All Tomorrow’s Kitchens

Hope for Black Farmers, Healthier Plant Burgers, and the Return of the Automat

A weekly roundup of everything bringing humans closer to a food-secure future

All Tomorrow’s Kitchens, a weekly series from Future Human, rounds up advances in food and agricultural science, tech, business, and culture bringing all humans closer to a food-secure future.

A new bill could return stolen land to Black farmers

After the Civil War, the federal government promised land to newly freed Black people. This promise didn’t quite come true: Land was often either given to Black people then taken away, or never granted at all. For those that did obtain land, racist policy and white supremacy in the following years made it hard for them to hold on to it. The 20th century saw an immense drop in the number of Black farmers in the United States — down 98% since the 1910s — and only now are lawmakers trying to rectify the injustice.

A new Senate bill called the Justice for Black Farmers Act, proposes to create an $8 billion annual fund within the U.S. Department of Agriculture that would be dedicated to buying farmland and granting it to Black farmers, together with other initiatives meant to…