The Overlap between Food Justice and Reproductive Justice
Food Justice is the fundamental belief that healthy food is a human right and the movement to address the barriers that keep that idea from coming to fruition (Food and Society Program, 2021). It is a uniquely multifaceted topic and, at its core, an issue of racial equity. Black households face issues of food insecurity at more than twice the rate as compared to non- Hispanic white households, with 21.2% of African American or Black households reporting food insecurity in 2018, compared to 8.1% of white households (Phojanakong, 2019).
Reproductive Justice (RJ) is understood to be the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent those children in safe and sustainable communities (Mann, 2020). The RJ Movement was founded by a collective of women of color to connect reproductive rights with human rights and social justice. Around the same time, Dr. Arline Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe how the myriad forms of chronic stress resulting from a lifetime of discrimination contributes to negative birth outcomes among the Black birthing community (Mann, 2020). These factors range from access to healthcare, to obstetric violence, all the way to food injustice.
There is great overlap between Reproductive Justice and Food Justice. One such overlap is Black people have always been at the forefront of both the fights for reproductive and food justice. Much of the advancement and organizing for both concepts have been done by people of color, specifically Black people. Historically, Black people have fought for the liberation of all, whereas movements led by other groups such as white women, or other peoples of color have tended to be exclusionary of Black people. For example, it was Black women who stood up against the exclusion of non-White folks by the reproductive rights movement. Just as a collaborative of Black women and women of color organized around RJ, one of the first examples of food justice in praxis in the United States was accomplished by a collective of Black people — The Black Panthers. In 1969 the Black Panther Party launched their Free Breakfast for Children Program as a way to provide Black Children with regular meals and nutrition, when their parents and communities were unable to (Food and Society Program, 2021). The program started in one church, but quickly spread across the country, with thousands of Black children receiving meals.
The many ways in which reproductive and food injustice manifest in the Black community is another point of overlap. They are a direct consequence of the structural racism and discrimination that are at the foundation of American culture, which was built on the backs of Black Americans but continues to disenfranchise them at every twist and turn. The government did not start to substantially invest in free breakfast programs until the Black Panthers started their own initiative. And as soon as they started to observe the positive benefits that that specific program was having on black communities across the country, the government launched its attack on the BPP, effectively shuttering the Free Breakfast Program, along with many others. Only then did they focus efforted on a USDA run free breakfast program, which today, it helps feed over 14.57 million children before school, and would not have been possible without the actions of the BPP (Blakemore, 2021).
In the 1960’s concern for the dietary health of women, infants and children began to rise in policy making circles. This led to the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) about a decade later. This is lauded as a landmark decision in the world of food justice however its creation also highlights the need for reproductive justice. WIC was primarily created for white mothers, a fact made evident in the racial breakdown of enrollment. This fact emphasizes how Black birthing people were not considered in creating sustainable environments to have and parent children. As of 2018 non-Hispanic whites made up almost 60 percent of WIC enrollees, compared to 20 percent of Black enrollees (USDA, 2018). There are still discrepancies in WIC distribution today. Black enrollees are much more likely to face overcrowded WIC sites, insufficient supply of nutritious food, and inadequate prenatal health counseling (Gai and Fen, 2012). Any further benefit to be gained by Black participants in WIC is mitigated by the negligence of the program towards those that need it most.
The intersection between maternal health and food insecurity is a precarious one, especially when it comes to birth outcomes. A study conducted in 2016 on a sample of 220 households found that 51% of the black mothers and their children were found to live in food insecure households. Both poverty and poor maternal nutritional status are linked to negative birth outcomes (Abu-Saad and Fraser, 2010). These negative birth outcomes can include low infant birth weight as well as various other kinds of perinatal morbidity (Fowles, 2004). Pregnancy puts specific nutritional demands on the bodies of birthing peoples, such as increased iron, folate, calcium, vitamin D, and protein, all of which are found in nutritionally dense foods such as fresh fruits, meat, and vegetables and communities that are facing food insecurity cannot meet those needs.
This article cannot overstate the way that food and reproductive injustice faced by Black birthing peoples is entrenched in the structures of the United States. To upend these structures would be to dismantle the United States as it currently exists, something that needs to happen for justice to be a reality for all.
Mariama Drammeh is a Policy Intern at the National Birth Equity Collaborative (NBEC). She is passionate about reproductive justice and is interested in the way that it intersects and interacts with many other facets of society. She is currently a senior at Tulane University studying Public Health and International Development and hopes to continue working in the field of Maternal and Child Health in some form after undergrad.
Sources:
● ://moveforhunger.org/hunger-racial-equity-issue
● https://www.fns.usda.gov/resource/wic-racial-ethnic-group-enrollment-data-2018
● https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4096937/
● https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774284/summary
● https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11293-011-9294-y
● https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/32/1/5/492553?login=true
● https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/0884217504270599?saml_referrer
● https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party
