2025 Season Opens June 21st at Pilgrim Rest Church!
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2025 Season Opens June 21st at Pilgrim Rest Church!
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2025 Season Opens June 21st at Pilgrim Rest Church!
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2025 Season Opens June 21st at Pilgrim Rest Church! • 2025 Season Opens June 21st at Pilgrim Rest Church! • 2025 Season Opens June 21st at Pilgrim Rest Church! •
Our Mission
To serve as a public venue in a food desert as an outlet that brings together black farmers, growers, foodpreneurs, artisans, and makers to sell their Wares directly to the public and strengthen the local food system and economy.
Our Why
Food Apartheid
In 2019, the Feeding America Map the Meal Gap study showed that 140,940 residents of Shelby County, including Memphis, were food insecure in the year prior. That means close to 15 percent of people faced “lack of access, at times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members and limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate foods.”
Cultural Misconceptions
Cultural Food, aKA “Soul Food", is touted as unhealthy. “healthy” food options do not reflect black american cultural practices. Racism and Classism define nutrition, which often leads to chronic illness, such, as hypertension and diabetes, run rampant in black communities.
Black Farmers?
Currently, 95% of America’s farmers are white.
The number of black farmers in America peaked in 1920, when there were 949,889. Today, of the country’s 3.4 million total farmers, only 1.3%, or 45,508, are black, according to figures from the US Department of Agriculture. They own a mere 0.52% of America’s farmland.
Black farmers who have managed to hold on to their farms, barely make a decent living; making less than $40,000 annually, compared to over $190,000 by white farmers. The average acreage of black farmers is about one-quarter that of white farmers.