In the first stage of what sources say may be a prolonged insurgency against the forces of hunger and malnutrition in inner-city neighborhoods all across America; repeated sightings of peppers, onions, tomatoes, broccoli and turnips in these neighborhoods have liquor stores and bodegas on edge.
KwikShop on 4th says - "They're popping up everywhere. Right outta the ground! For years, that lot over there was just broken bottles and potato chip bags. The kids'd stop by here after school and pick up their Pepsi and Cheetos on the way home. But now, I seen 'em eating things like carrots and peas!" ABC Liquors, Check Cashing, Payday Loans & Deli concurs: "We didn't think much of it at first. I mean - those things are green, and they come from the ground. They ain't even got no commercials! Our cookies come in bags with cartoon characters. Kids love that shit. But now, those veggies are cutting into my business. What's next, they gonna start drinking water? Yeah, those fresh things got iron and vitamins and stuff; but where the kids gonna get their partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, Polysorbate 60, or their HFCS? Not from cauliflower, they're not!"
Okay, but seriously -
"Awesome! This is sweet," 6-year-old Zwena Gray said as she stirred up mealy potting mix with her hands at Earthworks Urban Farm.
Zwena, a Detroit resident, was one of about 10 children who came out during spring break to start seeds through the Growing Healthy Kids program. The year-long weekly program involves urban children in everything from planting and harvesting to painting boxes that house honeybee hives and making whole-wheat pesto pizza by hand.
What We're Doing For Our Kids
Detroit's Earth Works Garden is a great example of one of the many organizations that have sprung up over recent years in inner-city neighborhoods that have long been without access to fresh foods. Supermarkets have long since fled to the suburbs, our broken-down and woefully underfunded mass-transit systems can not carry residents out to the far-flung sprawling highway strips where these places are mostly located (or if they can, it's usually an hour-plus trip each way, involving two or three transfers..), we've systematically destroyed our old urban cores and 'zoned' our way into a living arrangement designed exclusively for private automobiles running on foreign oil. Now that rant aside, I should also state that I don't believe corporate chain supermarkets are ideal places to shop for food, either. For one, that whole system in itself is predicated upon a never-ending supply of cheap oil to transport goods by truck thousands and thousands of miles, and they're also out of town entities that may throw a pittance here and there to local charities...while sucking the economic life out of the communities in which they squat. Not to mention the soul-sucking hideousness of the buildings themselves and their omnipresent parking lots which more often than not also double as racetracks.
Now that second rant aside, 98% of the stuff in those places is crap, anyways. The processed 'foodlike-substances', the candy and cookies bearing likenesses of your child's favorite cartoon character ("Daddy! Look, Dora!"..."Yeah, well if she really ate all the crap that they have her selling; she'd no longer fit on the screen, hon. Sorry.") That's the stuff they push at us (and our kids), that's where their profits come from, and that's what we buy no matter how much we really know that we should stick to the outer aisles of the grocery store. Of course, the bland chemical-laden produce found in those places that are nowhere near their nutritional peak aren't exactly ideal either...but that's definitely preferable to the only stuff that can be obtained in most inner-city neighborhoods - fried fast "food", frozen convenience "foods", chips and soda from the liquor stores or corner stores that by necessity fill the void left by the absence of real grocers. Unfortunately, they do a shit job of it. Unless the plan was always to promote diabetes, obesity and countless other nutritional deficiencies amongst successive generations of our urban poor. Now, whether that was the plan or not...they've clearly succeeded on at least that count.
Attempts have been made over the years to lure grocery stores back to these neighborhoods, to mixed success. Urban Enterprise Zones, Empowerment Zones, and etc... are typical of the cautious piecemeal approach favored by politicians. However, people in these neighborhoods are still stuck in this situation now. And groups have been organizing to find their own solutions. Many problems remain, of course...and I hope to outline some of these problems and highlight a few innovative approaches that have already been taken, and also some others that I think should be tried more widely.
Groups like Earth Works and others are running these types of programs for children in inner-city neighborhoods all over the country. We should have been doing things like this for decades, but we lost sight of where our food comes from as we've been lulled into a certain complacency for decades now by the historical fluke that was the Late 20th-Century's fossil-fuel soaked abundance of 'cheap' industrial foods that were always at hand. That era is at it's end now - and we've lost all kinds of agricultural knowledge as a society by sitting by while family farms and farmers disappeared, the farms themselves became parts of giant monocultural corporate operations growing commodity crops...that is, if those farms weren't first paved over and turned into exurban housing developments or strip malls. There have since been multiple generations that have zero experience with any kind of farming, no familial connections to same...and who quite literally wouldn't know what to do if the shelves at their local Safeway just one day stopped magically restocking themselves.
Providing experiences like these for our children is one of the greatest things we can do to secure their future, and ours as a society. It's heartening to see school gardening programs increasingly being done here and there, but I believe this should be a part of the curriculum in schools everywhere. And not only by nonprofits and community groups, but also by the schools and our towns and cities themselves. Even if my fellow 'doomsdayers' or whatever we're called these days are wrong about the very immediate troubles our society faces? Well, what would it hurt if every kid in America had these kinds of experiences, and actually knew that food really comes from the ground? Being able to feed ourselves should circumstances dictate that we do so, is in my opinion the single most important skill we can have.
What We're Doing In Our Neighborhoods
Beyond children, we also need to account for the vast majority of the rest of us who'd be in serious trouble ourselves, if we all had to figure out other ways to feed ourselves tomorrow. Again, I'm going to draw the focus back here to inner-city neighborhoods as they need the most help and are already at quite a disadvantage since they lack the supermarkets, decent restaurants and farmers markets that already exist in other parts of the country, and in the better-off parts of our cities themselves.
Urban Fresh is growing fresh food for residents of West Louisville, Kentucky -
Urban Fresh supplies locally-grown fresh food to underserved neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky. Founder, Sayheed Asante, pulled together a group of like-minded young people who were focused on transforming their lives and improving their community. With the support of the nonprofit Community Farm Alliance (CFA) and Grasshoppers, a farmer-run distribution center, Urban Fresh now hosts farmer’s markets in low income neighborhoods in Louisville’s West End.
West Louisville, an urban community, is home to 80,000 people including 27,000 children, 38% of whom are living below the poverty line. Statistically, across Jefferson County, there is an average of one grocery store per 6,100 people. In West Louisville, that average is one store per 20,000 people. And many West Louisville residents report poor product variety, low quality, and higher prices. In fact, the Community Farm Alliance conducted a Community Food Assessment in our major urban areas confirming that low-income residents pay 10-40% more for food.
There are many convenience stores in West Louisville, however the Community Food Assessment found that only one-fourth of them sold all five basic food groups and none sold leafy vegetables and very little fresh fruit. Nearly all of the stores sold alcoholic beverages.
And improving their neighborhood in more ways than one -
Prior to the Farmer’s Market, the area was filled with residents too fearful for their safety or the safety of their children to use the park.
In just three weeks, residents were on their front porches, children were in the park and citizens from surrounding neighborhoods were coming for fresh foods and entertainment.
An August 2007 article from "In These Times" touches on what's going on in quite a few other neighborhoods around the country -
In the Midwest, Growing Power runs three farms in Chicago, youth employment and education programs and a world famous vermiculture (worm compost) project.
In Oakland, Calif., People’s Grocery operates five urban gardens in the largely black and Latino communities of West and North Oakland, as well as a youth nutrition program staffed by young people.
In Brooklyn, Added Value has turned an old asphalt baseball diamond into a full-functioning farm. And in Philadelphia, Mill Creek Farm is using storm runoff to irrigate its urban farm. Indeed, community agriculture projects are sprouting up in cities across the country—in San Francisco (Alemany Farm), Buffalo (Massachusetts Avenue Project), Birmingham, Ala. (Jones Valley Urban Farm), and Houston (Urban Harvest). According to the USDA, the number of farmers’ markets has grown by 50 percent since 1994, and the federal Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program is funding more than twice as many groups as it did a decade ago.
From this month's "The Atlantic": "A Papaya Grows In Holyoke", -
Though it is in the bucolic Pioneer Valley, Holyoke, among the state’s poorest cities, is notorious for its drug use and attendant crime. As in many picturesque New England river cities with impressive Romanesque Revival buildings, mills made it rich and then dealt it a decisive blow when labor costs shut them down. In Holyoke’s case, the mills made paper, not textiles, and the blow came relatively late—after a sizable Puerto Rican population had settled there in the 1960s and ’70s, drawn by factory jobs and nearby tobacco farms. The farm jobs dried up about the same time the mills closed, and unemployment rates have remained high. But the knowledge and love of farming have stayed strong in the Puerto Rican community, which accounts for nearly 40 percent of the city’s population.
Holyoke was thus fertile ground for "urban agriculture"—the successor to the still-flourishing community-garden movement, which itself grew out of World War II victory gardens. In the late 1960s, in the wake of urban renewal’s wholesale razing, community gardens cleaned up blighted lots, curbed vandalism, and gave people who had never had one a say in how their neighborhoods were run. Today, according to the American Community Gardening Association, there are more than 17,000 community gardens all over the country. The urban-agriculture movement looks for ways people can make money on what they grow (seldom a focus of community gardens) and puts an emphasis on training youth to strengthen their communities. And it gives people access to fresh vegetables in "food deserts" where the only oases are gas stations and convenience stores.
Other Places We Can Utilize
School roofs. City property.
Also, Newark and other cities have been tearing down their old high-rise public housing complexes (the old human filing cabinets...) in favor of townhouse-style public housing with lawns and lots of green space. Why not grow food there, instead of just grass? Encourage container gardening, and provide education and training programs along the same lines as the job training already provided.
What We Can Do To Keep These Gardens Working
A potentially troubling side effect arising from the successful conversion of vacant lots in run-down neighborhoods into places that grow our food and improve our communities, is the inevitable accompanying rise in property values. Neighborhood residents may see the garden as a key central component of their neighborhood's health and vitality...but developers will see it as an opportunity to build more condominiums. And as we've all seen too many times, when neighborhood residents clash with developers and their politicians; well, it's certainly never a safe bet to put too much on the community coming out on top.
The Neighborhood Gardens Association is a Philadelphia Land Trust nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving existing community gardens, and is widely viewed as a huge success and a model that should be replicated in every city across the nation -
The Neighborhood Gardens Association / A Philadelphia Land Trust (NGA) is a nonprofit corporation whose mission is the long term preservation of existing community-managed gardens and open spaces in Philadelphia. Incorporated in 1986, NGA resulted from the efforts of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), the Penn State Urban Gardening Program (PSUGP) and local business representatives and community gardeners. They saw a need to create a mechanism for preserving community gardens threatened by development. Often these gardens were former vacant, trash-filled lots that had been transformed into gardens through the efforts of the neighbors in low and moderate-income neighborhoods. In most cases, the land was not owned by the gardeners but by the city or private (often tax-delinquent) owners. After years of caring for the land, some gardeners lost their gardens to development projects. It was this possibility of losing more gardens that lead to the creation of NGA.
Getting The Food To The People
Ah, okay...now one more obstacle. The reality of too many inner-city families is a single mother working long hours at sometimes two jobs, trying to figure out how to juggle work, kids and the other necessities of life. Coming up with the time to cook healthy meals at home is a serious consideration here, and one that I'm not glossing over. But I really don't have an answer to that right now, and I'm definitely hoping somebody does have experience or suggestions on same. For now though, I'd like to focus on ways to get the food to families who work odd and irregular hours in service industry jobs and who might have trouble making it to pick-up spots or produce stands near their community gardens.
I stumbled across a great link while doing research on this part, and found a very interesting and innovative solution offered by a market in Houston (scroll down towards the bottom of that page) -
To combat transportation problems, Houston's Fiesta Mart provides door-to-door mini-bus service to its stores and permits grocery carts to be taken home (which the store pays to have picked up and returned).
Another idea I'd like to see implemented on a much larger scale is Mobile Farmers Markets. Something along the lines of a lunch truck, or an ice-cream truck...only with real, healthy food.
Now this idea can be taken in so many different ways, and operate under many different systems. It can be solely a side-project of a large community garden, or a group of same. It can operate as a joint venture between local nonprofits and government agencies. It can operate as an offshoot of a local food bank, maybe in conjunction with sponsorship by local grocery stores, food co-ops or other community organizations. Any combination of the above...
I understand that funding is a problem there...and for right now I'll leave aside the thought of how many billions we'd free up and be able to use on great projects such as these if only we'd finally come to our senses and stop our ridiculously stupid "War" on Drugs. But then again, I guess feeding the corporate police state has always been more important than doing all we can to get good food to people who need it...
I'm still trying to figure out the numbers and logistics of this, but I do believe that it would be possible to get a system like this up and running in a densely populated, relatively 'small' (area-wise) city like Newark, where a vast majority of the population lacks any access to fresh, healthy food and where the public transportation system is far from great. Starting with one truck working evenings - something like 6 - 8:30 PM on weekdays, and maybe 2 - 9 PM on weekends...hitting 2 neighborhoods a night on weekdays, and backtracking on some and also hitting new ones on the weekends. I realize an issue would be funding, but if we were really a forward-thinking society I'm pretty sure it would seem clear to everybody that the public-health related cost savings alone would more than pay for a system like this in every city across America; and that's not to even get into our moral obligation to every American...
But sadly these days, it's apparent that even the "good guys" just don't get it...