The Bittman Project

Share this post

Food with Mark Bittman: Olivia Watkins and Karen Washington

www.bittmanproject.com

Discover more from The Bittman Project

A home for those who believe food is everything and should be treated that way. We celebrate the joy it brings us, but also focus on the very real challenges of making it sustainable and available for all.
Over 101,000 subscribers
Continue reading
Sign in
Podcast 🎙

Food with Mark Bittman: Olivia Watkins and Karen Washington

Two amazing women working to see a thriving and racially just agricultural ecosystem

Mark Bittman
Feb 8, 2023
5
Share this post

Food with Mark Bittman: Olivia Watkins and Karen Washington

www.bittmanproject.com
Share
Karen Washington, Olivia Watkins

Wednesday, as you know, is Food with Mark Bittman day, and we’ve got an important one for you this week.

LISTEN HERE

New York State has 57,000 farmers, but only 139 of them are Black. Our guests today are both trying to remedy that situation and help those existing Black farmers to become more successful.

My partner (in life, not business) Kathleen Finlay, President of the Glynwood Center for Regional Food in Farming, joined me as co-host this week (Kate is back next week), and we talked to Karen Washington and Olivia Watkins, founders of the Black Farmer Fund.

“We started to say that this food system is not for us, or by us. And if we're going to wait for the knight in shining armor, and we're going to wait for capital to fall from the sky, we already know the negativity and the racial injustice when it came to the USDA, in the past, when it came to working with Black farmers — this is something that we have to do on our own.” — Karen Washington

Karen is a native New Yorker, a farmer, activist, and the founder of Black Urban Growers. Olivia has made it her goal to build a resilient food ecosystem and community investment fund to better support Black farmers — yes, the Black Farmer Fund.

This is a relevant, even critical conversation, and I’m really glad to share it with you.  

Follow on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Amazon Music

Share


5
Share this post

Food with Mark Bittman: Olivia Watkins and Karen Washington

www.bittmanproject.com
Share
Previous
Next
Comments
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Double B Publishing
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing