התמלול המלא של Rights-Based Food Banking: Moving Produce Rescue towards Justice Across Borders

multiple heads of program from across the organization, community members, food recipients and local food activists, all looking at this rebalancing of hunger, relief and justice as an interconnected lens through which to achieve the right to food for people everywhere. Robert Ojeda: 00:09:55 There's a lot of interest and a lot of a lot a lot of activity around this kind of work. And so we're also through through the Closing the Hunger Gap work, we're connected to some alliances with Canada and then Europe, and all kinds of folks who are doing innovative work about that, too. And the language that's used is more around food as a right. And then what does that mean? Ali Berlow: 00:10:25 Let's take a moment and turn to the Closing the Hunger Gap and their solidarity statement, I'm just going to read it. "Hunger is a complex issue, but it'll never be eradicated without addressing the underlying interwoven structural issues of race and economic inequality. To end hunger, we must add the human right to nutritious food to the policies and practices needed to bend the Hannah Semler: 00:11:00 You know, Ali, to tell you the truth, I'm still digesting this statement every time I hear it, and every time I read it, and that's so important, and we certainly stand in solidarity with it. As we continue in our journey of asking 'what is American food?,' we're going from the initial story we started with in episode one and two about the millions of pounds imported and shared Ali Berlow: 00:11:43 And circling back to the Community Food Bank in Arizona, and the idea that national hunger relief systems depend on this rescued produce in the winter months. And that eaters all across the US depend on that 84% of winter produce grown in Mexico. Local food economies currently depend on this food. Because when any of us walk through the grocery stores in the winter, or restaurants Hannah Semler: 00:12:17 Definitely. And one part of the story that you'll hear from Michael Rozyne later on is that there are US small and medium sized farms, they're also struggling to survive. And some of that is due to possibly unfair competition. But it's important to take this at a farm by farm, crop by crop, and almost at the plant level. And think about what are the different buyer regions? And Ali Berlow: 00:13:13 And here's Michael. Michael Rozyne: 00:13:14 Red Tomato was hired to do some market research and development for a project based at Cornell called the Eastern Broccoli Project. And so we're researching the potential for developing an eastern and a New York based broccoli sector, which has already gotten off the ground. And we're doing fresh and frozen. And when you get into the world of frozen broccoli, what you find Hannah Semler: 00:15:20 Also important to think about is tradition and self determination because the unraveling of rural life is real everywhere. And a lot of how I see us rebalancing towards supporting the rural economic development that might happen in Mexico or might happen in the northeast, is figuring out what it means to build community, and to empower people to participate in the process of Michael Rozyne: 00:16:12 Red Tomato serves as marketing agent, for a very large black-owned plantation slash farm. It's a pecan orchard, in southwestern Georgia owned by New Communities, which is a nonprofit farm. And I would say black farmer rights organization. And we are the marketing agent for a 200 acre pecan orchard. And in the process of selling their pecans, I've been learning a lot about the Ali Berlow: 00:17:39 Yeah, let's talk for a second, Hannah, about the cultural rights that are intrinsically tied to worldviews and economic agreements that affect community's ability to continue to produce their own varieties of corn, for example. Hannah Semler: 00:17:52 Certainly the Maya indigenous communities that I spent years with learning from and understanding the importance of the cultural revitalization process that comes with the self determination of being able to grow the crops that are intrinsic to your worldview. So "somos de maiz," "we are made of corn," that that the Maya say is, is comes with not only denouncing the economic Ali Berlow: 00:19:14 It's really like seeing the unseen, and in a sense of privilege that that has been, but now the privilege that we must undertake. For me, it boils down to you know, I eat a lot of local food, but I still support the idea that some produce from Mexico makes it to my local food co-op, or grocery store or food bank in the winter. And I also think it's great that apples might make their Hannah Semler: 00:19:49 Here's Michael's speaking to the storytelling and what's needed in his view around that. Michael Rozyne: 00:19:54 First of all, people aren't told the story that you're telling. Logistics and distance, and usually the sourcing of long distance supply. That's just not part of, it's not part of the story that people tell. But I think most people don't see past their own nose when they're thinking about the source of their food. What they're caring about is safety. Is Is this okay for me to eat Hannah Semler: 00:20:57 Thinking about Michael and Central America, he mentions their first shipment was from Nicaragua. I wonder about the ways in which they learned how to tell the story to customers that was compelling. Michael Rozyne: 00:21:09 My heart was always in local farming and food. It's not in my family background, I don't know where I got it. Didn't seem to come through the genes, but my passion, my heart is growing local fruits and vegetables and I'm, I'm kind of out of control, homesteader gardener myself. So the whole time that I was at Equal Exchange starting, I was also really interested in, how does this Hannah Semler: 00:22:47 And what stands out to me is how Michael, immersed in the work of figuring out how to get people to understand the value of farming in general, across the board, wherever

that farming may be happening through the lens of fair trade through the lens of local, and now Community Food Bank, looking how to tell their story through combining their lenses. And so here we go back to the Robert Ojeda: 00:23:39 I think the way food banking has been structured, tends to prioritize or value efficiencies. And so with that comes, how quickly you can do all these tasks around, you know, the aggregation and distribution and all these logistical functions. We just don't take the time to slow down and really think about, you know, how things are interconnected, and how how we're impacting Ali Berlow: 00:24:54 One way Robert and his team worked to build trust was by understanding who are the people in the Community Food Bank's community. And they did that by reaching beyond just the demographic data to collecting ethnographies with support from the University of Arizona, which was pretty cool. Robert Ojeda: 00:25:11 We had like a really important conversation at the food bank, is it possible to do hunger relief and other work at the same time, that allowed us also to say, let's bring more healthy food, including produce? So that was the beginning of sort of that journey for us as an organization, then we grew very rapidly with the produce. But then then, you know, the next question, then we Hannah Semler: 00:26:31 So here it is, here's the concept of rights based work that Robert brings to figuring out how the produce rescue efforts, that are only three years old, can introduce a way of partnering with their donors in Nogales and the farms that are in Mexico producing the food and share community level stories that ultimately help them build the strategies to creating a better life Ali Berlow: 00:27:24 So let's hear now, from Michael's perspective, about the challenges and differences in storytelling and narratives told about farming communities abroad, compared to the narratives and storytelling around farming communities in the US. Michael Rozyne: 00:27:39 I think it's maybe the difference between sympathy and empathy. I think it's easier to feel sympathy, and to believe one kind of has the picture, when the farmer in mind is living 1000s of miles away, and is really destitute poor, earning less than $1,000 a year, for example. There's not really any moral conflict for anybody to say that's not fair. And it shouldn't be that way. Hannah Semler: 00:30:02 What Michael returns us to here is that farms are a part of their community, whether or not they're seen as such, and wherever that food may be produced, whether it's locally or globally. And as we consume 84% of our fresh produce in the winter months that is Mexico grown. And you think about all that food, truck after truck coming across the border? Well, do we think about Ali Berlow: 00:30:32 So I just want to ask, is the foundation of food security, knowing where your food comes from, and its place in the supply chain, whether that's right around the corner, or across the globe? And a lot of these questions make me really want to acknowledge and explore what we think hunger and poverty and food justice looks like in the US. Here's Robert. Robert Ojeda: 00:30:55 So one thing that I'm very passionate about, and it has to do, I think, with, I think a precondition for food security is like our ability to participate fully in public life, and have the power to be able to influence and make decisions in your community. And so that, to me, feels like a very, very important thing. And so what is the relationship between communities and Ali Berlow: 00:33:23 I think of the border and Nogales like it's a semi permeable membrane when it comes to commerce and trade, yet it's hostile, designed explicitly impenetrable with persistence in terms of people and their culture on either side, and the environment, including wildlife and biodiversity. So next, we're gonna hear from Michael, where he brings up some really good points about Michael Rozyne: 00:33:55 It makes me think about situations I've been in more than once in the food movement in the last years, where, you know, all of us just to do our job, we have to kind of get up in the morning and stay focused on the mission of the organization that's buttering our bread, that's paying our way, that we've dedicated our careers to. But an awful lot of those organizations and missions Michael Rozyne: 00:36:24 transformative solutions as being kind of the absolute right way forward. Ali Berlow: 00:36:30 I love how forthright Michael is. Hannah Semler: 00:36:32 It's interesting to me to think that it's taken my lifetime, to get to a place where food banks and the food system are actually converging around the need to look at rights, interconnected rights across the supply chain, regardless of sector. Here's Robert. Robert Ojeda: 00:36:49 One of the transformative moments for me had to do with, you know, when I met folks from Covilli family farms, and Hannah, you may have met him but and, you know, this is a family owned business, that fair trade business that, you know, has, they work in Mexico and in the US, and they've they certified many, many farmers, here and there. But just the stories I heard about sort of Hannah Semler: 00:38:35 There's a shift, it's a game changing shift in how food banks might see themselves as influencing the future of food from a lens of justice. Let's come back to Robert Ojeda and his personal story of finding voice. Robert Ojeda: 00:38:50 My first job of the food bank, I was overseeing the educational programs. And when I applied for the job, they said they wanted a community organizer. And I was really perplexed and interested in in that, that whole thing. But really, for me, it was when I was an ESL teacher, I found that a lot of my students had all kinds of issues that were impacting their lives. And I had no Hannah Semler: 00:40:26 That's it. That community piece. A precondition for food security is our ability to participate fully in public life. Here robert continues to talk about how he brings his experience to his work. Robert Ojeda: 00:40:42 original facilitators of that are playing different roles. That work led to you know a lot of the cooperative development work that we do today like building collectives and incubating ideas at the food bank and then transitioning out of that and then having communities owned that. I mean all kinds of things that have grown from really the home gardening program that was i think the Robert Ojeda: 00:43:06 started developing partnerships throughout the country so that those partnerships will give us best practices, innovative ideas but also would serve to reinforce that we were moving in the right direction. Hannah Semler: 00:43:23 Let's hear a little bit more about community food banks process in developing this network approach to change. Robert Ojeda: 00:43:31 It felt very lonely to me when I started working here in 2009, I realized that you know I would go to a gathering of like the more progressive voices around food justice and people were very critical of food banks and it you know like there was very little room for dialogue around that. And then you would go to the more traditional hunger relief food aid type gatherings and there was Ali Berlow: 00:45:22 It is so wonderful. And what an honor to hear about Michael and Robert's work. It's very grounding. Hannah Semler: 00:45:30 It really feels like this journey that Robert has been on, and Michael has been on, and how these voices come together, are really nudging us all towards going out there and realizing that now more than ever, we have an opportunity to take this forest fire that's happened and figure out where we can sprout up with our voice and our power and rebuild. Ali Berlow: 00:46:08 So I just want to say this episode has been a journey in and of itself. Hannah Semler: 00:46:12 Thank you so much to the entire team of Community Food Bank, the produce rescue team in Nogales. There were some people that we weren't able to interview Efren Trigueras, Ben Rodriguez, Tomas Lopez. We're really excited about all the work that you're doing. Thank you to Robert Ojeda and Dana Yost, the leaders of Community Food Bank, and their commitment to listening and dialogue is Ali Berlow: 00:46:55 And thanks again to the Betsy And Jesse Fink Family Foundation for their support of this podcast. You can find more about their commitment to this work at BJ F F F dot org. And now, Barley. [dog barks] Hannah Semler: 00:47:13 Thanks, Melody Rowell and Ian Carlson for production support. Our music is by Ian. Ali Berlow: 00:47:18 And we give voice to Barley who barks, lives, eat Hannah Semler: 00:47:23 Right here with me in Maine. Ali Berlow: 00:47:25 I'm Ali Berlow.