Many communities face an uneven food landscape: plenty of cheap junk food, but few places to buy fresh, healthy food. This pattern—often called “food apartheid”—doesn’t happen by accident; it grows from redlining, unfair rules, and corporate control. The impacts are steep: higher rates of type 2 diabetes, kidney failure, and learning problems in Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, along with unsafe conditions for farmworkers. These harms have a long history, and government subsidies and convincing marketing keep ultraprocessed foods on top. However, we take practical steps to make change including investing in regenerative and community farms, protecting and fairly paying farmworkers, and enforcing civil-rights laws so public dollars support real food, healthy soil, and communities that thrive.

In this episode, Leah Penniman, Dr. Rupa Marya, Raj Patel, Karen Washington, and I discuss why food injustices exist and how we can create regenerative food systems to serve everyone.

Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol educator, farmer/peyizan, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2010 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. As co-Executive Director, Leah is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs - including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. Leah has been farming since 1996, holds an MA in Education and a BA in Environmental Science from Clark University, and is a Manye (Queen Mother) in Vodun. 

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, mother, and composer. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where she practices and teaches Internal Medicine. Her research examines the health impacts of social systems, from agriculture to policing. She is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakota health leaders, she is currently helping to set up the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock in order to decolonize medicine and food. 

Raj Patel is a Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the University’s department of nutrition, and a Research Associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A James Beard Leadership Award winner, he is the co-director of the award-winning documentary about climate change and the food system, The Ants & The Grasshopper. 

Karen is a farmer, activist,