All posts of HEAL Staff

Interdependence & Solidarity: HEAL’s Statement on the Recent SCOTUS Decisions

By Navina Khanna, Executive Director, HEAL Food Alliance The slew of recent SCOTUS decisions – that grant more rights to guns than people with uteri, that exempt power plants from regulation, strip tribal Nations of their sovereignty, and protect police over people – are a sobering reminder that the systems that govern us were never […]
22 hours ago

Food Justice is Land Justice

A legacy of stolen land and stolen labor The history of agriculture in the US is one of colonization and enslavement, followed by a long history of denying land rights to Black and Indigenous people, and later to other People of Color. Between 1784 and 1887, 1.5 billion acres of land was stolen from indigenous people—through […]
5 days ago

Our food is grown and gathered by a variety of people in a variety of ways

The second plank of HEAL’s Platform for Real Food calls for the creation of a farming system that makes it possible for everyone to grow, raise, catch, hunt and forage for healthful food in ways that are environmentally sustainable and culturally appropriate for themselves and their communities. This includes: Independent farmers and ranchers, especially those […]
5 days ago

SoPL is Timely and Necessary: Reflections on Session 6

By Marlene Manzo, Political Leadership Coordinator, HEAL Food Alliance Twelve people joined us for the School of Political Leadership this year. In January, I was filled with anticipation and excitement of what this cohort would be like. Unsurprisingly, we had the pleasure of working with twelve loving and passionate food and farming leaders. Twelve people […]
7 days ago

Raising grassroots voices to take on corporate factory farms

Land Stewardship Project (LSP) is a Minnesota-based grassroots organization that is committed to breaking down power and consolidation in the food farming system while supporting small and medium farmers to build viable, values-based farming and ranching operations. They do this by organizing local campaigns, advocating for better policy on local, regional and federal levels and […]
1 week ago

Why are we calling to phase out factory farming?

What is “factory farming”? The handful of giant corporations that control the meat industry in the US tout factory farming as an efficient, cheap way to produce meat. In reality, factory farming comes at a huge cost to health and safety, the environment, and consumer pocket books, and that’s why we’re working with members and […]
1 week ago

The movement to phase out factory farming

In the previous sections, we covered why factory farming is bad for people, animals and the planet, and laid out facts about the systems and structures that are propping up this harmful system. Luckily, there’s a movement of people that are working towards mitigating the harms of factory farming and phasing out the system and […]
1 week ago

Voting with your fork won’t stop factory farms – but here’s what might

We’ve all heard the rallying cry that eating less meat can mitigate the climate crisis. From Silicon Valley CEO’s to celebrity billionaires to New York Times columnists, the urban middle-class has embraced the idea that going vegan or vegetarian, and switching to farm-to-table shopping habits can reduce our harmful emissions. But the science is mixed: […]
1 week ago

Can we phase out factory farming and still feed everyone?

One of the biggest arguments corporations and decision makers use to avoid taking action to stop harmful industrial farming practices like factory farming is that industrial farming is the only way to grow food at a scale large enough to feed everyone. It’s true that world  hunger has been rising since 2015: 650 million people […]
1 week ago