So for day 3 of the conference, here are some workshops I attended.
- What's Labor Got to Do with It? Livable Wages and Workers' Rights in the Food Chain (Food Chain Workers Alliance, Economic Policy Institute, RAFI)
- Drawing Connections Between Food Security, Social Justice, and Sustainable Agriculture
There was also a final closing Panel and Lunch in which Suzanne Adely, Malik Yakini and Aleya Fraser spoke.
Getting to the good stuff, wanted to share a few quotes/things I head that were moving. Keeping it, again, short and sweet.
- "You cannot be anti-hunger and pro-capitalism." Said beautifully by Malik Yakini, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.
- Food is medicine, food is magic, so let us treat it as such.
- Farmer's, under National Labor Relations Board, are exempt from federal minimum wage laws. Think about that. Said to be racist policy out of New Deal Era (1930's) when members of government, (especially in the South) did not want to extend fair wage to blacks, who were main workers within agricultural sector
- Food access by itself is not a solution
- We have to think about root of problems; what has communities hungry and impoverished in the first place. (What I'm writing my senior thesis on!)
- Honor the sacred
- Make the invisible, visible
- Need to be thinking past sustainability, towards regeneration (regenerative)
- We need radical shift in power
- Afroecology: (shared by Aleya Fraser of Black Dirt Farm Collective)
" A form of art, movement, practice and process of social and ecological transformation that involves the re-evaluation of our sacred relationships with land, water, air, seeds and food; (re)recognizes humans as co-creators that are an aspect of the planet’s life support systems; values the Afro-Indigenous experience of reality and ways of knowing; cherishes ancestral and communal forms of knowledge, experience and lifeways that began in Africa and continue throughout the Diaspora; and is rooted in the agrarian traditions, legacies and struggles of the Black experience in the Americas."