Food as a Black Lives Matter Issue

Racism is as American as apple pie, so it is no wonder that Covid has been yet another front that Black and brown Americans have had to fight for justice on. Although it differs from state to state (CNN health), one study from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity found that Black people are 2.4 times more likely, and Latinos are 3.16 times to get infected as compared to white people. The statistic for Black Americans was extrapolated to reveal that if Black Americans were dying at the same lower rate as white Americans, 13,000 Black lives would not have been taken (Scientific American). Those are 13,000 people that were arguably killed by racism (rather than the usual governmental ineptitude).

It has been interesting to see some people immediately jumping to biological differences as an explanation for these disparities. It couldn’t be the fact that Black and brown Americans are systemically put at a disadvantage in all aspects of society? Well yes it actually does turn out to be those systemic inequalities. And part of this is income; the death rate of a wealthy non-white is three times that of a wealthy white, and the death rate of a poor non-white is nine times that of a poor non-white (TIME). Poverty plays a factor, and wealth softens the disadvantages, but clearly since there is such a huge disparity between poor whites and non-whites, and still a disparity between wealthy whites and non-whites, race is still a major factor.

Because this is a health issue, people often focus on the overt medical racism, such as higher insurance rates for white populations, and worse medical care for Black patients. Indeed, the usual practices of downplaying the pain of Black patients and giving less attentive treatment have continued during Covid (NPR), and have no doubt affected the disparate outcomes. In addition, frontline workers are disproportionately BIPOC, and also disproportionately women (CBS). Being able to work from home is a privilege enabled by racial and class advantage.

These are all important parts of the picture of racial inequities revealed by Covid, but this is not a holistic view of health. Part of what is broken with our current system of caring for people’s health, is our tunnel vision focus on pills and treatment and what is done at a hospital, rather than healthy lifestyles, preventative medicine, and what is done in our daily lives. Both are important, but the latter is often sidelined as simply a self improvement individual rather than a political issue. However, Covid has revealed that lifestyle-related chronic health issues of Black and brown Americans--born out of corporate and often government-induced conditions--is a life or death issue; 94% of Covid victims who died had other health issues (News Channel 8). Chief among the deadly underlying conditions were high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease--BIPOC, and especially Black and Native American people, are shown to have a disadvantage in all three. Compared to non-Hispanic white people, non-Hispanic Black people suffer from higher rates of high blood pressure (54% vs 46%) but lower rates of blood pressure control (25% vs 32%), higher rates of diabetes (11.7% vs 7.5%, for Native Americans the number climbs to 14.7%), and scored lower on cardiovascular health (CDC, American Diabetes Association, Journal of the American Heart Association).

This has led these groups vulnerable to Covid, but this crisis has only revealed an ongoing, largely unaddressed issue. Of course now these chronic conditions have led to these groups dying disproportionately from Covid, but even before Covid, the number one killer in America was heart disease, the seventh being diabetes (CDC). These ongoing, preventable deaths have taken millions of lives over the years, and that is an issue in and of itself that Covid has only drawn back the curtain on. In fact even this year, heart disease (which takes a yearly 650,000) is still projected to take twice as many lives as Covid (which has so far taken 200,000), but while people furiously wash their hands, they aren’t necessarily furiously chowing down on vegetables. These chronic conditions will always take a backseat because these types of diseases quietly, slowly, undramatically take lives. We simply accept these deaths as a fact of life, but they are not so much treatment diseases as they are preventable diseases. Oftentimes, medication simply serves to clamp down on the symptoms rather than addressing the causes. This is why a complete picture of racial disparities in health must also examine lifestyle, and within lifestyle perhaps the most influential, and also most politically controlled factor, is food.

Just like we live, arguably, in an apartheid state with regard to policing, schooling, and residing, activists have extended this term has been extended to define our current food injustice as not only “food deserts,” but as food apartheid (see here for more information on food apartheid. Not only do white neighborhoods have four times as many supermarkets as predominantly Black communities (Food Empowerment Project) which are preyed upon by junk food restaurants, but Black farmers are also discriminated against in federal loans. Black America has been disempowered on both the supplying and purchasing sides.

We recommend Americans to eat their fruits and veggies in nutrition guidelines, but then only give those foods 0.04% of what we give in subsidies to meat and dairy (Meatonomics). The whole foods plant-based diet, centered on whole grains, vegetables, and fruits, pioneered by Dr. Dean Ornish, is the only known reversing treatment for heart disease (link to study here), and also acts as a strong preventative measure for heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and other common illnesses (How Not to Die, Greger). The longest living people in the world eat a 95-100% plant-based diet (Blue Zone Diet). But America is a pitiful distance from even following our own corporate industry-influenced nutrition guidelines (only 10% of Americans eat the government recommended intake of fruits and vegetables), much less a plant-based diet.

Why is this? Our environments were created to usher us, but especially Black Americans, into lifetimes of bad eating habits. We subsidize fast food companies with commodity crop subsidies such as corn and soy, that are either processed into fast food or turned into animal feed. In an ironic and cynical twist, fast food companies benefit off of the government’s Small Business Administration subsidies through a loophole, the money from which chains usually use to open up in “experimental” locations, at the expense of tax dollars, as well as taking advantage of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, where fast food chains rake in thousands of dollars in tax credit for every low income worker they hire, despite the fact that these chains operate on mechanization and providing as little training as possible (Fast Food Nation, pg. 72, pg. 102). All of this generous government support has emboldened these fast food companies, whose chains are disproportionately clustered around Black and brown neighborhoods (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).

Big meat and dairy also profit off of government contracts, with the government buying up the surplus of meat and dairy that the free market has rejected, and funneling it into government food programs such as school lunches, which are disproportionately depended on by Black and brown Americans as well (National Center for Education Statistics). I know there is the school of thought that supports government intervention for the public good, and the school of thought that wants the market to operate freely, but right now we are following a bizarre philosophy of government intervention on behalf of wealthy, corporate interests at the expense of public health and small business interests.

A more lucrative system could not be arranged for both the pharmaceutical and food industry. One gets to make a profit off of poisoning us, the other gets to make a profit off of barely keeping us alive with expensive drugs, and Black and brown Americans get the worse end of both sticks.