food and race

Titled the “Race and Food Justice Panel,” Monday’s lecture examined food and agriculture in terms of their historical and current impacts on the city. The lecture also explored how food helped shaped present racial relationships within the city.

The panel included local activist Oya Amakisi; Kami Pothukuchi, professor of Urban Studies at Wayne State University; and Anthony Hatinger, garden production coordinator for the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation.

Sucher said the panel aimed to look at social justice from a unique lens and to push students to look at race and hunger in Detroit from an angle they might not have thought about before.

“We just really wanted to focus on different areas of food justice,” she said. “Social justice doesn’t just happen one way, you can look at the same problem and have a lot of different solutions for it.”

...Pothukuchi, who was raised in Mumbai, India, employs her work in architecture and community planning to find links between communities and their food systems. Similar to Hatinger, Pothukuchi noted the importance of addressing Detroit’s larger problems including water shutoffs, housing shortages and poor land quality.

“We don’t really plan for food, that thinking is shifting partly due to the work my colleagues and I have done in raising awareness between the links between community planning and food systems and how integral those links are and how many community goals you can advance by intervening in the food system,” she said.

The dialogue brought in the panelists’ backgrounds and their wide array of experiences to help explain barriers to food accessibility within the city.

Hatinger said power-holders like politicians and corporations oppressed residents by controlling the distribution and access to food and thus limiting the resources of the general public. He added that learning about the dynamics of power and giving food resources back to the people is what propels him to do his work with agriculture in the city.

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