Dr. Niesha Douglas of Fayetteville State University and Dr. Marianne LeGreco of the University of North Carolina - Greensboro are the authors of Everybody Eats: Communication and the Paths to Food Justice. The book focuses on food insecurity and food access programs in Greensboro, North Carolina. Between the years of 2009 and 2019, Greensboro was ranked on the Food Action and Research Center’s list of major U.S. cities experiencing food hardship, and it topped the list in 2015. When the two professors met, momentum was already growing to address issues of food disparities in Greensboro.

Some “micro-interventions” were centered around the historically Black neighborhood of Warnersville, which the county’s epidemiologist had studied as having high levels of both poverty and chronic health issues.

NIESHA DOUGLAS: “One of the issues was food, and the access to food, and how many grocery stores are within a one mile radius. As well as how people get to the grocery stores, what are they eating, or what are they picking up, and do they have enough money. Also during that time community gardens were starting to pick up a little bit more steam, where people were wanting to grow their own food. Not because they were hungry, but because of health reasons. They wanted to go back to gardening in a way that would save them money, but also would benefit them health-wise.” 

MARIANNE LEGRECO: “Not long after that is when we started making news, with the FRAC headlines. We were really well-positioned as community groups to keep those conversations going. We had already started to speak with folks in the neighborhood who had identified things like urban gardens and community farms, mobile farmers markets, community stores, [and] better walking paths as things that they wanted to see in their neighborhoods. And that's how Niesha and I met. We had started to work on implementing some of the farmers markets and mobile farmers markets ideas, she lived in the neighborhood and she had been invited to become a part of some of the interventions themselves. Niesha was getting her PhD at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and I was working at that time as an assistant professor, and then eventually an associate professor, at UNC Greensboro.” 

The professors look at the successes and failures of this decade of interventions through the lens of Communication Studies. 

ML: “People often underestimate the role that communication plays in the community engagement, in the mobilizing of the resources, in the sustaining of the conversations. There were a couple of times when newcomers to the partnerships would be facilitating conversations, and they would introduce me and say, ‘This is Marianne. She's a communication professor at UNC-G. She manages our social media.’ And I would say ‘Wait, wait, there's a little bit more to it than that.’”

ND: “Particularly in Warnersville  there was a sort of a recurring theme where people would come into the Warnersville neighborhood and say ‘Oh, you guys need this. And so this is what we're going to do.’ And then after it didn't work, they [would] leave. There's a residual effect that happens when people come in, and, and try to create something and it doesn't work. Because I was from the neighborhood, and I understood the culture of the neighborhood, I knew a little bit more. I knew what would work and what won't work, because we've seen it before. The residents would be very leery of having anybody come in and try to create something when they weren't involved in the process. They are very active within the neighborhood, and they want to be involved. They want to preserve – number one – the history of the neighborhood and the integrity of the people that live in a neighborhood. They also do want to see change, but they want to see change on their own terms.”

Interventions described in Everybody Eats include the Warnersville Community Garden, the Mobile Oasis Farmers Market, and the Renaissance Community Co-Op. The authors recount the work of planning groups like the Warnersville Community Food Task Force and the Guilford Food Council. Some chapters cover initiatives that may not – on first glance – seem to relate directly to food hardship, like the Ethnosh restaurant tour, the Downtown Greensboro Food Truck Pilot Project, and the incubator kitchen Kitchen Connects GSO.

ML: “Addressing food insecurity is not only about addressing food access, it's about addressing intersections between access and poverty. Some of those programs help to address the poverty side of things by allowing people less financially-risky entry points into food markets like through the food trucks. It also encouraged people to buy food and support local restaurants, and to support restaurants that are owned by immigrants and first generation folks who are serving the food from the cuisines from the background and culture that they come from. But then also creating some of those lower-cost entry points, like through our kitchen incubator programs. So that people could test out whether or not they wanted to start up a food business, without having to take on such huge financial risks as opening up their own kitchen to decide whether or not then they could sell their jams and jellies and sauces on a larger scale. So I think it's about changing the culture of the way that we talk about food, that when we are willing to test out some of these ideas, we're continuing to center food as something that's important to our communities and our cultures.”

As Dr. Douglas and Dr. LeGreco reflect on the decade of work that they’ve facilitated and also researched, they are starting to see the impact of these programs and conversations.

ML: “Honestly, I think the way that the interventions shaped the bigger picture conversations around food is the single biggest impact that all of those interventions had. Because if you look today, some of them are very different than when they started out. Some of them have completely different partnerships, some of them are on hiatus, some of them have ended completely. At the same time, everyone, across the board in Greensboro and Guilford County, will acknowledge that we now speak differently about food and food security than we did 10 years ago. We know a lot more about how food systems work. And I think most importantly, we know more about how to work in partnership to create some of the networks that are needed to make sure that people have access to food. For me, this really came into sharp relief during the pandemic … We were able to engage the community so quickly that within a week we were able to do things like implement advanced ordering and drive-thru pickup systems at two of our farmers markets, so they never even had to close down during the lockdowns around COVID.”

Since topping the FRAC food hardship list in 2015, Greensboro fell to number 14 in 2018, the most recent study year. But the process of writing a book about some of these food justice strategies has brought up more questions than answers.

ND: “The more we thought about it, we said, ‘Well, is it really a food issue, more than it is a poverty issue?’ Should we not address the fact that people are still making $7.25 an hour and still are paying $800-plus a month in rent, or still cannot afford childcare? Could we really say that food is the issue if we didn’t address those problems first? I know when people make more money, or people have more residual income, that they do spend more money on food, they want to make healthier choices. It's something that we, as a collective, as a community, could have deep and meaningful conversations about. Because anytime we bring up poverty, nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to talk about raising the minimum wage. Nobody wants to talk about income-based housing. Nobody wants to talk about affordable health care … You can't put a BandAid on a gunshot wound. Those are the kinds of conversations that I’m willing to lead, that I’m willing to be a part of. I would like to see other things happen surrounding the conversation of food.”

More on the history of the Warnersville neighborhood here, and here. 

Listen to the story on this episode of Earth Eats.