Land, Power, and the Plate: Ending Food Apartheid with Regenerative Justice

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Rupa Marya
Deep medicine is understanding that health cannot be pursued on an individual level, that health can only be attained in proper relationship to each other and the entire web of life. And so those, activities that we can do around our food system that reawaken, rehydrate our ancient relationships to seeds, to water, to soil, to each other are going to be a part of that practice of decolonizing our food

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the HymanHive, for live q and a's, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health.

You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhymen.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. Or in 02/2006, a long time ago, you were living with your husband in South End Of Albany near, you know, the capital, New York state. And you said it was easier to get weapons and drugs than healthy food and that your neighborhood was a place of food apartheid, which is really an interesting term.

I wanna get into that, but there were no grocery stores, farmer's markets, fast food, and bodegas in every corner just selling processed junk and alcohol. And it sort of helped you catalyze a lot of what your thinking was and what you're doing. And why why is this whole term food apartheid the the right term that we should be using instead of talking about food deserts?

Karen Washington
Sure. So there's a lot there. I mean, a food desert implies a natural ecosystem. It's the term the USDA uses for a high poverty neighborhood without grocery stores. But there's nothing natural about a system where certain people have to food opulence and other food scarcity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I say man on purpose.

Karen Washington
Right. So it's apartheid. It's apartheid. There's a whole history of redlining and housing discrimination that's led to neighborhoods that don't have these resources. And I think for me, living with my children who were quite small then, Nishima was two, Emmett was a newborn.

And as you said, there were no grocery stores, farmers markets, places to have a garden. And so we ended up joining a CSA program, so like a subscription program, that cost more than our rent and had to walk over two miles to get the vegetables, pile them onto the laps of the sleeping children in the stroller, go back down. Like, that was the only way to get vegetables. And so when our neighbors found out that we knew how to farm, there was a clamor for us to create the farm for the people. And that was where the idea for Soul Fire Farm came about.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. So food apartheid really is a better way of describing sort of the intentional segregation, the deliberate policies, the redlining which you described, which maybe you could explain, that led to this incredible disparity in access to food and also in the health disparities that result from that. Because we're seeing this tremendous increase in diseases in African American and Latino populations. It's not an accident.

Karen Washington
Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. So food apartheid is the right term because as you mentioned, if you are Black or Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, you're much more likely to struggle with diabetes, heart disease, and other diet related illnesses. Not, to be clear, because we don't know how to make good food choices or know how to cook food or want those foods, It's really because of access.

If you have $3 in your pocket and you live in a food apartheid zip code, you can get some Hot Cheetos and blue colored drink, but you cannot get a burrito, a salad, or anything like that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Nothing.

Dr. Rupa Marya
And so it's really tragedy

Karen Washington
that is rooted in institutional racism. As I mentioned, in the 1930s, the federal government commissioned these maps to be made of neighborhoods that rank them from most desirable to lend down to least desirable. The communities of color were outlined in red as too risky to lend, too risky to have a mortgage, too risky to own homes. And so the wealth disparity has grown and the property ownership disparity has grown and with it these neighborhood conditions.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Incredible. I think people don't realize the magnitude of the health disparity that exists out there. Diabetes, heart disease, chronic illnesses, kidney failure, hypertension that affect Black and indigenous people, Native Americans, Latinos far more than whites. If you're African American, you're eighty percent more likely to be diagnosed with type two diabetes. You're four times as likely to have kidney failure.

You're three and a half times more likely to have amputations from diabetes as whites. And it also somehow connects to sort of how our whole system is operating. It's almost like a weapon that is used against these populations, not necessarily intentionally always, but it sort of has been the unintended result of our food policies, of our ag policies. And the way I think about it is we're facing an unprecedented proliferation of biological weapons of mass destruction. Our processed food, which kills literally forty to fifty million people a year globally from hypertension.

So how do you see the role of a farmer shifting this systemic violence, these biological weapons of mass destruction as I call them? And how do we do that?

Karen Washington
I mean, what you said is so powerful because food has intentionally been used as a weapon. You look at the Greenwood food blockades that were used to punish civil rights activity, literally cutting off food supplies to Black communities in the 1960s for the audacity to try to register to vote. I actually don't think it's an accident that our schools, our urban schools, our prisons are filled with these highly processed foods because a population that's not well is not going to resist. If I'm not feeling well and I'm dealing with diabetes, kidney issues, I'm not going to show up for a town hall and tell my senator what they should be doing. And so I don't think it's entirely an accident.

But I do believe it's not just farmers who are responsible for the solution. It's obviously everyone in the food system. But farmers do have a unique role to play because we have an opportunity, one, to see where our food is going and to do what we can to make sure there's equitable distribution. We have the opportunity to make sure that our farm workers are treated fairly, signing on to programs like the Food Justice Certified. And we have a unique voice where we can really get bipartisan ear.

Farming is considered a everybody kind of issue, we can be telling policymakers about the shifts that need to happen on a systemic level.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly. And I think we are seeing a farm system that also has generated out of a series of policies that have led to the overproduction of these highly processed foods. The poor and minorities are targeted by the food industry with extra marketing for these foods. When SNAP or food stamps come on with your monthly stipend, it's usually at the beginning of the month, and that's when there's maximum advertising in all these bodegas in local stores for more soda and more junk food. So it's sort of an intentional process.

And the other thing that is that I'm not well understood, I think, my most is that your cognitive development depends on your nutrition.

Dr. Rupa Marya
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So if you're growing up in a poor community with lack of access to nutritious food, with lack of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and all that you need to create your healthy brain, these kids are not going to be cognitively where they need to be. I mean, I mean, even even, you know, the exposure on on farms to pesticides, these kids have lost, you know, 41,000,000 IQ points in farm and food workers, which are among the most dangerous occupations in this country because of the use of these industrial agricultural chemicals. So we have both the issue of food justice, but we also have the environmental racism and environmental justice that's connected to the food system because most of the workers on farms today are brown, mostly Latino workers or migrant workers. They're not protected by the farm I mean, the the the labor Fair Labor Act that was in the thirties, but they were excluded mostly because at the time, were mostly African Americans doing the work. And, and it's it's a a biggest it's a big barrier.

So what what are the biggest barriers you see to what you describe as decolonizing farming? And can you just take a minute to describe what is the colonization of our food system? Because I think people don't understand that we have a colonization of our food system.

Karen Washington
Absolutely. That was a lot. That was a lot. Environmental justice, I agree, is absolutely a huge issue, first of all, because we're talking about who's getting environmental benefits and who's suffering from environmental harms. Pesticide exposure, extreme heat from climate chaos.

We're talking about the effluent from hog farms and

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, toxic and rights are abuse, sexual abuse, all

Leah Pennington
sorts I believe.

Karen Washington
So I'm glad that you mentioned because those issues are certainly linked. I mean, the colonization of the food system is the imposition of European control power and European norms over our food system. And it's quite pervasive. I'll tell a quick story just illustrate one example of it. You take maize, a 9,000 year old staple crop.

It was a gift from Sky Woman to the indigenous people of Turtle Island of this continent. It was given to prevent starvation in combination with her sisters, beans and squash, to be grown together. You all heard

Dr. Mark Hyman
of the three Or intercropping.

Karen Washington
And there are many, many origin stories. But the condition was that the gift of maize needed to be shared freely. So the colonizers got some too, as a gift. That's how they stayed alive. But look what they did with maize: Tore her away from the sisters, monocrop, laden with chemicals, pesticides leading to the dead zone in the Gulf Of Mexico, turned into corn syrup pumped into the veins of our children driving the diabetes epidemic, and genetically modified BT, terminator seed, all of this.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we could go on and on.

Karen Washington
Looking at maize is just one example of colonization of the food system. You look at the fact that the soil has lost over 50% of its organic matter. 50 of its carbon is burned up into the atmosphere. That was the beginning of climate change, was the 1800s opening of the Great Plains.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We had extractive agriculture that wasn't regenerative, and that's led to this massive climate change crisis. And I think we've talked about it on the show, but our food system end to end is the number one cause of climate change.

Karen Washington
Absolutely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And people don't realize that. It's about 50%, whereas fossil fuels are about 30%. And it's not just the fact you're farming of cows. It's everything from deforestation to land destruction to food waste and so forth. So you don't just talk about this stuff.

You've got your hands in the dirt.

Karen Washington
Absolutely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you are not just talking the talk, you're walking the walk. You created an extraordinary place called Soul Flower Farm, which I read a lot about. I watched movies about it. I'm super impressed with what's going on there because you're helping your community and poor communities understand the benefit of the land and becoming farmers and training them to become farmers. And then you're doing all sorts of collateral good in the community by providing food for ex cons who can't get food or for immigrants who can't actually afford food.

I mean, it's really amazing. So tell us what you think the role of Soul Fire Farm is in creating a new food system.

Karen Washington
Wow. I'm sorry.

Leah Pennington
I'm putting you on the spot. No.

Karen Washington
It's my heart work. So Soul Fire Farm, we are a community farm. There's eight of us up on the land, up in the mountains of Grafton, New York.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm coming to visit.

Karen Washington
Please do. Every month, we have a community day. Everyone can come. But we're dedicated to ending racism in the food system, and we're doing that in three basic ways. Right?

The first is to regenerate the 80 acres that we get to steward of Mohican territory. So we're using all these Afro Indigenous technologies to heal the land, produce food, and get that to the people who need it most through a doorstep delivery program. That's the first thing. The second thing is to equip black and brown farmers through our training programs and mentorship, helping people get the knowledge and land and credit they need. And then the final thing is mobilizing public support, trying to change policy, get reparations for farmers, reparations for indigenous people who've lost their land and so forth.

And, you know, it's been really heartening because we actually haven't had to convince people that this is worth doing. I thought I'd be all alone in the hills, but our waiting list for our programs are years long because we wanna get back to the land as a people.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, you know, most people aren't aware that Lincoln, when he freed the slaves, promised 40 acres and a mule, which, Andrew Johnson, the president who got impeached right after him, revoked. Yeah. And it's been estimated that if that was in place, that there'd be a land worth $4,600,000,000,000 in the African American community, which has been usurped for them. And then at the turn of the century, you know, 14% of farms compared to less than 1% of farmers now were African American. And they were in the South, and they were threatening the existing status quo down there.

And the people who were running those farms were lynched. Their homes were burned. Their farms destroyed, their land was taken over. And it's a legacy that people just don't realize, that this was sort of an injustice that's never been talked about, never been really addressed. Maybe we need to get back that $4,600,000,000,000 of land.

Karen Washington
We absolutely do.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think you mentioned reparations, and I think that's what made me think about it.

Karen Washington
Yeah. Because 40 Acres and a Mule was a broken promise. All of the land that Black folks got was purchased off their own dime despite the oppressive sharecropping and convict leasing conditions. And it wasn't just the violent lynching and terrorism that drove people off the land. It was the federal government itself.

The USDA in the 1962 Commission of Civil Rights report was named as the number one culprit in the decline of the Black farmer. Reagan later closed that office. He didn't like their findings, but that's why black farmers sued the government. They won a settlement of $2,000,000,000 in 1999, the Pigford case, which was the largest civil rights settlement in US history. But by then, most of the farmers were in their nineties, and 50,000 is not gonna get you back your land.

So it was really a symbolic victory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so, you know, you you point out that, you know, partly as a result of the broken promise of 40 Acres and a Mule and many other sort of deliberate and political and and social injustice that happen, you you talk about, you know, how there's been an starting to be an increase in African American farmers. You know, it used to be 14%. Now it's like maybe 1% or 21.5%. Yeah. So but you see that changing.

And I I just saw this incredible graph in one of the articles where there was this complete divergence, you know, where white farmers are going down mostly because they're aging out of farming and no one's coming in new, and African American farmers are going up.

Karen Washington
Well, the the USDA actually just got called out for fluffing up its numbers in the 2017 census, so we're not exactly sure if black farmers are on the rise according to the USDA count. I will say, though, that as someone who focuses on training a returning generation of Black farmers, that there is a clamor, there is an interest, and there are a number of success stories on an anecdotal level. So we're hoping to see some legitimate shifts upward in the coming census.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, it's it's you know, I I work a lot in Cleveland, and I go through some of the poorest areas there and see, you know, the the way people live, the lack of access to food. And, you know, I you it know, strikes me that they're in this vicious cycle that they can't get out of and that thinking about how to bringand I know it's not your expertisebut how to bring farming and community agriculture back into these communities. I was at Ebenezer Baptist Church a number of years ago, and they had a a two acre plot. Like, right near the church in in the middle of Atlanta was a massive farm where the church members were growing the food. They were eating the food.

They were distributing it to the communities that needed it. I was really like, wow. This is a model that could be scaled.

Karen Washington
Absolutely. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
so how do you see that being part of the solution? Because I I it it is something I struggle with. It's like I you see the problem is so tough. I mean, I'm working in Cleveland. We're working with a a group there, you know, really underserved African Americans who are very sick.

They have diabetes, they have kidney failure, they have all these issues. We put them in a group together, we're using community based solutions, we're going to them, we're teaching them how to cook and shop, And they want it so bad, but nobody ever has helped them. And they're losing weight, they're feeling good. It's But are just really neglected communities, and bankrupting our country. We should care about it because a big part of our $22,000,000,000,000 debt is the cost of healthcare.

So how do you see intervening in these communities as well? Because I think how do you bring people up to say, Okay, well farming is not about slavery, it's not about working on a plantation, it's actually my salvation, it's what my ancestors did and brought to America and I should be proud of it, which is what you're trying to say. But how do you get people's mindset to change around that?

Karen Washington
Absolutely. I mean, I would say at least half of our graduates from our week long beginning farmer training program go on to start urban farms or work on urban farms. So it's really part of the same solution. And I think it's a false dichotomy between the rural and urban. Yeah.

I wanna shout out, you know, if you look at Reverend Heber Brown's Baltimore Black Church Community Food Security Network, he realized, you know, that Black churches are actually the biggest landholders in the Black community. And so is, as you you saw in Atlanta, putting in gardens, also sourcing from rural black farmers, and getting that food to urban black community. And so it's happening in Chicago. It's happening in Detroit with D Town Farm, Malik Gikini's work. So we're very excited to be collaborating and have found that it's not so much, again, that we need to convince people.

I think the will is there. It's often the resources that are lacking. So if we can make sure that folks don't have to pay a high water bill and that they have the tools and the land and institutional support, website development, whatever the thing is that they need, it emerges. So we don't even have to evangelize.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's crazy. Mean, Haber Brown said, the pastor in Baltimore said, We're losing more people to suites than the streets. Cause he was ministering to his congregation, seeing how many people were dying from all the food they're eating. So I think it's an important solution to empowering people, getting them out of poverty, giving them food sovereignty in ways that there aren't a lot of solutions that people are offering, and I think this is a powerful one. But it's still hard for people of color to become farmers.

So how do we overcome those obstacles?

Karen Washington
Yeah. Absolutely. So recently, the USDA, again, we we looked at their numbers, they're still giving out a disproportionate amount of their resources to white farmers, large farmers, corporate farmers. And so we need an overhaul of the civil rights commission in the USDA to address that discrimination.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is there a civil rights commission at the USDA?

Karen Washington
There is. And they have a multiyear backlog of complaints that are unaddressed. And so we've been meeting

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is there one 75 year old lady running the whole thing or what?

Karen Washington
Oh, it is a hot mess. But I will tell you, you know, we've been talking to senator Sanders, senator Warren, other politicians for the first time are interested in the plight of the black farmer. And so, hopefully, we'll get those cases addressed of discrimination so people can get their loans and crop allotments and technical assistance. I think also we need massive land reform. 98% of the rural land is owned by white people right now.

That's the highest amount of land concentrated in the hands of European Americans ever in the history of this country. And so we really need to look at a patchwork of land trust and land link and land transfer to make sure that 40

Dr. Mark Hyman
that acres and a mule.

Karen Washington
Yeah. Exactly. 40 acres and a mule in 2019, 2020.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Maybe not a mule. Maybe some other tools.

Karen Washington
40 acres and a couple trackers.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What's really fascinating about this conversation is that if you do the right thing for the land, you do the right thing for humans, you do the right thing for climate, you do the right thing for biodiversity. You do the right thing for our scarce water resources. Right? You do the right thing for all the things that matter. You do the right thing for injustice.

You do the right thing for our economy. You do the right thing for health. It seems like too good to be true, but is that how you see it?

Karen Washington
I do think it's all really connected. You know, some of my mentors have taught me how to farm in Ghana. They're called the queen mothers, so these elder women who are just badass in every way. But they said, you know, Amida Day, is it true? Leah, is it true that if you have, want to plant a seed on your farm in The United States, don't pray over it or sing or dance or say thank you to the ground?

You expect the seed to grow? I admitted that was true and they said that's why you're all sick.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're all

Karen Washington
sick because you treat the Earth like a commodity and not like family member. And so I do think that the reverence that we have for the earth, by extension, the way we treat the land is going to be mirrored in the way we treat ourselves and our human communities.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, you're so right about this, because when you look at the at the impact of regenerative ag to reverse all the wrongs to our earth and to humans, it has so much potential. It's like a I wouldn't say it's the entire solution, but it's a big solution if we scale this. And think and and doing all the things I said by producing better quality food where the farmers are happier, they're healthier, they make more money producing food that's good for humans, that's actually reverses climate change, that actually doesn't deplete our scarce freshwater resources, that increases the biodiversity, protects our pollinators. Mean, there's all this downstream benefits. It's like a duh, but it's still sort of this people when you say regenerative ag, what's that?

Karen Washington
I mean regenerative ag, I think we ought to give a shout out to Doctor. George Washington Carver. People thought he was nuts. I mean, is a generation and a half before Rodale. And so he's telling farmers literally to let their land rest out of cash crop for a little while.

Put some legumes in there because legumes, as we know, are best friends with bacteria.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they fix nitrogen and stuff. Need fertilizer.

Karen Washington
Exactly. He was getting people to go and muck out swamps to make compost piles. I mean, he literally quoting bible verses to get folks convinced that this is what god wanted them to do because it didn't make any logical sense.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Figure it out? Was it from his

Karen Washington
It's from traditional African and indigenous practices Wow. Bringing them into the university. So he said, you know, whatever. God says whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me. And God's talking about the earthworms, so come here over here.

And his model was really neat because he would go out to the most decrepit farm in the county, do an extreme farm makeover with regenerative practices, and then invite everyone over to see the model, then move to the next county. So that was the beginning of extension agencies in this And we're building on it now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Even if if we have food security in America, we don't have nutrition security. And they're they're quite different. Food security is I'm on food stamps. I can have, you know, a two liter bottle of soda and a giant bag of Chips Ahoy cookies, and I'm food secure because I have enough calories. That's gonna cause you to feel sick and not be functional, not work and be depressed and inflamed.

It's not nutrition security, which is access to real whole foods that's going to promote health and well-being and help you advance. I think the structural changes that we're seeing in our society that are from the food system and the way you describe it is really driving some of the worst, challenges we see around social justice, around racism. I mean, the life expectancy drop that we saw in the last report of three years in black and Hispanic communities. It should we should all be going, wait a minute, why is this happening? What's going on?

What's the cause of it? And yes, it's it's more than just food. It's it's the traumas, it's intergenerational issues. But food is such a central piece of that and it and it perpetuates a cycle. And it seems to me one of those levers, like Archimedes' lever, to actually change the the whole dynamic of what's happening in our society from a sickness and and and the the the consequences of our food system to to one that's, you know, more able to create a healthy society.

And we just are so far from that. But I have raised up hope. I see these things happening on the margins. I see what you're doing, Rupa, and the things you've been talking about, Raj. And I get really inspired to think, wow, there are a lot of people thinking about this and working on it.

And I think you're doing the hard work, which is fantastic. What is the anatomy of injustice, and what are you talking about, and how did we get the food system we got?

Raj Patel
Well, I mean, the reason we chose the idea of anatomy of injustice is because we've structured this book as a kind of anatomy. It's an introduction to the immune system, to the respiratory system, circulatory. And we go through a number of bodily systems as one might in one's first year of medical school. So, you know, the idea of presenting things anatomically is something that we're sort of taking from the world of medicine, but we're transforming it. And we're along the journey trying to really delve into precisely the kinds of histories you're asking about, Mark.

Well, how do we get here? And a lot of the error comes in thinking that there's one entity of society over here, and that society was initially populated by white men who had property and the, you know, working class and women and indigenous people and enslaved people were firmly outside that alongside nature and the rest of the way of life. And then gradually more and more humans were sort of invited into society after having fought for that right. But what that sets up though, is as Rupaul was saying, the possibilities of being able to exploit and take things from the land. And so really the sort of first moments of what we understand now as the world food system were birthed in the 1400s with the island of Madeira and sugar plantations in the Atlantic.

And then really, you know, the ball gets rolling in 1492 with the arrival of Columbus in The Americas, the Western Hemisphere. But then also with the clearing of Jews, for example, from Iberia. The sort of arrival of the modern nation state and its technologies of finance and exploitation and racial purity happen in the same year, and it's not an accident. And it's food corporations in particular who are very interested in this sort of rolling colonialism of a frontier of where can we find the best land? Where can we find the cheapest labor?

Where can we find the cheapest food products? And you know, the first products of colonialism are precisely the food that comes back or the cotton or the tobacco. It's all about agriculture. And that's important to bear in mind because, you know, when we think now of, well, of course The United States isn't colonized, you know, au contraire. The wealth of this country was made possible through food and agriculture.

And there's still a fairly large debt to be redressed. And again, as we mentioned earlier on, those debts are amounting every day because the corporations that now run our food system have, you know, six hundred years of practice of making other people pay for the costs that they generate.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. And so true. The the the true cost of food concept that the Rockefeller Foundation put a report on recently is is staggering. It's actually how I started my book, which is talking about, you know, what is the true cost of the food we're eating in in in our human in the human community, in our and in our in the natural in the natural resources and our, you know, our economic resources. So what are the what are the real costs into our social, you know, our our natural capital and our our human capital?

I mean, those are those are real phenomena that we're not really addressing at all and are thinking about how to solve some of our biggest problems. But you talk about the, inflammation and how it's actually a natural response to what's happening. And so when you cut your skin and you get bacteria, your body sends an army of your immune system to go create inflammation and redness and swelling and tenderness. That's all a good thing to deal with an acute injury. The problem is that we're constantly injuring our bodies in the same way as we're for cutting ourselves by the food we're eating, by the stresses we're under, by the structural environments of poverty and disenfranchisement and lack of, sense of a locus of control and other traumas that are even worse, you know, sexual trauma, physical traumas.

All these things get really written into our genes. They get written into our biology in ways that you're describing in your book. So Raj, what was sort of unique for you as you begin to sort of think about this from a medical perspective? Because your your focus has been on, you know, capitalism and colonialism and food systems from a sort of political and structural view at a very high level. Although you talk about the health impacts, how did this sort of change your thinking about what we need to be doing around our food and food systems?

Raj Patel
Well, thanks for asking, Mark. And I mean, of the journey for me was realizing that there are so many pathways to and from health. And learning how these circuits work within the body helped me to make connections between the circuits that I was seeing outside the body in terms of flows of life and flows within the economy. So for example, you know, through the sort of work with Rupert, I was able to finally sort of wrap my arms around a statistic around debt, for example. I mean, you know, in The United States, there's a vast explosion of consumer debt.

And right now, as we record, there's the end of the eviction moratorium, which means that a lot of people are gonna be finding themselves either with much higher rent or on the streets and unhoused. Now, you know, the debts that come with that are an acute form of capitalist stress. And you know, who should swoop in but the financial, you know, the sort of the robber barons of finance offering things like payday loans. For listeners who don't know, mean, if you have a payday loan of say, $300, you'll probably end up paying, at payday loan rates, about $800 back. Those kinds of loans are incredibly stressful to manage, and they manifest themselves Isn't

Dr. Mark Hyman
that called usury and illegal in what organized crime usually does?

Raj Patel
Well, No, that's easy. In other parts of the world, it's illegal and in The United States, it's licensed. And because we are at apex of this kind of predatory capitalism. But what I didn't fully appreciate was how that stress works through our body, through our microbiome, through our guts, through our skin, and, you know, through our endocrine system. And finally, you know, drives us towards despair and stress.

And so statistics that I came across when were researching this certainly blew me away. I think Rupert was less surprised because she understood the mechanisms. But you know, if we were to abolish payday loans, the suicide rate in The United States would drop by one point nine percent the fatal overdose rate for narcotics would drop by eight point nine percent. Now, know, one can trot that out in an economics discussion or in a medical discussion. But when you do it in both, I think you get the full kind of span of how the bodies, our bodies, everyone's bodies are stressed by the kinds of everyday rough and tumble of capitalism.

And we, you know, unless medicine opens its eyes to saying, you know, a good medical intervention here would be to ban payday loans, Then we are stopping short of how it is that we might heal one.

Dr. Rupa Marya
No, that's what we're so bad at in medicine. What Raj was just describing that an actual structural change. So we've gotten good at now noticing the structural determinants of health, we but have no training in how to understand where those structures came from, why they were put there, and then how to dismantle them. And that's what we see with COVID. As soon as we saw the racial disparities, everyone's talking about it, but no one has come forth and said, let's do universal basic income so all of these folks can just stay home and ride out this wave.

Instead, it's been the cattle prodding of black and brown workers back to serving the interests of Jeff Bezos so he can go on a joy ride. So that's the kind of grotesque lack care for each other we're seeing manifest here. So we have the ability to notice and to describe in medicine, but we don't go that extra step at prescribing a change because modern medicine is a part of that colonial capitalist project that this land was colonized by medics, missionaries and military. And so that we have to understand that what we are a part of so that we can actually effectively leverage and push on points of pressure to change the things that would actually bring real population level health outcome changes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's really true. I think we have to go back. I know in my electronic medical record at Cleveland Clinic, we now have this new feature, is your social determinants of health, then it's like, well, now what? Like, what do you do? We still are seeing one on one patients in the office hoping we're going to fix them when what happens in the office isn't really the main determinant of health.

80% of our health happens outside the clinic, and I'm not going to cure diabetes in my office. It's cured in the farm. It's cured in the grocery store. It's cured in the kitchen, at the restaurants. That's where it's cured.

And I think we don't even talk about that. And as doctor, I'm so shocked that you actually have gotten this because we basically learned the exact opposite, right? Where we can fix everything. Just come to us. We got you.

Just follow these instructions and go home. And it's just a farce, and it's why we're seeing escalating costs, escalating rates of all these inflammatory diseases. And it's something we don't really talk about what to do. And I wanna get into what to do about it, because I think that the concept of how do we solve this is really challenging. Because it's a big problem.

But, Raj, you said something I wanna sort of push back on a little bit. You you you talked about this idea. Both of you sort of touched on it, and I just wanna push back around this idea of colonialism and capitalism. One, are they the same thing? And two, is capitalism inherently the problem, or is it a corrupted capitalism that is causing the problem?

Meaning it's it's basically rigged and geared for the wealthy, but not for everybody. And it's not really truly free market because if it was free market, then all the externalities and costs would be built into the price of the goods you're buying. So a price of Coca Cola would be probably a $100, looking at the impact on soil, on pollution, on the degradation of our water systems, and air quality, and climate, and health. I mean, you know, we'd be paying for this stuff four times, that would be the price. So how do how do you sort of frame it in a way that people are listening to, well, what are we expecting?

Communism? What's the answer?

Raj Patel
Let take a stab at that first by just sort of explaining, look, there are lots of different kinds of colonialism and there's long histories in the history of human civilizations of, you know, one civilization coming in and displacing or altering another. You see that throughout Asia. You see that even on the land that I find myself on. It used to be Tonkawa Land, and then it was invaded by the Comanche empire. And then it became temporarily part of the Spanish empire, then part of Mexico, and then now The United States.

So there's a palette obsessed on the land. So colonialism is one thing where just one power comes in and occupies and dominates another. I think capitalism is this sort of tendency, not towards competition and to free markets, but actually to monopoly. And I think that that's the important thing to remember here when we're talking about capitalism is that, you know, and you know this well, Mark, I know that this is a kind of softball question, but you know this well through your work in your study in Food Fix, for example, and thinking about how food corporations work. The way that capitalism has worked in the food system has not been to generate an abundance of free markets and competition and true costs being revealed, but exactly the opposite, right?

If we, you know, the report came out from the Rockefeller Foundation a couple of weeks back saying, look, The United States spends $1,100,000,000,000 on food every year, but the damage caused by these corporations, which they've even managed to make other people pay for is $2,300,000,000,000 So for every dollar we spend on food, more than $2 need to be spent cleaning up what these capitalist corporations have created. So what we're saying is that capitalist colonialism is a way of breaking relationships between people and between people and place and the rest of the web of life. It's a way of concentrating power in the hands of a few people rather than democratizing it. And so what we're excited about is actually, you know, what would it be like to have free exchange? What would it be like to have people be sovereign over their decisions in a way that pure economic theory suggests they might one day be?

And we kind of like the idea, for example, of competing ideas, and that's why we like science a great deal. We like the idea of level playing fields. But unfortunately, colonial capitalism has kind of prevented those from happening.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It has. And and and and you're right. The monopolies are true. You look at the food industry, we see all these brands, literally hundreds, thousands of brands, but there's nine companies that own all the brands.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know? If you look

Dr. Mark Hyman
at the the chemical and seed and ag companies, you know, they were 100 like twenty, thirty years ago. Now there's like six, you know, that does provide all the chemicals and seeds. And we see this consolidation, the monopolization, structural changes that really undermine the ability to actually start to create change. Because all of a sudden, it was like, there really was democratization of our food system, then then new ideas could bubble up and change can happen and people will be able to sort of implement alternatives. And now it's very, very tough.

And these behemoths, know, like Nestle and, you know, Mondelez and, all these these these giant PepsiCo, all these giant companies are are so dominant that, it's very hard to get them to shift. I mean, they're they're thinking about it, they're looking at it, they're feeling the pressure from our culture, but it's it's really tough. So as you guys have come to sort of understand this and understand the structural violence and understand the the colonization of of our society in general, how have you how have you understood the food colonization? Because I think it's something that's new. And these terms have been tossed around like food apartheid and food colonization and the decolonization of food and medicine.

What is that, and and what does it mean, and what do we do?

Dr. Rupa Marya
So I I just wanna take a moment to point out a couple of the things that you've said, Mark, that hit on because I was trained in the same medical system, that hit on kind of the errors of thought that we are trying to move away from in our book. One of them was talking about the immune system as unleashing an army. Right? So what we talk about in our book is that the immune system, this this met aphors that we use as in, you know, the invisible enemy that's covid and you know, we're fighting disease and we're off there with these, you know, these armies of white blood cells. The militaristic imagery is coming from that same time of colonial conquest.

We think about self versus other, and that's an error of thought of how the immune system actually works, which is to repair damage. That is what our bodies are trying to do. We're not out there fighting an internal epic battle in our bodies. Our bodies are simply trying to restore the optimum working conditions. That and then to posit that the opposite of the the violent system of colonial capitalism is communism, to and use the language of red scare.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, knew people were thinking that.

Dr. Rupa Marya
That's why it's so and that's why I wanna address it. I wanna address it. Because we are, again, this is not a dichotomy. We are sophisticated, highly imaginative, amazing creatures that have a whole repertoire of ideas and creations and experiments and expressions that go beyond the dichotomy between an economic system that is currently destroying the planet and everything that supports human life on it, And another economic system that we've seen exist in authoritarian models that doesn't feel particularly inviting. So I just want to share that.

In terms of what decolonizing medicine and food means to me is it starts with the concept of deep medicine, which is what we have conceptualized as being an analogy to deep ecology. So deep ecology is the understanding of ecology beyond and outside a human centered approach. That life around us is vital and beautiful and amazing and deserves to be respected regardless of its utility to human beings. It's not simply there to be used by us. It's to move away from the Judeo Christian framework of humans up here and the rest of life all

Dr. Mark Hyman
down The word in the Bible was dominion, which means to rule over.

Dr. Rupa Marya
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
As opposed to the word, which really wasn't in the original Hebrew was stewardship.

Dr. Rupa Marya
Exactly. What's Which is more of

Dr. Mark Hyman
care and not you don't own it, you're basically a steward of taking care of it. It's a very different framework.

Dr. Rupa Marya
Exactly. A kinship. And that's what, know, in that beautiful book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer's book, she looks at the myths, the stories of Skywoman who was the Kirk that creation story is a story full of relationship as opposed to Eve, which is the severing of relationship and the banishment from the garden. You don't get to eat anymore from here. And now you get to menstruate and be in pain.

Just the whole framework is what kind of reality, what kind of story do you want to live with? And what we're saying is that deep medicine is understanding it's those relationalities that were actually interrupted through a colonial capitalist framework. And we joined those two together because it's the way that capitalism spread. And it was the architecture of cosmology, the way of understanding who we are in relationships to things. Things needed to be severed in order to exploit them.

You needed to be able to see the mountain as inanimate in order to mine it and riddle it with holes. You needed to see the river as not a person in order to pollute it. You needed to see the salmon as a commodity in order to not sing to it. So you could club it over the head and rip out its eggs, which is how they farm salmon. I mean, it's the most grotesque And thing I've ever so I think that deep medicine is understanding that health cannot be pursued on an individual level.

Health can only be attained in proper relationship to each other and the entire web of life. And so those activities that we can do around our food system that reawaken, rehydrate our ancient relationships to seeds, to water, to soil, to each other are going to be a part of that practice of decolonizing our food system. And it is directly anti capitalist. It is saying there's no place in this for turning profits and, you know, consolidating power and, you know, having dominion, as an executive having dominion over the workers in the fields. So it's about honoring and respecting our dignity and the dignity of all the entities around us that support our health and that are vital for our health.

And I feel like for me as a doctor, nowhere is this more exciting. So this shows the gap between the practice of medicine and how we're being educated in medical schools and even the cutting edge of the science right now. There's like a thirty, forty, maybe sixty year gap. So we're still being taught of the digestive system is this tube that goes from your mouth to anus and like food goes through the system, right? But it's in fact a whole rich forest and that forest needs to be tended like an ecologist.

So that's, you know, deep medicine is really understanding those relationships and putting them into good practice.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's The something ecological medicine.

Dr. Rupa Marya
Well, it's, yeah, it's beyond the, it's like the ecologies of our social ecologies, our political ecologies, our our biological ecologies. And and that you know, those are ways of thinking of medicine that are so exciting. And my medical students who are especially black are coming up to me, wanting to quit medical school Yeah. Because they know the science. They're like, what we're learning in medical school is not scientifically it's not actually based in the real science that that's here right now in front of us.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's it's twentieth century. It's not twenty first century thinking.

Dr. Rupa Marya
It's enlightenment. It's even beyond. Mean, it's so far gone, and it needs to reassert itself because the lines of power within medicine and those hierarchies are are recalcitrant to change. And that's exactly what decolonizing medicine is is to to change them.

Leah Pennington
You know, when I started growing food, I just couldn't concentrate on just growing food because so many things were happening around me. Living in The Bronx for over thirty something years and being a physical therapist, I saw the relationship between food and health. Saw the relationship between food and education and the environment and housing and how they all intersected. And then I realized that talking to especially a lot of my patients who are older, who came from farms, and realizing that at one time their parents and grandparents lived till they were 100 years of age, and now here they are, type two diabetes, hypertension, obesity, succumbing to strokes, end stage renal diseases. And right then and there, it sort of clicked in my head that there's something wrong with our food system, because here were people who grew up on farms who were healthy.

Now, all of a sudden, because of what they were eating, were getting these diet related diseases. And when I would go into their homes as a physical therapist, I was a holistic physical therapist because I couldn't really work and do my job unless I looked at their medication and looked at the food that they were eating.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You So look at their medication cabinet, you look at their fridge.

Leah Pennington
Oh, boy. Went back French biopsy. The fridge and the kitchen cabinet. And open that cabinet door, and we see cookies and chips in the freezer, ice cream, in the refrigerator, soda. And it was like, What the heck is going on here?

Yeah. And so because Like I said, going to my neighborhood and going to the bodegas and seeing the colors of fruits and vegetables, but yet it was potato chips, it was cookies, it was sodas. And then I got to thinking that, wait a second, there's gotta be some sort of thing that is going on, especially in low income neighborhoods. Because when I would go to my white friends' and go into their stores, walking in, you would see fresh vegetables and fruits, and you the would never type of food that I would see in my neighborhood that's number one. Number two, on my block in my area, you can go every block to see a fast food store, but when you go to my white neighborhoods, to the suburbs, you gotta take a car to drive.

And so it just got me thinking about the food system and what was happening, not only in my neighborhood in The Bronx, but in so many of my friends' neighborhoods that lived in Detroit, in Baltimore, in Philly. We were having these same conversations about what we see in our food system in low income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And did the people who were suffering from diabetes, your patients, did they understand that what was in their fridge and what they're eating was causing them to be sick, or were they just trying to just get by and trying to eat it the best they could?

Leah Pennington
The thing about it is that when you're on a fixed income, you try to stretch those dollars. And so you try to spend as Be somewhat proactive in what you can spend, getting a buck for your dollar. And most cheap. We know most unhealthy food is cheap. And so, I didn't wanna go there and be the sergeant and reprimand.

I just wanted them to see the relationship between food and health as number one, but also to understand that if you're a diabetic, there's a whole concept with diabetes. You should know about that because you're diabetic. Sugar becomes like a drug. You want it more. You want it more, you want more sugar.

If you're a dialysis patient, you're limited to amount of liquids, but you want more water. And so even though you would try to talk to the patient, and they would understand, don't get me wrong, they understood their disease and what was happening. But when depression sets in and when you're trying to stretch your dollars, sometimes you just say, you know, what the heck? You know, what the heck?

Dr. Mark Hyman
So You think it's a lack of education or lack of skill? College?

Leah Pennington
It's I don't think it's a lack of education. What I think it is is that if you gave people healthy food options, they would take it. But there's no healthy food options. Know, what I used to somewhat say is, time and time and time, people will tell our community, if you want to be healthy, all you gotta do is drink water, give up soda, drink water, eat fruits of vegetables, plant a little garden without looking at the systemic problems, the institutional and structural problems that reinforce racism in our society. Yeah.

And no one talks about that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No, it's true. Mean, I remember working with my friend Chris Kennedy and Sheila Kennedy in Southside Chicago, where they created a program called Topbox. It was a nonprofit that got food basically at wholesale from distributors, from the meat packers, the farms. You package it up in boxes. It was fresh food.

It was $35 for a family of four for a week of fresh food. And they brought it into the churches in the South Side Of Chicago. And you could see from the church, there was no grocery store in Staipers. You could see literally from the church parking lot, probably five or six fast food restaurants just circling around. And the whole parking lot was filled with people, mostly African Americans, hungry to get real food if they had access.

And I think, you know, that's something you probably have witnessed in your community is when you bring these foods there, people want it. And it's not that they're avoiding it, it's just they don't have access. Is that is that fair

Leah Pennington
to say? Absolutely correct, though. Yeah. Absolutely correct. And I say that because you can't tell people to eat healthy, eat fresh fruits and vegetables if they don't have that option.

Yeah. And so for me, I've been trying for years, started a farmer's market, low income farmer's market in The Bronx. We're going on our eighteenth year to do just that, to provide our community with the access of fresh fruit fresh fruits and vegetables. And why does it always have to be in affluent neighborhoods and not in our neighborhood?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So true. Know, I think

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think most people don't realize the extent of health disparities, and it's often, you know, passed off as genetic or whatever. But, you know, if you look if you look even at America in the nineteen sixties, African Americans had healthier diets than whites. And if you look at pictures from back then on the marches, there were no people who were overweight, of color back then. It was pretty much everybody was slim and it was just not an issue. And all of a sudden in a generation, we've seen the incredible sort of speed of these diseases ravaging this community.

So if you're African American, you're 80% more likely to have type two diabetes, four times as likely to have kidney failure, three and a half times as likely to get amputations as whites. Same thing if you're Latino. And and in COVID nineteen, we're seeing incredible racial disparities where where African Americans and Latinos are three times as likely to get it and die of it as whites. And it's not just because of genetic susceptibilities. There's there's these structural racism issues that I think are embedded in our society, whether it's the essential workers who are mostly brown and black who have to endure commutes and working in close quarters, and whether it's food packing plants or farms, migrant farmers, they're the ones who are getting sick, or whether it's because they live in more crowded housing and can't isolate, or whether they just don't have access to the same type of health care, they're not getting the same type of health care and testing, you're less likely, if you're African American, for example, to get tested for COVID if you have symptoms than if you're white.

So there's all these embedded problems in our system. And I think that, you know, the framework that you described is quite different than we typically think of this idea of food deserts. We talk about food deserts as this sort of natural phenomenon, like a desert is a natural thing, but it's not a natural thing. It's a design problem and it's you refer to it as food apartheid. So can you talk about this concept of food apartheid and how do we how do we begin to break down this food apartheid issue?

Leah Pennington
Mark, you know, you know, I don't understand why, especially during this climate right now here in 2020 when all of a sudden people just woke up and realized Black Lives Matter. You just you know what I'm saying? That's number one. And people know for a fact, where does the cheap, subsidized, processed food go into? They know.

I mean, it's not rocket science. They know for a fact that it goes into poor neighborhoods, mostly neighborhoods of color. So, you know, let's cut the BS when we've had this conversation because everyone knows because it's not going to end in their neighborhood. So everyone knows that there is a difference between what is in white affluent neighborhoods and what is in poor black and brown neighborhoods. That's number one.

And I'm infuriated by that conversation because all of a sudden, people act like they're dumb, like they don't know. And they know exactly the difference when it comes to food and housing and education based on color, demographics, and how much money you make. And so when the term food desert was first brought to our attention in my community, I sort of backed off of that. I'm saying, wait a second. We live in a food desert?

First of all, who coined the term that's number one?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wise people a problem.

Leah Pennington
Wise being some woman in The UK coined it. And then, of course, the USDA and everyone picked up on it because when you say food desert, it sort of like softens the the tone of of of of of the food disparities we see in our in our society. And so for me, it's a forgetful desert because people in the desert would say, Why they say, Do we get food? And so I coined the term food apartheid only because I wanted people to, first of all, what does that mean? But also look at the food system along race, the color of one's skin, look at the food system along demographic, where does one live, and look at the food system on how much money you make, your affluence.

You know, and economics and wealth. And when you start talking about food and pasta, I wanted people to start having that conversation around these issues because it's time and time again we go over and over again about the school system when we all know for a fact where does a cheap and subsidized school enter each and every day? And I'm sick and tired of having that conversation because for me, it's about action. How do we change it? How do we stop spinning our wheels talking about hunger and poverty and food deserts and preexisting diseases and diet related diseases.

At one time, we look at this country, any of the was more plant based. And as we started to add more animals, we become more animal based in our food. And as a result, at one time, were 2,000 calories per capita, now over 3,800 calories per capita, and you can see what was happening in other countries as we brought from plant based to animal based, the intake of calories.

Dr. Mark Hyman
As we Mostly starchy, sugary calories. That's it.

Leah Pennington
Sugary calories, how we pay how we pay farmers to grow subsidies such as corn. Corn is a billion dollar business to turn into a sponsor. That corn that you see is that for us is for food, and it's for feeding cows that really can't digest it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So And and ethanol, which is stupid.

Leah Pennington
Right. So let's get off let's get off this bandwagon about the food system, and, yeah, it needs to be fixed. No one needs it. It doesn't need to be fixed. Doesn't do exactly what it's supposed to be doing because we know for a fact.

You ask any person, you know, in this country, well, would you rather, you know, shop at a low income neighborhood, or would you like to go to, like, the Whole Foods, which are in Yeah. Trader Joe's and see? So I'm

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's fascinating. I I saw this clip on Instagram of a a woman talking to a a largely white audience, I think most all white audience, saying, how many of you in this audience would like to be treated in the way that African Americans are in this country and have have their experience? And not a single person stood up. She said, stand up.

She said, I don't think you understood my question. Would would anybody who would like to be treated as an African American in this country just stand up? No one stood up. She said, well, you all know the problem. You you're just pretending you don't know.

And I think it's easy to look aside and ignore it. It's easy to blame people. And I think there's a lot of focus on personal responsibility. You know, people just aren't eating well because they don't want to. But there really are structural issues of access, structural issues of of of of skills, of knowledge, of tradition.

They're just they're just sort of obscured the ability for people to to reclaim their their health and their traditional food waste. And I think that's that's what you're doing in The Bronx. That's what you're doing with your farm. And I think it's interesting to hear from you what what has that

Dr. Mark Hyman
experience been like over the

Dr. Mark Hyman
last few decades of being in those communities and trying to change the way people think about food and their health and access. How how is that giving you insight into maybe how to solve this problem on a bigger scale?

Leah Pennington
Well, I think for me, I I see myself as an an agitator as well. I've been gifted, I guess, with the ability to say what I want to say. I've never been beholden to a nonprofit or a job that's sort of like, No, Karen, you can't say that. Or, The funders are not going to like that. So I've always been a person very independent in what I've been able to say and do.

And so that conversation I would have with my patients was really, really mind blowing because after a while, would sit down and say, Ms. Washington, you're right. My parents are never sick a day in their life and look at me. And they would wanna change. And I would bring them fresh fruits and vegetables from my farmer's market at the end of the day because I think I wanted them to care, to have someone to care about them, but then also to take action.

Mean, as cheap people talk about food justice and food sovereignty. But for me, in order to do this work, have to be actively involved in dismantling some of the social injustices that you see. And so for me, doing the farmer's market, going around and speaking at different venues, I think my biggest accomplishment has been through the BUGS conference is the impact that it has on young people, on the younger generation of black and brown youth. And I say that because growing up as a youth, if I was to tell my parents that I wanted to be a farmer, or anybody, they would look at me like I was crazy. I mean, even to think about going on a farm or visiting a farm or wanting to be a farm, because for so long growing up, farming was equal to slavery.

You you're working for the man, this type. And that was a history that was embedded in my head. Since I've been older and really been in the food world and to really understand the history of the African American experience in this country and how African American enslaved people built the agricultural system in this country with Seeds in Our Hairs and knowledge around crop rotation and irrigation and medicinal herbs and tools, all of a sudden there's a resurgence of inquiry, especially from our youth, getting the history right. And once you plant that seed in their head and understand that what we've done wrong as African Americans is that we moved away from the land. And as we moved away from the land, you can see what has happened to us.

Our history is that we are agrarian people. This is in our DNA. This is our blood. We are we are people of land and food. And so when you start talking to that to young people and have them understand their place in history, their place in agriculture, all of a sudden, light bulb goes off.

And it says, wait a second. I've been taught that farming has been slavery when in fact, it's my people who brought farming to this country I should embrace it. I want to embrace it. I want to understand more. And then I don't wanna be like my parents and grandparents who are now stroke, end stage renal diseases, amputations, you name it.

I wanna lead a more healthier life. That's number one. But then I also wanna go back to the land. I wanna go back to land because there's a history around stolen land. There's a history around wealth building that has been taken from us.

And so we're trying to right that wrong and put that knowledge back into the hands of young people so they understand the importance of growing food, the importance of growing back to the land, the importance of what it it means to be a community, what social capital and communal wealth means to us. And so the whole dialogue has shifted and the concentration has been on naive. So so for me to see the overwhelming youth that want to farm is extraordinary.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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