Hi Rachelle, thanks for visiting with me today. Would you mind introducing yourself, and sharing a little bit about who you are and your role at Zenger Farm?

Yes, so my name is Rachelle Dixon, I am a community advocate, food justice warrior, and also a Community Chef at Zenger Farm.

Thank you for sharing! I am deeply grateful to be hosting this interview with you in honor of Black History Month, and in honor of your incredible work as an outspoken activist and brave advocate in the community. Although you organize and fight for justice in many different capacities, you have mentioned that you have a background in food justice – would you mind sharing a little bit more about what this work has looked like for you?

Sure. I’d like to start by saying why food justice? If you look at food it is one of the requirements for life obviously, but it’s also one of thing that crosses income levels, it crosses race lines. So if you are looking at food justice you are looking at labor justice, you’re looking at land justice, you’re looking at economic justice, you’re looking at food sovereignty, even climate change. So it crosses so many paths that I think it is an important thing to work on. So out of all the things to work on, this seems like one of the most important ones that would affect everybody in our community, so I chose that as an area to work on and also help.

So working on food justice has looked like a couple different things. Often times I want to support a change in diet for communities that have colonized diets, that eat the standard American diet that leads to diabetes, heart disease, obesity and other issues related to health. I also want to support the area around labor. Food justice for me has looked like buying local, and to teach cooking and to teach eating that doesn’t use meat. So what I would call plant based and excluding meat from the diet, and showing people how they can incorp fresh veg and things they can find locally into their diet. That’s been one of the ways that’s been really successful, when people get around the table and share their stories about what food looked like before it was colonized for them.

For African Americans, people tend to think of the Southern diet. There is a difference between the Southern diet and the African American diet, but they merged as a result of colonization and having very few choices. So you see a lot of pork, which is not healthy at all, and wouldn’t have traditionally been eaten in African countries. So having folks eat pork to survive is actually kind of a form of oppression in itself, because you are making people who probably had religious reasons for not eating pork suddenly eat the thing they are told not to eat. So I take the pork out, I take all the salt and the sugar, and much of the fat out. And I leave in the flavor, the smokiness, all the things that people like, the sense of community that you can get from gathering around a table – but I try and decolonize it.

One of the things you have talked about is Decolonizing Our Diets. What does this concept mean?

Decolonizing our diets means going back to the original foods that we used to eat, the foods that we had before they were highly processed and with a lot of corn, a lot of corn syrup, a lot of wheat, a lot of the things that are just cheap that Big Agriculture produces for us. Before, we had more regional foods, regionally-specific foods, we had more foods that had cultural impacts. In the South it might be okra, it might be sweet potatoes. In places like in Texas, you would have had more variety in things like, believe it or not, potatoes: purple potatoes, red potatoes. You go in the grocery store today, you find three kinds of potatoes. There are literally hundreds of potatoes. It’s amazing. The same is also true for corn. You have two or three kinds of corn being commercially produced, but if you actually look around there’s blue corn, there’s red corn, there’s pink corn, there’s all these different kinds and varieties of corn! But they never make it to our market.

So we are either going to have to produce them regionally ourselves and eat more locally, or we can continue to eat the things that are sold to us that aren’t good for our health, and don’t allow us to have the range of food that would be better for our communities and allow us to connect to our ancestors. For example, if you want to look up some of the indigenous diet and some indigenous recipes, it’s gonna be very hard for you to do that because most of them have been lost. There are things obviously, like fish, and salmon, and blueberries, and squash. But try and look up a recipe – it’s very hard to do!

One of the things that people are really surprised about is a Southern dish that people enjoy all the time called cornbread, and they say “oh, it’s Southern.” It’s not – it’s indigenous, it’s a Native food. It comes from a kind of cornbread that was made by Native people with corn and water. And so, in different places like Mexico – same thing, looks a little different, but it was adapted to Southern tastes. You add the butter, you add the fat, and you also have the health problems with that. Acorns can be eaten and part of indigenous diet, but where do you commercially buy acorns? These are the kinds of challenges that we have.

And fishing rights for indigenous people in these areas have been curtailed, and the health of the fish supply is not there because we’ve done things, either build dams or contaminate the water so they don’t have an opportunity to have the diet that was their original diet, so they have made adaptations. One of the things we think of as part of the indigenous diet is we think of fry bread. That is a colonized food, it comes from having to survive off wheat and oil which were rations assigned to people who were pushed off their land, and so they made the best of it.

What I’d like to see is more people getting back to the diets they had before they were colonized. For African Americans that would look like perhaps rice, okra, yams, spinach – those are things that were grown in southern parts of the world, in Africa, in the southern part in the US. In places like Jamaica and Haiti, you have chicken and goat. What’s important about that is you don’t see the consumption of beef, a high consumption of beef. I believe we are eating like 250 lbs of beef per year, or 250 lbs of meat, but that’s a ridiculous amount of meat consumption and we are going to have to slow down for climate change. So if people are going to eat meat there are things that are better for the environment, in terms of what its doing to the environment, in terms of land use, water use. 40% of grains that are grown are eaten by animals so we are spending a lot of water resources on that and I think it would be better if we didn’t do that.

I personally think it’s good if folks don’t eat a lot of meat, but if they are going eat it, just be aware that beef is probably the worst thing you can eat. Things like lamb, or goat, or even chicken tend to better from the environmental perspective. Obviously not better for the lamb or the chicken (laughs) if you’re gonna eat it, but this is just from the environmental perspective.

And I’d like to see even folks who consider themselves white – I know it’s a social construct – but I’d like to see them go back to some of their original foods. I see a lot of them grasping at what it looks like to be white. They’ve realized that they have swapped their original culture for something that was supposed to be American, and they realized that it wasn’t a fair trade. I’d like to see what a good Irish meal look like, what would it have looked like from Ireland using those resources, or a Swedish meal. You’ve got this American food which isn’t very tasty, it’s highly processed and everything. So that’s what my idea of decolonizing the diet is to go back to some of the original foods. Let’s go back to the cookbooks from 100 years ago, let’s go back to some of the traditional foods and get away from allergens in the food, let’s use organic methods of farming, let’s get smaller family farms back, and get folks more invested in farming.

Which by the way, is one of the things what i like about Zenger Farm! You have programs that help folks who don’t have experience in farming or maybe want to get back to farming have that opportunity, I think it’s very important because the average farmer is like 58 yrs old and will be retiring soon, so soon we are gonna have a farming crisis because we’re not gonna be able to produce our own food here. And I think that is a matter of security. I don’t want my food imported from other countries where they don’t have similar laws as to what should go into the food, how the food should be grown, and we really won’t be able to control that.

So I think one less problem to have is to start to educate farmers now, get them involved, give them resources to help them sustain a healthy economy. And this area is growing, it’s going to continue to grow, because it’s very wet here, and while sometimes that’s upsetting for us it means it is also very fertile for growing things. I’m very excited about Zenger farms, I’m also very excited about the equity work that’s going on at Zenger Farm. At the turn of the century 19% of farmers were African American, and now it’s about 1%. I’m glad Zenger is one of the orgs that really has a strong commitment to equity and is working to change that, so there are more farmers that are Native, more farmers that are Hispanic/Latino, and more African American farmers. I’m excited about that, thank you for doing that work.

What are some ways we can decolonize our diets, and support the movement to decolonize our food system?

I actually think we are gonna have to start with the farmers. I don’t think it’s possible to go into one of your mainstream grocery stores and demand that they change the available selection of the various foods. It’s hard because they regionally order, and that can be difficult. You can try it, I don’t think you will find much success. I think it would be much easier as a community community to say “Hey, the Ethiopian community needs this” and have a farm specifically grow those foods, and if they know there is a ready audience for those foods they’re more likely to grow them because it’s more profitable. I think that’s what need to happen and, we can get together to do that.

I personally don’t really wanna shop in a grocery store anymore. I’m looking into forming a food co-op, because of the food sovereignty issues, the labor issues, and the lack of fair trade with most of the things i buy in the grocery store. It’s hard to go into a grocery store – and ethical capitalism doesn’t exist, and i’m not saying that it’s gonna be perfect, but I feel better about buying food and products from orgs that are local. I can observe their labor practices, observe that they are not harming animals, and that they are providing foods we want to eat. When I see cruelty free and all these things on vegan cheeses, I’m like how was this produced? Was the tofu that was produced, was it cruel to the people who produced it? I don’t necessarily buy into that but I do think we could have better labor processes, and better land processes. I want to make sure we are not harming the land, not spraying chemicals all over it. I think that would be the best way to start, you go out to a farmer and say I need to buy 500 lbs of oatmeal, and then you have a distribution site. I see that coming in the very near future for me.

I am done with shopping in grocery stores where I have to get things in plastic, and it comes in a box, and I then I have to throw the box and the plastic away – contributing to landfills and more garbage. Recycling is great but it would be nice to not produce that waste. I would like to see farmers who can work with community to make sure that they are provided for, it supports the farmers and the community.

I would like to see organizations, community centers, churches, help folks with decolonizing their diets. From both the health perspective and the cost perspective – it actually not more expensive to buy things that aren’t processed, processing adds a huge cost. So for a little bit more work you can produce more superior foods. I know we are all short on time, so I’m gonna recommend the Instapot and Crockpot to make sure that this can happen. I eat a lot of beans: garbanzo beans, pinto beans, red beans, black beans. And a Crockpot does wonders for that. They have digital ones that you can set them to turn on or off, and if you have those two jobs, you can make beans and freeze them so you don’t have to cook several times a week, it saves you time and energy. It’s just all around good if we can have organizations that support that.

Zenger Farm does this with the Community Chef program: people can come in and have that different experience of a more decolonized diet from the Chefs, who bring their own knowledge and lived experience of their diets to the community. It’s been very exciting participating in that. I look forward to the next dinner that I am gonna prepare. We’ll see. But it will definitely not be colonized foods (laughs).