Food Proves Powerful Connection Point

For many Americans, growing food is a transactional process. Food is planted, harvested, eaten and then the cycle renews. And for Black and Brown Americans living in cities where a lack of grocery stores, planting space and nutrition education leads to health disparities, it can be even easier to feel removed from not only the practice of farming, but the cultural elements behind it, too.

Hanifa Adjuman stands in front of a DBCFSN school garden in Detroit.

“Part of my work is changing that attitude, that negative response that we have when it comes to our relationship to agriculture and understanding that agriculture for us is much more than growing food, but more importantly, agriculture for us did not begin with our enslavement,” said “Mama” Hanifa Adjuman, when we spoke with her on the topic.

“It's important to see and understand how we as a people, with everything that we have gone through, have been able to maintain and create and expand on what it means to be human in a space that does not value our humanity. What better way than through food? Because food is the one thing that connects us all.

Adjuman is a co-founder of and the education and outreach directive at the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network (DBCFSN),  a Strengthening Cities partner that builds self-reliance, food security and food justice in Detroit’s Black community. Its work includes urban farming, promoting healthy eating and directing youth toward careers in food-related fields.

We spoke with Adjuman to learn more about the role that culture and history play in food sovereignty, especially for Black Americans. Going beyond just ensuring equitable access to fresh foods, food sovereignty emphasizes access to culturally appropriate foods and the knowledge of how to use them. For Hanifa and organizations like DBCFSN, work in food access is incomplete without those elements.

“It’s about bridging those gaps in our understanding of food, foods that are culturally specific to us as a people, and knowing why it's important for us to understand those relationships and also why it is important as we engage in this food sovereignty movement,” Adjuman said.

Like many organizations that Healthy Futures supports, DBCFSN focuses on kids and teens. As an experienced educator, Adjuman leads DBCFSN’s youth engagement programs where children learn about nutrition, gardening and food sovereignty. Those programs are where discussions about culture and urban agriculture begin.

Adjuman speaks at the Rite Aid Healthy Futures Strengthening Cities Summit in 2023

In DBCFSN’s recent Food Warriors program session, students participated in a unit on traditional African harvest festivals where they learned about how and why specific foods are celebrated in African culture. They also got a chance to taste traditional foods, like a black-eyed pea fritter that is known in Ghana, West Africa as akara. They also learned that black-eyed peas are an indigenous Africa food. 

 Even when the foods are unfamiliar, Adjuman said she encourages students to try them. Often, they enjoy them more than they thought they might, like in the case of jollof rice, a spicy tomato-based rice dish found across West Africa.

“One of the kids came back three times,” Adjuman said, laughing.

For Adjuman, one of the most important steps to reconnecting kids to the human elements of agriculture is simply stepping outside. DBCFSN partners with schools in Detroit to plant gardens where students can spend quality time up close with plants and nature, something that can be hard to do while living in the city. While outside, Adjuman and other program instructors introduce kids to the practice of planting and the intentionality that comes along with it.

Adjuman says that as simple as it is to bring kids to a garden, the impact can be powerful.

“I will never ever forget the kindergartner who, as we sat in the circle on the ground and we were sharing the sounds that we heard, looked up at me and said ‘Mama Hanifa, I heard the ants walking on the grass.’ Now this might be debatable. Did she actually hear ants walking on the grass? Debatable. But what I know is that something deeply connected in her.”

Adjuman shares more about the crops at the school garden

From gardening to classroom lessons, DBCFSN works to ensure that sessions are centered in the cultural and historical elements that give the work greater depth. This shows up through the inclusion of the Nguzo Saba, also known as the seven principles. Most associated with the celebration of Kwanzaa, the Nguzo Saba represent traditional African values that although they are celebrated and highlighted for seven days of the year—December 31st through January 1st, serve as guides as to how we should engage with one another daily. These values include the principles of Umoja, which means unity, and Umima, which means collective work and responsibility. 

“Those values are what anchors our Food Warriors programming, and so every session we recite those seven principles,” Adjuman said. “And as we are going through our sessions, whether it be a class, an activity or working in the garden, we're reflecting back on those seven principles.”

Adjuman emphasized that community members of all ages – not only the youth – are integral to renewing the connections between culture and food.

“We have to have the elders informing the young, but it's a reciprocal process,” she said “We as elders have to be open and receptive to what it is the younger generations also bring to this work. It's about guiding, but it's also about being open to the exploration of the possibilities that can become.”

Perhaps one of the most meditative ways to understand why Adjuman and others in food sovereignty emphasize the importance of reconnecting food to culture is through the idea of Sankofa, an expression that comes from the Akan people of Ghana in West Africa. In its most literal translation it means “It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” 

Sankofa’s most recognizable symbol is the image of a bird looking to its back while holding an egg in its mouth.

“The symbology in the bird looking back is reminding us that we must look into our past and bring from our past those things that are good and positive that we can use in the present, but that will also help to inform our future,” Adjuman said “It also means that we have to look back and see those errors or those mistakes so that we will not repeat them.”

Adjuman and DBCFSN are not the only farmers to tap into the power of Sankofa and its relevance to urban agriculture work. Roughly 500 miles away from Detroit in Philadelphia’s southwest corner, another Healthy Futures partner has made the word an important part of their mission.

Bartram’s Garden, a public park, is home to the Sankofa Community Farm, a 3.5-acre community-based crop farm. As its intentional name would imply, Sankofa Farm also emphasizes the need to reflect when building for the future. The farm offers over 60 different crops and wild foods and follows traditional African agriculture techniques.

Nestled between project housing and the Schuylkill River, Sankofa is one of the only open green spaces available for public use in the area. It also offers the neighboring communities a rare chance to engage with urban agriculture. Besides the crop farm itself, community members can also plant their own beds where they’re free to grow whatever they wish.

The entrance to Sankofa Farm

One of Sankofa’s main goals is to reintroduce culturally relevant foods to those of African descent.

The farm is home to plants like the African moringa tree, a “miracle tree” known by many indigenous peoples for its nutritious and medicinal qualities. Beside it, you might also find sorghum, a corn-like crop that is integral to everyday life for many East and West African countries.

Each year, Sankofa produces over 15,000 pounds of fresh foods that are distributed back into the community. With so much being grown annually, the farm certainly doesn’t run itself. That job falls to Sankofa Community Farm’s dedicated team of staff and volunteers.

One farmer, a white man from the Northeast, was once a science teacher, but his passion for equity and the Earth led him to Sankofa. Now, he helps lead a farm rooted in reconnecting the community to its food and ancestry.

Another, a Black Southerner and fourth-generation farmer, brings his own spiritually based approach to the work, too. Together, the pair are an energetic and deeply authentic team that inspires the youth and community around them to engage with food, ancestry and agriculture.

Like Adjuman, Sankofa Community Farm wants to see more food reaching the communities who need it – and the focus on the cultural history that makes it meaningful, too.

As Adjuman puts it, “We have had a relationship to nature, a relationship to Earth for millennia and that relationship kind of guides and shapes how we see the world. So, when we talk about food, we're not just talking about food as something that nourishes us physically, but our relationship to food also has an emotional and a spiritual component.”