What’s on the Plate?

WANDA Joins Word In Black’s National Conversation on Black Farmers, Food Safety and Trust

Join WANDA at Word In Black’s “What’s on Your Plate Part II – Black Farmers Roundtable.”

On Wednesday, September 16, WANDA Founder and CEO Tambra Raye Stevenson will join farmers, food-system leaders, researchers and journalists from across the country for Word In Black’s virtual “What’s on Your Plate Part II – Black Farmers Roundtable.” The conversation comes at a consequential moment for Americans thinking about what is on their plates and who is responsible for getting it there.

Following a summer marked by a widespread Cyclospora outbreak, Word In Black is bringing together Black farmers and food advocates to examine food safety, food quality and why Black farms matter. The event is part of the publication’s broader What’s on Your Plate initiative examining the relationship between food, health, affordability, access, culture and inequality in Black America.

For WANDA: Women Advancing Nutrition, Dietetics, and Agriculture, the questions are deeply familiar. For more than a decade, WANDA has worked to ensure that Black women and girls are seen not simply as consumers within the food system, but as growers, nutrition professionals, scientists, entrepreneurs, caregivers, storytellers and decision-makers shaping it.

Stevenson will join Sha’ka Von Thomas of the Houston Board of Food Security/The Happy Camper

and Word In Black Insights & Research Director Dr. Christa Mahlobo for a discussion led by Health Correspondent Jennifer Porter Gore about the American food supply, food access, affordability and trust. The program will later turn to a roundtable featuring Black farmers including Christa Barfield of FarmerJawn, Ursula Kendall-Johnson of aGROWKulture Farm, Jeremy Peaches of Fresh Houwse Grocery and Elisabeth Ramsey of The Farming PhD.

A Crisis of Trust at the Grocery Store

The conversation is grounded in new data. Word In Black’s national At the Table: Food & Health In Our Community survey gathered responses from 1,249 Black Americans between April and June 2026. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said healthy food prices are too high, while more than 60 percent reported that they do not trust that the food they purchase in grocery stores is safe. Respondents pointed to price, proximity and access not simply lack of nutrition knowledge as major barriers to eating the way they would like. Those findings complicate a familiar public-health narrative that places responsibility for diet-related illness primarily on individual behavior.

For Stevenson, a more useful question is not simply, What did you choose to eat?

It is: What choices did the food system make available to you in the first place?

“People have been told for generations to make better choices,” Stevenson said. “But we also have to examine who determines the choices, who produces the food, who profits from it, whose knowledge is trusted and who gets to participate in governing the food system.”

That distinction is central to WANDA’s call for people to see themselves as food citizens, rather than only food consumers or “foodies.”

A consumer asks what to buy. A food citizen also asks who grew it, whether workers and producers were treated fairly, whether families can afford it, how public institutions procure it, whose businesses benefit and what policies shaped its journey to the plate.

From “Food Desert” to Food Apartheid

Language also matters. During the conversation, Stevenson will address why WANDA prefers the term food apartheid to “food desert.” A desert is a naturally occurring ecosystem. Unequal access to nutritious, affordable and culturally relevant food is not.

The term food apartheid shifts attention toward the history of decisions involving land, transportation, segregation, retail investment, agricultural policy, neighborhood development and economic power that help determine which communities have access to high-quality food and which do not.

That framing also changes the solution. If limited food access were simply a geographic accident, opening a supermarket might solve the problem. But if the challenge is structural, communities also have to ask who owns the store, where its food comes from, whether residents can afford it, which farmers have access to its shelves and whether the community has meaningful power in decisions affecting its food environment.

For Stevenson, the Story Is Also Personal

Stevenson’s relationship to agriculture did not begin in a classroom. A fifth-generation Oklahoman, she comes from a family with roots in livestock agriculture and meatpacking. That family history shapes how she thinks about the American food system from the people who raise animals and work inside processing facilities to the scientists, regulators, retailers and families who ultimately depend on the safety of the finished product.

It is also a reminder that Black history in American agriculture extends far beyond a narrative of exclusion. Black Americans have been farmers, ranchers, meatpacking workers, agricultural scientists, food chemists, nutrition researchers and innovators. Yet many of those contributions remain largely absent from the popular story of American food.

Consider Dr. Lloyd Augustus Hall, the pioneering Black food chemist whose innovations in meat curing, preservation and spice sterilization helped transform modern food processing. Or Dr. Flemmie Pansy Kittrell, the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition, whose research connected family life, socioeconomic conditions and community nutrition decades before those relationships became standard public-health conversation.

For WANDA, recovering those stories is not nostalgia. It is workforce development. Children cannot easily imagine themselves becoming the next food scientist, farmer, dietitian, agricultural engineer or food entrepreneur when they have never been taught that people who look like them helped build those professions in the first place.

The Black Press Has Always Asked Who Is Missing From the Story

There is another reason the Word In Black conversation matters. The Black press has historically done more than report what happened to Black communities. At its strongest, it has documented the systems surrounding those experiences: labor, housing, health, business, civil rights and food. That role remains important in 2026.

Food safety can appear to be only a scientific or regulatory issue. Farming can be treated as separate from public health. Nutrition can be discussed without examining labor or land ownership. Food access can be reduced to the presence or absence of supermarkets.

But families experience all of those systems at once.

That is precisely why WANDA describes its work as stretching from farm to health.

Stevenson recently told Word In Black that the expanding Food Is Medicine movement raises another set of questions: not only whether food can function as medicine, but whose food is recognized as medicine, whose knowledge counts as evidence and who has the power to write the prescription.

The same questions apply to agriculture.

• Who owns the land?

• Who receives capital?

• Who gets institutional contracts?

• Who is able to bring a product to market?

• Who becomes a researcher?

• Who tells the story?

• And who gets to decide what a “healthy” food system looks like?

Black Farmers Are Part of the Health Infrastructure

Black farms matter for reasons that extend beyond representation. They can be part of regional food security, community economic development, culturally relevant food production, agricultural knowledge and a more diverse network of producers. The disappearance or marginalization of Black farmers therefore is not solely an agricultural concern. It is also a question of health, wealth and community infrastructure.

For WANDA, investing in the people behind the food is as important as investing in the food itself. That philosophy informs WANDA’s work developing future nutrition and agriculture professionals through WANDA Scholars, convening women through Sisterhood Suppers, advancing maternal Food Is Medicine through NOURISH, and introducing children to agriculture and nutrition through Little WANDA and the emerging WANDA’s World digital ecosystem.

The common thread is human capital. “We spend enormous amounts of time talking about changing the food system,” Stevenson said. “But food systems do not change themselves. People change them. The question is whether we are investing in the people our communities need to lead that change.”

Pull Up a Chair

Word In Black’s What’s on Your Plate Part II – Black Farmers Roundtable begins Wednesday, September 16 at 6 p.m. Eastern and is free to attend virtually. The discussion will explore food safety, affordability, Black farming and what it will take to build a food system worthy of greater public trust.

For WANDA, there is one more question to bring to the table: Will Black communities simply be consumers of the next food system or will we help grow, research, own, communicate and govern it?

Join the Conversation

What’s on Your Plate Part II – Black Farmers Roundtable Wednesday, September 16, 2026 6 p.m. ET | Virtual | Register here

WANDA encourages families, farmers, nutrition professionals, educators, students, policymakers and anyone interested in the future of food and health to pull up a chair.

Because what is on our plates matters. But so does who had the power to put it there.