The goal of Food Empowerment Project (F.E.P.) is to raise awareness about how our food choices can change the world. By making informed, ethical food choices, we can make a difference and take a stand against abuses against both human and non-human animals.
F.E.P. encourages people to use their individual choices to eat with their ethics and use their collective voices to help bring about positive change. We strive to do this in our outreach as well as on our website.
The main focus of our work and campaigns can be broken down into these areas:
Veganism
One of the core values of F.E.P. is to lessen the suffering of all beings, and for those who have access to healthy foods, to encourage them to go vegan, which we define as not participating in the exploitation or causing the suffering of non-human animals.
F.E.P. works to promote ethical veganism through education, outreach, and by providing tools.
We have five recipe sites featuring cuisines from the cultures of current & former F.E.P. team members & volunteers. These projects help people enjoy comfort foods from their culture and share these delicious vegan versions with others. You can find all of the cultural food sites, including vegan Mexican, Filipino, Lao, Chinese, and soul food with their accompanying recipe guides here!
Among our most successful vegan efforts is our One Glass at a Time anti-dairy campaign, which we launched in 2022 as a website and an eight-page booklet. The campaign explains how the dairy industry hurts the environment, animals, and workers, as well as its role in environmental racism and colonization. We complemented our campaign with “Got Colonization?” billboards located in high-traffic areas near universities.
Also in 2022, we turned our attention to Amy’s Kitchen, a Bay Area-based frozen food enterprise known for its organic vegan and vegetarian meals. While Amy’s Kitchen presents itself as a socially conscious, family-owned small business, its workers have reported widespread injuries, low wages, unreliable healthcare, and mistreatment by supervisors, including a lack of bathroom breaks and penalties for taking sick days. F.E.P. actively supports the boycott to help these workers—hundreds of whom were fired shortly after they expressed interest in forming a union—and calls on retail outlets to remove Amy’s Kitchen products from their stores until the company’s CEO agrees to sit down with workers and discuss their concerns.
From 2016 to 2021 we organized the Vallejo Healthy Food Fest, which we launched after the publication of our study on food access in the community. This enormously successful festival celebrated the culture and resilience of Vallejo residents, bringing hundreds of people together to enjoy a variety of delicious vegan cuisines, watch vegan cooking demos, listen to local musicians, watch local performers, learn about veganism for the animals, and much more. These events—which were free to Vallejo residents—were held in the city until 2020, when we began hosting them virtually due to the pandemic.
F.E.P. understands the critical importance of our ocean, which is why we launched our annual Fight for the Ocean Day. Held in honor of the birthday of oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle (August 30), Fight for the Ocean encourages participants to take action by organizing a clean-up at a local beach, river, or lake, and to stop eating marine creatures.
All events that F.E.P. hosts are vegan, and we have been successful in encouraging other justice groups we have worked with to serve vegan fare at joint events.
Among our online events is a vegan cooking show based on the popular Food Network series Chopped. Chopped with a Vegan Twist puts multiple talented vegan chefs head to head to create a delicious dish using four mystery basket ingredients.
F.E.P. also coordinates events featuring local community members where we serve vegan food and spotlight animals who are raised and killed for food.
Access to Healthy Food
As an organization dedicated to looking at food justice from a local and global perspective, we also consider the impact that racism has had on equal access to healthy foods in the U.S. Such racialized access to healthy and affordable food has led to what are commonly called “food deserts,” where such access is limited or where there are no grocery stores. But since the USDA defines this term as mostly being about proximity to food providers—rather than considering other factors such as racism, cost of living, people being time poor and cash poor, cultural appropriateness of available foods, the ability of people to grow their own foods, etc.—F.E.P., and others, consider the term “food apartheid” to be more accurate.
Knowing the importance that fresh fruits and vegetables have on one’s health and that Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities lack access to them, we have added this to our work. We only go into communities when invited, and our work is to ensure the voices of the community are heard. Also, it is easier for people to go vegan when they have access to fresh fruits and vegetables (they can’t if they don’t).
When community members ask to work with F.E.P. on increasing access to healthy foods where they live, we do an assessment on the availability of healthy foods through surveys in the areas—the majority of which tend to be Black, Brown, and low-income areas. After the assessments are completed, we conduct focus groups in the communities to find out about barriers they experience and potential solutions. We then inform public officials of our findings through our reports and encourage policy changes. Our work on the lack of access to healthy foods over the years has allowed us to collaborate with various community organizations as well as governmental bodies.
Our access work began in Santa Clara County, California, where we got our start in 2007. That Santa Clara County report on access to healthy foods in 2010 was followed by a 2014 focus group in San José to hear from the community about the barriers they face and potential solutions on accessing healthy foods. As an organization, we acknowledge that the barriers for people to purchase fresh and healthy foods are not limited to access issues. We wanted to hear directly from impacted communities to learn how they experience these barriers and how they wanted them addressed.
In 2016, we published a report on a similar survey we conducted in Vallejo, California (adjusted for the different demographics), and followed this with a community focus group report in 2018. As mentioned above, in the same year that we published our Vallejo report we launched the Vallejo Healthy Food Fest with vegan food, speakers, and music.
In 2020, Growing Healthy People for Pittsburg, a group in Pittsburg, California, asked us to conduct an assessment on the availability of healthy foods in their community. Among the dozen volunteers who went into grocery stores, markets, and other businesses that sell fresh produce was Pittsburg’s vice mayor, Holland Barrett White. “Partnering with Food Empowerment Project has reinforced, for me, the importance of plant-based eating and what that can mean for the health of our Pittsburg community,” he said. “As a public official I want to help empower my neighbors and my colleagues throughout the region to embark on this journey to transition our communities towards a healthier way of living. I am tremendously grateful to work with an organization that’s dedicated to racial equity and vegan food justice.”
Our reports on access to healthy foods have been cited by the United Nations Human Rights Committee and are a resource for many schools and universities across the globe. In 2017, the city of San José, California, and the city of Vallejo, California, recognized and honored F.E.P. for our vegan food justice work, including our access work within their cities. San José awarded us for our work a second time in 2018.
Currently, we are engaging in the corporate campaign Shame on Safeway to pressure Safeway (and other banner companies under Albertsons) to change their unjust policy that sometimes leaves neighborhoods without a grocery store for a decade or more.
Chocolate
One of the core values of F.E.P. is to lessen suffering and recognize the power that our food choices have—both locally and globally—to create a better world while knowing that veganism is just a step toward that goal. Although chocolate can be void of animal products, it cannot be truly cruelty-free if it involves the worst forms of child labor, including slavery.
To assist consumers with their chocolate purchases, we have created a list of companies that make vegan chocolates that we do and do not recommend, and it is available in English, Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese. This list, which includes more than 1,100 companies, is updated monthly.
In addition, we have apps (Android and Apple) that people can download for free to help them with their purchases.
We also work to get corporations to be transparent about where they source their cocoa.
And we have created a mascot, a rabbit named Chavez, to help with your shopping, and many vegan grocery stores have our “recommended” tags up!
Bottom line: If you care about human rights, do not buy chocolate that comes from slavery or child labor.
Farm Worker Rights
As an organization dedicated to looking at food justice from a broad perspective, it is imperative that we not always look outward but look at issues within our own country, as there is a huge injustice taking place in how food is produced here in the U.S. And being an organization with a goal of lessening the suffering of non-human animals while encouraging people to go vegan—and therefore eat more produce—means it is important that we advocate for the rights of those who pick our food.
F.E.P. works to advance the rights of farm workers by supporting legislative and regulatory changes as well as corporate efforts led by farm workers, including such boycotts as those against Wendy’s/Publix and Driscoll’s. In 2018, F.E.P., along with The Center for Farmworker Families, Human Agenda, and others, successfully led an effort to change California’s “50-mile” rule that negatively impacted the education of children of farm workers.
We have also organized school supply drives for the children of farm workers, as well as food drives. Since 2015, we have distributed thousands of school supplies to the children of farm workers.
In addition, F.E.P. encourages consumers to buy organically grown food whenever possible, since it means farm workers were not exposed to agricultural chemicals—and that’s one less bad thing they are forced to suffer.
Finally, we have also held special drives for farm workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, like this one in which we collected food and school supplies for their children who were doing schoolwork at home, and we collected PPE masks and donated to farm worker organizations to buy masks.