A recent documentary, Roots of Resilience: East Knoxville’s Black Food Renaissance from filmmaker Ronald Levy, tells the story of the organization Rooted East. The Black-led food justice nonprofit is fighting deeply rooted food apartheid in East Knoxville, Tennessee.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Access Research Atlas, all eight of East Knoxville’s census tracts are designated low income, low food access areas. Rooted East Founder Femeika Elliott describes an abundance of convenience stores and liquor stores in the area and points to the historic redlining and displacement of Black residents that led to this. “You can’t make a salad anywhere in East Knoxville,” she tells Food Tank.
“We heard a lot of talk about food insecurity and food deserts within the city, but nobody was talking about food apartheid,” Elliott explains. “Food apartheid is strategic. When we found out what to name this, which is food apartheid, we were like, it’s time to get to work.”
Elliott founded the organization with pastor-turned-gardener Chris Battle in 2022. Battle was using a converted minibus to distribute fresh produce from his urban farm throughout East Knoxville. Although the community was grateful for the produce, Elliot says, “they wanted somebody to teach them how to grow their own food.” The first Rooted East meeting included only six people, gathered in a private kitchen.
Since then, Rooted East has focused on using garden education and land partnerships to create a self-sustaining food system. The organization teaches people how to grow food using ancestral wisdom and reparative agriculture techniques, feeding into their mission of “establishing a community led and hyper local food system,” according to Elliott. She describes positive results of their efforts including reports from new gardeners about improved mental, physical, and emotional health.
Rooted East values contributions from elders who grew food before discriminatory policies in the 20th century created the food apartheid seen today. “We had community elders who were doing food justice work,” Elliott explains. “They were farmers, they were gardeners, they tended to the lands. They did a lot of skill sharing to preserve community sufficiency.”
“There’s a lot of trauma getting back to the land—when we talk about involuntary servitude and what our ancestors have been through over the past 200-plus years,” Elliott says. “But also, there’s beauty in learning about what’s happening right underneath our noses.”
The East Knoxville elders who partner with Rooted East represent key voices in Roots of Resilience, which, Levy explains, helps preserve a side of history that is largely undocumented. “They have so much to say, and not even just elders, but people in the community who don’t really reach the masses,” he tells Food Tank. “I felt like it was a true calling to make sure that I helped tell those stories with a simple microphone and a camera.”
The film “is an ode not to us. This is an ode to them,” Elliott says about the elders featured. “To uplift their stories, to tell their narratives. Letting them have a sense of dignity and integrity, and telling their lived experiences was amazing.”
During screenings of Roots of Resilience, Levy noticed that the documentary is spurring conversations about not only not just the film, but the themes it explores. “It seemed as if people were having conversations with the film,” Levy says.
Looking forward, Rooted East hopes to increase farmland access for the community through land trust models, acquiring land to steward that might otherwise be left fallow. According to American Farmland Trust, if recent trends continue, Tennessee could lose over 1 million acres of farmland by 2040. Rooted East is seeking partnerships with landowners, especially churches and blighted plots, to create gardens and farms that benefit the wider community.
Elliott tells Food Tank that after the documentary, an abundance of people expressed an interest in volunteering at local gardens. “The best thing to do, aside from donating out of your pocket, is to donate your time,” she says, adding that people of all ages and skill levels can be valuable to the movement.
“Everybody plays a role in the food system. Everybody plays a role, or should be playing a role, in the community,” says Elliott. “The bottom line is, we are here to take care of each other and our neighbors, and we have to get back to that.”
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Photo courtesy of Ronald Levy
