World Food Day 2025: From Local Struggle to Global Solidarity — Aligning Our Forks with Our Values

This World Food Day, on October 16, 2025, the world unites under the theme “Hand in Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future.” The message, set by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in honor of its 80th anniversary, is both a celebration and a challenge: to work together — across borders, governments, and communities — to build food systems that nourish all people and sustain the planet.

That global call to action feels especially urgent here in Washington, D.C., where the consequences of national policy decisions ripple through neighborhoods in real time. As federal cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its nutrition programs take effect, and the relocation of its Beltsville Agricultural Research Center weakens one of the nation’s strongest hubs for agricultural innovation, the nation’s capital finds itself both a microcosm and a mirror of the global food crisis.

Despite these setbacks, D.C. continues to lead locally — proving that when the federal table grows smaller, communities can still feed each other through collaboration, compassion, and creativity.

A Global Theme with Local Relevance

The FAO’s 80th anniversary reminds us that the idea of food as a global right — not a privilege — has deep roots. Yet even 76 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrined the right to food and right to health, only two countries have never ratified those provisions. Ours truly. The United States is one of them.

That omission has consequences. As the nation debates the economics of healthcare and nutrition programs, millions of Americans — including residents in our own backyard — face chronic hunger or survive on low-nutrient, high-cost foods.

As I wrote recently in my essay for the Milken Institute, “Why Food Democracy Matters to the Food as Medicine Movement,” food security without nutrition security is not freedom — it’s dependency. A truly democratic food system begins when we align our forks with our values.

That conviction underpins the Food Bill of Rights (foodbillofrights.org), an initiative I launched to affirm that access to healthy, culturally relevant food is not a charitable act — it’s a moral and civic responsibility.

From Frederick Douglass to Food Apartheid

The struggle for nourishment and dignity is not new to this city. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass, who once lived at Cedar Hill in Anacostia, drew a searing portrait of food as both sustenance and subjugation. He contrasted the “gnawing hunger” of enslaved people — who fought with dogs for crumbs or subsisted on “coarse mush” — with the lavish tables of slaveholders “overflowing with fish, flesh, and fowl.”

Even holidays, when liquor was provided to enslaved workers, were tools of control. “It was the plan of the slaveholder,” Douglass wrote, “to disgust his slaves with freedom by plunging them into excess.”

That manipulation — feeding some and starving others — echoes across centuries. In the District today, the Urban Institute’s report “Alcohol Outlets as Attractors of Violence and Disorder” (2008) shows how liquor stores still outnumber grocery stores in many neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. The correlation between alcohol outlet density, violent crime, and binge drinking is well-documented — a modern reflection of the same forces Douglass described: profit and pacification through consumption.

If we are honest, food apartheid — the structural exclusion of certain communities from healthy food access — is not just an urban design flaw; it’s the unfinished business of freedom.

Shifting the Narrative: Beyond Food Deserts

This is why, on World Food Day 2025, I’ll join Bread for the City, Dreaming Out Loud, and the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative for a public dialogue titled “Shifting the Narrative: Beyond Food Deserts to Collaborative Food Communities.”

Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025 | Time: 12:00–1:00 PM (ET) 

Moderator: Trazy Collins, Bread for the City 

Panelists:

• Tambra Raye Stevenson, WANDA

• Jaren Hill Lockridge, Dreaming Out Loud

• Courtney Butler, Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative

  
  

Registration: Zoom Link [Recording available before Q&A.]

Together, we’ll examine how organizations rooted east of the Anacostia River are transforming scarcity into sovereignty. By centering community wisdom, honoring heritage foods, and building cross-sector coalitions, these leaders are proving that food equity isn’t charity — it’s justice in action.

“Our communities are not food deserts—they are fertile grounds of wisdom, culture, and resilience waiting to be nurtured. When we center the voices of community, honor our heritage foods, and build together across sectors, we move from surviving on scarcity to thriving in sovereignty.” — Tambra Raye Stevenson, MPH, MA, PhD Candidate

Bread for the City, host of this year’s World Food Day panel, echoed that sentiment:

“Tambra Raye Stevenson’s work embodies the very spirit of this panel—reframing the conversation about food in our communities from one of scarcity to one of strength. Her leadership with WANDA has empowered women and families to reclaim cultural food traditions while advancing policy and partnerships that create lasting change. We invited Tambra because her voice bridges grassroots experience east of the Anacostia River with national and global advocacy, offering a vision of food systems that are equitable, culturally rooted, and community-led.” — Bread for the City

From Local Action to Global Responsibility

The FAO’s theme, “Hand in Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future,” reminds us that no single country, city, or community can transform food systems alone. The same global forces that drive hunger abroad — inequitable trade, corporate consolidation, and climate change — are the same forces undermining local food security in D.C., Detroit, Dakar, and beyond.

Author Miguel Altieri, in Food Fight: How Food Has Been Weaponized, argues that food is both a tool of liberation and domination. In times of war and peace alike, control over land, seed, and sustenance determines sovereignty. The same was true when protein scarcity during the World Wars drove the expansion of U.S. agriculture — and it remains true as we face a glut of ultra-processed, low-nutrient foods today.

If nutrition is neglected, national security itself is compromised. Chronic disease, diet-related healthcare costs, and dependency on fragile global supply chains weaken a nation’s resilience as surely as any external threat.

Investing in nutrition security — not just agricultural output — is a matter of national security.

D.C.: From Policy Epicenter to People’s Kitchen

While federal systems falter, local communities are reimagining what sovereignty looks like. From urban farms in Ward 8 to community-supported agriculture in Ward 7, D.C.’s food advocates are proving that resilience grows from the ground up. Initiatives like Dreaming Out Loud’s community kitchens, WANDA’s Food Bill of Rights, and Bread for the City’s food programs are creating what Frederick Douglass might call “a different kind of independence” — one rooted not in ownership, but in shared nourishment.

As Douglass wrote, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Today, that demand is simple: to feed our people well.

The Call to Align Our Forks with Our Values

As we mark World Food Day 2025, the message is both global and local: we cannot separate our nation’s health from our humanity.