Center for Regional Food Systems Racial Equity in the Food System Workgroup

Dr. Lindsey Lunsford is an Assistant Professor for Food Systems Education and Policy at the Tuskegee University Cooperative Extension. She has been a member of the Racial Equity in the Food Systems (REFS) workgroup since 2017. Learn more about her background and perspective in this reflective Q&A!

What is a moment in life that shaped your perspective on and approach to food systems?

I grew up in Southern Indiana surrounded by agriculture, but agriculture never felt like it belonged to me. I could see cornfields from my window, but I couldn't see myself in the people who owned the story of farming. As a young Black girl, the food system felt culturally distant and, at times, quietly unwelcoming.

Everything shifted when I moved to Alabama's Black Belt. What began as a professional opportunity became something far more personal. For the first time, I was surrounded by communities where food and agriculture were deeply tied to identity, history, resistance, and self-determination. I worked alongside farmers, elders, organizers, and students whose relationships to the land carried knowledge that stretched across generations.

That contrast environment taught me what it feels like to be outside the narrative and the power of being reflected in it.

How do you practice race equity-centered food systems leadership?

I start from the assumption that expertise already exists within communities. Some of the most important teachers in my career have never held an academic title. They are farmers, cooks, organizers, and community members whose knowledge often goes unrecognized by formal institutions, and whose wisdom has shaped how I think about nearly everything.

My role is often less about leading from the front and more about creating conditions for others to lead, connect, and be heard. Whether I am teaching, mentoring graduate students, convening conversations, or supporting emerging scholars and fellows, I try to center relationships and shared learning over hierarchy.

I also believe race equity work requires us to tell fuller stories. Too often, food systems conversations focus on deficits. While those realities matter, communities are more than their challenges. I make room for stories of resilience, creativity, joy, and cultural richness alongside the harder conversations, because equity is not only about addressing harm. It is also about cultivating conditions for people to thrive.

What is your personal challenge in race equity-centered work?

My greatest challenge is learning to hold urgency and patience at the same time.

The inequities in our food system are real and immediate. When you work closely with communities navigating barriers to land, capital, healthy food, or representation, the pace of change can feel impossible to accept. There are moments when the gap between what is and what should be is simply hard to sit with.

At the same time, I have learned that lasting change is built through trust, relationships, and long-term commitment. Those things cannot be rushed. Some of the most meaningful work I have been part of happened not because someone had the perfect solution, but because people were willing to show up consistently, listen deeply, and stay in it for the long haul.

I am still learning how to hold both of those truths without letting one swallow the other.

What hard question do we need to ask ourselves about food systems leadership and transformation?

Are we willing to share power, or do we simply want to diversify who sits at existing tables?

Food systems leadership conversations often center on representation, and representation matters. But transformation requires more than adding new faces to old structures. It requires us to ask who makes decisions, who controls resources, whose expertise is valued, and who gets to define what success looks like.

If we are serious about transformation, we must be willing to examine systems that many of us have been taught to accept as the way things are.

How do we bridge "gaps" between and among worldviews through language and action?

I think we bridge gaps by becoming more curious about one another, and by spending less time trying to persuade and more time trying to understand.

People come to food systems work from different histories, priorities, and ways of knowing. Farmers, researchers, policymakers, educators, and community members may use different languages to describe goals that are not so different at their core. Finding common ground often starts with listening for shared values underneath different vocabularies.

But language can only open the door. Action is what builds trust. Trust grows when communities are engaged as collaborators rather than beneficiaries. It deepens when people see their ideas reflected in decisions and projects. Bridging worldviews is not about reaching agreement on everything. To me, it is about building enough trust to move forward together across differences.

What is the best advice you've been given?

A wise woman once told me: when you don't know what to do, don't do anything.

It sounds simple. It is not. We live and work in spaces that reward action, urgency, and decisiveness- spaces that treat stillness as failure or indifference. But that advice has stayed with me, particularly in the moments when the pressure to move is loudest and the path forward is genuinely unclear.

What I have come to understand is that sitting in indecision is not weakness. Sometimes it is the most honest thing you can do. You will often find yourself in that uncertain space longer than you want to be, and longer than anyone around you is comfortable with. But decisions made before the clarity arrives can cause more harm than the discomfort of waiting.

This has shaped how I work with communities, with students, and with colleagues. I try not to rush to solutions when the question itself is still forming. I try to hold space for the discomfort of not knowing. And I try to trust that when the right move becomes clear, it will be worth the wait.