Episode 153: White Spaces and Food Racism
September 19, 2023
About the Podcast
Today, Clancy speaks Kate Gardner Burt, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Lehman College, City University of New York and a registered dietitian nutritionist. You won’t want to miss their discussion about how systemic racial bias and whiteness impact the dietetics profession and food systems.
About Kate Gardner Burt
Kate Gardner Burt, PhD, RDN is an associate professor at Lehman College, City University of New York and a registered dietitian nutritionist who studies how systemic racial bias and whiteness impact the dietetics and food systems.
Discussion Takeaways
- At the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kate became more aware of systemic and institutionalized racism, and her own white privilege. As she began to learn and reflect, she desired to translate the national conversations and principles of the Black Lives Matter movement toward initiating progress within the dietetics profession.
- Kate runs the Burt Research Lab, at Lehman College in New York City, with the goal of uncovering and exploring the ways in which institutional and systemic racism, and ethnic and racial inequalities, exist within the dietetics profession.
- Her recent work explores the bias of the popular Mediterranean diet, in regards to the scientific instruction and the way in which the health advice is communicated to people.
- The Mediterranean diet is an eating pattern followed by only a small portion of countries located in the Mediterranean region—it is not a way of eating that transverses the entire region, especially Northern African and Middle Eastern countries.
- While the Mediterranean diet pattern of eating is correlated with health, researchers are not sure the diet actually causes health.
- The current nutrition advice to follow the Mediterranean diet is an idealized version of the eating pattern.
- It is important to ask—who is defining health and an idealized diet?
- There is no one idealized diet. We need to embrace that people eat different foods, and there are different patterns of healthy eating. There does not need to be just one “right” way of healthy eating.
- Dietetics professionals need to bridge the gap between what nutrition advice they are giving people to follow and what people’s lived experiences are.
- White privilege and socio-economic privilege bias nutrition recommendations.
- In order to affect change, communities need to be engaged to determine what they want instead of others entering in and telling the community what they want or need.
- There has been growing critique toward CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and Farmers Markets as white dominated spaces, with white leaders deciding these initiatives should be added to communities yet these initiatives are not want the community wants or needs.
- To do the work of dismantling racism and bias in the dietetics profession, dietetics professionals need to be willing to acknowledge mistakes so as to not further perpetuate bias.
- The Burt Research Lab conducted a brief study which found that dietetic students feel unprepared to serve a diverse population.
- In the study, students expressed that their education and training lacked different perspectives and did not align with what they ultimately were experiencing in their professional practice.
- It is important to acknowledge all the ways different people and groups have contributed to our food system.
- For example, the Black Panthers started the first School Breakfast Program in the United States, in Oakland California in the late 1960s. “Breakfast for Children” was so successful, that the FBI actually shut it down because they feared the program would make people sympathetic to the causes. A few years later, the federal government launched their own version of the program which is now the National School Breakfast and Lunch Program.
- Food Dignity means that everyone has the right to healthy, culturally appropriate foods of their choosing, within a system that promotes free choice. Food Dignity is food freedom.
- Dietetics professionals have the power to advocate for accessibility to and affordability of healthy foods. There has been advocacy within the profession to promote accessibility, but more could be done to advocate for affordability. In addition to advocating for SNAP, dietetic professionals should push for a higher minimum wage and champion policies that get more money directly to people, so they have more money for food freedom.
#1 tip to improve access to healthy food
- There is no one idealized diet. We need to embrace that people eat different foods, and there are different patterns of healthy eating. There does not need to be just one “right” way of healthy eating.
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