Milwaukee Food Council Hosts First Food Justice Summit

Participants, volunteers and community organizers gathered at round tables with food, refreshments, notepads and business cards for networking at Milwaukee Area Technical College’s downtown campus in late April. With their first Milwaukee Food Justice Summit, the Milwaukee Food Council hosted a public event to foster a dialogue on food justice and to envision a way forward for food systems in Milwaukee and surrounding areas.

The Milwaukee Food Justice Summit hosted a diverse crowd in the 6^th floor conference center at MATC, where community members participated in discussions, activities and presentations about heath insecurities, racial disparities and collective action. Other topics addressed local food systems, systemic change, segregation and land dispossession. Vendors catered full tables of vegetarian foods from Twisted Plants, a full line of fresh juice and refreshments from Kuumba Juice & Coffee, and intricately designed fruit platters from Kreative Fruits.

The Milwaukee Food Council defined food justice as “catering a fair and inclusive food system where everyone can access nutritious food and where social, economic, and racial disparities are actively addressed and mitigated,” Director Solana Patterson-Ramos said during introductions. She said the definition is dynamic, and takes on many variations.

The Council told attendees that urban food deserts are created by city planning, chain grocery stores and disproportionate retail access. Patterson-Ramos said that the term “food apartheid” is more accurate than “food desert,” because the term apartheid refers to segregated systems created by policy and laws that resulted in disadvantaged food systems. The term “food desert,” she said, suggests that these social issues were naturally occurring, or events of happenstance.

The mission of the Milwaukee Food Council is to “support a locally anchored food system that advances Milwaukee’s social, economic and environmental wellbeing through collective action,” Jessica Thompson said. Thompson is a UW-Milwaukee sustainable peace building graduate student and Milwaukee Food Council fellow with the Institute for Systems Change.

In his keynote, Reggie Jackson, an award-winning journalist, public historian and senior researcher at The Redress Movement, discussed historical food insecurities in Milwaukee. Jackson shared his perspective on historical injustices that led to current inequities in our society though his series of story maps that covered food insecurity, historic captivity of African Americans, dispossession of native land, failed policies and Black agriculture.

“We know we live in a very segregated community here in Milwaukee, and segregated communities tend to have different levels of access to all the good things in life, so access to quality schools is segregated, access to food is segregated, [and] access to transportation,” Jackson said. “When you don’t have access to some of those things, it makes it very hard to live.”

Jackson is writing a book about food apartheid in the Midwest, and how Milwaukee became one of the most segregated cities in the United States. According to Jackson’s research, Milwaukee used to be a very attractive city to people from all over because of an abundance of manufacturing jobs in the city following World War II. During that time, the Black population in Milwaukee was low, but steadily increased by tens of thousands as more Black people moved to Milwaukee for good jobs which opened to Black workers after decades of discrimination.

In the 1970s, Milwaukee used to have many corner grocery stores, owned and operated by Black community members, that served as food access points for local communities between shopping trips to larger grocery stores. Many of those stores closed in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Often times, those store owners provided credit to people in the neighborhood and supported the community,” Jackson said. “Those stores existed for one reason, and one reason only, because the people that had opened up stores worked in manufacturing plants, in many respects they had disposable income, so they can open up that store and provide that resource to their community.”

In the early 1980s, the United States experienced a series of recessions, Jackson said. As Milwaukee manufacturing jobs disappeared, other minority groups including Puerto Ricans and Mexicans moved to Milwaukee and competed for the same jobs sought by Black people migrating north from Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama to join family and friends already living in the city. These groups also experienced discrimination and segregation. This was when Black, brown and indigenous people in Milwaukee started fighting for some of the cornerstone elements in food justice and urban gardening.

Healthy Food And Urban Land Access

During a spoken word performance, Brit Nicole, 37, from Milwaukee, addressed nutrition, systemic issues and grocery costs. “At the end of the day, we are accountable to the community that we feed,” Nicole said, “and we believe that folks deserve access to fresh food, fresh, clean uncontaminated water, fruitful gardens and plentiful grocery stores.” Nicole said that residents should not have to invest an entire paycheck to grocery shopping to feed inflation.

In Milwaukee, not every community is the same in the context of food access. For example, on the lower East Side, there are healthy food stores and plentiful markets, while on the North Side, grocery stores are sparce. People living in the inner-city may not always have access to transportation, and when they don’t live near a large grocery store, that creates a barrier to healthy food access.

“It’s not convenient for most, folks are still without, we still have more corner stores and drugstores pushing candy and all that kind of stuff,” Nicole said, “but when this is all that’s offered to you, that’s what you take, because no one wants to go hungry on purpose.”

Healthy food advocacy in Milwaukee has room for improvement, according to Maria Carmen-Beltran, 51, a community organizer and longtime resident of Milwaukee’s Lindsay Heights neighborhood. Living in a food desert, ultra-processed foods are available from her local convenience store, and a liquor store is the closest available grocery option.

“We have nothing that advertises the healthy foods, and that’s what we face in Milwaukee,” Carmen-Beltran said. “Everything that’s bad for us is available to us, and everything that’s good for us, either costs too much or we have to travel out of our comfort zones.”

Land access also created barriers in Milwaukee food systems, and Patricia Luevano Mayorga, community health leadership coordinator at Milwaukee’s Sixteenth Street Community Health Center, said that immigrants living in Milwaukee are often renters and not homeowners. Immigrants that lived in rental homes and apartments typically didn’t have a space to grow food, and they relied strictly on grocery stores and neighborhood corner stores for nutrition access.

“They cannot grow their own gardens, and they are not educated to know there are [urban growing] places where they can rent,” Luevano Mayorga said. “Sometimes they decide not to do that [grow food] because it’s a lot of work, and they are submerged into the system where they are working double shifts to sustain the family.”

Milwaukee full-service grocery-store access declined in 2023, and according to the City of Milwaukee 2023 Fresh Food Access Maps, more than 122,000 Milwaukee residents live more than one mile from fresh food access points. Farmers markets also declined, with only 16 active markets in 2023 compared to 43 in 2016.

During growing seasons, urban gardening initiatives in Milwaukee provided access to food in local communities, and farms surrounding Milwaukee provided lower food cost options compared to grocery stores. Urban farming helped some residents develop an understanding of how to produce their own food. However, growing food in the city continued to face barriers, according to Jackson, who remembered more people having backyard gardens and institutional knowledge to grow food from seeds when he was younger.

“One of the biggest challenges for urban gardening is finding affordable real estate to plant gardens,” Jackson said. “It’s not always easy to find space to plant gardens, and then having the money to get access to that space is a real challenge for a lot of people.”

The Future of Healthy Food Access in Wisconsin

The Fresh Food Access Fund (FFAF) provided grant access for retail outlet development, to stock fresh foods in corner stores and attract grocery store development to underserved communities. The FFAF aimed to 50% match cash expenditures up to $25,000 to increase healthy food access in Milwaukee.

Farming resources in Wisconsin aimed to increase fresh food access as well. The Wisconsin Local Food Purchase Assistance Program (LFPA), created in collaboration with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) and the USDA, strengthened Wisconsin food systems and healthy food access. The LFPA continued efforts from 2023 and awarded $1.5 million in grants in February 2024 to purchase foods from local farmers and develop logistics to distribute locally grown, nutrient-dense foods to underserved communities across the state.

At the Full Circle Healing farm on County Line Road in Mequon, a suburb north of Milwaukee, Martice Scales, a 37-year-old Milwaukee farmer, grows food and develops community on his family-owned farm. Devoted to food justice, racial justice and land stewardship, Full Circle Healing aimed to provide education, take on poverty and increase mental health awareness.

“It’s a spiritual process for me. One day I just woke up while I was going to school for computers, and I just heard I need to learn how to grow food,” Scales said, “and I need to teach people that look like me how to grow food, because we get hit the hardest when there is a deficiency in the system.”

Scales said that urban gardening in Milwaukee increases access to healthy food but remains too small to fully impact the city’s food systems. Urban gardening remains part of the solution, but won’t tackle the all the inequities. Issues like urban soil poisoning reduced food growing potential, and Scales said there is a need for remediation and organizations like the USDA to invest more funding into urban support systems.

The Milwaukee Food Council holds quarterly networking socials, and the Milwaukee Food Justice Summit was meant to create, not just a networking opportunity, but an educational environment for Wisconsin food justice leaders, growers and community organizers. Patterson-Ramos said people can learn about becoming volunteers and members by following Milwaukee Food Council newsletters and social media.

“We wanted to educate people, and make sure to highlight the people that are doing this work,” Patterson-Ramos said, “so, our whole thing is about accessibility, making sure that anybody and everybody can make it into the room, and that anybody can learn.”