ICE officials raided numerous Mississippi food processing plants on August 7, arresting 680 mostly Latin-American workers in what marked the largest workplace sting in over ten years.

The raids happened just as Donald Trump was arriving at El Paso, Texas, the majority-Latinx city where a white nationalist linked to the white supremacist theory of a “Hispanic invasion” was charged in a shooting that left 22 people dead in the border city.

Coordinated attacks by 600 ICE agents took place in Bay Springs, Carthage, Canton, Morton, Pelahatchie, and Sebastapol. Family and friends watched as arrested workers filled several buses at a Koch Foods Inc. plant in Morton, 40 miles east of Jackson. They were taken to a military hangar to be “processed”, i.e. be interviewed about their immigration status and have their identification documents reviewed.

Entire communities are reeling in pain today as loved ones are torn from them violently and permanently. Mothers will go to bed tonight without their children, brothers and sisters will not know whether they will ever see each other again, and children are left without parents to care for them.

For a community already under attack by informal white supremacist organizations, to have ICE and the full power of the executive branch of the US government targeting them is devastating.

Despite the fear and shock brought to all of our immigrant and indigenous migrant communities, food system workers, farmers, and organizers nationwide unite in solidarity with the workers in Mississippi. Our siblings working to put food on their table and your table in Mississippi are the latest casualties of a system that attempts to destroy our will. But we will not only survive —we will thrive as our resolve becomes focused on “our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

• We demand an immediate moratorium on all immigration enforcement activities until Congress approves a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
• We demand that all workers captured in today’s raids be immediately released.
• We demand that all camps where children are being held be immediately shuttered and the children reunited with their families.

Until this is done we are all in a state of siege and none of us is safe. FCWA and HEAL have established a “bail fund” to help food workers and their families when they’re arrested by ICE.

Click here to visit HEAL Food Alliance and see the full list of signatories.

Donate to the Emergency Fund for Detained Workers 

The post Joint Statement: Defending Immigrant Workers Means Defending Us All appeared first on Real Food Media.

Our food system needs radical transformation. It also needs healing from a long history of oppression and exploitation. This healing can only happen if we create spaces for honest conversation, trust, and relationship-building across the food chain. That’s what makes HEAL Food Alliance—a multi-sector, multi-racial coalition building collective power—so special.

Christina and Tanya—a.k.a. Real Food Media’s official (unofficial) Midwest Contingent—had the honor of participating in HEAL’s 2nd Annual Summit in Cleveland, Ohio, last month. As the hotel lobby began buzzing with energy and heartfelt hugs, it felt like a family reunion descended on Cleveland. We were just plain giddy to connect with so many of our partners including Good Food Purchasing Program coalitions from around the country, the Center for Good Food Purchasing, the Food Chain Workers Alliance, and fabulous Real Food Media advisors Neshani Jani, Dara Cooper, and Anim Steel. (Little did we know, Dara, co-founder of the Black Food & Justice Alliance, would soon be awarded the James Beard Leadership Award—congrats Dara!)

This year’s theme was Good Food Rising! and it was in full effect. This was authentic movement-building: issues framed by community leaders; stories of both trauma and triumph; and delicious, real food. (A big shout out to Rid-All Green Partnership, a 26-acre farm and education center in Cleveland’s Lee-Miles neighborhood, for providing us with such lovingly prepared food and an inspiring—if a bit chilly!—farm tour.) 

Perhaps most powerful? Naming names. As many participants noted, there are few “food” spaces where words like capitalism and white supremacy are used without apology. Where land reform is a banner struggle. And where the prison-industrial complex is called out for its role in perpetuating a violent food system and foreclosing community-based alternatives. And as both a grounding and a reminder of our collective history, there was the 80-foot-long food justice timeline created by Minneapolis organizers and shipped to the Summit for participants to interact with.

Needless to say, we came away with a lot to think about—and work on—to better support this growing movement of movements. 

Follow HEAL Food Alliance on Facebook and Twitter check out more photos from the Summit. HEAL is now on Instagram too!

The post HEALing Together: Report Back from HEAL Food Alliance’s 2nd Annual Summit appeared first on Real Food Media.

This past weekend, thousands of people around the world from Oakland to Lagos opened their homes, places of worship, and collective spaces to share food and stories with allies and strangers as part of Dream Defenders’ #dayofdinners.

We joined forces with HEAL Food Alliance to gather our community in and around the Bay Area to pull up a chair and pass a plate with us. We hosted our community dinner at the Alena Museum in West Oakland and held our breath to see if people were going to show up – in person! – and connect about what matters to us over a meal. (PSST: it worked!) We shared our migration dishes – food that reminded us of home, family, tradition, or comfort. After some moments of guided reflection, we got ready to share. Each person stood up in a room full of strangers (twenty-something of us) and, with strength in vulnerability, shared the story of their dish. Some stories evoked laughter, others evoked tears.

We even had the pleasure of having Kwesi the Dreamer, a spoken word artist, at our dinner who not only shared his food story, but two original poems as well. We learned so much about each other through the act of sharing food (before we even tried any of it!) and were reminded once again of the power food has to bring people together.

The food itself was delicious, but it all tasted better knowing the personal significance it had to the person who made it. A slice of mango cake was a memory of a mother making sure her child was well-fed. Shepherd’s pie was a journey to find out where one’s family came from. Cauliflower gratin was a generations’ old tradition in times of hardship of creating a variety of dishes from one ingredient.

Our hope with Day of Dinners was to change the narrative by sharing our individual stories, to build community with neighbors we might not have known otherwise. I’d say this one goes down in the books as a success.

The post Day of Dinners appeared first on Real Food Media.