The Color of Food

This spring Natasha Bowens, an urban farmer and the blogger behind Brown Girl Farming and the multimedia project The Color of Food, published a travelogue, of sorts, that chronicles her time spent driving across the country talking to farmers of color. The book is extraordinary. In giving voice to these practitioners, it ends up giving voice to many of this country’s undertold stories: forced migration of indigenous populations, Japanese internment, Hmong immigration and resettlement, Black resettlement and African American land rights, and more.

The book is subtitled “Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming” and the word resilience can be felt on every page (and seen on every farm she visits). These farmers are not just doing the incredibly hard work of growing food with care, but they are also swimming upstream to hold onto their land, hold onto their history and do it within a food system that has often discriminated against them, stolen their land, and forced them to the margins.

An additional extra special feature of this book is that it features a current FoodCorps service member, Tyrone Thompson of the North Leupp Family Farm, and a FoodCorps alumna Catherine (Marlene) Yanez, of La Semilla Food Center. We’re so proud to count them as part of the FoodCorps team.

To learn more:

• Read Natasha Bowens’ Color of Food pieces on Civil Eats
• Read about Tyrone and Catherine in the book (buy the book! It’s worth every penny)
• Watch this short video interview that Catherine did for FoodCorps on the very first day of her service 4 years ago
• Read a short blurb about Tyrone on our website
• Visit La Semilla’s website