How Briana Hurt discovered her passion in agriculture
Hurt is doing an internship with Keep Growing Detroit, a nonprofit that operates several urban farms and educational programs to support the organization’s goal of making Detroit a “food sovereign” city.
By Lou Blouin
UM-Dearborn
Jan 18, 2024
Excerpt:
Hurt says the initial spark came during a class project in a Health and Human Services course taught by Assistant Professor Finn Bell. The students were charged with conducting a community needs assessment, and Hurt chose to focus on her own and other east side Detroit neighborhoods.
Dozens of conversations with friends, relatives and neighbors revealed persistent challenges around food access. It was an eye opening experience, one that led Hurt not only to do a deep dive into the complex relationship between food and health but food and politics.
“You get out into the neighborhoods and it’s not hard to see the unequal distribution of resources,” Hurt says. “Some neighborhoods have a Whole Foods Market, and in other neighborhoods, residents have to walk close to a mile to the grocery store, which may or may not have quality produce.” Hurt learned about how this phenomenon of “food deserts” — or what some academics and activists call a system of “food apartheid” — leads to systemic health disparities and long-lasting impacts on residents’ and neighborhoods’ socioeconomic well-being.
The following summer, Hurt traveled deeper down the food politics rabbit hole with Bell, working as a research assistant in the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. Her work focused on collecting oral histories from BIPOC farmers and gardeners in the Ypsilanti area.
