The numbers are harrowing. According to the Centers for Disease Control, obesity affects 17 percent of all US children. That’s 12.7 million of our young people. Race and racism impact these numbers: obesity affects 22 percent of Latino children and 19 percent of non-Latino Black children.
How did we get to this point? It’s chilling when you talk to a child and they don’t even know what a vegetable is. They have never seen an onion or even heard the word, and they think French fries are a fucking vegetable. One kid we were working with thought a damn strawberry was a small apple. It wasn’t his fault, but I’m like, What the fuck? What school are you going to? Food is so important—and that’s why I focus my foundation work on nutrition and how food creates the preconditions for a healthy body and mind. But we have so far to go. If food is self-determination, then right now, that self-determination does not exist.
Athletes have a moral responsibility to step up and do something about this, because we have been lying to children for years. We sell junk food to kids who look like us. We pretend we eat this shit and imply that this is how we were able to rise to the top of our sports. We say, “Hi, kids! I eat McDonald’s!” But Michael Jordan is not eating McDonald’s. He has a chef. I guarantee that Jordan spends a million dollars a year on his food, and it’s not a million dollars of Big Macs.
We need to stop selling this poison, and we need a frontal assault on the food deserts in poor areas. The people who run Whole Foods don’t want to build stores in these neighborhoods, unless they are neighborhoods “in transition,” where poor people of color are going to be forced out anyway. They say it’s not profitable to build in these communities, and they can’t or won’t drop their prices to make food affordable. This is why Pele and I are committed to building a network of community gardens and, once we have set them up, killing the myth that eating healthy is so expensive you couldn’t do it.
Food education means the world to me: giving people the opportunity to understand how nutrition plays a decisive role in being healthy, intelligent, and able to live your best life. We say to families, “We know how tough it is out there to make a food budget work. But let us work with you. You buy five Happy Meals and four burgers, it’s twenty-seven dollars, right? Let’s talk about how to go to the grocery store and shop for a twenty-seven-dollar healthy meal. Or fifteen dollars? Twelve dollars? Let’s talk about how we can try to make it work.” But it’s often a deeper problem than how to grocery shop, though. Often, the parents we speak to just don’t have the time to cook or are too exhausted from work. The commute to the nearest supermarket with fresh produce is also a killer. We do cooking demonstrations and seminars to show how to make preparing food as time-effective as possible, but we know we are up against a lot of real-life obstacles as we move forward.
This passion for food justice is why I’ve partnered with the Freedom School in Seattle. It’s a summer program based on the original Freedom Schools in the South during the civil rights movement. The Freedom Schools believed that literacy, history, and life are best learned through struggle, and this school is part of that tradition. At the Seattle Freedom School, kids learn about the history of struggles for justice, then they pick a project they want to focus on and the whole summer culminates in their day of action. In 2017, they picked food justice. Their action was a march and rally, culminating in speakouts in front of all the fast food restaurants near their school. They talked about nutrition, the lack of healthy food in communities of color, and the lack of a living wage for the restaurant workers. I brought the Freedom School to the Seahawks preseason camp. The kids looked at us like we were heroes, but I wanted as many of my teammates as possible to meet with these amazing young people and learn something from them.
Pele and I, with our foundation, also do food justice work in youth prisons. If you go to what they call “a juvenile detention center” and ask a counselor who’s been there for twenty years what the difference is between kids today and back when the counselor started, they’ll say that it’s not that youth prisoners are more dangerous or more violent now. It’s that they are more tired. The word used is “lethargic.” They don’t want to play sports. They don’t want to move. It’s the coming together of depression and junk food, but it’s bigger than just having no energy. These kids don’t want to live. If you don’t eat healthily, you don’t want to be alive. I’ve built community gardens inside these detention centers, teaching kids how to garden, and you would be surprised how these young people—demonized as super-predators but too defeated on some days to get out bed—come to life. One kid told me something I’ll never forget. He said, “This project is not only teaching me what to eat, but it’s showing me that I’m a human being. When I eat something that I grow, I feel like I am not in jail anymore.”
Outside the prison system, when I meet kids who do eat healthily, the whole family is doing the work and taking the time to help them
