Meet Yvette Blair-Lavallais | Food Justice Scholar and Activist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Yvette Blair-Lavallais and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Yvette, how does your business help the community?
We Knead Bread is a faith-based response to food deserts, food insecurity and food injustice. It looks at the root causes and asks the question of why is this happening and what can we do about it. I convene and participate in national conversations that address the disparities in food insecurity, looking at it through a faith lens. Food insecurity affects millions of people globally and thousands of people in North Texas. You’d be surprised at the number of people in our communities who do not have access to fresh, affordable, healthy food. It’s really more complicated than you might even know. There are barriers that prohibit access and sometimes those barriers are in the form of policies that prioritize one area of the city over another area in terms of whether or not there are full-scale grocery stores in every community.

We Knead Bread is currently focused on cultivating community gardens, working with churches and nonprofits to address and respond to food insecurity in the Red Bird community of Dallas.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I always like to give some connectional context and acknowledge my family history of how I enter this space of food justice work. I come as the fifth-great granddaughter of Matilda Berry, who traveled and relocated to Central Texas from Mississippi in the late 1800s with her daughter Mariah Blair, Mariah’s three young sons and a boarder. Mariah eventually owned land and was a farmer at a time when it was normalized for Black women to own land. That is important to me and it undergirds my work.

I believe that what sets me apart in this critical work of food justice is that I approach it through the lens of faith. In other words, because of my background as a pastor and a faith leader, and with the doctoral research that I am doing that looks at food insecurity at the intersection of faith and policy, along with the gentrification and displacement of Black, Latinx and Indigenous peoples, it is really charting new waters. To center faith in this work is a more nuanced approach toward delving into the root causes of food insecurity and the interrelated systems that have historically disadvantaged and marginalized the vulnerable among us.

This work is not easy but it is a labor of love. I enjoy teaching others and the opportunity to lecture in classrooms about what I am learning and having conversations about the theological and social implications of hunger. It is as much pastoral anthropology as it is culturally anthropology. This work really began when I was in seminary at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas when we did a campus project called “Harvest for the World,” to collect food for a local food pantry. Not long after, I became more aware of so-called food deserts where grocery stores were closing in neighborhoods in the southern sector of the city, leaving residents without a source for fresh food. As a writer, I began writing and publishing articles in various national outlets about food injustice.

A few years later I was recruited to the doctor of ministry program at Memphis Theological Seminary to be in their inaugural cohort “Land, Food and Faith” which looks at food theology and the interrelated practices of land stewardship, injustices and what demographics are disproportionately affected. This gives me the language, research and pedagogical approach to also teach about food theology and food insecurity.

What I am most proud of is having recently convened and curated a national conference, “The Texas Mobile Institute -The Politics of Food: Health Disparities and the Epidemic of Food Insecurity in Texas,” sponsored by Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. I assembled leaders in health equity, policy, civil rights, grassroots activism and even storytelling through film, to talk candidly about the correlation between food insecurity and health disparities.

I am also proud of having been invited this past summer to be one of five speakers at “Conversations with the White House in the Southwest Region ” hosted by Bread For the World, where I centered Texas in the narrative on food insecurity.

Here’s what I want people to know: we need conversations about the reason people need food, and then we need to move toward sustainable practices and policies that ensures food security. We Knead Bread is not about making bread; rather it is about getting our hands in this work of food justice – from cultivating gardens to raising our hands and speaking at town hall meetings, to drafting faith-based policies – and ensuring that all of our neighbors in our respective communities have fresh, affordable, healthy food.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
If my bestie was visiting, I’d definitely take her to Trinity Groves in West Dallas. The vibe is good. There are plenty of restaurants to choose from, and we’d have to make time for coffee at Soiree Coffee Bar while we are there. The mix of jazz and jazz-influenced coffee drinks like the Lena Horne and the Louis Armstrong are a must try! Of course, it’s a great walking area with the Ron Kirk Pedestrian Bridge just steps away, overlooking Dallas.

I’d also include the Bishop Arts District on our list of places to hit up. There are great stores, eateries and fun things to do there. It’s an eclectic space and it is also a cool space with vintage finds as well as art, clothes and jewelry from local artisans.

Because the North Texas area has so many great spots, we’d have to cross the Trinity River and head over to Fort Worth and check out the zoo, the vibe downtown, Sun Dance Square and then drive around and see some of the local farms like Opal’s Farm, a response to food insecurity that 94-year-old Miss Opal began a few years ago.

My bestie is an arts enthusiast and would appreciate seeing the museums in Dallas and Fort Worth and enjoying a refreshing margarita or mojito at Gloria’s Restaurant or for a different vibe – dinner at Yardbird Southern Table and Bar in downtown Dallas for their lobster mac n’ cheese or plentiful chicken and waffles.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
This is definitely a group effort and I have been inspired by so many others in this food justice work. Here locally, I have worked with and been supported by Wyonella Henderson-Greene and Candace Thompson with the Dallas Coalition for Hunger Solutions; Bettie Montgomery and her son Ples Montgomery IV, the founders of The Oak Cliff Veggie Project; and Jesse Herrera, Roderick Miles, and Linda Fulmer with Grow Southeast in Fort Worth.

I’d have to also say that I have learned much about the history of food injustice through the scholarship of author and professor Dr. Monica M. White and her book, “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement,” and Dr. Bobby Smith, an assistant professor at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A huge shoutout and kudos to Dr. Angelique Walker-Smith, Sesheida Young, Terrence Mayo and Chonya Johnson – my friends at Bread For the World who are doing the work of food justice and who generously include me in many conversations and webinars about the disparities of food insecurity particularly in Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities. I am in good company with my cohorts in the doctoral program at Memphis Theological Seminary and my cohorts at the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative at Vanderbilt Divinity School under the par excellence leadership of Rev. Dr. Teresa Smallwood.

Website:
yvetteblair.com 
We Knead Bread (wekneadbread.faith)

Instagram: preachergirl716

Twitter: YvetteRevYBlair