by Kamal Patel
When I walk into Whole Foods near South Lake Union in Seattle, I feel unwelcome. I feel so incredibly brown, bearded and poor that once while there, I was asked by a passing, older man there if I was Muslim in a fearful kind of way. This happens to me now, in a post 9–11 world. And oddly, I know I’m privileged, since I’m Indian and usually perceived as economically successful in most eyes, but I don’t feel that way when I’m in Whole Foods in SLU.
What I’ve realized is this is just a taste of the hidden racism and suspicion felt by many People of Color (POC), specifically black folks, in places like Whole Foods and the local food movement. POC often state they have a farmers’ market nearby them, but they don’t feel welcome. I know what that — feels — like.
Now this same feeling is happening online.
The food tech world is booming, and everyone wants it delivered to their door on-demand. If you take a racial justice approach, or inclusivity approach, these food tech companies are a nightmare. The hyper-convenience of good, local food delivered on-demand to well-to-do urbanites continues this same line of underlying “neoliberal racism” people of color feel at Whole Foods.
As Dr. Aime Harper AKA Sistah Vegan Project, writes in her article, “From Seed to Table(t): Can Foodie-Tech Startups Change a Neoliberal, Racist, and Capitalist (food) system? “Many people with good intentions are ignorant about how racial, gender, and class injustice/inequality operate at the systemic level, end up engaging in food entrepreneurship that may unknowingly have negatively racialized, gendered, and classed outcomes.”
And why wouldn’t it be considered neoliberal racism when we create a two tiered food system, where people at the top eat well and are healthy and people who are lower income, and more so people of color, have to eat foods that are lower quality and affect their health?
Kristin Wartman in her Civil Eats article, Why Food Belongs in our Discussions of Race, talks to Karen Washington, a food leader in the bronx, who says the problem of food deserts isn’t access to good food — it’s jobs. “No one talks about job creation, business enterprises, or entrepreneurships in low-income communities. We have to start owning our own businesses, like farmers’ markets, food hubs, and food cooperatives. When you own something it gives you power.”
This is where tech can advance the food justice movement of today. If people of color and low income folks want to actually build power in their communities through food, they need to bring the ownership online. They need to take advantage of the network capabilities of the internet and create a new, 21st century food system. Though since most venture capital firms have no interest in funding companies looking to build fairness in the food system, these online platforms need to be cooperatively owned and funded.
Luckily much of this work is developing. In the recent Platform Cooperativism conference at the New School in NYC, Trebor Scholz talks about how “the distrust of the dominant extractive economic model is growing, companies in the on-demand economy have been criticized for..the elimination of democratic values like accountability, dignity, and rights for workers.” This can be seen in UBER’s drivers having little say or pay in the model and demanding and winning rights through unions in Seattle.
The key solution to a cooperative online platform would be decentralization of the food system. We no longer need a physical store-front that needs to be able to survive in a low income area, or one placed in a high income area that doesn’t meet the needs for lower-income or people of color. A decentralized model, like Farmigo’s buying clubs, brings food to people’s places of work, schools and churches, and gives people who live near each other a way to collaborate through food.
For food tech startups like Farmigo to actually serve in the goals of the lower income and POC, it needs to keep ownership of that system local. That the food hubs, warehouses, processing, distribution, preparing, producing, the platform — can be owned and profited by the community. Where the internet can be used to keep prices down and ownership local, instead of sent to a CEO and investors in Silicon Valley.
I feel it’s time to disrupt the food industry to make it work for all. I also feel like this needs to come from a collectively effort of white, black, latino, brown (and bearded), low and high income and everything in between to use the internet and local food to tie their individual food community needs together. If communities use the internet to build community power around food, they can create a new economy that disrupts the distruptors by changing how these online platforms are owned.
I’ll end this with a Homer Meme.
