In an unexpected turn, the economic slump may lead to healthier eating habits for Americans, especially lower income people. A number of trends are coming together including more people using emergency food banks, the growth of farmers’ markets and community gardens, Alice Waters’ edible schoolyard, the White House garden, etc. One thing I’ve noticed in my grantwriting class at Portland State is a number of students looking for funding to start or expand school, community, or food bank gardens.
Any number of studies say that Americans eat too much meat, fat, sugar, and salt and too few vegetables. This is especially true for poor families who live in neighborhoods without good grocery stores, or don’t have decent kitchens or time to cook, or can’t afford fresh produce. Chronic preventable diseases like diabetes and hypertension, which are epidemic in many poor and minority communities, can be prevented or controlled with diet.
Getting more vegetables into Americans’ diets would have major health benefits and note that most of these aren’t government programs. However, nonprofit Food Banks have for years overused government surplus foods, largely subsidized agricultural products, without regard to their health benefits.
This is from the Oregonian:
“We have a hunger crisis in Oregon. It’s just expanding,” explains Multnomah County Commissioner Jeff Cogen, who’s just set up a vegetable garden on the empty cropland, fertile with irony, of the former county poor farm. “My hope is this is the first of many.”
Up at the Vancouver Vineyard Church food pantry, David and Andrea Walker are looking to their third summer harvest. Clark County is part of the Oregon Food Bank area, and in its first year the operation received an OFB award for excellence in client service.
This year, the Walkers are hoping for 5,000 pounds of produce from the 3,000-square-foot garden out behind the church. It’s not a rolling or pastoral stretch; it’s off to the side of an alley-like casual road, just some cultivated acreage — or more precisely, yardage — in the midst of a weedy lot. At some point in the future, the space could turn into a small apartment court, like so many around it.
The New York Times Magazine had an article last Sunday about Growing Power in Milwaukee.
Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.
And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites – through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.
Another Times story tells of a consultant who works on sustainable food in Oakland, CA:
With its high crime and poverty rates, Oakland doesn’t have nearly the same precious food culture – or produce – that defines nearby Berkeley and San Francisco. But Fernald and Sardo’s home is a modern homestead, preserving the larder for leaner (and busier) times. Every summer they host tomato-canning and jam-making parties; fall is for pumpkin-processing events and butchering pigs with 10 guests invited to make sausage, which Fernald cures in a modified wine fridge in a closet. Splitting a steer with friends? Their chest freezer contains a beefy ode to their vacuum sealer.
Fernald, 34, a former family-farm advocate, was the executive director of last year’s Slow Food Nation event. Now she combines her activism and her acumen with Live Culture, a consultancy that helps companies create sustainable food practices and products. Projects range from developing a line of artisanal cured meats in Shasta and an agritourism in Belize to helping an Alabama barbecue chain source better pork; from working with nonprofits to develop value-added food businesses to organizing the Eat Real Festival, an August fund-raising event that involves 20 taco trucks serving sustainable street food to an estimated 20,000 (plus a butchering contest and home-canned and foraged-food exchange). Fernald is also intent on spreading the urban homesteading bug throughout the Bay Area, having organized the recent Yes, We Can (Food) event, which taught 80 people to make jam.
Here’s a story about the garden on the old Multnomah County poor farm, mentioned above.
On the county’s eastern outskirts where Northeast Halsey Street meets 244th Avenue, prime farmland waited for a new calling. What if the county took even a few of its dozens of vacant acres, Madrigal wondered, and asked the community to work a farm that could help feed hundreds?
The idea not only is part of a local and national trend to return to the earth, but it also brings the county back to its historical roots. The land picked for the farm is part of a sprawling tract that once fulfilled the county’s state-imposed mission to care for its indigent: the Multnomah County Poor Farm.
For practical reasons, she says, gardening makes sense. The county garden will cost about $22,000 to clear, irrigate and plant this year. That could buy a lot of prepackaged food — but not the 20,000 to 40,000 pounds of fresh organic produce that Stone estimates could be grown on the two acres each year.
That produce will go to the Oregon Food Bank and will feed what food resource manager Mike Moran calls a desperate need.
Here’s another farm dedicated to a food bank.
Formed in May of 2000, the Mother Earth Farm is an eight-acre organic farm located in the lush Puyallup Valley. The Farm produces over 150,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables each growing season-all of which is distributed directly to local food banks and hot meal programs. Produce from the Farm is in the hands of food bank clients within eight hours of being harvested. In 2008, the Farm again reached full cultivation of all eight acres producing more than 149,000 pounds of fresh produce, herbs and honey.
Then there are Community Gardens, where neighbors share plots, usually on vacant land or a park. If you Google community gardens you get results for probably all major American cities, and that’s just for starters.
The American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was founded in 1979 in order to help gardening programs share their limited resources and thereby benefit from each other’s experience and expertise.
ACGA staff, board members, and volunteers answer thousands of requests for information each year about community gardening and greening. They offer support, coach fledgling groups, and promote networking and information sharing on all levels. Through our networking, publications, trainings and annual conference held in a different part of the country each year, ACGA:
- promotes the formation and expansion of national and regional community gardening networks,
- develops resources in support of community gardening and greening,
encourages research on the impact of community greening, and- conducts educational training programs to further community gardening and greening.
Another model is school gardens, where students plant and tend the garden, with produce being used in the cafeteria or shared with families. Pioneered by uber- restaurateur Alice Waters in Berkeley, there are now school gardens in hundreds of communities. A quick Google search turned up four networks promoting school gardens: Kids Gardening, City Farmer, Growing Gardens, and School Garden Network.
Then there’s Michelle, who’s in a sort of class by herself in inspiring American gardeners. From a NY Times article on the White House veggie plot:
Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot, in a spot visible to passers-by on E Street. (It is just below the Obama girls’ swing set.)
Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs. Virtually the entire Obama family, including the president, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said with a laugh. “Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know.” Her mother, she said, will probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot.”