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My co-host James Connolly turns the tables on the host of the Food and Faith podcast, Derrick Weston after James was a guest on Food and Faith.
The first question on every Food and Faith episode is “What’s your geography?” Naturally, James begins his interview with Derrick with the same inquiry. Derrick begins with his Pittsburgh roots and his choices that led to seminary school and ultimately Baltimore, Maryland where his work in the church intersects with food.
While it seems on the surface that religion may not relate to food and sustainability, Derrick argues that this couldn’t be further from the truth. The bible was written in the midst of an agrarian society with many of the lessons centering around food and feeding people.
Derrick finds that food is often the simplest entry point to difficult conversations. Everyone eats so it is one of the few things that unifies everyone in the world. Listen in as James and Derrick tackle some of the challenging subjects that come up around food and social justice like:
- Derrick’s realization that social justice is connected to food
- Connecting bible stories of injustice to current stories of the food landscape
- The appeal of veganism in the Black community
- The use of food as a means of control
- The taking of land from Black and Indigenous people
- Growing food as a way to healing
- Taking time to realize the pain of others
And if you find these topics interesting, check out Global Food Justice Alliance to join the initiative for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system.
Resources:
Educated by Tara Westover
Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture by Ellen Davis
Derrick’s course on food and race
High on the Hog Netflix Documentary
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
A Wilderness like Eden – A Food and Faith documentary
Black Church Food Security Network
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Connect with Derrick:
Website: Faith & Leadership
Instagram: @derricklweston
LinkedIn: Derrick Weston
Twitter: @derricklweston
Podcast: Food and Faith Podcast
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
Quotes:
“A realization hit me that every justice issue that I cared about had a food component: the racial inequality of who has access to food and the ways that the dynamics of what quality of food, people of different colors have access, to the impacts on our environment, are connected to food.” – Derrick Weston
“The food is just, you know, we all have to eat, and therefore it becomes an equalizer in a way that almost nothing else is.” – Derrick Weston
Within history, the overarching, oppressive nature is to go and take the food that was created by certain people, then say that those food are unhealthy.” – James Connolly
“The conception is that soul food is slave food and that progress means that we leave those things behind. And of course, that’s progress, defined by a white capitalist system.” – Derrick Weston
“There are so many people who, because of the historical trauma that has been experienced on the land are alienating themselves from the land now and that’s tragic.” – Derrick Weston
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance and initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now onto our show.
James Connolly
Good morning, this is Sustainable Dish’s podcast, James Connolly hosting today. So today I have on Derrick Weston, I was on his podcast Food and Faith. And it was a great conversation, you know, the thing I wanted to kind of like keep on going back to was I do feel like these conversations are very important. And I think the faith community, having listened to a number of episodes on the Food and Faith podcast now the… so the correlation between the activism that we’re working on and the activism you’re working on, we should actually be having a lot more conversations crossing that and think if you, you know if you read the Bible is as a historical document, or as a story or as a methodology for viewing the world. So many of the metaphors are surrounded around food and food production, and agriculture, and seeing the world in terms of cycles and weather. And, you know, everything has the plausibility of a narrative and a story. I thought I would start this off, I’m going to ask you, I’m going to turn the tables on you and say, Derrick, what is your geography?
Derrick Weston
Yeah, thank you for… all right. I should be more prepared for that question. So, my current geography is, I live right outside of Baltimore, Maryland. But I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And for anyone who’s familiar with Pittsburgh, I grew up with the stories of people turn of the century, coming out of factories, having to change shirts at lunchtime because of the soot in the air and coming home, you know, and just the terrible air quality and things of that nature. Fast forward to Pittsburgh, of my college years, I went to the University of Pittsburgh, clean air, a lot of green spaces, completely reinvented itself. And I think that I’ve been more informed by that than I realize that I grew up with those stories of environmental degradation that changed that completely changed around Pittsburgh is a beautiful city now. You know, I think it always was a beautiful city, not perfect, but beautiful rivers, beautiful mountains, trees everywhere, lots of green space protected. And I think that idea that we actually can have agency to change our environment has kind of always been a part of me. I think that’s a part of the city that continues to live inside of me. And so I’ve lived on the West Coast I lived in… I went to seminary in the Bay Area, I did an internship in Portland, I’ve lived in Ohio. Pittsburgh will always kind of be where I still kind of consider home. Even as I’ve grown to love Baltimore. And I, I really appreciate the two things that I think Baltimore and Pittsburgh have in common is one is that they’re small enough that you get to know a lot of people and big enough to still have big city amenities. And two, there’s kind of this blue-collar, no-nonsense. And particularly in Baltimore, like Baltimore is a hard city. Like there’s no one denying the hard of living in Baltimore, but there’s so many people… no one’s got their head in the sand, but they’re all kinds of thinking like, okay, what are the things that I can do in my small little ways in my small little corners of the world that can make some kind of impact and I just really love that about the city. So it’s starting to become a little bit more of my geography. It’s starting to become a little bit more identified with who I am.
James Connolly
As somebody, I have no idea what a seminary school does. Yeah, no, I mean, seriously, I would love to learn like what?
Derrick Weston
So I went to, so I like I said, I’m born and raised in Pittsburgh, and there’s actually… I started working at a faith-based nonprofit in my 20s and really kind of reoriented my faith. I had grown up in sort of an evangelical church, but this was in the 20s, this organization I worked for in the 20s. In my 20s, was the first time that I really saw people’s faith motivating them to work for social justice. And I was really compelled by that and started thinking about what does that looks like for me in a vocational path. So as I was told, over and over again, and I am, I’m a Presbyterian PCUSA, you got to specify because there’s a bunch of different flavors of Presbyterian. But as I was told over and over again, there’s a perfectly fine Presbyterian Seminary in Pittsburgh. But I lived in Pittsburgh my whole life. So I went to San Francisco Theological Seminary. And everyone told me like, it’s gonna be a really liberal seminary. And I’m like, I don’t know what that means. So I went out and quickly found out what that meant. And the big thing for me was that, I would say that one of my professors had a quote that has just kind of always lived with me, that he said, I take the Bible too seriously, to take it literally, that you have to really understand that there is a historical context in which the text was written. It wasn’t, you know, Moses sitting down with voice recorder or listening to God, that there were people with agendas, who wrote these things. And they were trying to, you know, they were writing myth because they were trying to understand. They were doing world-building, they were trying to understand where God was in the midst of the fact that the Bible was written by people who were routinely conquered by it, whether that was by Egypt, whether that was by Babylon, whether that was and then you know, when we get into the New Testament, the Roman Empire. So the Bible is written by people who are on the margins of a world system. And it’s really interesting, to me anyway, that it’s been so adopted by people in power when it’s clearly the voices of oppressed people. And it’s clearly the wishes of oppressed people for a different world and a better world and a more just world, and that when their societies become unjust, which mostly looks like the rich and powerful, having too much, and the normal people not having enough, God is angry, and bad things happen. That is the consistent message of the Bible, that that that kind of inequality is unpleasing to God. So what happens in seminary is that you know, I learned, learned Greek and Hebrew so that we could read the text in its original language, be able to take it apart, do some of this historical criticism, literary criticism, because there are a lot of different literary forms in the Bible as well, which is another thing that people need to understand. Some of its poetry, lots of its poetry, some of its history, but not history the way that we think of history in the Western world. These are things that would have been passed down through oral tradition that then ultimately gets written into some sort of final form. And again, that comes with agendas, and then kind of thinking of a theology and learning theology and learning how do we… how do those who do vocational ministry communicate a theology of a God whose central interest seems to be justice? How do we teach that? How do we, how do we explain that to people? How do we make that more a part of what it means to be thought of as part of the church? Because the church has a long social justice history. But what people see in the church in the United States is the evangelical movement that has so much – one, been co-opted by right-wing politics and two, so focused on kind of, like individual morality, and not on communal aspects of justice. So that’s a lot of what seminary was, for me.
James Connolly
Great, really interesting. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Educated, it’s an interesting book. It’s the daughter of a family that is kind of a, I would say, kind of an apocalyptic cult, based on Mormonism, out of Idaho. And she’s sort of born and raised in this environment. And it’s a really, it’s a hard read, because the family is dealing with mental illness, and they’re dealing with like… Ruby Ridge had become kind of a sort of seminal moment in the lives of the church that they belong to. And the father was a very domineering presence in their life and they lived on the edges of poverty, but they’re, in many ways, sort of preparing for the Second Coming their whole lives. And it’s a really interesting narrative story because the girl eventually, she decides she wants to leave, she wants to go… they’ve been homeschooled their whole lives, but also kind of given the option to leave if they wanted to. And so she ends up going to Brigham Young University, and she’s sitting in a history class, and they’re talking about the Holocaust. And she raises her hand, she says, What’s the Holocaust? So everybody looks at her, and they’re appalled because they think that she’s making a joke. And you know, but she had no idea of worldview that was outside of this very, like, segregated, you know, varied, like domineering presence that was surrounding her. And she eventually goes, she studies at Harvard, she goes to Oxford University, and just talks about, like, education in general, like what it is, you know, what, what it means to be educated. And I think she ends up getting her degree in the studies of historians. So how do historians think, and I’ve actually been thinking about that a lot lately, just because the way that we are telling the history of the United States, the history of empire, the history of Western culture. It’s always been very centric, to the people who actually have the pen and the paper, and the facility and the ability to write down the stories. And you know, when I look at the Bible, I look at it from a perspective is it’s very nebulous, it’s a little unclear, it can be interpreted in many different ways.
Derrick Weston
Absolutely.
James Connolly
Yeah. And so how do you like, how does the ministry work where you are, then bringing in people from many different perspectives, you have to dismantle your own perspective to see it from there’s. But then also get them to understand your point of view, which is, I think, seminal to a lot of the work of what the Bible was if you’re dealing with justice, and justice in this life and the afterlife. Is there a question that, I think?
Derrick Weston
Yeah, I think I heard a question. So let me try to answer the question I think I heard. I think part of it is recognizing that there are disparate voices. There’s not just numerous voices in the Bible, there are disparate voices in the Bible. Like there are voices that are conflicting with each other, there are voices that have competing agendas in the Bible, and that that cacophony is actually important. So there are four different gospels, you know, and there’s this effort in the evangelical church to harmonize the gospel., You know, so like, let’s make them all fit together so that’s one big cohesive story about Jesus. But it’s four, at least, stories about Jesus. Because there were editors afterward. And I think part of, you know, I use the Gospels as an example, because I think that the Gospels are a way of coming at a subject from four different points of view, and saying that there is validity in all four points of view. And if we can find the parts of our story that fit with that story, then we can work towards common goals. I think it’s too much to ask that the Bible be saying one thing. It’s actually unrealistic. But we can look at themes, we can look at big themes that cross the entirety of the canon. We can have questions about why there’s a canon, why there are certain books that weren’t included, because they, you know, contradict what a bunch of people who were making the canon decided should be in there. And again, even that process, right of like, there’s going to be 66 books. And well, there’s also these apocryphal books. And well, there’s also these Gnostic Gospels. And some of this gets really messy, and let’s just keep it to the 66. And, you know, and that was a choice made by a group of dudes in a room, you know, and like that, that’s a part of it as well. That for every stage in the development of the Bible, and the theology that has come subsequent to the Bible has been the result of someone’s perspective. And the more that we can, we can respect and understand that the more that we can allow our perspectives to be changed and informed by what we see going on in the world, what makes sense to us, what rings true to our own sense of right and wrong. You know, a lot of, I’ll be very honest, like a lot of my understanding of who God is what God is, comes from my own sensibilities of what right and wrong is so… and everyone does that. You know, everyone does that. But most people, there’s a lot of people who want to say well, well, you know, I’m biblically informed and we’re a biblical church. We’re a Bible-believing church. It’s like, okay, well what’s part of the Bible? And what does that even mean for you? And does is that the human sacrifice part? Is that the passing off, you know, your brother’s widow down the line to the next brother is that…. which part of the Bible is it that you’re believing in? Because theirs… is it the no shellfish part? Is it? The shellfish is okay. You know what? Yeah, like, it’s a big book. Yes. You know, I think it’s not about… Martin Luther King Jr. said that leadership is, you know, I’m gonna totally butcher this quote, but you know, that leadership is about molding consensus, that like we don’t… the idea isn’t to have everyone think the same. It’s it’s not. It’s not about groupthink. It shouldn’t be about groupthink. It should be about everyone bringing their perspectives and saying, I want to contribute to the collective bettering of the world.
James Connolly
So alright, so but you’re growing up in a very industrial city, very much like me, grew up in Queens, New York, you’re going to seminary school, this is your vocation in life. I love how religion becomes a vocation wherever everybody else gets an occupation. But there’s this element of that, then you like you transfer so much of that, to that wisdom behind growth and agriculture and community gardens? Like, where is the germ of that? Where does that come from?
Derrick Weston
Yeah. Yeah. So what’s funny, in hindsight, to me was, we were given a list of like terms, at the very beginning of seminary, during the orientation of seminary, the like, terms, you’re gonna hear a lot. So you know, just commit them to memory and know what they mean. One of them was an agrarian culture, that you’re going to hear about agrarian culture a lot because the Bible was written in an agrarian culture. I mean, that was, like, I did not care. That was totally out of my mind during orientation of seminary. But then try… you know, the way I’ve been, I’ve been telling the story a lot, 2015 happens. And I’m 2015, I’m a year after a really hard divorce. And I’m out here in Baltimore, and I’m doing a lot of gardening and it’s very therapeutic. It’s good for my mental health. But anytime I’m interested in something I obsess about it. And so growing food became sort of an obsession. And a realization hit me that every justice issue that I cared about had a food component, that the racial inequality is of who has access to food and the ways that the dynamics of what quality of food, people of different colors have access to the impacts on our environment, connected to food, and even when we get to issues of sexism and heteronormativity. Like, historically, those issues have connected to who gets to own land, and who passes land down into what lineage and can we confirm paternity and things like that. And like so, all of a sudden, I’m connecting these dots that… and then I started to like, actually go back to some of the things that I was supposed to be reading in seminary. There’s a wonderful book by a biblical scholar named Ellen Davis. It’s called Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture. And it is a wonderful exploration of the ways that food shows up in the biblical text and the ways that food and access to land are used as a means of oppression. That, you know, one of the stories that we get in the Bible is a story of a man named Naboth who has a vineyard. And the king who lives not too far from neighbors says, ‘hey, I want your vineyard’ and Naboth says ‘No, it’s my family vineyard,’ and the king goes and sulks and then Jezebel goes and has Naboth killed and then takes his land and kind of uses that as a like, this is what happens all the time with rich people taking the land, taking the family farms of, the family land of people. This is the quintessential injustice, right, that the prophets then speak on. And then kind of like connecting the dots of like, oh wait that’s still happening. That’s a lot of what our food system looks like. And then going to Jesus’s ministry of being like, literally most of the things he did was feed people. To the extent that the feeding of the 5000 is this idea that Jesus fed this crowd, is a story that appears in all four Gospels, when the birth of Jesus doesn’t appear in all four Gospels, when the resurrection of Jesus only actually appears in three of the Gospels, that this feeding, that feeding people was such a part of what it meant to care for those in need to make sure that they had food to make sure that their actual bodies were taken care of, was so important that every gospel writer thought that this story needed to be included, says a little bit about where our priorities should be. So, you know, as I started realizing that food is just the entryway to so many conversations about justice, about equity, about equality, about community, about what it means for us to belong to one another, about a lot of hard conversations. So in the last this year, I developed a six-week course, that I’ve been doing at churches on food and race, because a friend of mine came to me and said, you know, we’ve been doing all of this reading on anti-racism work, and we don’t know what a practical next step is. So it started, I said, let’s… so I developed this course. And as a result of that, this church is starting a farm. And they’re thinking about how they get farmers of color onto the land, who wouldn’t necessarily have access to the land and thinking about how they have access to different markets and thinking about, you know, all these sorts of things that came out of the discussion in that class. The food is just, you know, we all have to eat, and therefore it becomes an equalizer in a way that almost nothing else is. So that’s kind of where the connection has come for me. And I continue to be amazed by the fact that there are conversations that I can have, if I start them with food. If I start them with a conversation about food, in the course of this class, we’ve had hard conversations about race. We’ve had hard conversations about slavery, we’ve had hard conversations about indigenous people and indigenous genocide. But it all started with a conversation about, well, how did we get this food? How did we get this crop? How did we get? How did this become a staple? Those conversations, the entryway to those conversations has been food.
James Connolly
There’s a new film that came out it was like a limited release. It’s a first-time Black filmmaker and a vegan documentarian filmmaker who got together, it’s called, They’re Trying to Kill Us. And he profiles it’s a number of hip hop artists and rappers and people in the African American community, and Lakota and indigenous communities kind of talking about the system of how much we’ve functionally changed the landscape of so many of these communities to divorce them from food production altogether, by design, really design. And it goes through sort of the medical community, the pharmaceutical community, it goes through what I would describe it as the ring of fire – gun community. So you have all of these gun manufacturers that started to pop up. And they were mainly centered around selling guns to inner-city communities and actually made so much wealth off of it, that they were able to buy out like Smith and Wesson and Colt and all of these really kind of older by just making cheap guns. And then so just goes through this sort of laundry list of, you know, liquor stores, and redlining, you know, within communities, every single one of those. So even manufacturing and recycling and all of it… like the way that they design communities so that people ended up with poor health outcomes… with more marginalization, but like all of these different things, so the documentary is centered around that. The basic premise is, this is a history from the Black community, indigenous communities’ perspective on food. And then it takes a weird turn because then it’s like… it says all of these things, and then it kind of advocates veganism, as if veganism is the answer to it. And I’m like, Dude, no!
Derrick Weston
You were so close.
James Connolly
It’s, I mean, it’s showing the level at which the US government went to go and kill the Indian and save the man. You know, take these children away from their communities, they can no longer speak their language. What is language? Language is the ability to tell the story of yourself. Take that away, pull them from their communities, kill their main food source, which was the buffalo, and then put them onto marginal land where you can’t really… like you have no agricultural space. So then you become dependent upon that. And you have a genocide by a different form. And so it’s an interesting film. I mean, it’s really heartfelt. You can’t help it be moved by the story. But I also feel like it’s oppressive in a way because it’s not… So here’s the question that I want. So that goes through this whole period of time because you had actually talked about this before with the birth of Southern cooking, and how it came from many of seed growers and agricultural communities in Western Africa and came here through the diaspora and through slavery, and all of Southern cooking, essentially Black and indigenous cooking. Yeah, absolutely. We just got to have to say that over and over again. And but one of the things that they said, which I’ve had… there was another documentary called Soul Food Nation, I think, talks about chitlins. It talks about collard greens, it talks about like, foods, that me being somebody who actually studies a lot of nutrition is like, actually, a lot of those foods are really good for you. You know, yeah, cooking food in lard. At least it’s not an agricultural byproduct that was turned into vegetable oil, that we now fry everything in. Right. But within the community, it’s like, within that history, the overarching, like, oppressive nature is to go and take the food that was created by these people, then to say that those food are unhealthy. Yes. And then they also take that away from that community. And I don’t know how to do that. It’s like the metaphor that they use is living high on the hog, which is an English term, means like, the king gets all of the good cuts of the pig. And then, you know, the servants get the feet, the ears, and all that stuff. Now, I go to a super fine, you know, Italian restaurant in New York City, and they have a pig’s ear salad that I spend $26 on. Like, I don’t know. So is there a question in that? Yes, I think I just want your wisdom.
Derrick Weston
So there’s two pieces to that. One is the… there was the literal taking of land, there was the literal stealing of land and swindling people out of land for both Black and indigenous people, particularly after the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. But then you also have something else that happens as part of the great migration was this idea that moving away from land is progress. And moving away from the foods of the South, the conception that soul food is slave food. And that progress means that we leave those things behind. And of course, that’s progress, defined by a white capitalist system. And so you have one of the things that I always talk about is like one of the insidious, more and my ideas, more insidious aspects of slavery – the legacy of slavery – is that it made us not want to be on the land, it made us not want to be in the land, it made the idea of there’s a… I think it’s the movie Boomerang where one of the characters… that’s an all-Black cast. And one of the characters says, I don’t even pick the cotton out of the Tylenol bottle. Like they’re this idea that we’re not going backwards to achieve any of these old things that were oppressive, where I think we’re beginning to have the realization that we got swindled out of our not only out of our land but of our relationship to land. Yeah. And I think that’s that same thing is happening with food that not only did… we were told that our food was less than we were swindled out of our relationship with food. And now you’re seeing boutique soul food restaurants, selling all the same things that we were told we’re bad, and they’re selling them at really high prices. But like, you can go to a really nice restaurant and get collard greens and mac and cheese and they can upsell the price because now all of a sudden, it’s kind of trendy, to have genuine Southern cooking, and of course, it’s always southern. And I feel like I’ve mentioned this guy in other conversations and like, I don’t have anything personal against Sean Brock. But Sean Brock is one of those chefs who like has totally made a living off of high-end Southern cooking, without acknowledgment, without like, real formal acknowledgment of the Black origins of the foods that he makes. So, and that’s, I think he’s just kind of like the most high-profile one that I often see, but it’s happening.
James Connolly
I mean, we had Paula Dean. Oh, yeah, you know, that whole family empire and what was his name? John Nash. There’s a lot of like New Orleans cooking. The only elevated people I have seen within, like Southern foodways are Black barbecue. Yep, you know. And so that is elevated and taken to just a higher level. But it’s still I mean, it’s not necessarily accepted by, you know, a Michelin rating or anything like that. Whereas you get some Argentinian chef who cooks wood on a fire on some island somewhere. And he’s like, considered… and everybody’s like, oh, we have to go there. But, you know, like, Yeah, I mean, I think the reconciliation of these stories and a proper understanding of them is why there is such a huge push now to upend any type of critical race theory, which is essentially just teaching history, right? Like, I mean, it’s really just like children arguing, like closing their eyes and putting hands over their ears because they just don’t want to hear the history. If you’re reading James Loewen’s book, Lies My Teacher Told Me the preface to it… It’s actually kind of interesting. He’s like, Americans in high school, the subject they hate the most, do you think it’d be math? Or, you know, maybe gym? Physical education, you’re awkward, you know? Just to figure out what’s happening in your mind and body in space. The subject that is hated the most is history. And why is it hated the most is because it’s so antiseptic, and cleaned up and like, made into this, like George Washington chopped down the cherry tree. Like, what does that mean to anybody? You haven’t learned anything about American history. But you’ve held on to the mythos, it’s kind of created around that. And just want to say, like Leah Penniman actually talks about this a lot, she brings a lot of kids growing up in the inner city out to agricultural communities and has them spend time on the land to heal themselves. And that healing actually takes a really long time. When I was teaching in schools, you know, we’d be teaching in the South Bronx, kids were afraid of dirt, they were afraid of it because of germs, they were also afraid of it. Because a lot of the playgrounds are like grade D listed. You’re looking at these abandoned landscapes and then having kids play on them. And, you know, there’s broken glass, there’s, you know… and so it becomes associated with the dirt itself, when the, what we realize now is like, we’re still living in the agricultural revolution, like, because we can sip our tea and read a book and all of that stuff. It’s because of an agricultural revolution that is still going on now.
Derrick Weston
Yeah, Leah Penniman is doing such amazing work. And Soul Fire in my field trip list. You know, for me, coming to terms with… I was out last year, on the community farm that I manage, and I was with another friend, a Black woman who’s a friend, and we were, we were just kind of sitting there watering and kind of ruminating on like, we were both kind of out there going. This is therapeutic. This is, like what we needed kind of mid pandemic. And the joy of having your hands in the dirt was stolen from us. The joy of the like, pride of tending to something and watching it grow like that was stolen from us. And we both were just kind of overwhelmed for a second of the idea of that we were kind of doing something on a volunteer basis that our ancestors were forced into. And like we just had this really chilling moment. And that healing is gonna take a long time and that healing, and it’s why I encourage Black people to grow things. Why encourage like… grow anything, like go back to your grandparents and, and ask them about you know, my grandfather had a garden and my grandmother grew flowers and I took that so for granted, but you know, we’re losing a lot of of their wisdom and a lot of their stories. That’s sad. And we’re also losing an understanding of what their relationship to land was. It’s complicated. It’s really a complicated thing. It’s I think, as people become, you know, I think there was this huge uptick last year and people who just decided to garden right, and because it was, you know, it was a thing you could do during the pandemic and be outside and I am 100% in support of that. And we can’t conflate what we do in our little backyard plots with the oppressive nature of agricultural systems, both of the past and the present. It’s not the same. It’s not the same. And there are so many people who, because of the historical trauma that has been experienced on the land, are alienating themselves from the land now, and that’s tragic.
James Connolly
So when you have these conversations and are beginning the process of healing, what do you find the barriers for change? I mean, of course, it’s always individual, but how have you, like figured out a way to kind of talk about these things in a way that can move through that?
Derrick Weston
Yeah, I mean, first off, it is talking about them. It is the fact that it’s a conversation that my friend, and I could have in that moment. And we totally got each other. And then I think the the the harder part and the thing I find myself continually working on is opening the window to my white friends of what that moment might have felt like for the two of us. Because I think that one of the big problems that we have in our culture is that white equals normal. And therefore, the white experience of a thing is the normal experience of the thing. And so the idea that in the midst of gardening, you would have a traumatic thought about slavery, probably doesn’t cross the minds of most of my white friends. Yeah. And so part of it is, you know, and I, because I have a lot of white friends, I have a lot of white friends who I love dearly, and I’m always trying to usher them into that space of, can you take a second outside of your own experience to imagine what this pain might feel? Like, draw on the traumas of your own past, we all have trauma, we all have trauma in common, we all have some kind of traumas, drawn the experiences of traumas of your past, and can you then kind of connect that to an experience of trauma for an ancestral sense of pain that is that kind of living in every Black body right now? Because we’re not allowed to let it go. We’re not allowed to let it go. Because there’s, you know, because Ahmaud Arbery, you know, happened, and George Floyd happen. And, you know, so we’re not allowed to let that pain go. And so, you know, I think it’s talking about it, and it’s continuing to show up in that space, and then having new experiences of joy. Because for me, the part that often where we often stop in these conversations is the experience of pain. And we have to push through to the experiences of joy, we have to push you to the experiences of Yeah, I grew that’s me now and it tastes amazing and better than anything, I would get a store, we have to push through to the experience of just delivered 40 pounds of sweet potatoes that I grew on, you know, and I helped grow and knowing that I’m feeding a part of my community, it’s pushing through, pushing through that pain to get to experiences of joy and get to experiences of, of celebration and life. You know, I think that’s where the healing comes from. It’s not just staying in the pain it’s pushing through the pain to get to experiences of joy
James Connolly
you know, I mean for me, it’s a sort of reevaluation of my work. I think we’re still doing good work with death in the garden. But you know, in some ways I look at that documentary is just yet again, another bunch of white people just talking to white people, you know, and that’s what documentaries are.
Derrick Weston
But we need white people to talk to white people. I say that as a Black person because like honestly, I have put myself in a lot of white spaces some of that has been my upbringing. My parents, when I was 10 moved us to a suburb of Pittsburgh, I was one of like five Black kids in my school. So some of that has been a nature of upbringing of like, I’ve always had a lot of white friends. And so I have kind of taken it on myself to put myself in white spaces and do this education. And I own that. But like, there are so many other people for whom these conversations are exhausting, and they’re tiring. And they’re not getting a proper hearing the way that white people can when they speak to each other, the way that white people can when they dare to have an awkward political conversation over their Thanksgiving dinner when they dare to call their friend out on being sexist on being homophobic on being racist. You know, there are conversations that you can have, where you can have credibility that I can’t. And yes, you know, you know, you know, is it a medium of white people speaking to white people? Yeah, yeah, it might be. But we really need you to stop. Yeah, we really need that actually.
James Connolly
Yeah, that reminds me of one of the other comments from Combahee River collective was, say, if you’re in a space of predominantly people of color, shut up. And white people, you should speak up. Yeah. And I remember taking that. So tell me what, like, what else are you working on?
Derrick Weston
Yeah. So I’m actually one thing that I am hoping to circle back around and talk to you about, again, I’m working on a book called A Just Kitchen. And the idea is that we can bring a lot of the things that we care about, in terms of stories that we’re talking about like we can bring those into our cooking, we can bring those into our kitchens, we that our kitchens can be places of healing and transformation, and mutuality, that the kitchen has historically been a place of uneven power dynamics, and that we can turn the kitchen into a place of healing and mutuality. So that book just started doing some work on that. And I’m really excited about it. Been working on this, if you go to food and faith.org there’s, there’s a short documentary called A Wilderness like Eden, which highlights food-based ministries, and the ways that they shifted their work during COVID. And we’d like to do a couple more, we in faith called it Episode One not knowing that we would be able to make other episodes. But you know, there’s ever since I’ve started showing it to people have been, you know, there’s an organization here in Baltimore, the Black Church Food Security Network, which connects Black churches and Black farmers and is creating markets for Black farmers, rural Black farmers to be able to sell it, they grow into ad markets at urban Black churches. And really, that organization is doing great work and would love to tell the stories of the churches and farmers who are part of that network. So we’re having some early conversations about that. But those are the kinds of things that I’m really kind of in this mode of storytelling, and particularly, really trying to light a fire under the feet under faith communities, to really reevaluate how we think about land and how we think about space. A lot of churches have started doing land acknowledgments now, which I think is *bleep*.
James Connolly
Tell me what that is
Derrick Weston
Where you acknowledge that the indigenous peoples who were on the land before you and on the land where your churches were built. I think that’s admirable. I think it’s like, if I steal your wallet, and then go, ‘Hey, James, I just want you to know that I stole your wallet. This is the wallet of the wallet that I stole from you. I saw it a couple days ago. You’re not getting it back. But I really want you to know that there’s a lot of pain in my heart around the fact that your wallet was stolen.’ Like that’s *bleep*. So I really want churches to think more creatively about how are you know, church land should be a commons. It should be something that is a communal good. And I think when we had a year, a year and a half for a lot of places where church buildings set empty because of the pandemic, you really have to reevaluate what is the value of that building in that space. And we could be growing food on that space. And we could be having community meetings on that space. And we could be that space could be far more productive. So, you know, those are the kinds of things that I’m working on, and feels like the time to have those conversations because again, the pandemic slowed us down to do some reflection. And the other side of that is people who pastored through the pandemic are exhausted, and there’s gonna be huge turnover, there’s gonna be huge amounts of turnover in church leadership in the next five years. And to have these conversations while some of those transitions are happening, I think it’s gonna be really important for people of faith.
James Connolly
I might recommend a book called Invisible Women. It’s an economist’s perspective on mostly about capitalism, and how capitalism is just so highly dependent upon unpaid labor. Still, to this day, especially women, women, and mothers, but one of the examples that she uses is the kitchens are in essence, they’re designed for the height of men, when over 90%, I mean 95% of them are women who are cooking in a kitchen. You’ll never look at a kitchen the same way again.
Derrick Weston
Absolutely ridiculous
James Connolly
Somebody’s grandmother who is reaching eight feet up but it’s the absurdities of our world that we because our culture is, in essence, the atmosphere that we have to walk through, we just don’t see it, you know, and it’s a really great book. Check it out. But it’s yeah, it’s a good perspective to kind of see it from. Yeah, well, thank you so much. This is wonderful. Love to keep the conversation going as you’re moving along. Yeah. So Derrick Weston, how can people find you?
Derrick Weston
Yeah, you can find me. I make it pretty easy. Derrick L Weston, on Instagram, on Twitter. You can find the work I’m doing at food and faith.org.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for joining us on the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you like the show, please leave us a review on iTunes, and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter at Sacred Cow.info. See you next time. Thanks for listening.
