As our country reckons with our historic systemic and systematic racism, I want to share these links to posts by Chris Newman and Joel Salatin, both farmers in Virginia. I was out a bunch in late 2019 so I missed these at the time they were published.
Some of the comments on Instagram are so sad and just show us how we have a long way to go.. but we are moving forward. Here are the articles I read recently and there are more on the Twitter feeds.
Change begins with each of us. Change in the food system starts with each of us doing our own personal work. For those readers interested in learning more about what you can do to create an anti-racist food system in Texas, please consider the training offer by NCCJ, the National Conference on Community and Justice. The Texas Center for Local Food is honored to be sponsoring nine (9) attendees to the NCCP Anti-Racism training in 2020. Each will be posting a blog entry and we’ll share those here.
Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer by Chris Newman, a 2020 Castenea Fellow on Heated at Medium
Whining and Entitlement, by Joel Salatin of Polyface farm Instagram feed https://www.instagram.com/p/CDKI4SBFqfb/
“Hostile Native Americans!” Oof. So strange to see Salatin, assumedly a proponent of sustainable agriculture, both strip Indigenous peoples (the original stewards of this land and of sustainable food forests) of their identities, and reduce them to the antagonists in some kind of romanticized fantasy of rugged American independence.
That sneering attitude towards the importance of cooperation in a system absolutely rigged towards big, already-wealthy ag corporations is painful to see. We ARE interdependent. As long as some of us are still collectively targeted for hostility and violence, collective action will be important.