Who Gets to Decide What Nourishes Us?

From community tables to Capitol Hill, the World Bank, and Un civil-society spaces, WANDA has spent a decade arguing that food policy is not simply about what Americans eat. It is about who has the power to decide.

A 13-page letter sent to congressional appropriators this summer does not look much like a revolution. There are no protest chants in its margins. No placards. No crowded hearing room. Instead, there are funding figures, federal offices, proposed report language, and page after page of organizational names. Among them, on page eight, is WANDA: Women Advancing Nutrition Dietetics and Agriculture in Washington, D.C.

The letter, organized by the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, asks Congress to make a series of specific FY2027 investments to better integrate nutrition into healthcare: $25 million to support Food is Medicine research and launch NIH networks or Centers of Excellence; additional resources for the NIH Office of Nutrition Research; at least $5 million more for federal Food is Medicine coordination; and $15 million for maternal produce prescriptions through the Health Resources and Services Administration.

WANDA was one of 159 organizations signing the letter up from 119 organizations supporting the previous FY26 effort. Together, the signatories represent organizations employing roughly 450,000 people and accounting for nearly $180 billion in annual U.S. revenues or budgets. Their ranks include health systems, public-health organizations, food retailers, universities, anti-hunger organizations, food businesses, nutrition groups, community organizations, and healthcare associations.

For WANDA, the signature represents something larger than a line on an appropriations letter. It represents a 10-year journey from asking for a seat at the food-policy table to helping determine what should be placed on the agenda.

And this month, WANDA added its name to another federal advocacy effort: a letter led by the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs and the National Healthy Start Association calling on Congress to provide at least $145.25 million for Healthy Start in FY2027. AMCHP has warned that the administration’s FY27 budget proposal would eliminate Healthy Start and has urged Congress to preserve funding for the program.

Healthy Start has been working since 1991 to improve health before, during, and after pregnancy, particularly in communities experiencing elevated infant mortality. Its community-based model can include prenatal and postpartum care, doulas, care coordination, mental-health screening, transportation and housing assistance, and connections to other health and social services. In other words, the federal budget debate is arriving at precisely the intersection WANDA has been talking about for years: food, mothers, babies, community and power.

It Started With a Question of Who Was Missing

When WANDA was launched on International Women’s Day in 2016, its premise was straightforward but disruptive: Black women and girls should not simply be recipients of nutrition programs. They should be among the people designing, researching, leading, financing, communicating, and governing the food system.

Early coverage described WANDA as an effort to cultivate a new generation of women and girls leading “from farm to fork” across Africa and the African Diaspora.

But the organization's policy roots ran deeper.

Founder Tambra Raye Stevenson came to WANDA with experience in public service, including work in the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Women’s Policy and Initiatives. She would later be appointed by Mayor Muriel Bowser to the D.C. Food Policy Council, where she helped bring public health nutrition into conversations about the District’s food system. D.C. Food Policy Council records show Stevenson serving as a council member, while the council’s racial-equity programming later featured her in a discussion examining how racism and white supremacy shape nutrition education. That distinction mattered.' Traditional nutrition education tends to begin with the individual: What did you eat? Did you read the label? Did you cook dinner? Did you follow the recommendations?

Food policy begins somewhere else.

• Why does one neighborhood have a full-service supermarket while another does not?

• Who determines which foods receive agricultural support?

• Whose cultural foods are researched, recommended, reimbursed, stocked, or stigmatized?

• Who writes dietary guidance?

• Who gets invited to testify?

• Who gets funded to solve the problem?

• And whose knowledge counts as expertise?

Those questions gradually became the foundation of what WANDA calls food democracy.

A foodie may know where to find a good meal. A food citizen asks who wrote the rules governing that meal.

From Representation to Rights

By 2022, WANDA had moved beyond the language of representation toward something more structural: a Food Bill of Rights. The organization launched a petition and policy campaign arguing that Americans should be able to understand food not only as a commodity or personal choice but as a matter of health, culture, dignity, knowledge, participation, and rights. WANDA also submitted policy recommendations around the 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, including calls for a Food Bill of Rights, a White House Nutrition Security Council, stronger nutrition communication and education, expanded medical nutrition therapy coverage, and more equitable nutrition research.

At a Sisterhood Supper that year, one grandmother distilled the idea more simply: “It’s a necessity.” That summer, the conversation also reached Capitol Hill. During a congressional briefing, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee urged Black women to bring their knowledge into policymaking and help direct policies affecting children and families. A few days earlier in another part of Washington, the work might have looked like women sitting around a table eating together.

That is precisely the point. For WANDA, Sisterhood Suppers, surveys, petitions, policy briefs, testimony, coalition letters and public demonstrations belong to the same democratic ecosystem. A community meal can produce a story. A story can reveal a pattern. A pattern can become data. Data can become testimony. Testimony can become a policy demand. And eventually, a policy demand can become a budget line.

Local, National and Global Advocacy Require Different Kinds of Power

WANDA’s experience also reveals something often lost in national food policy debates: policy operates differently depending on the level at which people encounter it.

At the local level, policy becomes personal. A grocery-store closure is not an abstraction when it changes how many buses a mother takes to buy food. A shortage of maternity care is not simply a workforce statistic when a pregnant woman is trying to decide where she can safely deliver.

This July, Stevenson returned to the D.C. Council to testify during a Committee on Health roundtable on maternal and infant health. Drawing from WANDA’s NOURISH Maternal Food as Medicine pilot, she argued that nutrition should be treated as part of maternal-health infrastructure rather than an optional educational add-on. “We have to incorporate nutrition professionals as part of this maternal health conversation,” she told councilmembers.

The NOURISH pilot had recruited 20 participants and trained birth workers and community professionals around gestational diabetes, hypertension, culinary skills, culturally relevant foods, and family-centered nutrition. That is local policy: close enough to see where a system breaks. At the national level, however, policy becomes a question of scale and allocation. It is one thing for a community organization to demonstrate that produce prescriptions, nutrition education, doulas, or culturally responsive care are valuable. It is another for Congress to decide whether federal agencies will have money to research, reimburse, coordinate, and expand those approaches. That is why appropriations matter.

The Food is Medicine letter WANDA signed this summer does not merely ask lawmakers to declare nutrition important. It asks them to finance it. One of its recommendations would continue $15 million for maternal produce prescriptions at HRSA, explicitly connecting nutritional insecurity, chronic disease, maternal health, and infant wellbeing. The Healthy Start campaign similarly moves the conversation from sympathy for mothers and babies to a harder question: What are we willing to fund?

At the global level, the vocabulary changes again. Here, the questions of hunger, nutrition, agriculture, climate, sovereignty, development, trade, gender, and human rights collide.

WANDA has carried its perspective into World Bank and IMF spaces; World Bank records list Stevenson among participants in its 2019 Spring Meetings, and other professional profiles document her engagement at World Bank/IMF gatherings.

In 2021, Stevenson also participated in the Faith + Food Coalition’s dialogues connected to the United Nations Food Systems Summit. Those civil-society dialogues brought together farmers, faith leaders, Indigenous advocates, activists, and food-system leaders and submitted recommendations through the U.N. Summit’s formal civil-society process. Among their principles were a universal right to healthy food, respect for Indigenous and local knowledge, stronger local food systems, and resistance to excessive concentration of food-system power.

Stevenson’s food policy work has also been represented in spaces including the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women NGO Forum and other global food and nutrition convenings. The geography may change. The central question does not. Who controls the food system and who gets to participate in deciding what comes next?

Food Democracy Is More Than Getting Invited Into the Room

There is an important distinction here. A proclamation is not legislation. A hearing is not implementation. A petition is not a statute. Signing an appropriations letter does not guarantee that Congress will fund what the signatories request. And being invited into a global institution does not mean communities suddenly possess equal power within it.

That is precisely why food democracy requires more than representation. In 2022, Mayor Muriel Bowser proclaimed the inaugural WANDA Week in Washington, D.C., recognizing the contributions of women and girls of African descent to food and agriculture.

Recognition matters. But WANDA’s next phase increasingly asks what comes after recognition.

In 2024, WANDA joined members of the National Right to Food Community of Practice and other human-rights advocates in engaging White House officials around the right to food. That work drew on recommendations from the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calling for a rights-based national approach to hunger and food insecurity.

The evolution is significant.

From Food Access to Food Agency

For decades, much of American food policy has been organized around access. Access to SNAP. Access to WIC. Access to supermarkets. Access to school meals. Access to healthcare. Those protections remain essential. But access alone leaves unanswered the question of agency.

• Can communities influence what is grown?

• Can mothers help design maternal nutrition programs?

• Can Black farmers and food entrepreneurs participate in food-system ownership?

• Can residents shape the research questions asked about their health?

• Can cultural food knowledge count alongside institutional expertise?

• Can people help govern the systems meant to nourish them?

That is the difference between being a food recipient and becoming a food citizen. And it may be the most important lesson from WANDA’s first decade. Food democracy is not an event WANDA attended. It is a practice the organization has tried to build through testimony and teaching, petitions and protests, policy briefs and community meals, congressional engagement and coalition building.

Sometimes democracy looks like people marching. Sometimes it looks like a grandmother speaking across a supper table. And sometimes democracy looks remarkably unglamorous: page eight of a 13-page appropriations letter, where your organization’s name sits beside 158 others. That signature still matters. Because somebody must tell Congress what our communities value enough to fund.

The Next Ten Years Begin Now

The policy fights before us are becoming more consequential, not less. Congress is deciding how much the nation will invest in maternal and infant health, nutrition research, Food is Medicine, community-based care, and programs serving families facing some of the greatest health inequities.

So WANDA’s 10th anniversary is not simply an occasion to look backward. It is an invitation to practice food democracy. Before August 21, organizations can join the FY27 Healthy Start appropriations letter calling for at least $145.25 million in federal funding. Organizations can also continue joining the Food is Medicine Institute’s FY27 sign-on effort. Individuals can contact their members of Congress, support the Food Bill of Rights, participate in community food-policy conversations, share their experiences, and invest in organizations building community power.

Because the next chapter of food policy will not be written only inside USDA, HHS, city halls, universities, hospitals, foundations, or congressional offices. It will also be written at kitchen tables. At farmers markets. At birth centers. At community meetings. At Sisterhood Suppers.

And by people who understand that eating makes us consumers but having a voice in the systems that determine how we are nourished makes us citizens. For 10 years, WANDA has been fighting to make room for those citizens. The next decade is about making sure they have power.