Creating a Culture of Female Food Heroes

As a college student in the early 2000s, Tambra Raye Stevenson was excited about an assignment to track her meals over the Thanksgiving holiday. She loved technology and used the assignment as an opportunity to test out a nutrition analysis software program on her PalmPilot.

She was the only African American in her nutrition undergraduate program at Oklahoma State University. “So imagine being in Oklahoma, in the heartland. It wasn’t particularly healthy dishes. It was mind boggling to realize between chitlins and all the other fixings that we had that were customary and very cultural, what the health impact was. I found myself shying away, feeling shame,” she recalls. It was all of the things she has since read about in Psyche A. Williams-Forson’s 2022 book Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America, that bubbled up for her at the time, she explained recently from her Washington, D.C., office.

“I had no way to talk about it,” she says. She had no outlet, no mentors who understood how she was grappling with the fact that the celebratory foods in her family were contributing to their dietary health concerns, like her grandmother’s diabetes and grandfather’s coronary heart disease.

“I was thinking: What is the solution? And I had no real answers. We eat chitlins to pay homage to our ancestors who had to use these foods as a way to survive,” she says. “I was curious, what are those foods that we now need to thrive?”

Ever since, that has been the ongoing question for Stevenson, who has devoted her career to empowering communities and the next generation to improve their health. She recently shared how her journey from nutritionist to food is medicine advocate has combined a blend of research, policy, cultural awareness, food equality advocacy, and life experience.

Your career started in nutrition before it broadened into public health and communication. What initially drew you to the field of nutrition?

Believe it or not, I didn't know nutrition was a career track until I found myself in chemistry class at Oklahoma State University. I was biology pre-med, and I was curious why we didn’t have a biology department, but there was an entire department devoted to nutrition. As a kid I wanted to have a restaurant, and so the thought that there was some other pathway into food was intriguing, especially that it could be a science, not just an art.

When I walked down the halls and saw the research labs, I saw they had funding. It was women in science. As some would say, “This is not Betty Crocker over here.” At the time there was a stigma attached to those “home economics” studies coming from the June Cleaver era, and I was inspired by women leaders in nutrition who wanted to turn a new tide and show that this is a science women can be in.

I cut my teeth conducting nutrition research in labs with other women and seeing that as a viable option outside of clinician work. And I did that all throughout college and through different internships every summer—from Baylor University to Harvard Public Health to working in the Dominican Republic. Being a nutritionist helped me to stand out … creating these unique opportunities to be at the Department of Nutrition at Harvard working with amazing researchers, doing community work on populations that I cared about.

Your work connects so many dots, so many areas of study that may seem unrelated at first—from community health to media technology. 

Most definitely. I would say I'm a ‘silo smasher’ because of what I've come to realize, and that became more clear when I went to Tufts University to earn my master’s in health communication. I am passionate about community, and it helped me understand those principles of public health, about working together as this interdisciplinary team, everyone bringing their different superpowers together.

How do you solve common health challenges in a community? The research doesn't matter if we can't translate it into layman's terms for people to apply to their everyday life to improve their health. And I kept going down the communication pathway because of it. So my mindset was that of Moses. How do you tell it on the mountain, the good news of what can happen in the area of nutrition to improve everyday people's lives?

I also became interested in using technology for improving our health. The program at American University in media technology and democracy felt like a natural progression even though there was definitely a change in direction from the health communications I knew at Tufts, which was more interpersonal.

You’re four years into your PhD at American University. What has been the focus of your research?

Initially, I came in looking at games for health. My orientation was what my kids were doing online playing Roblox, Minecraft. But with the pandemic, that changed. The idea of belonging became of great interest, because right next to food, when we think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, food is critical, housing is critical, safety is critical. But also belonging became critical in terms of what people were willing to do just to have a sense of community in the midst of the pandemic.

I became interested in how women were being affected in these online spaces and how they were getting information resources for themselves to survive a whole pandemic. Within those communities I was interested in how they were building belonging. So my research is also about Black women's belonging to improve their health in online communities. It's really an opportunity to inform organizations that as you set up online interventions or online communities, how you can maximize that opportunity to communicate a sense of belonging.

Last year I passed my dissertation proposal the same week the U.S. Surgeon General produced a report on loneliness as an epidemic. And so it just affirms what my spidey sense was already telling me about loneliness and health. It really costs our economy when people feel alone and don't have a sense of community. So it parlays into the conversation of food because food is a way in which we have built community around a table. My organization, WANDA (Women Advancing Nutrition, Dietetics, and Agriculture), brings women together, understanding that our sisterhood is our medicine just as much as our food is medicine. And so the PhD has been a way to research that as a real opportunity to merge with the work that WANDA is doing, to affirm and inform that food is medicine, but our community also is medicine.

At what point in your career did that concept of food is medicine crystallize for you?

After working in federal and local government, and as an extension agent designing U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and EFNEP (Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program) here in D.C., food is medicine became very clear for me in my communication to audiences, whether it was a childcare center, housing authority, or just out in the community. It’s about the decisions that we make every day and the purchasing of food as a community, as a family, as an individual, and how that can or cannot improve our health conditions.

What prompted you to found WANDA?

I saw Michelle Obama kick off the Let's Move! initiative, and it was the first time I saw a Black woman in a key position speaking on food and nutrition. I hoped that would grow into a larger movement of more women seeing themselves, of taking back their families, their health, their kitchens in a way that we hadn't seen before. And riding on that wave, I wondered how do we continue to build on this idea that we need more Michelles of the world and not have it anchored in politics?

It became clear to me that we need everyday women to see themselves as food heroes. And so WANDA was born from this idea of wanting to build a movement of women educating, advocating, and innovating the food system from farm to health, with the goal of creating healthy, sustainable communities.

We bring women together to learn and build community and educate themselves around their food as medicine. For example, a lot of times in nutrition we give recipes, but through WANDA we want women to have agency and learn how to create their own recipes. That's why we started the sisterhood supper cookbook project, to just share how important recipes can be to preserve your history, your identity, but also the ways in which we've used food to journey through life. That recipe can be used to be a metaphor to healing your life, healing with meals, one at a time.

The organization empowers women within their communities, but it also advocates for food justice. Tell us more about how WANDA shapes food policy.

Advocacy is the other part of WANDA’s work because we know that once women feel whole and healed, we can now heal our communities together. The right to food has been an issue we've been wanting to beat the pavement on and why when we issued our first policy report to the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health we really wanted to make a proclamation that as Black women, we have thoughts and opinions on how we think about food policy in this country. It's our right as part of democracy to speak up and speak out on how a better food system can help all of us, not just some of us. And how a food bill of rights is one pathway to get there, to level set how we think about values that shape our communities, our future, and how it can be a framework of how we think about building a better food system together.

Food is medicine is still an emerging field. How does your work bring this concept into everyday homes?

I think about my grandma, who's 97 in Oklahoma. She spent 35 years as a nurse who has diabetes, and she overcame a stroke. If I were to have a conversation with her as someone who has grown up on the farm making her own herbal tonics, I would say, “Grandma Ruby, when you think about what you've been able to do and living the life that you have for so long, outpacing your own son and husbands, I would say the food that you grew up with was our medicine. It spoke to your culture; it spoke to what affirmed you. When you think about the greens that you make, the black-eyed peas that you make, it's not only food that gives you the fiber that you need, the vitamins and minerals that you need, but it also affirms your own identity. And for that, that is your medicine.”

To me, programs like “produce prescriptions” are no-brainers. Pharmaceutical drugs should not be the only option of dispensing and being reimbursed by insurance companies. Medical costs should encompass healthy food options, and all cultural healthy food should be a part of that equation. If food truly is our medicine, that means our insurance is covering the cost of it. My grandma shouldn’t have to choose between diabetes medicine or her grocery bill. They're one and the same. And right now these are the battles that our seniors are having to face, choosing between medicine or food.

You’re saying that cultural foods, like black-eyed peas, can be more than nutritious—they can also affirm someone’s identity. How is that related to healing or preventive medicine?

It has particular meaning for any culture community that has felt marginalized. African diasporan foods are often discussed as hunger foods, forbidden foods. And now the argument for me is how do we get to the next level, affirming through research and development dollars that our African heritage foods can be our medicine.

Right now that is not the case. That has not been the investment, that has not been the top priority agenda for our institutions, be it government or industry. It locks out a full potential from a market perspective of a consumer base that is seeking, wanting, needing to be affirmed by their foods being their extension of their identity, and part of their health. Instead we're redirecting dollars to say that it's only the Mediterranean diet that is our medicine, which is so monolithic of a narrative. But it hasn't been challenged. And if our table truly is an extension of democracy, my argument is then how is representation of democracy showing up? How is it affirming my own identity?

How can the food industry and food scientists learn about nutritious foods that aren’t in the Western mainstream?

The first step is just studying, right? Have intention and seek knowledge, build a community of practice. And once you have reached knowledge saturation, it’s the experimental phase. There's a lot of segmentation happening and we just need to cut through the silos and converge knowledge together … I hope that can change and we can rethink formulation and consumer testing of products and packaging and what resonates. … And that's why I'm so grateful to have the ability to engage with IFT. It's an audience I hadn't typically had the opportunity to engage with, but that's the point of breaking through the silos, not just talking to nutritionists or other people in the communication space, but how can we understand that we all have one agenda, a common agenda. And that's bringing innovation, not only to products, but really giving the consumer what they want—and maybe what they didn't want until finally someone put it out there and now they were like, “This is the product I wanted and I never knew!”

What will it take for the medical community to embrace this concept of food is medicine?

For medical doctors, it will take evidence. A lot of times if you think about how they've been trained to ask: What does the research say? Also, how they're being trained and educated. I was at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Food Is Medicine Summit just a month ago and there was a panel on the need to increase more culinary medical training. There’s not a lot of nutrition training happening in medical schools, but folks want to change that.

The other piece is policy, and the guidelines needing to be changed and how we think about ways to use different nutrition or food is medicine strategies in clinical settings. WANDA is partnering with key institutions here in D.C. We're looking to host a summit on food is medicine in the Black community and Johns Hopkins will be one of our partners on that. It's important to level set the understanding by convening key stakeholders around these topics. So to me that's just the starting place.

Then there’s the advocacy part, and knowing what needs to be funded through our health departments. In nutrition we'd say: If nutrition is your passion, policy must be your business. What I loved about my early days as a pre-med marching the hill in white coats, fighting for universal healthcare, was this appreciation that if we truly care about the life extension of a patient, then it's not just what we do in clinics that matter. It's also what we do in putting our feet to the streets and looking to use our voice for change.ft