Subject: Food Hosts: Jerry and Tonya Guests: Sneaky Mar 25, 2026 Food Insecurity # Episode 4: Food Sovereignty **Tagline:** *Food is a basic right — not a market opportunity.* ## Overview Episode 4 is a hosts-only episode recorded on March 25, 2026. Where the prior episodes focused on housing and featured expert guests, this episode turns inward — Jerry and Tanya reflect on the project's momentum, then dig into food as both a personal and systemic issue. The conversation moves from the emotional and biographical to the structural and political, grounding everything in the Sovereignty and Basic Needs are Basic Rights pillars of the Project 2026 framework. The episode is the fourth in the series and the first to directly center **food sovereignty** — the idea that communities must own and control their food systems rather than depend on systems designed to extract profit from them. --- ## Hosts **Jerry Norris** — founder of The Fledge, born and raised in Lansing. Grew up in Section 8 housing on food stamps. Went on to study math and computer science at University of Michigan, built and sold software companies, and returned to Lansing about twelve years ago to start The Fledge. Personal relationship with food is complex — shaped by poverty, wrestling weight cuts, and the joy of gardening with his grandparents. **Tanya Pieslowski** — co-host and longtime Lansing-area resident with over 25 years in the community. Her work centers on energy justice and utility regulation, which she frames as inseparable from housing and basic needs. Draws the connection between war, tariffs, gas prices, fertilizer costs, and the downstream impact on food and transportation as basic needs. --- ## Opening Reflections This is Episode 4, and both hosts note the project is gaining momentum. Jerry mentions journalists, software developers, artists, musicians, and renewable energy workers stopping by The Fledge after hearing about Project 2026 and wanting to get involved. He emphasizes that this is a decentralized community project — not a Fledge thing, not a Jerry-and-Tanya thing. Tanya asks Jerry to reflect on what he's learning and hearing. He shares a quote from Jorge Luis Borges: *"The author of an atrocious undertaking must imagine it as already accomplished."* He spends time visualizing what Lansing and Michigan look like when everyone's basic needs are met — potholes gone, more art, more leisure, less complaining about the weather. Tanya adds that this vision-first approach is what makes an overwhelming situation actionable: you can see what you're building toward, and that allows you to take concrete steps. Jerry also notes a practical early signal: The Fledge's food pantry is running low faster than it used to, and new people are coming for food who weren't there before. The ALICE threshold pressure is visibly rising. --- ## Framing the Issue — Food Apartheid, Not Food Desert Jerry introduces a key language distinction that carries throughout the episode: > **"Food desert" → "Food apartheid"** A desert is natural. An apartheid is manmade, structural, and deliberate. The geographic overlap between redlining maps from 90 years ago and current food access maps is not coincidence — it is the direct legacy of human policy. Using "food apartheid" keeps that accountability visible in the language. In Lansing's north side zip code 48906, the numbers are stark: **82% of households are below the ALICE threshold**, and **64% have low access to food**. The late Sunrise Market on US-127 is cited as an example of what a neighborhood food anchor meant to that community — and what its loss represents. --- ## Sovereignty and Ownership Before turning to food specifically, the hosts ground the episode in the Sovereignty principle. Jerry uses a metaphor: imagine building a machine on rented land that creates a utopia for everyone — then being told to leave and that you can't take the machine. The lesson: solutions to complex problems must be *owned* by the community that depends on them, or they can be taken away. > *"Sovereignty means you've got choices. You've got the ability to own the means of production for our basic needs. If we do that, the hand that feeds us won't be the hand that starves us."* Tanya ties this to housing, where investors buying up vacant stock and not converting it to affordable units is a direct parallel — private extraction of public-adjacent resources. She frames food sovereignty as one of the most tangible and empowering ways to push back against that dynamic. Renters face a specific sovereignty barrier with gardening: landlords may not permit it. The workaround offered — container gardening, pots on balconies — is itself a small act of food sovereignty. --- ## Root Causes of Hunger The hosts agree on a foundational premise: **there is enough food. Hunger is a policy decision and a systems problem**, not a scarcity problem. Causes discussed include: **Food waste.** Roughly 30% of food produced is wasted — sent to landfill or compost rather than to people who need it. Restaurant and bar workers who pack up leftover food in to-go boxes and bring it to freestands are described as doing something "punk rock" — food rescue as an everyday act of resistance. **Food apartheid geography.** Even when a grocery store is technically accessible, carrying groceries home on the bus adds time, physical labor, and cost. When you factor in transportation costs, buying from a nearby convenience store may actually be cheaper than a trip to the grocery store — a poverty trap hiding in plain sight. **Ultra-processed food and manufactured addiction.** Jerry names RJR Nabisco — a tobacco company — as a key actor in engineering ultra-processed food to be more addictive and to make people thirsty. This is not a coincidence or a byproduct; it's a business model. Salty bar snacks are given away for free for a reason. **Wage suppression and corporate welfare.** Tanya names Walmart directly: the largest private employer in the country by number of workers receiving SNAP benefits. Companies that pay sub-living wages while their workers depend on public food assistance are effectively subsidized by taxpayers. This is the "real welfare queen" — corporate welfare that offloads the true cost of labor onto the public. The cycle is self-reinforcing: workers can't afford to shop at the food co-op, so they shop at Walmart, which strengthens Walmart's market position, which drives out corner stores, which deepens the food apartheid. **Poverty traps and the logic of "bad choices."** The hosts deconstruct the dominant narrative that hunger is a character flaw. Payday loans, convenience store food, not using coupons — things often cited as "poor decisions" — are in fact deeply rational responses to constrained choices. When your power bill is shutting off today, a payday loan makes sense even at 300% interest. When carrying groceries costs $15 in bus fare and an hour and a half, buying from the corner store is cheaper. The poverty simulation tool — a kit created by a Missouri community action agency that puts people through four 15-minute "weeks" of poverty decision-making — is cited as a powerful way to make this legible. **Hunger is disproportionately borne by children.** One in six children in Lansing experiences hunger on a regular basis. Single mothers face a 50/50 chance of living in poverty, and child hunger and childcare costs are deeply intertwined. **Historical policy legacies.** Redlining, structural racism, and decades of oppressive policy don't disappear — they compound. Tanya notes that what looks like present-day inequality is often the direct forward momentum of past policy, and the dominant culture's preference to treat that history as finished prevents accountability for its ongoing effects. --- ## What Government Can Do **Michigan's universal free school meals.** Michigan now offers free breakfast and lunch to all students — a policy change that removes the stigma and administrative burden from children who need it. When everyone gets the same lunch, no one has to hide the fact that they can't pay. Jerry shares a memory of being the "only poor kid" in his school and having to hide his lunch card — universal access eliminates that. **Zoning reform.** Community gardens and neighborhood food pantries face zoning barriers that make little sense when weighed against the goal of food access. Several people in the tri-county area have been cited or stopped from running small pantries. Jerry asks directly: are we zoning to end food apartheid, or to perpetuate it? Corner grocery stores — which once anchored neighborhoods before megastores undercut them — can't survive under current zoning and economic structures. **Community garden support.** Policies that fund, protect, and expand access to community garden space — especially in food apartheid areas — are a direct sovereignty investment. This includes both zoning protection and financial support. --- ## What Everyday People Can Do The hosts deliberately shift to action that doesn't require waiting for policy: - **Try carrying your groceries home without a car.** Walk to the nearest grocery store, carry everything back. Not as imagination — actually do it. If you've never not had a car, this is the most direct way to understand the physical and economic weight of food access inequality. - **Donate to your nearest pantry — not necessarily The Fledge.** Find the closest pantry and stock it. Decentralization is the point: it defeats food apartheid to require people to travel to a central hub to eat. - **Start a pantry.** The Fledge's first pantry started with a cabinet left on the porch and food put inside it. If there isn't a pantry near you, that's a gap you can fill. (Note: be aware of local zoning and HOA rules — this is a known friction point.) - **Use the Allen Neighborhood Center farmer's market double SNAP benefit.** Bridge card holders can buy tokens that are matched 2:1 — every dollar spent becomes two dollars of purchasing power at the market. This program exists at the Allen Neighborhood Center and several other Lansing food markets. - **Get your hands dirty.** Grow something. Even a pot of cherry tomatoes on a balcony. The benefits are nutritional, mental, spiritual, and political. Soil under your fingernails improves gut health. Growing your own food is an act of sovereignty. Jerry notes that The Fledge will provide seeds, dirt, pots, and education — trade labor for food at Urbandale Farm. - **Show up at community meals.** Groups like Your Mom and Honeymoon Bakery are hosting community meals, sharing food across pantries, and building the infrastructure of connection. The Southside Community Kitchen offers regular hot meals. A neighbor named Teddy is running neighborhood potlucks where no one needs to bring anything but everyone can. These gatherings address not just hunger but the layer above it on Maslow's hierarchy: connection and dignity. - **Rescue food from your workplace.** If you work in food service and your manager says throw it away, box it up and bring it to a freestand instead. This is legal, ethical, and described as "punk rock." --- ## Local Resources and Organizations - **The Fledge Freestand** — outdoor food pantry, The Fledge, Lansing - **Urbandale Farm** — urban farm on South Hayford, entering its second year, worker-owned co-op in development; food available in exchange for labor - **Allen Neighborhood Center Farmer's Market** — double SNAP benefit (2:1 match for Bridge card holders) - **Your Mom and Honeymoon Bakery** — community meals and cross-pantry food sharing - **Southside Community Kitchen** — regular hot meals open to anyone - **The Garden Project / Hunter Park / Allen Neighborhood Center / Lansing Area Food Bank** — seed giveaways, gardening support; Urbandale has joined the Farm Hub at Hunter Park - **Local food pantry map** — a community-created map of small neighborhood pantries exists; will be linked in episode materials - **The Rhinoceros** — a worker-owned investigative journalism collective launching with new software; covers city council votes and money flows --- ## Urbandale Farm Urbandale Farm is in its second year on South Hayford. It grew out of the Lansing Urban Farm Project, which Jerry credits as a major driver of Lansing's high concentration of community gardens. The farm is being structured as a **worker-owned cooperative**, explicitly to lock in sovereignty — so the land and its productivity can't be taken away by an outside owner or investor. Anyone can come, learn to farm, and trade labor for food. The Fledge will provide seeds, dirt, and pots for container gardening to anyone who wants to start at home. --- ## How This Connects to the Project 2026 Framework Jerry closes the episode by pulling up the Project 2026 diagram and walking through how food connects to the framework's core pillars: - **Basic Needs are Basic Rights** — Food is the most fundamental of all. One in six children being hungry is not an abstraction; it's a call to action. - **Sovereignty** — Community-owned farms and pantries are sovereignty infrastructure. Solutions built on someone else's land or someone else's system can be revoked. - **Decentralize Everything** — You can't require people to travel to a central hub to eat. Food access must be distributed and local. - **Create a True Democracy** — Zoning laws, free school meals, SNAP policy, corner store viability — these are political levers. Show up to city council. Know how your ward representative votes. - **Starve the Failing Systems** — We can't burn the systems down overnight (grandma still needs her medicine), but we can build alternatives alongside them and let the failing ones become irrelevant. Freestands, co-op farms, community kitchens, neighborhood potlucks — these are the seeds. - **Permeate the Culture** — Make it fun. Make art about it. Show up to the No Kings protest on Saturday. Growing food is not what the stereotype looks like anymore — it's diverse, it's cool, and it includes "even thug, hard people like me." --- ## Calls to Action 1. **Carry your groceries home without a car** — do it once, actually, to feel what food access without a vehicle costs. 2. **Find your nearest food pantry and stock it** — don't wait for a drive; find what's closest and give what you can. 3. **Start a pantry** if there isn't one near you — it started at The Fledge with a cabinet on the porch. 4. **Use double SNAP benefits at the Allen Neighborhood Center** or other participating Lansing markets — your Bridge card dollar becomes two. 5. **Come to Urbandale Farm** — trade labor for food, get seeds, learn to grow. 6. **Grow something in a pot** — The Fledge will give you seeds, dirt, and a pot. Tomatoes, herbs, anything. 7. **Attend a community meal** — Your Mom and Honeymoon Bakery, Southside Community Kitchen, or a neighborhood potluck near you. 8. **Rescue food from work** — if you work in food service, pack it up and bring it to a freestand instead of throwing it away. 9. **Tell the hosts about events that should be on the Show Up calendar** — ward council meetings, city council sessions, food events, community actions. 10. **Read The Rhinoceros** — follow the money on city council votes and local development. --- ## How to Get Involved Leave your ideas, resources, and pantry locations in the comments or podcast chat. If you run a pantry that isn't getting enough traffic and want it promoted, reach out. If you want to run a poverty simulation in your community, The Fledge has the space and sometimes the time — coordinate with them. This is a community project. It is not The Fledge's project or Jerry and Tanya's project. If you have ideas, skills, or energy, the invitation is open. --- *Project 2026 Podcast · project2026.wiki · Lansing, MI* *"Food is a basic right. It's more than just a basic need."* — Jerry Norris --- **See also:** Basic Needs are Basic Rights · Sovereignty · Decentralize Everything · Starve the Failing Systems · The Fledge · Urbandale Farm · Episode 3: Housing Part 2 · ALICE Framework
Outline Introduction - Laneir Introduction to Project 2026 Introduction to the details of Project 2026