Broke, Black and Vegetarian

I saw someone on my Twitter timeline this morning discussing the pressures for black people to eat healthier and the ways that the level of difficulty of this task are disregarded. She was ranting a bit about how vegans like to preach to meat-eaters the need to convert, but don’t realize that fresh market stores don’t exist in the hood and when they begin to, 9 times out of 10 you’ll be moving out of it quite soon since that’s a beginning sign of gentrification.

23.5 million people live in Food Deserts (an area where there is no access to fresh, healthy and affordable produce within a 6–10 mile radius) and black people make up more than 66% of that population. I am a part of that 66%, yup, I live in Richmond VA, I live in a food desert, and somehow I still manage to maintain vegetarianism.

However, I am very fucking aware that I do not have the opportunity to do that without certain types of privilege:

I have privilege in terms of my education because I have a bachelors degree.
I have professional privelege. While studying for my bachelors degree, I picked up a well paying part-time job. They liked me at that job so upon graduation they offered me a better paying full-time job.
Because of my job, I was able to purchase my first car and I now have the privilege of reliable transportation.
I also have the privelege of accessible information. I’ve done hours of research on the negative affects that meat has on the human body, both mentally and physically, and that’s how I made my decision to no longer eat it.

I’m sure that I have other privileges that I’ve failed to mention, but I put forth an honest effort to highlight the ones I felt most privy to this discussion. See, upwards of 80% of people in food deserts live in low-income “urban” (I hate that fucking word, just say black or minority) areas, and what does a low-income area mean most of the time? It means a lack of access to a more than decent education, it means a lack of push toward higher education, it means a lack of access to internet and therefore accessibly important information. I also think living in a low-income food desert means that the desire to change one’s dietary habits is so low on the totem pole of hard-hitting issues that it doesn’t seem worth it.

I was going into this article with the wrong attitude, I had my ego all in it because I know what it’s like to be the black girl at family dinner who everyone thinks is turning their nose up at them just because she doesn’t want to eat a chicken wing. And yeah, that’s annoying and all, but again, what’s more annoying is the people that can’t fully comprehend and understand this resistance from black people. I don’t think that they all want to eat foods that the FDA just discovered cause cancer, I just think a lot of them don’t even know about the discovery. Black people are getting killed: their moms, their brothers, their sisters, their cousins, their aunts, their uncles, their god parents. Black people are getting killed. So I do, even though I am a vegetarian, think that it’s unfair to be condescending towards a group of people for their eating habits when they’re dealing with issues that feel so much more pressing. I would never take that from them. I’m one of them. I do not separate myself from the issues that we face.

And while this is true to me, and while I understand that there are bigger pieces of chicken to fry (see what I did there?), I can’t help but still feel like it’s not okay to just sit on the fact that my people are eating shit that’s killing them and there’s nothing we can do about it because we’re broke and have no say. That’s not good enough for me.

I don’t need every black person in the world to go vegetarian, that would be a fantastic world for me to live in, but simply unrealistic altogether. However, I do want to have a hand in eradicating the constant diagnoses of thyroid, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, high blood pressure, etc. amongst my people, and a lot of these diagnoses can be prevented by healthier food intake. When I was a junior in college, the year I became a vegetarian, I volunteered for this urban farming non-profit called Tricycle Gardens. We worked as mini-farmers and planted fresh fruits and veggies all year long and then we provided local corner stores with mini refrigerators and we stuffed as many fresh fruits and vegetables as we could into them. This helped people that could only travel to their local corner store, and/or people that didn’t have the money for fresh fruits and veggies but had food stamps/EBT access. It’s a small effort, but it’s an impactful effort and I don’t think that it is a solo effort.

I think we can make more small efforts just like these, without even gardening, because I’m well aware that that’s not everybody’s thing and when it was 80+ degrees out it wasn’t my thing either. So instead, all I ask, is that black people like myself (most likely black people reading this article), with access to transportation and accessible information, go to a corner store maybe once a week and ask the clerk about fresh fruits and vegetables. He/She may tell you there ain’t shit they can do, but I promise that the thought alone will spark something in them, and closed mouths never get fed so we have to speak up for our people that do not know what to ask for or how to ask.

There are people out there that want to help. I just wish to be one of them.