In Black and brown communities, lack of food access isn’t just a policy failure — it is a severing from ancestral knowledge and the food sovereignty Black communities once held sacred. This post names food deserts as a continuation of systemic harm, then turns toward the power of community-led reclamation rooted in indigenous wisdom.
There is a particular kind of hunger that has nothing to do with an empty stomach.
It is the hunger you feel standing in a corner store where the produce section is two wilting heads of lettuce and a basket of bruised apples. It is the hunger of a child who has never tasted a mango from a tree, never smelled fresh sorrel steeping on a grandmother’s stove, never learned that bitter melon can cleanse the blood or that moringa leaves hold more iron than spinach ever will.[8]
It is the hunger of a people who once knew — intimately, reverently — exactly what the earth offered them and exactly how to receive it. And then that knowing was taken.
“We call the places where this hunger lives ‘food deserts.’ But that name flattens something much older and much more violent than a geographic gap in grocery store coverage.”
More Than a Policy Failure
Food deserts are typically framed as a market problem — areas where large supermarkets find it unprofitable to operate, leaving low-income communities, disproportionately Black and brown, without reliable access to fresh, nutritious food.[1] The solutions offered are equally market-centered: attract new retailers, issue vouchers, build more distribution chains.
These interventions matter. But they do not touch the root.
Because the root is this: the systematic removal of Black and brown communities from their own food knowledge is not an accident of urban planning. It is a continuation. Colonization severed African and indigenous peoples from their lands, their seed traditions, their healing plants, and the intergenerational knowledge of how to grow, prepare, and honor food as medicine.[2][3] Enslavement weaponized hunger. Redlining concentrated poverty into specific zip codes and then watched as those zip codes were quietly stripped of the infrastructure that sustains life.[4][5]
What we call a food desert is, in its deepest dimension, a site of ongoing dispossession. And dispossession — the severing of a people from what sustains them — is a form of spiritual violence.
When your body cannot access the foods that your ancestors’ bodies were built to recognize, something deeper than nutrition is lost. You are cut off from a living conversation between your cells and the earth that has been ongoing for thousands of years.
The Same Fight on Two Continents
East Harlem & East Africa — one mission, one wound
At Ubuntu Village, we do not see our work in East Harlem and our work in East Africa as separate missions that happen to share a name. They are the same story.
Kenya & Uganda
Women-led households grow food using seed varieties passed down through generations — seeds adapted to the soil, the rainfall, the nutritional needs of the people who cultivated them over centuries.[7] When industrialized agriculture replaces those seeds, communities lose accumulated ecological intelligence their grandmothers held in their hands.
East Harlem, New York
One of the most densely populated urban neighborhoods in the United States — majority Black and Latino — where fresh produce remains inaccessible for many families, while fast food and processed snacks fill every block.[6] Different in form, identical in function: a people cut off from the ancestral knowledge of what nourishment actually means.
This is not coincidence. It is the architecture of the same global system.
Reclaiming Food Sovereignty in Black Communities
And yet. Communities are not waiting.
Across Black and brown neighborhoods in cities throughout the United States, urban gardens are reclaiming concrete lots and rooftops. Elders are leading workshops on traditional plant medicine — teaching younger generations that elderflower can calm inflammation, that ashwagandha root can steady the nervous system, that moringa leaves hold more iron than spinach.[8][9] Community kitchens are gathering people around cooking as a communal act, not a solitary chore — restoring the understanding that preparing food together is a form of care, of ceremony, of belonging.
In the Ubuntu tradition, there is no separation between the nourishment of the body and the nourishment of the community.[10][11] Communal cooking, communal eating, communal growing — these are not programs. They are liturgy.
When we plant a seed that our ancestors knew, we are entering into a relationship that spans centuries. When we teach a child to identify a healing herb, we are placing a thread of ancestral knowledge back into their hands. When we build a community garden in a neighborhood that has been deliberately starved of green space, we are making a declaration: this land belongs to us, and we will make it feed us.
This is food sovereignty. And it is one of the most powerful forms of healing available to us.
Ubuntu Village’s organic farming work in Kenya and Uganda, and our commitment to health equity and community empowerment here at home, are rooted in this same belief: communities already hold the wisdom they need to heal. Our role is to resource, honor, and amplify that wisdom — not to arrive with solutions designed somewhere else.
If you are in a community wrestling with food access, know that your hunger for something different — for the foods your body recognizes, for the knowledge your grandparents carried, for a table that gathers rather than isolates — is not a personal failing. It is a righteous response to a system that deliberately took something from you.
And the reclamation has already begun.
Reclamation doesn’t have to wait for systemic overhaul; it begins at our own tables and in our own dirt.
What is one act of nourishment you can offer — to yourself, or your community — today?
📖 Learn one ancestral recipe
🤝 Find your local community garden
🥕 Share a meal
Support Ubuntu Village’s Work →
I am because we are. And together, we are learning to feed ourselves again.
References
Food Access & Food Deserts
- [1]Ver Ploeg, M., et al. (2009). Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences. USDA Economic Research Service. ers.usda.gov
Colonialism, Land & Food Sovereignty
- [2]Patel, R. (2007). Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Melville House Publishing.
- [3]LaDuke, W. (1999). All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. South End Press.
- [7]La Via Campesina. (2007). Declaration of Nyéléni. viacampesina.org
Redlining & Structural Racism
- [4]McClintock, N. (2011). “From Industrial Garden to Food Desert.” MIT Press.
- [5]Richardson, J., Mitchell, B., & Franco, J. (2019). Shifting Neighborhoods. NCRC. ncrc.org
East Harlem Community Health
- [6]NYC DOHMH. (2018). Community Health Profiles: East Harlem. nyc.gov
Traditional Plant Medicine
- [8]Fahey, J.W. (2005). “Moringa oleifera.” Trees for Life Journal, 1(5). semanticscholar.org
- [9]WHO. (2019). Global Report on Traditional and Complementary Medicine. who.int
Ubuntu Philosophy & African Thought
- [10]Mbiti, J.S. (1969). African Religions and Philosophy. Heinemann.
- [11]Tutu, D. (1999). No Future Without Forgiveness. Doubleday.
again.”
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Rooted in East Harlem and reaching across the globe, Ubuntu Village Inc. empowers communities to truly thrive. We believe sustainability is both environmental and spiritual—which is why we combine renewable energy initiatives, such as our Solar Power Project, with programs in digital literacy, holistic wellness, and ancestral wisdom. Discover how we’re lighting up the world at UbuntuVillageUSA.Org.
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