Sugar & Soil: How Food Apartheid Erased Our Ancestors’ Diabetes Prevention

Ancestral Wisdom · Community Power · Public Health

“Our grandmothers never had Type 2 diabetes until we stopped eating what our land grew.”

Type 2 diabetes is now the leading cause of death among Black Americans. That sentence should stop us. Not because Black people have weak bodies — but because our ancestors did not have this disease at these rates, on this land, in this number. The epidemic did not arrive with our genetics. It arrived with a system. A system that took our land, erased our food, replaced our grandmothers’ kitchen gardens with bodegas, and then called the result a food desert — as if the land had simply gone dry on its own.

Karen Washington, a Bronx farmer and food justice activist, gave us the more honest word: food apartheid. Not a desert — a deliberate exclusion. And when we understand food apartheid as the structural cause of the diabetes epidemic, we can understand food sovereignty as the medicine.

What Our Ancestors Ate

Before the Middle Passage. Before the plantation. Before the bodegas and the dollar stores. Our ancestors on the African continent ate in a way that modern science is only now beginning to document with the tools of glycemic indices and clinical biomarkers — but which their bodies already knew.

Traditional East African diets centered on fermented porridges, cowpeas, bitter greens, sorghum, finger millet, and yams. A review of the glycemic index of traditional Kenyan foods found that meals built on beans and whole maize eaten with cowpea leaves fell consistently in the low-GI range — meaning they released glucose slowly, keeping blood sugar stable. Research published in South Africa reviewed 46 studies on indigenous African foods and their relationship to Type 2 diabetes, finding that African vegetables, fermented foods, and tubers contained natural alpha-glucosidase inhibitors — the same mechanism targeted by some of today’s most prescribed diabetes medications.

Our grandmothers were not doing this because a nutritionist told them to. They were doing it because the land taught them, and they taught their daughters, and their daughters taught theirs. Finger millet’s high fiber content slowed glucose absorption. Bitter greens — like the Vernonia amygdalina our ancestors in Nigeria knew as bitter leaf — carried compounds that modulated blood sugar in ways that only received a clinical name in the last few decades. (We wrote about this in more depth here: Bitter Leaf and Blood Sugar: What Vernonia amygdalina Knows That Metformin Doesn’t Say.)

The ancestral diet was not a trendy eating plan. It was a long clinical trial, run over thousands of years, with outcomes that protected communities from the chronic disease we now call an epidemic.

How the Land Was Taken — and What Left With It

To understand the diabetes epidemic in Black communities, you have to understand what happened to Black farmers.

After Reconstruction, the promise of land was broken. Sharecropping replaced it — an arrangement in which Black families farmed someone else’s land in exchange for housing and a share of the crop, designed to keep them economically dependent and landless. Then came the Great Migration north, driven by Jim Crow terror, pulling millions away from the soil they had cultivated for generations. And then — systematically, for decades — the United States Department of Agriculture did what it was never supposed to do: it discriminated.

Black farmers were routinely denied USDA loans, extension services, and disaster relief that their White counterparts received as a matter of course. The result was land loss on a scale that beggars belief: research estimates that Black farmers lost $326 billion worth of land over the course of the 20th century. In 1920, there were nearly a million Black farmers. Today, Black farmers make up roughly 2% of all U.S. farmers and hold less than 1% of farmland.

A 2020 study in Frontiers in Communication argued that the erasure of Black farming from mainstream narratives has contributed directly to diet-related health disparities. When we lost the land, we did not just lose property. We lost the soil that grew our food. We lost the seed knowledge. We lost the relationship between the earth and the body that had protected us for centuries.

When our grandmothers moved north, they moved into neighborhoods where no one was growing sorghum. Where the grocery stores hadn’t followed. Where the corner store carried what was profitable to stock — and what was profitable was what was processed, shelf-stable, sugar-dense, and cheap.

Food Apartheid Named What “Food Desert” Hid

The term “food desert” has always been a problem. It describes a landscape — as if the emptiness happened naturally, as if no one made a decision. Karen Washington, who farms in the Bronx and has organized around food justice for decades, coined “food apartheid” in 2018 precisely to name the structure: the racial and economic decisions that determine who has access to nourishing food and who does not. “Food desert,” she said, was “an outsider term” — one that called places desolate rather than calling out who made them that way.

We have written about the material consequences of food apartheid in our community — the neighborhoods where, as we explored in What the Candy Aisle Doesn’t Tell You, bodegas outnumber supermarkets and sugary snacks are what’s abundant. But the diabetes connection is worth naming plainly.

According to federal data from the HHS Office of Minority Health, 12.1% of non-Hispanic Black adults had diagnosed diabetes in 2024, compared with 6.9% of non-Hispanic White adults. Black adults die from diabetes at a rate of 42.7 per 100,000, compared with 30.4 overall. These are not genetic facts. They are structural outcomes. They are what happens when the food that protected a community is replaced — through policy, through discrimination, through economic exclusion — with the food that harms it.

This is not a health failure. It is an engineered result.

The Science That Confirms What Our Grandmothers Knew

Science is finally arriving where our grandmothers already lived.

The South African researchers who reviewed 46 studies on indigenous African foods found that these foods did not just “fit” a diabetic diet as a modern medical construct — they actively inhibited the enzymes that convert carbohydrates to glucose. They reduced inflammatory markers. They carried protective compounds that have since been isolated, named, and in some cases turned into patents by pharmaceutical companies who did not credit the grandmothers who first boiled the leaves.

Kenyan research on the glycemic index of traditional foods found that the low-GI pattern was not an accident of poverty — it was a feature of food systems built around stability, community, and the long relationship between a people and their land. Teff. Finger millet. Cowpeas with bitter greens. Fermented porridges that introduced beneficial bacteria before anyone had heard the word “probiotic.”

The Nigerian New Yam Festival — the Iri Ji — is not just ceremony. As we explored in New Yam, Old Memory, the rhythms of harvest, feast, and rest that structured ancestral food culture also structured the body’s relationship with glucose. Seasonal eating. Fasting periods. Foods eaten with intention and in relationship. The body was never meant to eat the same ultra-processed products every day, designed for shelf life, not human life.

When we understand this, the diabetes epidemic stops looking like a mystery and starts looking like what it is: the predictable outcome of replacing a protective food system with a harmful one, in communities that had no structural power to resist.

Food Sovereignty Is the Return Path

Food sovereignty is not about nostalgia. It is not a call to return to conditions of scarcity. It is the assertion that communities have the right to define their own food systems — to grow, to seed-save, to name what nourishes them, to pass that knowledge to their children — without that knowledge being overwritten by a market that profits from their illness.

In northeastern Uganda, the Karamojong women we write about in Before the Granary Was a Statistic have held sorghum seeds through drought, displacement, and development pressure. They have kept the seed not because a program asked them to, but because they understand what their grandmothers understood: that the seed is the future of the body. In Kenya, women tending ancestral kitchen gardens know something that the global diabetes treatment market is not designed to know: that prevention is free when you grow it yourself.

As we argued in Food Sovereignty Is Health Sovereignty, the structures that shape what communities eat are the structures that shape their disease burden. Food apartheid did not produce the diabetes epidemic in a vacuum. It produced it deliberately, through the same mechanisms that took the land — and food sovereignty reverses those mechanisms from the root.

The return to ancestral food is not a diet trend. It is a political act. It is a health intervention with a 10,000-year evidence base, practiced by grandmothers who did not need a clinical trial to know that what grew from the earth was what kept the body whole.

What We Can Do

Ubuntu Village’s work in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria is rooted in this understanding: that the communities who have maintained their relationship with traditional food systems carry knowledge that the global health establishment is still trying to catch up to. Our role is not to teach communities to eat better. Our role is to support the structures — gardens, seed networks, ancestral food education — through which they teach themselves and each other what they have always known.

For those of us in the diaspora, food sovereignty looks like: learning what our grandmothers grew. Finding community gardens rooted in traditional seeds. Supporting Black and Indigenous farmers. Choosing bitter greens over processed snacks not as an act of discipline, but as an act of reconnection. And naming the system that made this choice harder than it should be — food apartheid — so that we can dismantle it rather than manage around it.

The diabetes epidemic in Black communities is not a medical mystery. It is a historical record. And food sovereignty is how we write a different ending.

This post is for educational and cultural purposes. Ubuntu Village does not provide medical advice. If you or a loved one is managing diabetes or a related condition, please work with a qualified health care provider who honors your whole self.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health. Diabetes and African Americans. 2024.
2. Otieno W, et al. Glycemic index and glycemic load of selected traditional Kenyan foods. Foods. 2021.
3. Agribook. Indigenous African foods and their relationship to Type 2 diabetes: A systematic review.
4. Washington, Karen. It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid. Guernica. 2018.
5. Union of Concerned Scientists. Black Farmers Have Been Systematically Excluded from USDA Programs.
6. BET Staff. Black Farmers Lost $326 Billion of Land in the 20th Century. BET.
7. Finney C, Ross L. The erasure of Black farming from mainstream narratives. Frontiers in Communication. 2020.

Related Reading

• Bitter Leaf and Blood Sugar: What Vernonia amygdalina Knows That Metformin Doesn’t Say
• What the Candy Aisle Doesn’t Tell You
• New Yam, Old Memory
• Before the Granary Was a Statistic: Karamojong Women and Sorghum Seeds
• Food Sovereignty Is Health Sovereignty