She became a board member of the New York Botanical Gardens to help Bronx neighborhoods turn their empty lots into community gardens. Washington has since become a leader in New York City’s urban-farming and food-justice movements-having empowered marginalized communities to grow their own fresh and nutritious produce for over three decades. “I realized that it was about more than growing food,” Washington says. Around the same time, Washington, then a physical therapist, started learning more about the intersection of healthy food access with diet-related diseases, racism, and poverty. Three years later, she helped start a community garden in the empty lot across the street through an urban farming initiative by the New York Botanical Gardens. Washington tells SELF she credits this "tomato that changed my world” with sparking her passion for growing food. Karen Washington hated tomatoes until she tasted one fresh off the vine in her own backyard garden in the Bronx in 1985.
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I try to break down Indian dishes that might seem intimidating at first to cook, and also show how to use every part of a vegetable-like using scraps to make your own stock. I began shooting cooking videos during quarantine, and now it is something that gives me great joy.
The James Beard Restaurant Relief Fund was incredibly helpful to get small businesses back on their feet, as well as the JBF Food and Beverage Investment Fund for Black and Indigenous Americans, which you can still donate to.ĭuring the pandemic, we’ve seen how important it is to combat food waste, as we couldn’t safely go to the grocery store as we usually did. It exacerbated inequalities that have always been there and has shown that we need a better safety net for these workers. SELF: How has the pandemic influenced your work in the food world? Lakshmi: We know that COVID disproportionately affected Black and brown people, and many restaurant workers lost their jobs in the pandemic. Anti-racism and social justice is not a “set it and forget it” effort it is a constant daily practice to try to alleviate suffering in the world and create equal opportunity in whatever way we can. I’d like to see a lot more women of color in leadership roles at restaurants across the country.Īs a UN Goodwill Ambassador and ACLU Artist Ambassador for immigrants’ rights and women’s rights, I try to shine a spotlight on injustice wherever I can and to encourage direct action. Representation matters, and seeing women who look like you in leadership roles in the culinary world (and other professions too) is endlessly helpful. I work with a few young women who have gone on to do incredible things. SELF: What would you like people to know about your mission? Lakshmi: As a woman of color who came up in the industry without a clear mentor, it’s always been my goal to help young POC realize their potential. For Lakshmi, it’s a personal story and a universal one. In August, she will publish her first children’s book, Tomatoes for Neela, about a young girl who bonds with her grandmother back in India through a shared love of their family’s food.
Lakshmi will continue to tell these stories, as Taste the Nation has been renewed for a second season. I hope you are as inspired and transformed by their work as I have been. Hearing these thought-and action-leaders talk about how they’ve been reshaping the food space has been like witnessing a revolution. The ability to access food that fulfills us physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially needs to be a human right in practice as well. What is healthy eating if so many of us simply do not have enough to eat? What is healthy eating if our food systems irrevocably harm the planet or the people preparing the products that line grocery store shelves? What is healthy eating if our relationship with food creates or springs from deep emotional wounds? In talking to this group of people to reframe what we consider healthy eating, my ultimate takeaway is that we need to move toward the idea that food is a human right in more than just theory. It has not so much created inequity and suffering in our food systems and culture as it has exposed these ills, exacerbating them to the point that they are impossible to ignore. It has also prompted a crucial reckoning with our essential needs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused much devastation.
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