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How did you get started with that transformational process? Yeah, so you looked around where you lived in Chicago and there was not a lot of grocery stores, not a lot of fresh produce, but there were a lot of vacant lots, so you started turning them into gardens. So I had a lot of things going for me already, and I just really began to realize that maybe this is bigger than just me not being able to give food, maybe it’s really about a community not being able to get food. Didn’t have a job and a nice contract to move around the city to get food. But there were many more people in my neighborhood who didn’t have the education. I had a car and at that time the internet wasn’t something that everybody had, but we had access to the internet and I could find stuff and I was having difficulty with it. So that’s when I started to learn that it was just a little bit more than just my family, not being able to get the food.Īnd I kind of want to have a caveat to that because I was able to buy the food. I don’t know what that is and so maybe that’s something you might be interested in? Would you staff that for me?” So I had never heard food and sustainability in the same sentence, and I started going to those meetings and we did form a circle in our neighborhood and it took off from there. So when I figured out that Wade had food allergies, I was talking to people about his allergies and his food access, and so one of the executive directors from Westside Health Authority called me and she said, “I got this call, they’re interested in setting up food sustainability circles. And I had heard my mentor and some of the other women who were community always talk about the lack of grocery stores in the neighborhood, but it was just really kind of in passing, it wasn’t an issue. So I wasn’t cooking at home for family, so I didn’t know that this piece of the infrastructure was missing. I never noticed that we didn’t have a grocery store because as a single adult, I was either out on a date and I ate, or I got a can of soup and I ate, or I went to my mother’s house and I ate. She’s been an activist for a long time in reproductive justice, violence prevention and sustainability, but the issue of food justice didn’t come into focus for her until her son Wade developed serious food allergies. Evidence has been accumulating for years and years that this country’s industrial food and agricultural system is deeply flawed, potentially irredeemably so.įood, poverty, labor, the environment, community, they’re all so deeply interconnected, something LaDonna understands well. But it’s not news to people who have been working on these issues for decades like LaDonna. We might deem them essential, but our society and certainly our economy does not value their work, which is pretty messed up. People working in food industries have been recognized as essential and rightfully so, but who are those workers in restaurants, in fields, in food processing plants? Black people, immigrants, other vulnerable people suffering extremely low wages and unsafe working conditions so we can eat. Fast forward to 2020 and we’re in the midst of a pandemic. She’s a national leader in food justice and the problems she’s fighting against they go back a long way, all the way to the beginnings of chattel slavery in this country stolen black labor used to grow food and other crops. So on today’s show, we’ll hear from LaDonna Redmond, a food justice activist, whose quest to find food for her son led her to planting urban gardens and radically altering the food landscape of her communities. The world is moving fast, especially at the college and it’s been hard to keep up, but I want to do my part from where I’m at to create some digital community and keep having conversations and telling stories that move us a little further towards a better world. It’s been a few months and wow, it has been a few months. I’m Ben Binversie, welcome back to the podcast. There has never been a fair, just, or healthy food system in the United States of America, so how do we get there? (singing).