
Jessica is a Canadian writer, animal advocate and plant-based food expert. Her work appears regularly in media across Canada and the US.
As much of the world copes with a global pandemic—along with revelations regarding systemic racism within our societies—issues concerning climate change and food production may be, for some, taking a backseat. For others though, these various issues are tightly bound together, presenting a broader picture of societal inequalities, injustices and concerns. For when it comes to improving human health, fighting racism, and tackling climate change, food production and availability is right at the core. And, As Washington, DC based physician Dr. Qadira Ali Huff, describes: “Plant based eating is a revolutionary act.”
And she’s not the only one who thinks so.
Dr. Milton Mills, perhaps best known for his appearance in the popular Netflix documentary “What The Health”, appeared last year in a video for health advocacy group Switch4Good, which is once again making the rounds on social media, to discuss the issue of dietary racism. In the video, Dr. Mills talks in particular of how US dietary guidelines (created by the department of agriculture) promote dairy products to people of color, whom have a much higher rate of lactose intolerance than white people. As a result, Dr. Mills has co-authored a two-part study entitled Racial bias in the US Dietary Guidelines. Part One, he explains in the video, focuses on lactose intolerance in people of color. Part Two focuses on “how an animal-foods centered diet promotes and creates excess disease in communities of color, and correspondingly, premature death.” Dr. Mills actively promotes a plant-based diet for communities of color.
Dr. Huff, a pediatrician and lifestyle medicine doctor, offers further thoughts: "Dietary racism relates not only to the way racism shows up in the food landscape, but also in nutrition education, and nutritional guidelines," she says in an interview, pointing out a great need for more diversity across the board in health care and nutrition.
On her highly insightful Instagram page, Dr. Huff writes: "When we talk about #healthdisparities and how #blacklivesmatter - we need to talk about access to healthy foods and the impact of our built environment on health." She shares that Black people in the US are 2.5 x less likely to live near a supermarket than white people, and that fast food chains concentrate in Black and low income neighbourhoods. “Racialized marketing, including directly to Black youth, has also contributed to entrenched fast food consumption in Black communities.” she writes.
For many folks, Dr. Huff explains, plant-based eating can be a return to one's cultural food heritage. "Throughout the world, including across the African continent, for example, many cultures historically ate meat only occasionally, with the bulk of the diet comprised of whole plant foods, like vegetables, whole grains, beans and legumes. This moment in U.S. food history, is an opportunity for many to reconnect with that heritage, as we see a growing number of plant-based eaters coming from the Black community!" Currently, Black people make up the fastest growing group of plant-based eaters, Dr. Huff writes.
Regarding her own journey to plant-based eating, Dr. Huff writes, “My parents’ example of protecting our health through a deliberate choice to feed us a non-standard American diet full of plant foods --in the midst of an often racialized food system set up for profit over people -- stayed with me.”
The link between animal-based food production and climate change has been even more well documented, with high profile studies over the past five years pointing to meat, dairy and egg production as leading contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, ocean degradation, profligate land use, fresh water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. And today, the deep rooted connection between climate change and racial inequality is also being made and deemed environmental racism.
California based non-profit, The Food Empowerment Project, brings attention to food as a “principal tool of colonization,” as stated on their website. Forced deviation away from Indigenous foods and food gathering practices, and the introduction of domesticated farmed animals by European colonizers, paved the way for the environmental racism we see today.
When they hear about industrial pollution, people often think about factories with billowing smokestacks. However, the food industry, with its factory farms and slaughterhouses, can also be considered a major contributor of pollution that affects the health of black and brown communities and low-income communities, because more often than not they locate their facilities in the areas where these people live.
The group points to land, air and water contamination caused by factory farms in areas inhabited primarily by people of color, the multi-generational health concerns this promotes, and the perceived lack of political power or financial freedom in these communities to push for change. “Environmental Justice activists consider the latter to be a form of economic extortion—having to accept the negative health consequences and adverse effects on the environment in order to have a job,” the site reads.
One of the core values of The Food Empowerment project “is to lessen the suffering of all beings, and for those who have access to healthy foods, to encourage them to go vegan.”
In a recent interview with the Washington Post’s climate reporter Sarah Kaplan, Penn State meteorologist Gregory Jenkins states that racism is “inexorably” linked to climate change, because it dictates who benefits from activities that produce planet-warming gases, and who suffers most from the consequences”. Thus it becomes clear, that the web of inequality and injustice entangling marginalized communities comes from a variety of quarters, and that food production and availability, a most fundamental strand of survival, is a major tie that binds.
But, as Dr. Huff writes:
As we advocate for many necessary upstream changes to address food injustice, as a lifestyle medicine physician, I will do my best to advocate for one of the most effective tools we have to reclaim health in the face of sometimes very bleak food landscapes.
(Hint: it’s #plantbased eating!)Sign up below to receive “Planet Friendly News” every month.