At the NAACP Health Summit, Food Equity Leaders Asked: Who Owns the Food System?

From mechanizing purple hull peas in the Mississippi Delta to healing contaminated soil in Chicago, panelists argued that food access without land, capital, decision-making power, and community ownership will never amount to food justice.

A purple hull pea may seem like an unlikely starting point for a conversation about civil rights.

But for Tyler Yarbrough, the Southern heritage crop carries an entire food system inside its pod: Black farming knowledge, family labor, agricultural technology, processing infrastructure, grocery access, and the power to determine who profits from what a community grows.

At the July 17 Equitable Food Systems panel during the NAACP Health Summit in Chicago, Yarbrough described work with Alcorn State University to mechanize the harvesting and shelling of purple hull peas. For generations, families picked and shelled them by hand. Mechanization could allow more Black farmers to place land into production, process a culturally significant crop efficiently, and move it into local stores.

That distinction between receiving food and controlling how food moves from soil to shelf became the central tension of the discussion.

“Is food justice possible without ownership?” moderator Tambra Raye Stevenson asked the audience. The answer offered by the panel was clear: not for long.

Beyond the Food Box

Stevenson, founder and CEO of Women Advancing Nutrition, Dietetics and Agriculture and health chair of the NAACP D.C. Branch, opened the discussion by reframing food justice as a matter of power.

Food insecurity, she said, is not only about empty shelves or plates. It reflects poverty, racism, wages, land, transportation, healthcare, ownership, and political influence. A truly equitable food system must therefore do more than deliver calories during a crisis. It must give communities authority over the conditions that determine their health.

The panel brought together Yarbrough, director of Mississippi Delta programs at Partnership for a Healthier America; Bweza Itaagi, co-founder of the West Englewood urban farm Sistas In The Village; and Ruby Ferguson, a registered dietitian and senior food-equity leader at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. (Sistas In The Village)

Ferguson offered the panel’s sharpest challenge to the traditional hunger-response model.

“If someone comes to a pantry, we fail them,” she said not because people should be denied emergency food, but because needing a pantry signals that the economic and political systems surrounding a household have already broken down.

Food banks must address the immediate emergency, Ferguson acknowledged. But if their work ends with distribution, they risk making hunger more manageable without making it less likely.

She pointed to the Greater Chicago Food Depository’s response when migrants arrived in Chicago. Rather than produce every meal internally, the organization purchased meals from Black- and Brown-owned restaurants still recovering from the pandemic. Food relief became an economic investment rather than a transaction moving in only one direction.

The outcome was not simply that people ate. Community businesses also received revenue, workers remained employed, and institutional purchasing power circulated through neighborhoods.

From Temporary Relief to Permanent Infrastructure

Yarbrough made a parallel case from the Mississippi Delta, where the closure of a major grocery store in Clarksdale exposed the danger of allowing distant corporations to control whether a community can obtain fresh food.

Partnership for a Healthier America responded by investing in locally owned stores, helping retailers purchase refrigeration and stock fruits and vegetables. Its Grow program has provided farmers and food entrepreneurs with grants of up to $10,000 for equipment, barcodes, processing, and other necessities that allow small businesses to enter retail markets.

These interventions may sound less dramatic than opening a gleaming new supermarket. But they build something potentially more durable: a network of local retailers, growers, processors, and entrepreneurs capable of keeping wealth and decision-making power close to home.

For Yarbrough, food sovereignty requires community influence over the full value chain—production, processing, distribution, and retail. A community that grows food but cannot process or sell it remains dependent. A neighborhood with a grocery store that can disappear after a corporate decision does not possess food security; it merely rents it.

The purple hull pea project offers another model. Instead of treating heritage foods as symbols of a disappearing past, it applies technology to help Black farmers carry them into the future.

Healthy Food Cannot Grow in Poisoned Soil

In Chicago, Itaagi brought the conversation beneath the food system—literally.

Sistas In The Village grows culturally relevant food in West Englewood, a community shaped by industrial development, segregation, and disinvestment. The farm is part of a larger network of Black and Brown growers rebuilding a local food economy. (Sistas In The Village)

But urban land comes with a difficult inheritance.

Factories and railroads once generated jobs while leaving lead, heavy metals, and other contaminants in the soil. Raised beds can allow a farm to grow food above that contamination. Concrete can cover it. Neither approach necessarily heals the land beneath.

Through Grow Greater Englewood’s proposed agro-eco district, Itaagi and other community leaders are pursuing longer-term remediation. That includes using plants and trees capable of absorbing contaminants, although meaningful restoration may take decades.

“It’s one thing to have a piece of land that you know is yours,” Itaagi said. “But if you’re stuck with all of this heavy metal, is that sovereignty?”

The question widens the definition of food access. Giving a community land without resources for soil testing, remediation, water, equipment, and long-term stewardship can transfer a liability rather than create wealth. The panel’s outcome was a stronger standard: equitable urban agriculture must include environmental repair. Soil health, child health, public health, and neighborhood development cannot remain in separate policy silos.

Community Engagement Must Include Control of the Budget

The phrase “community engagement” appears in nearly every institutional food-equity plan. The panelists argued that the term means little unless residents can influence how money is spent.

Ferguson recalled helping facilitate a process in which urban agriculture practitioners were asked to design the use of $2 million. Community members were accustomed to being invited to react to plans institutions had already created. They were less accustomed to being handed resources and asked what they wanted to build.

The resulting Community Growers Program invested in more than a dozen farms, helping growers access land, water, technical assistance, and remediation. The alternative would have been familiar: buy boxes of produce, distribute them for a limited period, photograph the activity, and return when another grant became available.

A food box can address tonight’s hunger. It cannot, by itself, secure land, install irrigation, develop a farmer, strengthen a neighborhood market, or change who makes decisions.

Itaagi summarized the distinction: Communities often have the solutions, but not the resources needed to implement them.

That observation shifts the role of large institutions. Their job is not always to invent a new intervention. Sometimes it is to transfer capital, remove administrative barriers, offer technical support, and then step aside.

Narrative Is Also Food Infrastructure

The panel did not treat storytelling as decoration added after the “real” food-system work was complete. Yarbrough described investing in original photography that presents Mississippi Delta farmers in their power—not as relics, victims, or stock images illustrating rural poverty. The images document farmers, historic Black-owned land, and contemporary efforts to build local food sovereignty.

Stevenson connected that work to a broader problem: Digital media shape what the public believes about Black communities long before people attend a policy meeting, visit a farm, or enter a grocery store.

Deficit terms such as “food desert,” “at-risk,” and “underserved” can identify inequity. They can also reduce a community to what it lacks, obscuring its growers, businesses, traditions, relationships, and ideas.

That narrative has material consequences. Images and language influence which communities appear investable, which leaders are treated as experts, and which proposals policymakers consider realistic. Funding community photography, media, documentation, and storytelling is therefore not separate from funding programs. It is part of building the political imagination required to sustain them.

Black Women as Architects, Not Only Caregivers

The final challenge reached beyond farms and grocery stores. Black women have fed families, churches, social movements, schools, and mutual-aid networks for generations. Yet they are still frequently celebrated for sacrifice while being denied the capital, compensation, land, authority, and institutional positions required to redesign the systems that depend on their labor.

Stevenson asked what would change if Black women were funded not simply as caregivers, but as architects of America’s food future. WANDA’s answer includes scholarships for women studying nutrition and agriculture, culturally grounded nutrition education through WANDA Academy, and pathways that connect children’s food literacy with future professional leadership. The goal is not to romanticize Black women’s responsibility for feeding everyone else. It is to invest in their ability to lead research, institutions, farms, businesses, media, and policy.

What Comes After the Panel

The discussion produced more than a list of problems. It offered a practical agenda.

Local governments can establish and fund food policy councils that give residents a formal role in food governance. Health systems and foundations can finance land remediation, irrigation, refrigeration, processing, and community-owned retail—not only short-term distribution. Food banks can use their purchasing power to strengthen local farms, restaurants, and businesses. Media organizations can portray communities through their assets and agency. Institutions can compensate residents for expertise rather than repeatedly extracting their stories.

Individuals also have a role: Buy from locally owned grocers and Black farmers. Volunteer with urban farms. Ask who produced, processed, distributed, and profited from the food on the plate. Join a local food policy council or organize to create one.

And invest in Black women-led organizations before asking them to solve another crisis with too little money and too much unpaid labor.

WANDA is currently marking its 10th anniversary with a Give 8/28 campaign supporting culturally grounded food education for children and scholarships, mentorship, and leadership opportunities for emerging Food Sheroes.

Because an equitable food system is not simply one in which everyone receives food.

It is one in which communities can heal the soil, own the store, grow the crop, tell the story, control the resources, and decide what nourishment looks like for themselves.

Learn more, invest, or join WANDA’s Give 8/28 campaign to help nourish the next generation of healthy eaters, readers, and food-system leaders.