For Noyes Foundation, Fixing Food Means Racial and Economic Justice
The problems in the modern food system run very deep, says Kolu Zigbi. At the root, there's a history of racial injustice—from appropriation of native land to reliance on slavery—that lingers in modern policy.
“That legacy of the inequities of our agricultural past are still being fought today,” says Zigbi, program director for Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation’s sustainable agriculture and food systems grantmaking. But as communities seek to move away from industrialized agriculture, there's opportunity.
“It also opens a way for us to build structural equity, because there are people of color and low-income people throughout the United States that are organizing and understand that there’s promise in the food system," she says...