Motivation

Food is our most intimate and powerful connection to each other, to our cultures, and to the earth, and to transform our food system is to take one giant step towards healing our bodies, our economy, and our environment.
Our understanding of the necessary changes is rooted in two conditions:

Concentration of market and political power in the hands of few agri-food companies

The corporate-driven shift towards deregulation, consolidation, and union-busting, accelerated in the 1980s forced hundreds of thousands of families off their farms. The large operations in their stead now profit enormous corporations.

These companies have become one of the most powerful lobbies in state capitals and in Washington (spending $173.5 million in just one year to lobby Congress). As such, food and agriculture policy, whether in the Farm Bill, global trade deals, or state environmental regulations, has been shaped by what is good for their bottom line, not by what is good for people’s health, rural communities’ wealth or what would avert catastrophic climate change.
All politics are local, and it’s important for all of us to be invested in our local communities
– Navina Khanna, Director

The legacy and current reality of racism

Our food and farming systems bear strong the imprint of chattel slavery and colonization. At the end of the Civil War and the beginning of emancipation, the plan to provide each freed family with 40 acres and a mule collapsed under a deficit of political courage, and the only government sponsored land redistribution was from indigenous people to White settlers under the Homestead Act.

Today, these decisions are reflected in who owns farms, and who works them. The descendants of those historically denied land now face enormous wealth gaps and the highest per capita food insecurity in the nation. This model of agriculture was spread across the United States, extracting land and labor and creating crises like the Dust Bowl of the 1920s, and rampant soil depletion across the country.

Our Platform for Real Food is grounded in the conviction that food system transformation is inseparable from the ongoing work to dismantle racism and the mythologies that hold profit as more valuable than people or the planet.

This dream will succeed because it must: it will succeed because we have shifted decision- making from corporate headquarters to the community; it will succeed because we have redefined “progress” and reinvented an economy that works for the many.
Take a moment to explore our Platform for Real Food! This Platform represents the bedrock of our principles and the policies we will actively pursue. It is a living document, part of an active alliance and as such will evolve as we collectively wrestle with the complexity of food and agriculture system. The Planks within this Platform are interrelated. For example, securing a living wage for farmworkers necessitates securing fair prices for farmers, and restricting the marketing of junk food too must be paired with boosting community-based food initiatives. Phasing out factory farming goes hand in hand with agroecological research, and supporting independent family farmers. As we fight to break up monopolies, we lay the foundation for a fully transparent and democratic system that is accountable to people. And we understand that all of this transformation depends on people organizing together to build collective power.