Karen Washington
Naming food apartheid, and building the grower networks that answer it.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Rise & Root Farm · New York
- Co founded
- Black Urban Growers, a volunteer organisation building networks and support for growers in urban and rural settings; and Rise & Root Farm, which she co-owns.
- The argument
- That reclaiming land and food production builds health, dignity and collective power, particularly in Black and Brown communities historically excluded from agricultural ownership and decision-making.
- Recognition
- James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, 2014; a 2023 James Beard Humanitarian of the Year honoree; named by Ebony one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the country, 2012.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Washington came to farming through community gardening in the Bronx and has spent decades on the part of the work that has no harvest: organising, convening, and getting growers who were working in isolation into contact with each other. Black Urban Growers and its conference are that network made durable.
The reframing she is best known for is a single phrase. Food desert describes a place with no fresh food as though it formed by weather; food apartheid names it as the product of decisions about zoning, lending, transport and land — which makes it something that can be undone by other decisions.
Rise & Root Farm is the growing end of the same argument: a cooperatively owned farm, in production, run by a group that most of American agriculture’s ownership statistics would say should not exist.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.