(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "A Slice of the Community" is made possible by the support of the First Horizon Foundation.

- Hello, and welcome to another episode of "A Slice of the Community".

I'm your host, Jerome Moore, and, today, we are joined by CEO of the Nashville Food Project, CJ Sentell.

How you doing, CJ?

- I'm doing all right.

- And welcome, I'm glad to have you on the show.

- Glad to be here, thank you so much for inviting me.

- Glad to talk about food.

(Jerome laughs) - Yes, let's do it.

- You have a real interesting background in studying and how you research just food in general, and, today, we're gonna be talking about food apartheid, food injustice, but, first, I want to...

If you can just give us like a background on how you kind of pivoted into the food of food injustice, food apartheid, studying, and how we all have access and consume food.

- Yeah, sure.

So I mean, I have a... Yeah, I grew up in agriculture, farmers on both sides of my family and grew up on a farm that my grandfather planted in like the late '20s or early '30s, the pecan orchard.

I say I was born on a nut farm, and I was, you know, grew up on this farm, and there was, on this farm, a sharecropper shack.

I didn't know it at the time.

I didn't know those words at the time, but I remember thinking, as a very young kid, like, "Who lived here?"

- Uh-hmm.

- "What were they doing here?

There were still affects of their lives in this house," and it really sparked a lot of questions for me, and as I grew up and became interested in agriculture myself, as, you know, the local food movement, organic agriculture, sustainable ag, I got into this and realized that that movement of good food relocalizing agriculture had not fully dealt with the history of agriculture and exploitation and the history and relationship of agriculture and slavery.

So as I began to do graduate work, I began to put together a project that examined the relationship between freedom and food and slavery and agriculture, and it was one of these projects that got deeper and deeper and deeper in as you went.

- Yeah, freedom and food.

- Freedom and food.

- I thank you for that background 'cause I think it goes in to when we talk about access to food, right?

- Yes.

- And how like food is freedom, but some communities have a food apartheid, right?

- That's right.

- Which is a term many people may be not familiar with.

They may be familiar with the food desert or food insecurity.

- Yeah.

- Or just poverty, food poverty, but apartheid is different.

Can you break that down to us when we say food apartheid compared to some of those other terminologies that we hear based around food?

- Yeah, absolutely, I think...

So just to get a couple terms out there, so, right, a food desert is a sort of an older term that refers to a geographical area, right, a neighborhood, a part of a city, rural, right?

Rural areas are often food deserts that don't have access to fresh, affordable food, right, or, oftentimes, any food at all, right?

So a food desert is this geographical lack.

Another kind of interesting term is a food swamp, right, and that's a newer term, but that's trying to capture areas that have a lot of food available, but it's unhealthy food.

It's processed, highly processed food, fast food, right?

Often, especially in urban metropolitan areas, food deserts and food swamps overlap.

- Okay.

- So right, so you've got an area with low of access to healthy, nutritious food that's also full of highly processed food.

The thing I wanna say about that is notice that both of these terms use environmental metaphors, right, a desert and a swamp.

- Right.

- And the thing that food apartheid and food justice, as terms, are trying to get at is those are not natural things.

We think about deserts and swamps as naturally occurring parts of the landscape.

The point about food apartheid is that, no, these aren't naturally occurring things.

These aren't naturally occurring parts of our city.

They're, in fact, structured and structured by the historical legacies of racism and, in fact, enslavement and redlining.

- Right.

- And other economic, these forms of economic discrimination, right?

- [Jerome] Right.

- So food apartheid is trying to get us away from these naturally occurring metaphors to think about the structural underpinnings of our food system.

- And I like, (clears throat) excuse me.

I like how, when we talk about food apartheid, we are directly going at a structure, a system that we know is organized and structured intentionally to prevent access or equability to food inclusion to nutritional, healthy, convenient food for, particularly, black and brown communities.

- Absolutely.

- And I think that's more intentionality on like where we need to figure out the solutions at as well.

- That's right, 'cause if you're not thinking about the root causes of these issues, food insecurity, food access, we're increasingly talking about health equity and the way that access to food affects community health.

- Yeah.

- Right, if you're not doing the deeper analysis and deeper work, you're really just sort of addressing the symptoms.

In the non-profit world, we often talk about a bandaid solution, right?

- Right.

- Now, to somebody experiencing hunger in the present, food is not a bandaid.

I just wanna put that out there.

- [Jerome] Right.

- But the solution itself may be, right, in terms of building a program to intervene in a problem in a particular neighborhood.

So people experiencing hunger, that's not a bandaid, right?

That's a real solution to a real person in the present, but like as an organization that thinks about how to build out a better, more just food system, we have to really get at those underlying causes.

- Right, and so when you think of like the term food injustice, what comes to your mind?

- Well, I mean, I think when we think about food injustice, we have to think about the lack of access to food, and in this city, there are some real, persistent food deserts, right?

- Right.

- Areas that experience food apartheid, North Nashville, Napier-Sudekum, right?

These are longstanding areas that have not received the investment.

- Right.

- In the food infrastructure, and really, we're talking not just grocery stores but community gardens and other alternative food access models.

- What are some of the complexities for somebody like yourself trying to navigate urban environments or metro environments, like in Nashville, especially a growing Nashville at this particular point that has been historically neglected, historically, food deserts, or, historically, been just on a food apartheid?

- Yeah, yeah, well, there are a number of complications and complexities to this.

I mean, first of all, in a city like Nashville that's changing so quickly, the price of everything.

So if you're thinking about how to create food access, you know, on a temporary basis, there's many organizations, including the Food Project, that are going around and doing sort of mobile food access, right?

We're taking trucks, and we're going into the neighborhoods where people are and providing that food access, but, again, to me, that's sort of a bandaid solution.

- Yeah.

- Do we want our grandkids accessing food in this way?

No, I would say.

So how do we think about the long-term solutions to this?

And the real estate problem is absolutely one of them.

Another one is the complications around, you know, the bureaucracy of food, right?

- [Jerome] Right.

- Fresh food has an expiration date.

Things need to be kept refrigerated.

- Right.

- There's food safety rules, and so you have to be creative and get the tools to address the problem in the present.

- Right.

- As well as imagine a better future and find the partners, whether it's in the city government, in the school system, in the churches, that we can really imagine a new food system.

- 'Cause I've done my research on you so I know what your dissertation and things and research was on, but can you break down for us like the role of racism and how racism continues to perpetuate even in current day 2024, having food apartheids in black and brown communities and kind of just even what you learned during just studying that up until this point?

- Yeah, well, I mean, I think as I sort of suggested, the deeper you go into this.

- Yeah.

- I mean, it just keeps going, historically, but, I mean, I think for our context, let's think about the American context.

- Yeah.

- Right?

I mean, even during enslavement, right, there were the provision grounds where the enslaved folks had control over the means of their own food production, and this, so, you know, even in a system that used agriculture as the primary mode of oppression.

- Right.

- There were these spaces of freedom.

- Right.

- The provision grounds that allowed people to flourish and create their own foods, right, to grow their own foods, to express themselves through their own cultural foods, and, you know, 150 years ago, you know, you had people from Africa, from all over the continent, and so rice came to this country, you know, watermelons, okra.

- Yeah.

- All the foods that we now consider American foods are really transplants with enslaved folks that came over.

So I would pause it.

I would suggest that like even from the beginning, this carving out this space of freedom around food was really important, and as we sort of progressed through emancipation and Jim Crow, I mean, one thing that's always fascinated me, why the lunch counters?

- Yeah, (indistinct).

- Right, and if you talk to Reverend Lawson and the people involved in the Civil Rights Movement, the lunch counters, why?

- Yeah.

- It's because of this basic humanity.

- Right.

- Right?

Sharing a table, having a plate, right, together is a really powerful symbol, and it's a leveling, right?

But if you think about this from a systems perspective, the way that racism and redlining cordoned off certain kinds of neighborhoods and the disinvestment by, you know, corporate food.

- Right?

- Think about a big turning point in this city was the interstate going through North Nashville.

- Right.

- Prior to that, there was a flourishing economic neighborhood, right, that had lots of grocery stores and lots of food access, and what you see over the years is a steady diminishment of these things for a number of reasons, but economics are at the heart of it.

- I want to go to... We talked about community gardens earlier, which I, when I think of community gardens, I think of like solution-driven things by community.

- Yes.

- Right?

Can you dive to other like solution-driven things that community can partake in, such as community gardens, that can create equitable access or just access to nutritional foods right then and there, and that may be even more affordable?

- Yeah.

- Maybe some startup costs, right?

But you can get those pretty much subsidized just working with like the Nashville Food Projects and others, but can get those started.

- Well, I think that's right, and when we talk about community gardens, it's important to realize that community gardens aren't going to like be the substitution or solution for the large scale problems in our food system, but they do provide a very powerful means within communities to grow food right there.

- [Jerome] Right.

- You don't have to worry about getting food from, what, point A to point B.

You're growing it at the point of access, right?

- Right.

- And that's very powerful.

And you can grow a lot of food on a little space.

- [Jerome] Right.

- And so community gardens are this place where the community comes together and finds a empowerment.

- Right.

- In growing their own food, but that's not the only thing.

I think all of the solutions to systems really start with local communities.

- Right.

- And people choosing to get involved in the community, and so if you think about a place like Detroit, right, that has seen rapid, you know, deindustrialization and all this land becoming available, urban agriculture is flourishing in Detroit, and alongside of that comes these innovative models where the community comes together to solve their own problems.

- Yeah.

- And so on May 18th, the Detroit Food Commons is opening.

- [Jerome] Wow.

- And it is a community-owned grocery store in a neighborhood that has experienced food apartheid.

It's gonna have a teaching kitchen, a grocery store, an event space, and a commissary kitchen where food entrepreneurs.

- Wow.

- Can rent out for their like food truck businesses, right?

So when you have the community come together and, again, imagine.

- Yeah.

- What's possible, you can build authentic solutions that are based in the community.

- How important are farmers?

'Cause we talk about the American farmer and how this, it is not as easy and this financially growing food, the market.

What role do they play in combating food apartheid and food insecurity in our local communities?

- I think that's a great question.

I mean, when we think about regional agriculture and like, so let's just talk about Middle Tennessee.

- Right.

- Right?

As land is gobbled up for development, and we do need more housing, absolutely, but we also need to plan around food system resilience, and so as we've lost agricultural land from around the city, our food system has become more fragile.

I think the pandemic showed us this.

There was a report done in 2017 that says Nashville has three days of food on hand.

- Wow.

- Right, so if the truck- - Just three days?

- Three days, and so local farms, local agriculture, including urban ag and sort of the ag at the periphery of the city are really important for creating resilience and food security for the city proper.

- Wow, just three days.

- That's what the report says.

- That's an apocalypse waiting to happen.

- I mean, I think that's- - A food apocalypse.

- That's right.

- Wow.

So can you kind of talk about... We in election year, 2024 an election year.

I know policy plays a huge role when it comes to some of these things, being that even so that some of our larger grocery stores, prominent grocery stores just can't give away food that they know that is expiring, and they just gonna throw it away.

I can't just say, "Hey, gimme that for free because I'm hungry or my community needs it, or my household needs it."

Why don't we see more of that or what should voters kind of be like challenging their elected officials or those who are candidates that are running to talk about some of these things from a policy issue and a system issue?

- Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question.

I mean, let's just take transit, right?

Transit is on everybody's mind in Nashville right now.

Transit and transportation access is a huge part of food access.

Having access through public transportation is more important than the location of the grocery store or the price of food, right?

And so transit, we could make a couple of really simple changes in our transit infrastructure to make food more available, right?

- Yeah.

- We don't, in fact, have to build grocery stores.

We could change a few bus routes.

- Yeah.

- Right?

And have a huge impact in that.

I think, on a broader level, we've got to challenge and empower our elected leaders to think big.

- Right.

- And to think about how we value people and the access to basic necessities.

- Right.

- Right, and so, you know, it's really important, and so it's really important to think about the quality of life.

- What would be two questions, I guess, if presidential candidates were here or those who running for state representative or a senator, what are two questions voters should have on top of their mind to ask these individuals that's running that's related to combating food injustice?

- Yeah, I mean, from a national level.

- Yeah.

- At a national level, I think we've gotta talk about the corporate involvement in the food system and the way that four companies is like four or five corporations control 90% of the food in this country.

So that's a structural policy level issue.

On a local level, we can talk about land use, right?

We can talk about dedicating public land to a grocery store.

- Right.

- A community-owned grocery store or urban agriculture, right?

So at the policy level, at the local level, things like land use and finding the political will.

- [Jerome] Yeah.

- To not let our neighbors go hungry.

- Right.

- One of the things that frames so much of the work at the Food Project is this notion that we live in a country where we're throwing away 40% of the food we have, while, in Nashville, one in seven, one in eight people don't have enough to eat.

So we are recovering that food.

- Yeah.

- And getting it out into the community in the form of meals.

- Right.

- But like closing that gap between waste and want.

- Yeah.

- Is a moral imperative I think.

- I know you had mentioned before like a study that said food insecurity had dropped.

- Yes.

I'm glad you brought that out.

- Can you explain how that has happened here locally?

- Yes.

- And why?

- So some new research has recently come out that says, in the last two years, food insecurity in Nashville has dropped by 1.5%, and when you dig a little deeper and see why, it's not that we've gotten better at food access.

It's that we've displaced the residents who were food insecure from the county.

So they're not even here anymore.

- Yeah.

- And so we have become an increasingly hostile place for poor folks and the working poor in our city.

- It kind of speaks to that whole narrative like two different cities of like, you know, you have those that can live great in Nashville, and you have those that struggle.

- Yeah.

- And those who struggle played a part in that dip in food insecurity because they can no longer afford to live in Nashville.

- Yeah.

- Which is so unfortunate.

Partnerships - Yeah.

- Community partnerships, what are some things that you all at the Nashville Food Project have being able to do in community with other organizations to combat food injustice here locally?

Because, sometimes, in the non-profit world, a lot of people like to work in silos, right?

- Yeah.

- I'm gonna do this by myself.

- Yup.

- You do that.

I wanna run this.

You run that, and there's a lot of intersection, but people, a lot of times, you know, don't work together for whatever reason.

How has the Nashville Food Project been able to not do that and be a part of community and bring community together with other organizations to be able to have more impact around combating food injustice in the food apartheids?

- Yeah, like so much of the systems level begins at the community.

- Uh-hmm.

- At the Food Project, we believe that partnerships are absolutely necessary for moving the needle on this issue, and so everything we do is in partnership.

Our community meals are in partnership with other non-profit organizations.

So we enhance the work of other poverty disrupting community building organizations with food, right?

We work in our gardens, in our food recovery, in our meals with something like 50, 55 partners.

- Wow.

- At about 70 sites.

- Wow.

- So we don't do anything alone.

- Yeah.

- We believe that partnerships and working together is systems change.

- Right, going forward in the future, what do you see the concept of like moving out of food apartheid, moving away from food injustice?

What does that look like going forward for our country, for our local community?

What do you foreshadow?

- I don't know, I think that we, again, we think about partnerships.

- Yeah.

- We think about the community leading on these issues.

I think, above all, we've got to move from a philanthropic-driven model to a community-driven model.

- Okay.

- Right?

Philanthropy says, "I've got these resources.

You need them.

I'm gonna give them to you."

- Right.

- A community led model says, "We have the answers, and we can build the future we need."

- Right.

- Right?

And so finding innovative, economically viable, culturally appropriate ways to address these things, and I think, to mention Detroit, again, Detroit Food Commons is this answer.

- Right.

- It took a few years, but what they are building is a magnificent testament to this power.

- Doing this work, can you share some of those individual or community stories that you've been a part of that, you know, community members have entered this work and was able to create change, whether it's on a large scale, even just on a communal scale, but they they got activated?

- Yes, I think we've got several of these examples, but we've got a young farmer from North Nashville started in our community gardens out at Mill Ridge Down in Antioch, right?

Started just growing alongside other gardeners to learn.

She did not know anything, right?

Graduated into a community garden plot of her own.

She went to the new farmer academy at TSU and the Terra Firma course, which Cumberland River Compact puts on.

She, now, is growing for market.

- Right.

- She's trying to earn, and she is earning income from her agricultural pursuits.

So she was interested, and, again, community gardens are the door, not the exit, right?

- Right.

- The doorway, and so she entered and has gained all this knowledge and is graduating up to a full acre, and the Food Project buys everything she produces.

- Wow, that's amazing.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

To kind of end, what advice would you give somebody that's watching or listening to this that want to be a part of combating food injustice, advice on how to get started, but advice on kind of action steps that they can take right away, whether it's from research, whether it's volunteering, what are some of those things that people can do as action steps to get involved in combating food injustice?

- Sure, absolutely.

Well, look, you know, I mean, the old adage, you know, everybody eats, we are what we eat.

- Yeah.

- You can begin in your own life.

- Right.

- In your own kitchen, reducing your food waste, supporting local agriculture, trying to make those choices, and I know it's hard.

- Yeah.

- To eat more healthfully, right, and this has a networking effect that builds, but, you know, at the Food Project, you can come in and volunteer.

We have volunteer opportunities six days a week in our gardens, in our kitchens, on share routes.

So we grow and cook and share food.

So there's many ways to get plugged in.

There are community gardens across the city that have nothing to do with the Food Project.

- Yeah.

- Right?

Depends on where you live.

If you have a question, if you're wondering, reach out, and we can connect you.

There's a Nashville Community Garden Coalition.

So there's multiple ways to get involved, but it begins at home, so to speak.

- Yeah, and, you know, a lot of people may not know this, but even our public libraries have seed banks.

(both talk indistinct simultaneously) - That's great.

- If you got a library card, you can go check out some seeds for free.

- Yeah.

- And you don't have to return the seeds.

If you wanna replenish the seed bank by what you grow, you can do that, too.

So I always think about little small things like that.

- Yeah.

- That makes it easy for people to just start somewhere.

- [CJ] That's right.

- Whether it's on their balcony or if it was with an acre of land or hectare, (laughs) you know, land, a hectare of land, as they're overseas, that's living abroad.

- You know, one thing to say is churches have a lot of land, and what I'm seeing a lot in the community is more and more churches are wanting to turn their campuses into places that grow food, whether it's for the congregation.

- Yeah.

- Or for the community.

- [Jerome] Yeah.

- And that's a very powerful way to harness the community-owned assets.

- Right, if there's one thing that you could change right away, snap of a finger, right, about food access, combating food injustice, food equality, what would that be?

- God, what a question.

(Jerome laughs) I think in Nashville, I think about these persistent neighborhoods that lack food access.

- Yeah.

- And I would ask the Mayor Freddie O'Connell to find some land in these communities and dedicate some resources to getting some food access, some culturally appropriate food, you know, grocery stores, food access points open.

- That's it, that's it?

That's the only one?

- I mean, you know, at a big level.

- Yeah.

- I think it goes back to this, this the way that the food system has consolidated.

- Yeah.

- And the corporate control of our food, and to disaggregate that a little bit.

- Right.

- But, you know, I mean, again, I really think we gotta begin close to home.

- Right.

- And that's a big, big problem, and we've got some problems that are big here, but they are solvable.

- Right.

- Right here.

- Well, CJ, I really appreciate your time, and I hope anybody that's listening or watching checks out the Nashville Food Project, volunteer, become a part, get active, and just keep doing the work you're doing.

I appreciate your time, and just it is such a big topic, and it's such a big issue that we all can do it alone.

You can't do it alone.

- It's a community thing.

- And it's a community thing, and I'm always about inviting community in.

So thank you for inviting me in to talk about this.

- Thank you for having me, Jerome.

- For sure.

- Yeah.

- And thank you all at home for watching another episode of "A Slice of the Community".

See you all next time.

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