Fighting Food Apartheid: The Detroit People's Food Co-op

Charles Brown:
Hello, everyone. Before we get into this episode, I just wanted to share with you all that I have a new book, Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement. It’s available for preorder at islandpress.com, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. Please do me a favor and go and preorder the book. Thank you.

Newsperson 1:
In exciting news here, Detroit’s North End neighborhood has a new grocery store, but it’s not your typical, everyday supermarket.

Newsperson 2:
That’s right. It’s a cooperative, owned by the community and for the community. Well, today I got the chance to hear from Detroiters what a big deal this is to people who live nearby and about how you can help make it a success.

Shirley Davis told me she only had to walk down the alley to get to the coop.

After 14 years, can you believe this day has arrived?

Shirley Jones:
Don’t make me cry. Don’t make me cry. I am so happy. I’ve been waiting on this forever.

Charles Brown:
In a nation of abundance, more than 47 million people in the US face hunger. When we look more deeply at who lacks access to nutritious food, a concerning pattern emerges. Black families are more than twice as likely to experience food insecurity compared to white families. While the term food desert has become common in discussions about this disparity, some community organizers and activists reject this language. They argue that desserts are natural ecosystems. What we’re seeing in America’s urban centers is anything but natural.

Today, we’re looking at Detroit, Michigan, a city that’s 77% Black. Of the major chain grocery stores that once operated in Detroit, many have closed, leaving residents with fewer options for fresh, healthy food. But this is not a story of scarcity and despair. It’s a story of resistance, creativity, and community. My name is Charles T. Brown and this is Arrested Mobility.

In 2024, the Detroit People’s Food Co-op opened its doors in Detroit’s North End neighborhood. This full-service grocery store was birthed by the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, or DBCFSN. It’s an organization that focuses on food justice, land access, and building Black self-determination. Today, we will hear from Gi’anna Shears and Dr. Shakara Tyler Saba, the co-executive directors of the DBCFSN, about their vision for a more equitable food system, why language matters in discussing food access, and how their organization is creating a closed-loop economic ecosystem to serve their community. You’ll hear them refer to each other as Mama Gi’anna and Mama Shakara, which is a way of showing respect in African-centered communities.

Gi’anna Shears:
My name is Gi’anna Shears and I serve as the co-executive director of DBCFSN, the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network. A bit of a distinction that I want to make sure is made is that DBCFSN birthed the co-op, but the co-op is now its own entity. It has its own general manager, its own board, its own everything.

Dr. Shakara Tyler Saba:
I’m Shakara Tyler Saba, co-executive director of DBCFSN with Mama Gi’anna, as mentioned. I also serve as one of the appointed board members to the Detroit People’s Food Co-op from DBCFSN.

In regards to the co-op, we birthed the Detroit People’s Food Co-op as a very practical solution to providing greater food access and equity within Detroit and beyond, so that Detroiters, and more specifically Black folks in our community, could have access to more fresh, affordable, high quality, culturally relevant foods. We consider Detroit to be an example of food apartheid, not a food desert.

There are many, many reasons why, but just to be brief, I’ll say that food apartheid illuminates how it is a social construction, it didn’t just fall out the sky. Deserts are natural ecosystems and very valuable in their own right, so to equate a majority Black city with low income to a desert ecosystem that primarily emphasizes lack or less value is a very racist, classist imposition that we don’t agree with. Typically, we use the term food apartheid to illuminate the racist power dynamics that created the food injustice in the first place.

The co-op is a way for us to very strategically provide a needed market for local produce and other local value-added products as a way to recycle the coins in our economy so that we’re not consistently paying for food outside of our community, and not supporting farmers and local food entrepreneurs in the process.

Detroit had the highest rate of Black homeowners in the country in the ’60s, ’70s, and even before then. Because when Detroiters migrated from the South to the North, of course they were following the job trend, but they were also running from the white terrorist lynchings that were happening in the South. When we migrated to what we call the Up South, to places like Detroit, and Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, be brought the wealth that we had with us. But not necessarily wealth in terms of coins, but the wealth in terms of agriculture knowledge, and also the knowledge of collectively [inaudible 00:06:11] our survival at the community, not on an individualist level. That collectivity produced what we call the co-op economy.

Cooperative institution, whether they were formally incorporated or informally incorporated, created this collective wealth that stewarded Black homeownership at its highest rate across the country in Detroit as a majority Black city. The state and the city strategically targeted Detroit through the emergency management that landed in the city in 2014 as a way to basically still the Black wealth that was accumulated over decades from Black Detroiters.

I consider myself to be a returning generation farmer, an emphasis on a returning generation farmer, because this is not new. Our ancestry is very laden with agrarian brilliance. We’re often taught at a very young age that Black people’s connection to food and land started with chattel enslavement, or it’s heavily laden with our connection to chattel enslavement, which is nothing further from the truth. The emphasis on being a returning generation farmer means that I am picking up the bread crumbs of sorts that my ancestors have left for me to do this work, this food sovereignty work.

Food sovereignty is ultimately about building the power as a community so that we can feed ourselves and be less dependent on the systems that exploit and extract from us. I got into this work partly because, as being a mother, I was a young mother at the age of 19. I wanted to feed my daughter better food than I grew up eating, so we started growing our own food. Ironically, I was an agricultural sciences major in college, because I always loved nature, and animals, and water, so that’s what I wanted to study when I went to college. I felt a very deep marginalization being a Black woman, sometimes the only or one of the few in my classes, at conferences. Just being on a predominantly white campus, studying a predominantly white topic where I couldn’t see myself visually and culturally reflected within was really shocking to me. It was a deep culture shock.

Then ironically, I was a Black studies minor at Penn State University, which was a predominantly white campus, because I wanted to study my people and I wanted to be around Black people, if you know what I mean. I took up as a Black studies minor as a way to culturally nurture myself in this predominantly white space, and I was still ostracized in that space because I was an ag sciences student. I always felt this really deep confusion why I felt I didn’t have any home place in the ag world being a Black woman, and also no home place in the Black studies locale that didn’t value agricultural science as a relevant college topic to study. The general response to me was, “We left the plantation a long time ago. Why would you even study that?” Like other things, like engineering, and education, and finance even is a more valuable, relevant topic for our people, so you shouldn’t be studying agricultural sciences.

I was always really confused by that message because I knew there was a deep history that extended beyond enslavement between Black people, and land, and food, and things. One of my mentors told me that I needed to do research to find out why that was, why I didn’t have a sense of belonging in either space, so that’s what I did. I came to grad school to do some research on Black agrarianism and cultural regeneration, and what that had to do with health, and literacy, and all these other things that intersect with it. I found the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network as a young mother, looking for an agricultural home of sorts that was unapologetically Black, that was unapologetically about community self-determination. That’s how I ultimately got into this work over 10 years ago.

Gi’anna Shears:
My trajectory is a little bit different, because I am very new to DBCFSN. Not new to Black liberation, but new to DBCFSN, and food sovereignty as well. My background is in mathematics. I originally was brought on as the CFO of DBCFSN. Within Black liberation, sovereignty and autonomy are paramount, and those are what lead and guide me. For me, being in this organization and in this position was a perfect way to mesh my mathematics skills with my Black liberation activism.

Growing up, my dad had a landscaping company. I was always very interested in horticulture. Not necessarily farming at first, but horticulture. We were kids, we would cut grass with him, we would lay flowers, we would do all those things. I grew up doing that, having my hands in the dirt all the time.

When I got the position here at DBCFSN, it was like a full-circle moment. I was able to really mesh my mathematics talents with agricultural, and also with Black liberation as well. That’s what brought me to this work. I’m a native Detroiter. I’m a native Detroiter, I love Detroit. Detroit is, in my opinion, the most unapologetically Black city that I have ever had the opportunity to be in.

Dr. Shakara Tyler Saba:
The co-op has been organizing for over 10 years. Now, the co-op started with the [inaudible 00:12:01] Food Buying Club that DBCFSN started with members of the organization back in 2010. This food buying club was a way for members to pool their money together to buy bulk food purchases, like flour, and rice, and chips, and crackers. Things that you could buy in bulk to get a better price for.

Then the idea emerged for morph the food buying club into a formal brick-and-mortar food co-op. Then, at that time, the mission became to find a building that could hold what we envisioned as a full-service grocery store that could operate as a cooperative. Then after some research, Baba Malik Yakini literally toured the country looking at food co-op models, and what emerged was a need to have something beyond a full grocery store that incorporated a community gathering space, that incorporated commercial kitchens. Because this is what, on one level, the community demands and needs, a place to process food and prepare catered food for events and organizational purposes. But also, have a community gathering space to strategize and build, where we own the space, where it’s a culturally relevant safe space to gather. That’s how the Detroit Food Commons was born.

It was beyond the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, which is the full-service grocery store. Then we wanted to do the community gathering space, which is now the Mama Imani Humphrey Banquet Hall, and the Kujichagulia Kitchens, which is the four shared use commercial kitchens. This, as you can imagine, grew into a much larger project than just one little building that could house a grocery store.

Then, we shifted from looking for a building to looking for land where we could building something from the ground up, because there was no existing building in the city that could accommodate the vision as it was. After some years, after a feasibility study, after searching for land through many cores of the city, the Woodward and Euclid location emerged as the best location because it’s highly visible on the main street that runs through the city, which is Woodward Avenue. The North End is a mixed income neighborhood. It’s being highly gentrified now, the back end 2012, 2013, and 2014, the proportionality of low income residents was rare. It’s still a very vast majority of low income residents in the neighborhood and still is being gentrified, so it’s become a mixed income neighborhood as of now.

The Woodward and Euclid location is a prime location because of visibility, because we want folks that are driving in and out the city, driving on Woodward often, to turn into the co-op parking lot when they’re on their way to work or they’re leaving work, as a way to patronize the store, to bring in money that we need to economically survive, to keep the doors open. It makes a statement when a Black-led development project is located on the main street in the city. It’s important to note that DBCFSN owns the land that sits under the building that the Detroit Food Commons sits on. That also speaks to the element of building power so that we have more ownership within the process of building these institutions that we know provide the solutions to restore greater justice and equity in our community.

The co-op means that we can rebuild health, regardless of what that looks like for each person, for each community, because there are many, many people and communities inside of our broader DBCFSN and Detroit People’s Food Co-op community. Helping them rebuild health on their terms. Providing access to, as we said, fresh, affordable, high quality, locally produced, culturally relevant foods that they can connect their ancestral stories to. Collard greens, and okra, and calalu, and these other ancestrally significant crops purchased in the Black-owned grocery store, to me, is a big part of health. Physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. Health isn’t just in the physical for us. We see the grocery store providing access to these foods as a huge component in providing health equity.

And we are exploring various ideas and programs with the store, like for example a farmer’s market day. We’ll have recipes and live cooking demonstrations, and many things that the member owners in the broader community in have been requesting. In terms of learning how to cook acorn squash, for example, or Delicata squash. Or these things that aren’t typically eaten in certain households, I don’t want to say Black to generalize. But typically, many folks depending on where you come from, don’t eat certain foods. They often want to know, “Well, what can I do with this? How can I eat it? How can I cook it in a way that’s going to retain most of the nutritional value?” Providing live cooking demonstrations and recipes with a very strong cultural grounding is going to go very far.

Gi’anna Shears:
What I would say is everything that Mama Shakara just said for the co-op, but for the Detroit Food Commons as a whole, in addition to the healthy food, and the demonstrations, and some of the other programming that we are going to be implementing, things that you can use instead of waste. Teaching classes on, “What do I do with this soft tomato?” Well, you can make salsa out of it, or you can make sauce out of it. Things like that contribute to diminishing health disparities, in addition to the things that we have, DBCFSN has, on the top floor of the co-op. The yoga classes, the dance classes. We used to have capoeira. Things like that also contribute to diminishing the health disparity.

You come in the co-op, and then you don’t know, “Oh, man, there’s a yoga class going on upstairs. Let me go on up there and take this yoga class.” Then after the yoga class you’re like, “Well, I did that. I want to eat healthy, let me go down to the co-op and get a fresh juice,” or something like that. It’s cyclical and it’s an ecosystem that we’re creating.

From a more, I guess logistical or practical standpoint, creating a Black ecosystem. That is one of the ways that we are challenging structural racism and white supremacy. What I mean by that is we’re growing the food. Once we grow the food, we’re washing it, we’re packing it. We are putting it in our own grocery store, selling it to our people, paying our people as employees. Then also, some of the food entrepreneurs that are actually cooking in our kitchens have their retail-ready products in the co-op. We’re creating a Black ecosystem where we literally, from the ground, to the store, to the table, to the retail, to the business entrepreneurship, it’s all Black.

Dr. Shakara Tyler Saba:
We say community self-determination is a collective endeavor. There’s no such thing as one person getting healthy on their own in isolation. That’s a very Western or white supremacist perspective. We’re going to transform ourselves from the inside-out. We have to do that within the essence of beloved community, as we say. We have to do that together, we have to do that cooperatively, in collaboration with everyone’s capacities, and knowledges, and values, and perspectives. That’s what community often represents for us. Resisting this individualist orientation that white supremacists, racial capitalism has taught us to do.

Gi’anna Shears:
Yeah. Being in a community with people that are living a healthy lifestyle. The classes that we have on Monday, the yoga class, that’s free. That’s how we’re helping the community. We’re offering wellness courses that are of no charge to the community, so that they can get in the habit and know that this isn’t just a one-off thing. I can come every week and I get some restorative yoga, and really get in touch with myself, my breathing, all those things. And know that I can come every single week and make this an actual healthy habit for myself that is sustainable longterm. And being in a community with people that do that, so that you can make those connections. “Well, hey, there’s another yoga over here on this side of the town. Oh, you guys want to go check that out?” Something like that.

A, our price points are lower. And B, you are eating food that is grown by your actual neighbors. I don’t know that Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s can say the same thing. We source produce from local farms. Majority of those farms are Black-led, Black-run, Black-owned farms. I don’t think Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s can say that. Then if you’ve been in the co-op, the energy in the co-op, the atmosphere of the co-op, the vibe of the co-op, you are represented from the mural when you walk in the door, to the What up, though on the top, right above the carts, to the music selection that’s played. All of that is very intentional. The food that’s on the hot bar, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, sweet potatoes. All those things are very intentional. Things that are significant to us and for our nourishment and our communities. You are not just welcomed, you’re celebrated. I don’t think you can say the same thing about places like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, where you’re simply tolerated.

Dr. Shakara Tyler Saba:
Right. We are actively creating an ecosystem, as Mama Gi’anna mentioned. You’re cycling money in your community, and not just sending it somewhere else to a corporation that is ultimately stressing to welcome our community.

Charles Brown:
Arrested Mobility encompasses the many ways that Black and brown people are systematically restricted from accessing resources, opportunities, and spaces for full participation in society. Food apartheid is one dimension of this larger pattern, where historical disinvestment, red-lining, and other discriminatory practices have limited access to healthy food options.

What’s powerful about the work of DBCFSN and the Detroit People’s Food Co-op is how they’re addressing this problem through community self-determination. By owning the land, building their own infrastructure, and creating an ecosystem of food production and distribution, they’re creating true food sovereignty, the power to determine one’s own food system. When I consider how this framework applies to transportation, health, and equity, my primary area of focus, I see important parallels. Whether we’re talking about food access, transit access, or housing, true equity comes not just from distribution of resources, but from shifting power and ownership back to communities.

I want to thank Gi’anna Shears and Dr. Shakara Tyler Saba for sharing their time and wisdom with us. If you’d like to learn more about the Detroit Black Community Sovereignty Network, and the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, you can visit the show notes page for this episode at arrestedmobility.com. We will have all the links there. If you don’t already follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, head over and tap the follow button. This podcast is totally self-funded, so please check out our Patreon. That’s the best way to contribute, join our community, and get access to all new exclusive content, including a signed copy of my new book. Thank you so much for your support. This podcast is a production of Equitable Cities with support from Puddle Creative.