Breaking Bread: Lunch and Listen

Welcome to Breaking Bread, Farm Aid’s popular education Lunch and Listen series. The Highlander Center defines “popular education” as an opportunity to learn from each other’s shared lived experiences to build collective knowledge.

Breaking Bread: Lunch and Listen features stories that uplift the shared history of food and farming; organizing and resistance that’s got us to where we are now. We pair that history with work that folks are doing presently, that will inform the future we want for each other as it relates to farming and agriculture, food, culture and rural communities. This storytelling and making our narratives public is a key and critical part of community organizing. Please join us!

Breaking Bread is back for a second helping! Join us for the first in the series on Thursday, February 26, at 12:30pm EST. This conversation will focus on Black farmers on the edge of resistance, specifically in the fight against the USDA.

Leading this discussion is shirlette ammons, a Black, queer, southern truth teller and Emmy and Peabody award-winning TV producer, poet and musician from eastern North Carolina. In 2025, shirlette released an audio series, Tending, profiling the Black farmers involved in a class action lawsuit against the USDA (a fight that became one of the largest class action, civil rights lawsuits in U.S. history).