Institutional Racism & Its Impact on the Food System

Sep 07, 2020

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."
-Martin Luther King Jr.

There are, no doubt, myriad issues concerning race in our society, but today we'll be discussing a topic that largely flies under the radar, as most things do when concerning this area: institutional racism in the food system. Institutional racism is, simply, another form of racial discrimination that is embedded in various aspects of society. The food system is one of the most nontransparent entities today, as can be expected in a system that intentionally encourages everyone to consume products that are detrimental to our health and profits immensely from our ignorance, and we will be exploring some of the many problems present today.

Health & Dairy

About 65 to 75 percent of all Americans are lactose intolerant, ranging from only about 33 to 35 percent of Caucasians to as many as 95 to 98 percent of Asian Americans. This is because Europeans have been milking cows and goats for millennia, far longer than any other civilizations. However, this actually makes non-lactose intolerant whites the abnormal ones because over the centuries we have developed a mutation to allow our bodies to more comfortably consume an unnatural product.[1, 2] With our advanced global development, we have spread our horrible farming and dietary practices across the globe to peoples that largely ate plant-based diets before our interference. Because of this, they are now more at risk of diet-related diseases than people of predominantly European ancestry.

Science Says...

Did you know that no study has ever shown that consuming dairy will give you strong bones?[1] In fact, increased milk intake is correlated with increased rates of bone fractures and osteoporosis, asthma and other respiratory problems, and prostate and ovarian cancer, with rates of prostate cancer in African American men more than double those of Caucasian men.[3, 4, 5] It turns out that IGF-1, a hormone found only in animals, promotes the growth of cancer cells. Studies have found that people who acquire most of their calcium from non-dairy sources are at reduced risk of developing cancer than the general population.[5] In addition to all of this, dairy contains casein -- a carcinogen that aids in the production of excess mucus, leading to respiratory problems -- along with excessive amounts of bovine estrogen, saturated fat, and cholesterol.[3, 4, 6]

"Drinking milk for nutrients is like inhaling cigarette smoke for oxygen."
-Dr. Milton Mills

Dietary Guidelines

Now, perhaps, as I once briefly thought, you believe that the government needs to know about this and eliminate dairy as a required food group. But they already know; they're not completely oblivious to scientific research.[5] It's because dairy lobbyists have cozied up to politicians, those with the power to enact change; the industry is now so massive, powerful, and profitable that they continue to receive billions in subsidies, political protection, and no repercussions for their disgusting practices, even as the public is slowly turning against them. And if you watch the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines hearing, you can see Dr. Milton Mills call out the panel -- the people creating the Guidelines -- for being completely white and unrepresentative of the American population.[2]

Food Deserts

So, maybe the best course of action is to urge everyone to simply stop consuming all forms of dairy, but that isn't as easy as it sounds. Some people don't have the privilege of being able to choose what kinds of food they eat. In public schools, for instance, kids have to pay for water bottles, but they all get a free carton of milk with every meal. They're fed greasy pizza and cheeseburgers instead of hearty grain bowls or veggie burgers. But even at home, avoiding dairy can be difficult. Many low-income families live in food deserts -- areas in which there is little to no access to fresh, healthy, affordable foods -- and may not even have an actual grocery store nearby. And if it takes two hours to make a trip to the store, many people are too strapped for time, sometimes working multiple jobs and raising children, to do that. So, they have to resort to whatever's available and inexpensive.

As every vegan knows, milk is found in some of the most unlikely places, and nearly all processed foods contain dairy or other animal products. If not, they're still full of fattening oils, added sugars, and artificial ingredients, which promote disease.

*For more information on the health implications of dairy on minorities, check out this article co-written by Drs. Patricia Bertron, Neal Barnard, and Milton Mills in the Journal of the National Medical Association.

Redlining, Healthcare & Jobs

In 1934, the newly-developed Federal Housing Administration began its efforts to segregate the white American population from the black population. With subsidies from the government, the FHA built many new developments in which the houses were only to be sold to whites, rationalizing "that if African-Americans bought homes in these suburbs, or even if they bought homes near these suburbs, the property values of the homes they were insuring, the white homes they were insuring, would decline."[7] Therefore, the majority of the non-white population were diverted to other housing, increasing the divide between these communities.

With the New Deal, maps were created of every metropolis, and areas with large black populations were outlined in red to indicate to financial institutions where it would be unsafe to insure mortgages. People in these communities received less government aid, fewer job opportunities, and poor healthcare services.[7, 8] Though this was more than 80 years ago, it wasn't until the 1960s that segregation became a legitimate issue addressed by the government, but redlined neighborhoods still exist today, even if the lines may no longer be visible on maps. There are many neighborhoods that are predominately white or black, and there are obvious differences that can be seen from infrastructure alone.

Healthcare

Because these neighborhoods never had the same treatment that white neighborhoods had (and have today), we see the prevalence of food deserts, where companies prefer to build stores in more affluent areas, the "good part" of town. There is also less access to healthcare, creating this twisted cycle of dietary and lifestyle choices leading to bad health that people can't afford to treat because there are fewer well-paying jobs, but there aren't any other options for them other than to continue living this way. It becomes more difficult to get out of or improve these neighborhoods because they are trapped in this cycle, and people on the outside don't want to get involved because we tell ourselves that this is America and anybody can do anything they set their minds to because freedom! (And also, maybe, just maybe, we don't want to deal with it.) Of course, there are exceptions, but there are generally fewer opportunities given to people in these areas.

Jobs

If you've ever watched footage from inside farms or slaughterhouses, particularly in the States, you'll notice that most of the workers are black or Latino. When in cities, slaughterhouses are nearly always in the "bad part" of town. In fact, there was a chicken slaughterhouse a few minutes away from where I worked in college, and that certainly was not an area in which I felt comfortable or safe, especially at night.

*You can check out the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' website to learn where the majority of slaughterhouses are, and you'll see that when they are in cities, they're in places like Camden or Newark, but most are out in the Midwest where there are many farms and far fewer people. There was also a map recently released by Project Counterglow of every known farm and slaughterhouse in the country.

With few other options, many people in the area take up jobs in these places of exploitation and death, and when their job is killing day after day, those workers, and therefore the neighborhoods, have higher rates of PTSD and other mental health issues, arrests, violent crime, domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide.[9, 10] And then affluent outsiders have the audacity to blame the residents, the people being oppressed, for all their problems; please, for just a moment, imagine the mental toll it would take on you if your job demanded that you murder innocent creatures over and over and over. But if you quit, you may not be able to feed your family.

Environment

And let's not forget what kind of a toll this takes on the environment of a community where this kind of animal abuse occurs. Low-income families can't just move away when a factory farm or slaughterhouse moves in next door. They have to hear the animals cry out for their loved ones and scream as they're killed; smell the stench of feces, urine, blood, and death; and watch as the animals are constantly carted in and out, on their way to be murdered. In Cowspiracy, we saw that some families have to suffer with farms spraying pig feces into the air every week right across the street from their homes, causing them severe respiratory issues, or farms polluting natural streams and rivers with waste. In 2018, North Carolina hog lagoons -- massive ponds of feces and urine -- overflowed during Hurricane Florence, contaminating all the surrounding flood waters.[11]

In Summation

The USDA tells us what foods we need to eat to be healthy with its Dietary Guidelines released every five years, but they somehow still fail to make the public aware of the negative health ramifications of consuming animal products. And when the vast majority of the minority population is lactose intolerant, including dairy as a necessary food group -- even freely providing milk and other animal products to tens of millions of children in public schools and to millions more of the predominantly-minority inmate population in prisons and jails -- is one of the most rampant forms of racism in our modern society.

The government seeks little to no action to improve the welfare of minorities in food deserts -- how can food deserts even exist in a country as "great" as America? -- and other impoverished communities, allowing them to eat worse and get sicker. They allow massive farms and slaughterhouses to infiltrate these neighborhoods, destroying lives, relationships, and the environment under the guise of "feeding the people." But if they really cared about the people, and not just about lining their pockets, they would have switched many years ago to a plant-based food system.

The Good News

Upcoming documentary They're Trying to Kill Us from John Lewis (@badassvegan) and Keegan Kuhn (Cowspiracy, What the Health) follows Lewis as he examines "the intersections of food, disease, race, poverty, institutional racism and government corruption." With these two powerhouses behind it, this will surely be a groundbreaking film to address food injustice and racism, both within and outside of the vegan movement, in the wake of similar documentaries like The Invisible Vegan.

In 2019, Canada, who, like the US, has an incredibly diverse population, took initiative by removing dairy as a necessary food group.[12] Hopefully, when our 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines come out later this year, we will have taken a similar positive step. In terms of institutional racism, there are certain things that aren't as easy to change as diet, which is saying something because even that can be difficult. Remember that progress takes time, but if we take action and make our voices heard, it will happen much quicker. If we truly want to live in a just, equal, vegan world, we must stand for the rights of all beings, all people, and demand that they be treated with the respect and fairness they deserve. It is not enough to simply not participate in oppression; we must be firmly against it.