Injustice 2 Update

[Suyay Escarsega]

InjusticeWatch is the only newsroom in Cook County dedicated to reporting on the court system. Our goal is one of public service: to listen to and center people affected by institutional injustices and provide our community with the information and resources needed to hold power to account.

One reason we should be careful about how we define what it means to be good or just when it comes to our food system is that food is one of the languages we use to inhabit and interpret social identities such as class. For as long as there have been social classes, the poor have been a repository for whatever the richer classes are most anxious about and wish to distance themselves from. In the Victorian era, when the rich proved their status largely by not having to work, they despised labor and the traits associated with it, like a muscular body and tanned skin. Instead, the Victorian elite idealized thinness, especially in women. Teenage girls on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to be slender and pale because those traits were associated with infirmity, delicacy, and an artistic or intellectual temperament. This stood in contrast to the rude health, strength, and lack of sophistication associated with the robust laboring bodies of the peasant and working classes and their voracious appetites.

The only condition that appears to be correlated in a statistically significant way with fruit and vegetable consumption is cardiovascular disease, but the association so far is small: a 28 percent reduction in heart disease risk for people eating nearly twice the USDA recommended intake for fruits and vegetables compared with those eating less than 1.5 per day, that is, virtually none.

A 2017 meta-analysis of 95 studies of fruit and vegetable intake, which included up to 2.1 million participants, reached a similar conclusion. After controlling for weight, smoking habits, and physical activity levels, eating more fruits and vegetables was associated with a small reduction in the risk of chronic disease. Compared with people who ate between 0 g and 40 g per day (less than one serving), eating 800 g of fruits and vegetables per day (about 10 servings) was associated with a reduction in absolute risk of chronic disease of around 1 percent. That is a real difference, and if it is caused by the difference in fruit and vegetable consumption, then getting people who eat very little of those things to make a radical dietary change might modestly reduce, or at least delay, the onset of some chronic disease. But even the most optimistic estimation of the potential public health benefits, at least based on these studies, should still be small.

What the epidemiological evidence really suggests is that people who generally eat more fruits and vegetables (and perhaps a tiny bit less fast food) tend to be healthier because they also tend to be wealthier. These behaviors, in other words, are not likely a meaningful cause of their healthfulness but rather markers of wealth and status, which are the real drivers of disparate health outcomes.

These studies all show mere associations that cannot on their own prove a causal relationship between poverty and poor health outcomes. Some very small part of the difference might even be due to how many servings of fruits and vegetables rich and poor people eat on average. But whatever is going with social class and health, it appears to have much larger effects than any dietary behavior we can measure.

For communities that would benefit from having more safe, green spaces where people can gather and eat, it might not be enough to plant a garden if the barriers include gun violence and high rates of substance abuse disorder. Funding gun violence prevention and conflict resolution programs and improving access to clean needles, safer injection sites, medication-assisted treatment for addiction, and mental health support would all do a lot more than selecting the best compact, high-yielding cultivars for urban container gardens. And were we able to establish those safe, green urban spaces, my concept of justice requires that people would be made to feel welcome to share food there whether it came from the garden itself, a local farmers market, or a KFC.

The pursuit of justice throughout the food system might also focus more on the food that middle- and upper-class people eat. Terrible injustice abounds in the food system. Most of the labor of agricultural production, slaughtering and processing our food, cooking and serving it, and dealing with the many messes created throughout that process is performed by immigrants, both documented and not. Food system workers are paid sub-poverty wages, made to work in unsafe conditions, given inadequate treatment when sickened or injured on the job, and in the case of undocumented and mixed-status families, deprived of rights such as driving legally and voting in the country where they live, work, and pay taxes.

On Nov. 9, 1938, the Germans orchestrated the destruction of synagogues and the looting of Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany. They destroyed Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools and homes. Police arrested 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. Those who were previously hesitant to leave realized that night that Jewish life in Nazi Germany was no longer possible.

Each year on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, I pause to reflect. This year has me particularly concerned about the rise of hatred in our society. With the Anti-Defamation League reporting that the total number of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States in 2018 was the third-highest total since it began tracking data in the 1970s, I am more aware than ever of the need to recognize upstanders.

These people who are willing to take a stand offer tangible evidence that freedom of choice and opportunities to fight injustice exist even in the darkest of times. Without the assistance of five extraordinary upstanders, my story would have had a very different ending.

3. The Marine. On Nov. 10, we went to our appointment at the U.S. Consulate to secure our visas, but delays required us to wait and return the following day. We did, only to find the consulate closed for Armistice Day, the holiday we now call Veterans Day. A Marine guard standing at the gates, compassionate to our plight, tracked down the consul general in town.

4. The Consul General. Despite the holiday, the consul general ran to his office to complete our visas, as well as those of many other Jews waiting outside the gates that day. His signature meant freedom.

5. The Stranger. My mother and I traveled to the Dutch-Holland border where all Jews were forced off the train. For reasons still unknown, and with all the suspense of an old noir film, a Dutch man tapped my mother on the shoulder and quietly separated us from the other Jews. His signal to us, a slight tip of his hat, told us to run, jump the track and board another train to safety in Holland. From Holland we went to England where we were joined by my father, who traveled separately, and on Dec. 15, 1938, we left for the United States.

As we mark the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht, we are reminded of our responsibility to each other. We have the moral obligation to take a stand for humanity. We have the power, through actions both big and small, to become upstanders.

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16 April 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statementcallingmy present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of mywork andideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries wouldhave little timefor anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have notime forconstructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that yourcriticisms aresincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patientandreasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influencedby theview which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as presidentof theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southernstate, withheadquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations acrossthe South,and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we sharestaff,educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliatehere inBirmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if suchweredeemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise.So I,along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am herebecause I haveorganizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophetsof theeighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyondthe boundariesof their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carriedthe gospel ofJesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry thegospel offreedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedoniancall foraid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. Icannot sit idlyby in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere isa threatto justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in asingle garmentof destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can weafford to live withthe narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United Statescan never beconsidered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

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