A Fight for Fair Food Systems

The term “food apartheid” was popularized by food justice advocate and urban farmer Karen Washington. She used it to describe the systemic inequalities in the food system that go beyond the term “food desert,” which merely refers to a lack of grocery stores. “Food apartheid” addresses the broader and more profound issues of race, geography, faith, and economics that create and perpetuate these inequities. It highlights how communities of color and low-income neighborhoods are deliberately deprived of access to nutritious food, leading to significant health disparities and social injustices.

Washington argues that “food apartheid” more accurately reflects the oppressive structures that create unequal access to healthy food, implicating not just the physical absence of food but also the socioeconomic and political forces that contribute to this disparity. This term prompts a deeper conversation about the root causes of food insecurity, including historical injustices like redlining and the deliberate siting of harmful industries in marginalized communities, which exacerbate these conditions.

It was African American civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis who coined the term “environmental racism” in 1982, describing it as “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the ecology movements.”