2nd Annual Food Action Summit Recap: Serving Sustainability and Justice!

Community based efforts for Food Justice are strong in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Black Panther Party pioneered food justice movements in the 1960’s with their free breakfast program, with many Bay Area organizations being inspired by the Black Panthers intersectionality of food and racial justice. Today there still exist many food justice non-profits and CBO’s in the Bay Area, each with a unique mission. Recently, many of these organizations united to form the Food and Agriculture Action Coalition Towards Sovereignty, or FAACTS. FAACTS is a coalition of 20+ food justice organizations that nourishes over 70,000 San Franciscans annually and has protected more than $75 million in funding for the city’s most vulnerable residents. FAACTS believes that “[a] citywide, broad-based movement is required to realize a more just and sustainable food system that meets the needs of everyone and builds toward food sovereignty” (FAACTSF.ORG). Members of the FAACTS coalition include the Food as Medicine Collaborative, Foodwise, GLIDE, Farming Hope, La Cocina, 18 Reasons, and many other organizations. The primary coordinator of the FAACTS Coalition is Jade Quizon. 

Unfortunately, San Francisco’s city government has been less proactive in its action towards food justice and sovereignty. Many other progressive cities, such as Seattle and New York City, have Food Action Plans, which are comprehensive plans to make the city’s food system more sustainable, sovereign, equitable, and prioritizing of health. The closest parallel that the San Francisco city government has released was the San Francisco Healthy and Sustainable Food Policy, which was released in 2009 by then mayor Gavin Newsom. While this plan is a good start, it lacks several aspects which are integral to a successful Food Action Plan, such as prioritization of access to culturally relevant foods and food waste plans. Food inequity and insecurity are huge issues among San Franciscans, with discrepancies only rising as prices rise. It is integral that planning for a food sovereign future starts now! 

It is clear that in order to form an equitable and effective Food Action Plan, input from many community stakeholders is necessary, and from this idea the Food Action Summit was formed! This annual summit is organized by FAACTS and is a conference style event which brings together stakeholders from across the food system with the shared goal of a food sovereign San Francisco. The summit has happened for the past two years, and it will continue to bring us together annually. 

This year’s Food Action Summit occurred on April 27 and 28 at the Hibernia, an event venue in the heart of the Tenderloin. The event featured representatives from many backgrounds, including non-profit organizers, restaurateurs, grocers, farmers, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and other government officials. More than 300 people gathered for this two day event, which included a grounding dinner and speeches from keynote speakers. The keynote speakers included Antonio Roman-Alcalá, who is an educator and community organizer who founded San Francisco’s Alemany Farm and works to translate global agroecology and land reform movements into a US context. Another keynote speaker was Andrea Freeman, a professor of law at Southwestern Law School, national and international expert on the intersections between critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit, and the author of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan 2024). These two provided an inspiring conversation about the current challenges and opportunities in food justice right now and set a great tone for the rest of the conference. 

On the second day of the conference, breakout sessions were held, with nine in total. The energy was electric in the room, and many inspiring and emotional conversations were had. Some topics covered by breakout sessions included how urban farming can be used as a tool for social justice, immigrant labor in the food system, food recovery efforts in San Francisco, advancing food as medicine in San Francisco, food in the carceral system, and many more! 

I attended the Food as Medicine and Food in the Carceral System breakout sessions, and I took part in planning the Urban Farming and Food Recovery sessions. Each session was unique, but they were all thought provoking and impactful! 

The Urban Farming workshop sparked discussions about our culture of individualism and how this is limiting us. The speakers, including USF’s own Novella Carpenter, highlighted how part of creating a food sovereign future means breaking down both physical and emotional boundaries and feeding our neighbors from shared land. One world builder, Cierra Cardenas, shared the story of how they turned their backyard into an urban farm oasis and are tackling hunger on their block by sharing food with their neighbors. They are also teaching other community members in the Bay Area how to fight hunger block-to-block by tending backyard gardens.

Attending the Food as Medicine session was wildly inspiring; here I was introduced to the idea of “produce prescriptions” which allow doctors to prescribe produce to their patients as part of chronic disease management. This practice has been implemented in Contra Costa County and has proven successful in helping patients lower their A1C’s and manage hypertension! Some programming similar to this exists in San Francisco through the Food as Medicine Collaborative’s Food Pharmacy program, though it is all funded through grants and therefore is not widely accessible. Food as Medicine should definitely be included as an aspect of the San Francisco Food Action Plan. 

The final session which I attended was the Food in the Carceral System session. This session was extremely moving and emotional, as many of the speakers were formerly incarcerated and could speak to the experience of inhumanity that the food served in prisons and jails brings to people. The panel highlighted different non-profit organizations in San Francisco which are working towards prison reform through food, including the Food in Prison Project and Land Together. I took away from this panel the extreme importance of nourishing people as they are going through the carceral system, and the huge difference that fresh food can make for people inside prisons and jails. 

Overall it was a huge privilege to attend and be a part of organizing this conference, and I am excited to see how the FAACTS team and other community members will put the energy and ideas generated at this conference into action! If you or any friends are interested in getting more involved with food justice efforts in San Francisco, you can join the FAACTS coalition by emailing hello@faactssf.org or following them on instagram @faactssf. Volunteers will be needed for next year’s summit!