The following is the text of the speech given by Movement Strategy Center Innovation Fellow Navina Khanna, recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s 2014 Community Leadership Award, at the foundation’s conference, “Health & Food: Is Better Food the Prescription for a Healthier America?” held in October in New York City.

When we talk about disease and disparity related to food, we often talk about obesity and diabetes. Those things are real and are prevalent in many communities. I see them in my own family and I’ve walked the streets of my hometown of Oakland, talking to hundreds of residents about how these illnesses affect them and their families.

Sometimes when we talk about disease and disparity related to food we talk about food chain workers – the 20 million people who work from field to table – and the repetitive motion injuries, pesticide poisonings, and other stressors that they face. These things are real too. I’ve worked with, organized with, marched with and fasted beside farmworkers, and I’ve talked to workers in processing plants and food retail about the long term effects of these jobs, including the low wages and working conditions.

Occasionally, when we talk about disease and disparity related to food, we talk about cancers, reproductive issues, skyrocketing asthma rates and contaminated drinking water. These things are real too. I see them in rural communities in California’s Central Valley and in my parents’ homeland of Punjab, where the 1960’s Green Revolution took hold.

The question posed to us here is, “What’s really making us sick?”

Before we talk about what’s really making us sick, I think it’s important for us to talk about what it means to be healthy:

Imagine vacant lots becoming vibrant gardens.

Imagine family farms and food traditions thriving.

Imagine a social culture that reflects our agriculture, where diversity is strength, where young and old work together, where both interdependence and self-reliance are valued.

What would it mean for us to live in a society where we were actually able to care for ourselves, each other, and the land? For us to be truly nourished by community, not fed by competition? For everyone to have the right and the means to thrive materially and culturally, free from exploitation of themselves or any other living beings?

What we often don’t talk about when we’re talking about disease and disparity is the system that’s designed this outcome: a system that values profit and power more than people or the planet, a system of patriarchy, exclusion, and exploitation of resources.

The system is sick, so we are sick.

It’s a system that devalues the lives of Black men, women, and children – to the point that our tax-subsidized police force is killing them.

It’s a system that devalues the lives of Mexican men, women, and children to the point that we’d rather invest billions of taxpayer dollars in militarizing a border than keeping families together.

It’s a system that devalues children so much that our school food directors are fighting for pennies to keep our babies’ mouths full.

These are signs of a sick society and it’s no accident. Profit and power are the most sacred things in this system that feeds our brokenness, our broken relationships – to our sense of self, to the land, to our cultures, to our communities, to each other.

The US food system is built on exploitation. It was founded on “free land,” on the forced migration of people from Africa. It now thrives on economically driven cross-border migration. It exploits human and natural resources: we are literally exploiting ourselves to extinction.

As the system becomes more consolidated, and as we tie food speculation to our financial systems and political systems, we’re pushing farmers off the land, forcing urban and cross-border migration. We’re depleting soil, polluting air, and creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We’re eating products that clog our arteries and kill our kids.

All of us are hurt by this broken system. But some are hurt more than others.

Fifty million people in the US are food insecure, meaning that they don’t have the means to procure their next meal. So we absolutely must talk about access to food and to land when we talk about disease and disparity.

And we absolutely must talk about how much money people have. We must talk about wages when we talk about disease and disparity – including the wages and working conditions of the people who work in our food system, a system that boasts five of the eight worst paying jobs in the US.

But we can’t just talk about reforms in an economy that was never designed for life to thrive. We have to rethink our economy.   We need a revolution.

Revolution (noun): “a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it.” — New Oxford American Dictionary

So here’s an idea.

What if –

• Everybody had the right and the means to produce or procure their own food? Had the right and the means to prepare, and to share and to eat it?
• What if everyone had the right and the means to do this in a way that didn’t hurt them, or any other people, or exploit other living beings along the way?

Life is sacred. What if we treated it that way?

Whoever controls our land, our water, our air, our seeds, and our food, controls our lives. But what if we loved ourselves enough to reclaim ownership of our lives and of our relationships?

We can approach food systems change, disease and disparity in many different ways. Let’s compare two examples:

• The Berkeley Soda Tax: People are already being taxed twice – for the production of the product and for the public health impacts. The proposed Berkeley Soda Tax doesn’t change the profit-driven, exploitative model. It doesn’t lead to life affirming, real solutions.

• Next door to Berkeley in Richmond there is Urban Tilth run by a third generation Richmond resident who hires other Black and Brown residents who live within three blocks of their program sites and pays a living wage for their work. They are reclaiming their labor, reclaiming their cultures, reclaiming vacant land. And even when their members can’t pay rent or medical bills, they know that they can still feed themselves and feed each other. They know their community, their land, their governance.

Not all of us are from a community like Richmond but all of us have a role to play in seeing, supporting, and sustaining real solutions that are created by real communities — solutions that affirm life and help us all reclaim control of our own lives.

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Feature photo: Navina Khanna speaks at the James Beard Foundation Award Ceremony. (Photo: Ken Goodman)

As someone working to change policies and practice to bring us closer to food sovereignty, I think a lot about land and how our current systems are built on private property ownership. I dream of a day when we will collectively steward what is common to all of us: our land, air, water, and other resources.

Our friends at Movement Generation remind me that what I’m dreaming of is a different way of understanding economy — that the word “economy” comes from the Greek oikos and nomos  – and translates to “management of home”.

I hear a lot of talk these days about a “new economy” – but many of those conversations seem to start and end with the idea of local ownership of local businesses.

What most of us want and need to talk about is this: How will we love and manage and govern “our home” in our next economy?

Who will control our land, our water, our food, our energy?  How do communities reclaim these resources and move away from profit driven systems towards community stewardship?

I don’t have all the answers but I’m learning from the momentum of local victories that offer new and achievable glimpses of what our next economy can be and do.

I just heard about a win here in Alameda County, where our Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to take the first step in exploring Community Choice Energy.  Community Choice Energy would take our energy systems out of the hands of profit-motivated giant utilities and turn them into transparent, localized, community supported systems that can bring a climate voice to energy systems, create jobs and generate wealth in our communities.

“It’s the same way we’re starting to understand that we don’t have to get our food from grocery stores, or that we can collect our own rain water,” explained Colin Miller and Bobby Fuentes, two activists from Bay Localize, who took a moment to talk to me last week.  In words that warmed my food sovereignty heart, they told me, “This is about energy sovereignty.”

According to Colin and Bobby, Community Choice Energy “is about creating a local system that’s self-empowering that supports our regional economy.”  It’s about “becoming more aware of what’s going on, about using a new public agency to help ground a new kind of culture.”  Colin and Bobby tell me that Community Choice Energy opens the door to localities buying solar energy cooperatively and creating worker-owned energy cooperatives.

This is the “economy” conversation I want to have and the local work I want to see on a grand scale.

Shifting culture and building new collective relationships, that’s how we’ll birth our next economy — our new home.