From Soil to Seeding Local Foods, Part Two

Presenting: From Soil to Seeding Local Foods

Content: 

• Main Voice(s): Emerson Cram 
• Special Guests: 
  • Jason Grimm 
  • Malik Salsberry 
  • Ilsa DeWald 
  • April Lawyer 
  • Felicia Pieper 
  • Scott Koepke 

Highlights

Join Emerson as they talk with the newest generation of GROW farmers, on why this work is meaningful, how food justice and food sovereignty overlap and depart, and what’s grown on site, beyond all of the vegetables. Emerson reflects on the relationships created and sustained through volunteer work, which takes them into the world of preserving fish pepper seeds, an ancestor of Black disability justice. Seeds are archives–stories rendered in biological form. 

Conclusion
Food justice includes farm workers themselves, and the industry faces high rates of burnout exacerbated by uncertainty, low wages, and inaccessible land and/or markets. In early 2025 into 2026, food and farming operations witnessed devastating blows to federal funding, and creatively adapted to continue their core mission. Scott remembers Alfred Knapp. 

Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, visit: disabilityecologiespodcast.buzzsprout.com

Credits
Episode written and narrated by Emerson Cram, University of Iowa. Recorded with Riverside FM. Production and Sound Editing by Maura De Cicco. 

All media clips are used for educational purposes only. Sound effects licensed through Pixabay.  

Funding
Research, writing, and production have benefitted from generous support from multiple sources, including: the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award; UI OVPR Arts and Humanities Initiative Standard Grant; UI Provost Investment in Strategic Priorities;  UI College of Liberal Arts DSHB Humanities Scholar; CLAS Summer Humanities Award.

Special Thanks
With thanks to Maura De Cicco; University of Iowa Departments of Communication Studies, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies (Especially Angie Looney, Kembrew McLeod, Eric Vázquez, Naomi Greyser, and Hallie Abelman); The Johnson County Local Food & Farm Team (Julie Watkins & Ilsa DeWald), State Historical Society of Iowa (especially Hang Nguyen, Allison Johnson, and Anu Tiwari); Sarah Keen, University Archivist, University of Iowa; V Fixmer-Oraiz, Johnson County Board of Supervisors; Kim Painter, Johnson County Recorder; Rebecca Dewing, Johnson County Historical Society; GROW Johnson County (especially Jason Grimm, Emmaly Renshaw and Malik Salsberry); the 2024 Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities Seminar Participants; Claire Fox; Teresa Mangum; Jennifer New; Phaedra C. Pezzullo; Constance Gordan; and Jesse Waggoner.  

Audience Participation

• Call to Action: Do you have a poor farm or county home story to tell? Reach out to our team to learn more about how to share! 
• Support the Show:Share this episode with friends and colleagues, & stay tuned for future episodes. 
• Follow us on Social Media:
  • Instagram:@disabilityecologiespodcast

Transcript

Transcript for Disability Ecologies Podcast Chapter Five, Part One: From Soil to Seeding Local Foods

Emerson Narrates, 00:00

…Welcome back. You are listening to Disability Ecologies, Chapter 5, From Soil to Seeding Local Foods, part 2.  

Emerson Narrates, 00:14: 
As of 2025, just shy of ten years into their strategic plan, newer generations of farmers, growers, and volunteers gather throughout the growing season to cultivate, weed, harvest, and distribute everything grown on site. Today, GROW has adapted their overall vision of hunger relief towards a mission that foregrounds participatory systems for community members. This spans collective decision making over crop planning, in addition to building community infrastructure, embodied by the farmer’s tool shed shared by all. Remembering Scott’s accounting, even as the beginning proved its challenges, shared infrastructure is a fundamental component for new generations of apprentices, growers, and farm managers. In all, GROW’s infrastructure imagines its purpose as responsive to community needs, in turn, building a more resilient community food system. Jason clarified why this shift was crucial to their overall mission:  

Jason Grimm, 01:29:

We used to actually use verbiage of hunger relief within our Grow: Johnson County program, and we've gone away with that because we don't believe that we're actually... We're not trying to solve hunger for people, we're trying to solve how the food system looks, like systematic things. So, for us in the food system for that specific program of ours is ensuring that we're growing foods to relieve people's needs, but we're doing it by having them participate in the process. People can physically come out here who are also getting food from our different partners and participate in the production, but we're thinking more of a participatory and they're actually guiding the input on what we grow. 

Emerson Narrates, 02:12: 
Jason clarified a participatory structure could help alleviate a disconnect between what was grown and what residents accessing pantries needed and wanted. The “Voice Your Choice” survey—written in English, Spanish, Swahili, French, and Arabic—provides feedback from residents, to assess if crops actually aligned with what was culturally relevant. For instance, Iowa’s climate is friendly to a wide array of crops that love heat and humidity, like collard greens, okra, African eggplant, roselle, all of which were grown in 2025, in addition to the ever-popular lenga lenga, propagated by Grow’s neighbors at the Global Food Project.  

But initially, many of these weren’t planted, as crop plans opted for green or sweet peppers, or crops widely available in Iowa but not resonant for many accessing the community pantries. Now at the end of the season, those on staff are readying their plans to collaborate with pantry surveys to reassess and diversify based on capacity and need. This level of coordination facilitates growing as much as possible, wasting less, and simultaneously working to balance capacity of labor and land. This is a kind of coordination that does not assign value based on arbitrary metrics of waste or that people must prove they “deserve” their needs be met; instead, it follows a strategy embedded with the motto: to eat is a human right.  

During the summer of 2025, I volunteered with the farm, and in turn, I met Malik Salsberry. Malik is GROW’s farm manager, and he also happened to be an intern with GROW at its very beginning. He underscored this value of abundance, and how GROW’s mission aligned with his own background growing up in Davenport, Iowa with grandparents who tended to the neighborhood kids. I asked him if he’d reflect on anything he learned growing up that he now brings forward into his own goals and vision as a young, Black farmer: 

Malik Salsberry, 04:47:

I think it helped to show that there's always enough to go around. I mean, especially with not just Southern homes, but homes that have moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas from the South. Everyone's invited to the table, no one's excluded. We have plenty of kids from the neighborhood that they're hanging out, they're playing. It's been like three or four hours. You're going to get a plate. That's just like... It wasn't a question of it. It wasn't anything extra or it wasn't a burden. It was just people need to eat, which has always, I guess especially hardened my position of good food is human right, which that was one of our first slogans that Grow had. 

Emerson Narrates, 05:29:
I was really struck by this story…the reference to feeding someone who needed nourishing, and they could be seen as a burden. Or that neighborhood homes offered respite to anyone who needed a plate. Later on, Malik and I traded our respective laments about how forms of punishment through shame and deprivation can accompany food insecurity and struggles for access. One of these includes just the existence of the phrase “school lunch debt.” How could a child amass debt from the need to eat so they can make it through the school day?  

Food is a connector, and because of that, it can also be resonant with deep layers of shame and policing—like, lunch debt, or even a watchful eye of “I know better.” In the December of 2024, Governor Kim Reynolds rejected federal funds for a summer EBT program, which provides money to low-income children in summer months, when they are not enrolled in school and thus accessing school meals. In their press release, Health and Human Services explained the $29 million refusal as based in a few reasons. One of which was based in the belief that direct support did not align with nutritional needs at “a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”[1] Before the catastrophe of November 2025’s SNAP defunding, the loss of these dollars impacted kids and their families on the levels of finances, health and nutrition, in addition to long lasting ramifications to their self-worth and dignity. As someone with family roots in farming, and as someone who survived the U.S. diet culture of the 1990s, and as someone who now can reflect on the impact of personal wealth on food access—I felt deeply for any kid who might have believed it was their fault that their family could not access the food they needed to live their lives.  

This is one of those places where shame and the charge of “dependency” co-mingle in powerful ways. Even if you are someone who needs support, the “I know better” gaze is one that determines under what conditions you should be supported. And so, returning to the idea that food is a connector makes me think about connections of other kinds. Even Malik made me appreciate all the new ways that I could prepare the humble kohlrabi—a Midwestern staple, but a plant that left me stumped on a weekly basis. 

Malik Salsberry, 08:33:

I truly believe that because it's not just food as a human right, obviously everyone has to eat. But having access to quality produce, produce that's fresh, that's relevant, that's culturally significant that you recognize and can use. I mean, it'd be different if we were just 30,000 pounds of kohlrabi and radishes and all these foods that I love, but that some communities here in Iowa City especially might not be as familiar with or even eat. Because you give a kohlrabi to someone even from the Midwest, and they're like, "What's this?" And I'm like, This is one of my favorite veggies. Get ready." Literally, just like with some salt and it's so good.

Emerson Narrates, 09:20:
And so, I earnestly believed Scott when he said that the mission for GROW was to cultivate not only food to distribute, but to grow people, to grow connections, to grow relationships. These are all immaterial, but so were the claims in the 1850s that “hard work” was an inherently moral good. I don’t mean to suggest these are equivalent—far from it. Hard work was a test of individual discipline, and in an ideal world for its believers, the route to self-sufficiency. By contrast, relationships grown encompass the much more difficult terrain of building a social infrastructure—of skills, perspectives, histories, and stories. This is the knitting of social fabric that everyone feels when someone decides they need to move to a different place, seeking refuge or different economic opportunities.  

Hanging out on the volunteer days, I find that these knowledge exchanges are freely given, and daily I am reminded of the parts of rural culture that thrives in generosity—of connections or offers to introduce you to a friend, knowledge shares about tomato trellises, insight into the best places to travel in the off season. A perspective about a book someone is reading. Reflections about the state fair and Iowa pie culture. The shared intimacy of the careful watch and reassurance on the hot and humid days, capped with brain freeze popsicles. New recipe ideas for okra, learning to dry marigolds for plant dye, or dispensing the names and details of hot pepper varieties.  

Towards prime pepper season in the early fall, Malik led volunteers in harvesting and shared with us the backstory of a small group of fish peppers, and the starter plants donated by a community member. Visually, these peppers are very close to most hot peppers, with rounded shoulders that make them seem identical to a thick jalapeño. They are distinct, however, with multi-color stripes that change colors, their pods vary from pale green to cream, to variegated spots or blotches known as mottled, then orange, and later, a deep red. Fish peppers are deeply enmeshed within the foodways of Chesapeake farmers, specifically enslaved African-Americans and Freedmen. Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty writes that fish peppers most likely migrated with Haitians to the United States in the late 1800s, and that their use in Afro-Caribbean foodways created Creole traditions in mid-Atlantic ports.[2] 

Fish peppers had a purpose that went beyond seafood dishes—they are, it turns out, a key player in the lineage of healing and Black disability justice.[3] Fish peppers helped those escaping the brutality of Southern plantations in a few ways. When rubbed on the bottoms of feet, they threw off the scent used for hounds to track, and thus facilitated or extended journeys to freedom. Peppers also provided healing power for tired limbs, painful joints, and ailments from fatigue and exhaustion and long days after day of physical labor. In her story of Fish Peppers, Debra Freeman notes another story about the seeds’ ongoing survival.[4] Horace Pippin—a Black painter in Philadelphia—traded seeds for bees in order to help alleviate the pain in his arm, activated by a war-time injury. Freeman elaborates how the beekeeper collected those seeds in small jars, storing them in the freezer for years into the future. Upon discovery in the 1990s, the beekeeper’s grandson shared those jars with Seed Saver Exchange, located in Decorah, Iowa. As a non-profit established in the 1970s, Seed Savers is a repository for heirloom seeds. To be designated as an “heirloom seed,” that seed needs a community, a story, a generation.    

So, even if I only remember one season of volunteering with GROW, I know there are innumerable ways to measure its impact—some of which can never quite be legible because it is just that profound. Seeds are archives—history in biological form. Seeds are stories, they are legacy, they are infinite futures condensed into the surface area of a sewing needle. These stories are testaments of why some on site or in food systems work use the language of “food justice” and “food sovereignty” to describe the “why” behind all decisions, and the “why” all of this is so worth every penny, every hour, every mud puddle. 

In our conversations, Ilsa provided a crucial reminder that food justice also encompasses those who are farmers and growers, many of whom are food insecure themselves, and over the span of decades, thought leaders, program leaders, and entrepreneurs have worked in ways to situate the advocacy of today. It’s worth mentioning that many of the farmers I met in the summer of 2025 reflected how working for a non-profit fundamentally changed their relationship to stability, in contrast to those who farmed for personal livelihood. Even as non-profits undergo immense funding challenges, knowing you have access to healthcare benefits and a paycheck alleviates some of the stressors that contribute to high rates of burnout among young farmers, especially those who are historically excluded from the food system.  

Ilsa DeWald, 16:21:

I think, especially when thinking about a term like food justice, it's like thinking about the larger systems and the history of our food systems in our country and in our state. Looking at a way to recognize food as a human right, and then understand that there are barriers that people have to food that are built out of these systemic injustices that have happened in our food system to prevent people from being able to access the types of food that they would like to access and to be able to have an abundant amount of that food too. And so, thinking about cultural crops as well as just you know caloric nutritious food items. Yeah, I think that that term, when we talk about like how to interrupt some of those injustices or recognize or understand why don't people, you know, why are people food insecure in our community? There's a multitude of reasons around that. And I think food justice is really looking at what, what is still showing up in our food system today, recognizing that food system work is some of like the lowest paid work overall.  

Emerson Narrates, 17:38:
Through a food justice lens, GROW Johnson County and its neighbors with the Global Food Project in addition to the Land Access Program are models for a food system designed on the basis of need. These structures work to reduce barriers to current growers who need access to land, in addition to people in the community who would otherwise struggle to access dignified foods. It also happens that crop planning for biodiversity is easier on the often-invisible workers of water and soil. For county supervisor V Fixmer-Oraiz, using public land in this way provides an essential service, akin to shelter, food, or healthcare. Further, they connect cultivating food on site to actions of reclamation. From this perspective, cultivation is movement towards a landscape grounded in the work of community healing, on a timeline of season to season, generation to generation. When paired with the intentions of community planning that amplify voices and perspectives otherwise pushed to the margins, shifts in land use can generate mechanisms for change.  

After a morning of harvesting marigolds, sunflowers, and coneflowers for bouquets to accompany edible crops, I sat down with April Lawyer to ask her what she valued about this work, despite all of the uncertainties and challenges in this time. April works as the Farm Coordinator, which means she is the primary channel between the community partner pantries and the farm itself. 

April Lawyer, 19:38:

What I find meaningful and really important, and probably is something that deviates from how providing food was probably framed in the past, is that we don't like to provide it as charity or donation because the people that are consuming their food to frame it that way, we don't want to seem like we are doing the work of angels or anything. We're just here to make sure that people get fed. So, we are constantly asking our distribution partners, what do you need? What do you want from us? Ask from us whatever you want. So, I think I value the dignity that we try to give people. Part of that is also today, picking flowers, making sure that people have nice things. Just because they have to use a pantry or use these services doesn't mean that they should get mid-quality stuff. They deserve the best. 

Emerson Narrates, 20:37:
The insistence on dignity certainly brings me back to the early work of the Disability Advisory Committee. Dignity is inherent, and as a bare minimum we can recognize too many people navigate a world that robs them of both their dignity and autonomy. For the growers of the Global Food Project, many of whom are migrants and refugees, difficulty accessing culturally relevant crops at local markets necessitated a different strategy. In public presentations, Global Food Project’s co-founder Ayman Sharif details that he was in search of not only vegetables but community. Partnering with the county, Global Food Project now provides access to 100 family plot gardens in addition to 11 much larger market plot gardens. Rather than growing for direct distribution to pantries, individual growers use their plots for their own families, or for a small Saturday market that had first run in summer 2025. For Felicia Pieper, the current Farm Manager, Global Food Project embodies principles of both food justice and sovereignty, through land access and cultural autonomy. 

Felicia Pieper, 22:06:

The justice aspect to me is definitely about the physical land and being on the county owned Johnson County Historic Poor Farm, that we're taking this public land and we're dedicating it and saying, "This is for this specific community who has less access to other things. But we're maybe giving the land, but we're not giving you anything else. You're growing your food." And I like that a lot. And I think it's a part of a layered food justice rescue system while also recognizing that not everybody can or wants to, has the means to grow their own food. But there are people that do. And giving them space to do that and recognizing that that benefit goes beyond that individual person, that individual family, because they're sharing it and they're cooking it, and they're freezing it and saving it for later. And while also still supporting and recognizing that people also just need food.

[audio of quick paced guitar strings, that layer under Emerson’s narrative] 

Emerson Narrates, 23:07:
As I hinted earlier, the start of the 2025 season was rife with cuts that were, in short, existential. Here’s a short though not comprehensive list: early spring federal hiring freezes and cuts to the National Weather Service resulted in the suspension of weather balloon flights, which are crucial to accurate weather forecasts.[5] Accurate readings facilitate planning and anticipate labor needs. In March, the USDA announced the cancellation of the Local Foods for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. In total, these programs supplied nearly $1Billion for schools, pantries, and food banks across the U.S. to purchase directly from local farmers in their areas.[6] Similar to SNAP’s benefit to growers, these programs created partnerships that aligned the needs of farmers to have access to markets and for food support agencies to stock fresh and nutritionally dense crops. In early May, the Trump administration ended nearly $400 million in grants to AmeriCorps, a national entity that provides small stipends for service positions, many of which can intersect with farmer training.[7] In early June, the USDA cancelled nearly $150 million in grants used to alleviate or remove barriers in food or climate work, building in turn, equity into those systems given histories of exclusion.[8] It felt like a cascade of dominoes. You’ll notice that all of these cut announcements landed in the early spring and summer, a crucial window of time in the growing season. It will take time to fully assess and reflect on the long-term impact of these cuts, and how different organizations were able to respond or adapt.  

Early on in my volunteer time with GROW, I remember hearing something that still stuns me. The average rate of burnout amongst new farmers is approximately five years. For comparison, this rate is on par with occupations in health care and violence prevention work. This seems like a strange comparison, given distinct forms of work. What they share, however, is revealing: exposure to chronic stress from uncertainty, extremely low wages, and long hours of physically demanding work, often in situations that can exacerbate that physical toll. April talked a little about the impacts of funding uncertainty—not only on her own mind, but the impact to the operation and to the community as a whole. 

April Lawyer: 26:26:

Funding for Grow has been uncertain this year. And it's the lack of funding, but it's also the uncertainty. That does a lot to you as a person. Are we going to be able to do four and a half acres next year? Are we going to have to go down to even fewer, even less land? It impacts how we plan because we don't know if we can plan for having the South Fields open again. Something like that. Yeah. I think funding is huge. We already have tons of wonderful volunteers, but there's only so much that the community themselves can help us with.

Emerson Narrates, 27:10:
When I hear references to the poor farm by key stakeholders, they tend to separate the historical and modern aspects. And I understand why, but one impact of that is the separation of the site’s disability history and the futures grown through commitment to local food. But the nexus connecting them both is how the land organizes our attitudes about dependency. That term—dependency—is such a charged and loaded term in a culture that prizes independence. It is a term that traffics shame and fear—these are emotions that build distance. Independence isn’t innately bad, far from it. But how far have we traveled from a simple truth—that we need soil, water, shelter, we are dependent beings and the longer we distance ourselves from this need, we distance ourselves from fully knowing our humanity. We have much to learn from disability culture and its creativity, learning how to be human by embodying trees or soil. 

In future years, I’m asking how amidst all the challenges, organizations like GROW are persisting, building connections between people, soil, and food. Will food become the great connector to bring people together? I really don’t know, but all things are possible. 

Scott Koepke, 29:00:
From hope to balance to peace to patience to listening to trust, resilience, gratitude, all these life skills. Right? And I remember so clearly some of the first times where I was talking about this in a class to not just the incarcerated people I was working with, or the "clientele," but other adults and professionals who wanted to learn what I was teaching, so, that they could maybe take some of that to their own context, and I still to this day talk about this, I think the title of the slide I throw up is just three words, Any Of Us. And it's a lead-in for me to talk to the group about sitting ... I challenge all of us to literally sit down with someone who is hungry and in trouble. Okay? How many people who are wagging their finger that I just described, and being judgmental about food pantry clients, how many of those people have actually sat down with anyone who is hungry and in trouble? And we're not excusing the theft or the weapons trafficking. We're understanding it. We're trying to understand why did this happen? But to then open up the conversation to now what? It's not just about saying, "Oh, I understand why you're struggling." "Yeah. That makes sense." My now what is gardening. My only thing I can do is I get ... "Hey. You want to join me in the garden and heal?" 

[audio of guitar strumming and flute that underlays Emerson’s narrative] 

Emerson Narrates, 30:44:
At the end of the day, it all comes back to ripples and compost. We can’t change the past, but we can challenge ourselves to learn where we’ve been. We can find patterns in the landscape, sometimes in the etchings carved into soft wood. That does not mean we are destined for repetition; some things decompose and turn into an otherwise. What ripples will last when we choose dignity, when choose to honor need, when we choose each other?

Scott Koepke, 31:26:
I'll start off by saying, when I first came in, before we were recording how emotional I was coming to this farm after 10 years. I spent three years here, blood, sweat, and tears, and to see the baby go from a toddler to an adult, these guys are sprinting now. In terms of the history too of this sacred place, I'll never forget the moments I had giving tours at this farm with school groups, volunteers, interns, anyone who would come out and wanted a tour. And in fact, even before going into the asylum, we went through the old barn over here and saw some of the old equipment that, not just farm equipment, but I'm talking about like old wheelchairs that had leather straps holding people in place. So, these disabled folks, and we're talking about the 1860s here, by the way. So, we're talking Civil War era buildings and history, and maybe 1880s is more accurate, but post-Civil War, let's just say.  

And I'll never forget, anytime I would go in there, just kind of laying back and watching the reaction of people, to just their mouths just dropped, like this is how people were treated? There was hardly any heat, there was no light. It's just these little, tiny cells that are like four feet by five feet with bars, wooden bars on them, literally just incarcerating people with mental and physical disabilities. That's how we treated these people that had no other place to go except the poor farm of Johnson County? Yeah, yeah, that's what we did. Then they did have work out here where they'd come out and do some of the same things that we're going to do today. We're going to pull weeds, we're going to tend to the chickens, which are, again, they're not doing, but I want them to do, because they used to do. So, but these folks did, yeah, they were doing some of the same tomatoes, two potatoes that we're doing. And then they'd come back in here into their cells, and there's a little place on these cells where you can see where food, a food tray is put that they... I mean, it's just, it's so emotionally devastating to think about that there's, and I hope that they've, I'm pretty sure that the county has preserved this to the extent that...  

And when you go into some of these cells, you will see poems written in pencil on the walls. They're very, very difficult to see, but if you get up close to the walls, you'll see on the wood these etchings, and sometimes it's almost like the old prison thing where they're keeping track of how long they've been there by all these little marks that either represent years or months or whatever. And there's one name in particular that I will never forget for the rest of my life that is written in pencil above one of the cells, Alfred Knapp. And I want to honor the memory of this man. I would go into that cell and close the door behind me, and the kids would come up in front. And I would ask some kid, I'd say, "Can any of you read this name up here?" And you have to kind of squint, and then you go, "Alfred Knapp." And I go, "Okay. How many of you have an uncle or a dad or a brother?" Everyone's hands go up. "I want you to just please with me for a moment, imagine if your relative by the name of Alfred Knapp was where I'm standing, in 1880, just got out of the field, working, didn't have hardly anything, but had some food, had some shelter, had some community. But this was his shelter. This was his community. This was his food source." And people, when they start to, again, it goes back to listening to people's stories and honoring and trying to put yourself in the shoes of someone else, nurturing empathy, nurturing humility, listening to stories, trying to figure out what it must have been like for people to have gone through that right where we're sitting, Emerson. And to just respect that and honor it and build upon it. That to me is just as vital of a foundation that this project needs to nurture as it does the soil and the food that comes out of that soil. And then I also, again, going back to the ripples, I just am so blessed to take a bird's eye view of this project and see all the things that have grown and will continue to grow that I could only have dreamed of. But despite that growth, if they do get the orchard, for instance, there will always be a fundamental foundation of building soil health, honoring the memories of Alfred Knapp and feeding hungry people. 

[guitar strings strum until the end of the episode]

[1] News Release, “State Agencies to Enhance Existing Childhood Nutrition Programs, Decline Summer EBT Participation,” 22 December 2023, Accessed 22 December 2025, https://hhs.iowa.gov/news-release/2023-12-22/summer-24-ebt
[2] Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Amistad Books), 2018.
[3] Sami Shalk, Black Disability Politics (Duke University Press), 2022; and Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (New York University Press), 2022.   
[4] Debra Freeman, “The Story of Fish Peppers, a Legacy of the African American Garden,” Epicurious 4 April 2001, Accessed 21 December 2025, https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/fish-peppers-african-american-garden-article
[5] Molly Ashford, “‘Unprecedented’ cuts to Midwest weather balloon launches could make it harder to forecast storms,” Illinois Public Media News 8 April 2025; Accessed 22 December 2025, https://ipmnewsroom.org/unprecedented-cuts-to-midwest-weather-balloon-launches-could-make-it-harder-to-forecast-storms/
[6] Marcia Brown, “USDA Cancels $1B in local food purchasing for schools, food banks,” Politico 10 March 2025, Accessed 22 December 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/10/usda-cancels-local-food-purchasing-for-schools-food-banks-00222796
[7] Jennifer Ludden, “Trump’s gutting of Americorps hits hard, for both volunteers and communities,” NPR 9 May 2025, Accessed 22 December 2025 https://www.npr.org/2025/05/09/nx-s1-5383188/trumps-gutting-of-americorps-hits-hard-for-both-volunteers-and-communities
[8] Ayurella Horn-Muller, “The USDA announced the cancellation of $148M in ‘woke’ grants. Then it went dark,” Grist Magazine 31 July 2025; Accessed 22 December 2025 https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/usda-148-million-woke-grants-cancellation/