May 15, 2018
By Evan Kutz In part our series on the intersections of food and race, The Food Fix spoke with Shane Bernardo, a long-life Detroiter and community organizer working in Detroit’s grass roots food movement to bring culturally relevant foods to minority communities. Shane grew up working in his family's small, ethnic grocery store in Westside Detroit, where they worked to cultivate a safe, nurturing environment for the Asian, African and Afro-Caribbean community to purchase culturally relevant foods and share recipes, traditions and rituals linked to these foods. As a result, Shane developed a heightened awareness of social and economic conditions within a racially, ethnically and culturally stratified Detroit. Now, Shane works for a number of grass roots organizations, such as Detroit Food Justice Task Force, Uprooting Racism: Planting Justice, The People’s Platform Detroit and Equitable Detroit Coalition. Recently, Shane’s been speaking at different public forums, focusing on how important food is for health, healing and spirituality. As the son of first generation Filipino immigrants, Shane speaks about the cultural and spiritual connection with food that his family and many other immigrant families have lost.
