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this beautiful arrangement has made me cry and brought me back to center too many times to count. the full album is now available on streaming but the video is as beautiful visually as it sounds ❤️

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FKJ - Just Piano (In partnership with Calm)

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I just ordered Leah Penniman's book, Farming While Black. I've been down a rabbit hole recently learning more about her work and the Black to the Land movement.

My family has a lot of land in East Texas between Houston and New Orleans and I'm thinking of creating something similar to Soul Fire Farm that would include an artists' residency.

For now, I'm designing a garden for my parents' backyard!

-bb

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"Black land matters." With these words, Leah Penniman begins Farming While Black, an extraordinary book that came out two years ago but feels like it was written for this very moment in American history, when a pandemic has exposed deep vulnerabilities in our food system just as yet another police killing of a Black man has ignited a conversation about systemic racism. Penniman's book-part agricultural guide, part revolutionary manifesto-is meant to empower Brown and Black farmers to regain what she calls food sovereignty. Penniman explains how the current agricultural system reinforces racial inequality, and she also gives would-be farmers the tools they need to break free from it.

A former public school teacher, Penniman began farming with her husband Jonah when they could not find fresh vegetables in their Albany neighborhood. Today they run Soul Fire Farm, a highly diversified 80-acre nonprofit organic farm in the nearby town of Grafton, New York, which has become an important training center for farmers of color. "We use Afro-indigenous and regenerative practices-fancy words that essentially mean we're trying to farm using the best advice of our ancestors and we're trying to farm in a way that actually makes the environment better and not worse," she says.

Soul Fire grows mostly perennial crops-berries, orchards of fruit trees, medicinal herbs-that help capture carbon. They also practice silvopasture, a system in which livestock like poultry and sheep graze among fruit trees, which also works to mitigate the effects of climate change. Much of what is grown is donated to the residents of Albany neighborhoods classed as food deserts, although Penniman prefers the term "food apartheid." Earlier this month, I spoke to Penniman about how her work as a farmer and activist has informed her perspective on the assorted catastrophes of the spring of 2020. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In your book there is a powerful quote from a young Black man who visited your farm and told you, "Look, you're going to die from the gun or you are going to die from bad food. So there's really no point." I was struck by his fatalism, and the implication that food poses just as much of a risk to the Black community as violence. Is that the way you see it?
I think there's a lot that you can pull out from that quote. Strictly speaking, a Black person in America is more likely to die from lack of access to their ancestral foods than they are from all types of violence. If you look at diabetes, kidney failure and heart disease-those are all inextricably linked to what types of food a person has access to. And the last time I looked, those are the leading causes of death. In no way-especially in this time of really heightened attention on the police murders of Black and Brown people-do I want to diminish the meaning and significance of each of those deaths at the hands of the state. I don't think one issue needs to be more important than the other. But I do think they're connected.

One thing I noticed in speaking to a lot of young people is that incarceration and untimely death are so ubiquitous. So it has been very, very difficult for young people to put their attention on the future. And farming is inherently about the future. How do I invest in this soil so that it's better five years from now? I'm going plant this tree and it's going to give me nuts-12 years from now. I'm going to eat this salad today, because I don't want to have diabetes when I'm 40. It's like, all of these things are long-term. Meanwhile, a high percentage of young Black men are incarcerated. Pretty much every Black person knows someone who's incarcerated or who's been murdered at the hands of the state. And when you're dealing with that, how are you then going to be thinking about, like, orchards? So I think the bigger issues of white supremacy and systemic racism need to be addressed for us to heal the food system and society as a whole.

You write that because you're a farmer and environmentalist you don't fit the stereotype of a Black activist. You noticed when you were starting out that Black activists tended to focus on issues like housing discrimination and gun violence whereas organic and regenerative farming were the concerns of what seemed like exclusively white people.
When I started thinking about making a career out of this, I attended all these farming conferences and saw what a white scene it was. And I started to really wonder if I should lend my strong shoulders and bright mind to something more relevant to my people. I think a big part of the healing and recognition of belonging in the movement has been learning about the history of Black farming beyond and before slavery. So many of the practices that are core to regenerative agriculture-like raised beds and polycultures and compost-have roots in African indigenous culture. There's been really this unbroken lineage of contribution. That narrative was important for me to uplift and teach Black and Brown farmers, to make them understand that it is not only our trauma that connects us to the land.

But before you uncovered that history, you felt that to spend your life farming you'd be, as you write in your book, "stooping" in some way?
Yes. Without knowing the wider context of our ancestors' relationship to land, I did not yet have a picture of farming as something that could be dignified and culturally relevant. I knew the stories of my own family turning away from the land. My grandfather fled rural Haiti and the brutality and poverty there to come be an engineer in the United States. My grandmother ran away from the racial terror in the farm country of South Carolina to come to the northeast and live in an urban environment. And so there was a sense that farming would be like a regression.

And that association of farming and trauma runs very deep. You mention an 11-year-old boy who visits your farm, sees Black people working in the fields, and his very first thought is slavery.
Absolutely. You know, there have been some really interesting studies-mostly in terms of Holocaust survivors and their descendants -about the way that trauma seems to be not just remembered in terms of the story and cultural passing down, but actually, you know, in terms of epigenetics, physiological changes in our bodies that happen because of trauma. And so it shouldn't come as any surprise that to an 11-year-old-kid, many generations removed from sharecropping, even more years from slavery, would come to a farm and go, "Now y'all slaves? Y'all cotton picking?"

I want to return to you as a young organic farmer attending conferences and noticing that a lot of people in that regenerative agricultural world happened to be white. I imagine that those people-because of their liberal politics or because they're pursuing a kind pro-social goal, trying to improve the food system, to improve the land-might be uncomfortable and even a little confused when you bring race into the equation. But of course your point is that it's not a separate issue. Food and race are intertwined-and people too often ignore that.
Absolutely. The entire food system is built on the theft of land and genocide of indigenous people. It is built on the trillions of dollars of unpaid wages to Black folks who didn't just do the labor but actually built the technologies and techniques that we use in farming. It was the Wolof and Mende people who were rice farmers who were stolen to build the rice industry of the Carolinas, which people are still profiting off of. The sixteen-to-one wealth gap-which means that a white child born in America today is sixteen times wealthier than a black child when they take their first breath-is not because that white child did calisthenics in the womb. It's because of inherited property-and inherited property from a legacy of discrimination. That includes everything from redlining to the Homestead Act, which involved literally lynching and burning people off their lands-16 million acres of land lost from Black farmers from 1910 to present. And so the food system is inexorably connected to the oppression of Black and Brown people. Even today, 85% of the actual labor done on farms is done by Spanish-speaking people with brown skin, right? The food system would collapse without that labor, which is mostly sub-minimum wage, with no right to bargain, no child labor protections, no sick days, no health insurance-the list goes on. And so how can you get a whole bunch of people together to talk about farming and food and ignore the racial priorities? Farming-meaning being a farm owner or farm manager, the way the USDA counts it-is one of the whitest professions in the United States. And being a farm worker is the brownest profession in the United States. And that's not some accident of history.

Your CSA boxes, or "Solidarity Shares" are delivered to families living in neighborhoods classed as "food deserts," although you prefer the term "food apartheid." Why is that?
According to the USDA, a "food desert" just means a zip code with high poverty and no nearby grocery stores. "Food apartheid" is a term that Karen Washington introduced me to and refers I think more accurately to the situation. A desert is natural, but there's nothing natural about your zip code being the number-one determinant of your life expectancy, usually highly correlated to race. And that's all about, like I said, histories of redlining and zoning exclusions of people of color from certain neighborhoods. The fact that certain people have food opulence and others have food scarcity is not because of personal choice. It's because of these systems of segregation that are more appropriately called apartheid. So that's a term that we use to not pretend that it's natural and inevitable when one in four Black children are hungry every night.

Do you provide education and recipes to people if they are not familiar with the foods you're growing?
I think that there's a little bit of a misunderstanding that the main thing that's needed is education or convincing people to eat healthy. We found the reality is that folks usually have within their households or within their family the knowledge and the desire. We surveyed folks on this and the major barriers to eating these foods are transportation and cost. So we eliminate those barriers and people have no problem cooking what we provide. If there's something uncommon, like kohlrabi, we'll share a recipe and there's even a Whatsapp group where we share cooking ideas. But as important as it is for us to grow and provide food, we, more importantly, grow farmers and growers. A big win at the end of all this would be if there were hundreds of thousands of more Black and Brown farmers and community gardeners and growers providing food for their beloveds and their community members. That's the endgame-food sovereignty, for folks to be part of and have ownership of their food system.

And as you work toward that goal, what effect does seeing yet another murder of an unarmed Black man in police custody have on your motivation?
Black folks are emotionally exhausted right now. Our team is out in the streets to protest and then comes back to work on the farm. Our resolve to do the work remains firm but it is absolutely heartbreaking. You know, my mother, [the Rev. Adele Smith-Penniman], was very, very active in the Civil Rights movement. She marched alongside Dr. King. She registered voters in South Carolina with the SCLC. And she said that even she is discouraged. She's like, "What actually, fundamentally has changed? We've sacrificed so much and here we are seemingly in the same place and not even sure if those laws that we fought for would be passed in this current political climate." She's so upset and she texts me all day long being like, "Did you see what just happened?" I was like, "Mom! I will call you back. But right now I have to plant carrots."

And of course all this is happening amid a devastating pandemic. How did you adapt to the demands of the moment?
Farmers are essential workers and we faced a number of challenges. Number one, with the crackdown on immigration and even inter-regional movement right at the beginning of the farm season when people's teams and crews were showing up meant that some farms didn't have any workers. Another thing was market disruption. Folks who are selling to restaurants, schools, wholesale, quickly had to pivot. Even farmer's markets were closed in most regions. So people are suddenly trying to figure out online sales and how to break up their wholesale orders into sizes that are appropriate for grocery stores. And then of course figuring out, with very incomplete and inconsistent information, what does safety look like? Is COVID transmitted on vegetables? On wax boxes? How do you do no-contact pickup-all of that. Our initial response was a rapid response-getting good information and good support to farmers in our network. Because in addition to being a farm, we're a training center that trains and supports thousands of new Black and Brown farmers every year. At the same time, we were getting a big outcry from regular, everyday people about how to garden because they were seeing empty grocery store shelves. So we started a weekly talk show on gardening and then also ramped up what we call Soul Fire in the City, which is a program where we go build home gardens for folks living under food apartheid.
Despite the difficulty of the past few months, has working the land offered you some consolation?
This is my 24th season. And there is nothing that gives me more consistent joy and satisfaction than bringing forth food for people. That is unchanged. I think the difference between before COVID and now is that there seems to be more people who understand how important agriculture is and specifically this small-scale, regenerative, local food system. There's just a sense of like a big bear hug coming from the wider community of folks who weren't already woke. And so that is satisfying.

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Soul Fire Farm's Leah Penniman Explains Why Food Sovereignty Is Central in the Fight for Racial Justice

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"Black land matters." With these words, Leah Penniman begins Farming While Black , an extraordinary book that came out two years ago but feels like it was written for this very moment in American history, when a pandemic has exposed deep vulnerabilities in our food system just as yet another police killing of a Black man has ignited a conversation about systemic racism.

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thinking of watching for a third time while i wait for season 3..

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thinking of watching for a third time while i wait for season 3..

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the writing is fantastic. all credit to kendra for recommending in 2019!

let me know if you've seen/liked/have similar recommendations.

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Fleabag is a hilarious and poignant window into the mind of a dry-witted, sexual, angry, grief-riddled woman, as she hurls herself at modern living in London. Award-winning playwright Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes and stars as Fleabag, an unfiltered woman trying to heal, while rejecting anyone who tries to help her and keeping up her bravado all along.

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Fleabag is a hilarious and poignant window into the mind of a dry-witted, sexual, angry, grief-riddled woman, as she hurls herself at modern living in London. Award-winning playwright Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes and stars as Fleabag, an unfiltered woman trying to heal, while rejecting anyone who tries to help her and keeping up her bravado all along.

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😭 the only way i've been sleeping through the night lately !!

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😭 the only way i've been sleeping through the night lately !!

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at first i was a skeptic but i fall asleep within 30 minutes listening to these and, most importantly, STAY asleep. bedtime stories for grownups.

issa miracle. thank you to kendra for the recommendation over a year ago!
-bb

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Listen to this episode from Nothing much happens; bedtime stories to help you sleep on Spotify. Our story tonight is called "A cool walk and a hot a bath" and it's a story about those particular days right on the edge of Autumn and Winter when the wind is changing and there are pleasures to be found in being outside and in being in.