Black History Month: Celebrating Black leaders in the world of food

February is Black History month, a time to celebrate the legacy of Black Canadians and their communities. This year’s theme in Canada is “February and Forever: Celebrating Black history today and every day”.

In North America, our farmland is stolen from Indigenous Peoples and cultivated by enslaved and exploited BIPOC communities. Racism and inequality are inherent to our food system and institutions and remain unaddressed as BIPOC communities face disproportionately high rates of social and economic disadvantage, including food insecurity and lack of food access. According to PROOF, an initiatives of the University of Toronto that researched household food insecurity in Canada, in 2017-18 Black households experienced the highest rate of food insecurity of any racial/cultural group at 28.9%, two and a half times the figure for white households.

Similarly, while small-scale regenerative agriculture has risen as a glorified rebuttal to ecologically devastating industrial agriculture, regenerative farming practices are largely whitewashed, excluding the Indigenous and BIPOC voices that developed them and the worldviews that inform these practices. This has perpetuated the continued erasure and marginalization of their ways of knowing while upholding the monochromatic nature of agriculture

This month, we’d like to uplift and honour some of the Black changemakers within the food world, both past and present.

George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver (1964-1943) is a pioneer of regenerative agriculture who promoted crop rotation and cover cropping using nitrogen fixing legumes such as peanuts, cowpeas, and soybeans to improve soil in the southern US that was depleted from intensive cotton cultivation. He was also an advocate for mulching and using compost to increase soil health. His research was published in agricultural bulletins that encouraged farmers to adopt these practices, and he also travelled around to rural communities to disseminate his information, thereby helping poor farmers save money by using inexpensive farming techniques and natural inputs they could gather from the land and increase productivity and resilience by building their soil.