Contemporary · United States
カレン・ワシントン / Karen Washington
Bronx community-garden activist; coined the term 'food apartheid'
Not a desert, but a man-made system — that was her reframing.
Karen Washington was working as a physical therapist when she bought a house in the Bronx in 1985 — across from a lot filled with garbage and abandoned cars. In 1988 she and her neighbours dug it into the Garden of Happiness. She has been at the centre of New York's community-garden movement ever since: resisting garden demolitions, organising the La Familia Verde garden coalition and its farmers market.
In 2009 she co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS) to support Black farmers and Black leadership in the food movement. Against the term 'food desert' for neighbourhoods without fresh food, she argued the reality was no natural phenomenon but a structure built by race and capital — 'food apartheid.' The reframing shifted the coordinates of the food-justice debate.
She received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2014, and went on to co-found Rise & Root Farm in Chester, New York, where she trains a next generation of farmers rooted in the city. Work that began in a vacant-lot garden now tills the question itself: who gets to hold land and food?
“It's not a food desert. It's food apartheid.”
Key contributions
- Turned a vacant Bronx lot into the Garden of Happiness (1988)
- Co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS) (2009)
- Redefined the food-justice debate with the concept of 'food apartheid'
- James Beard Foundation Leadership Award (2014)