Local Food and the Stories We Tell

Golden Apple Press, June 2008

Andrea Godshalk

There is a vibrant conversation about food going on right now. The fact that food, how it is produced and enjoyed, has risen to the forefront of our imagination supports the project of living on this planet. But how does racism interact with food? Because racism interacts with many aspects—in fact almost every aspect of food production—I am going to ask a more specific question. How does the racism of the media contribute to our understanding of what the local food movement is? In my practice of being aware of racism and white supremacy--especially as it functions in structural ways—it has become clear that the publishing industry willfully ignores that people of color grow good food.

The New York Times in March published Leaving Behind the Trucker Hat by Allen Salkin, an article about white college students, many from elite schools, leaving cities to grow food for farmers markets in cities. It’s great that white college graduates are growing food. I am a white college graduate who has fallen in love with growing food. The more food we grow in ecological ways the better. But when the local food stories we read are about white people who are able to gather the capital to buy or lease farms, we miss many important collaborative methods being developed by people of color in cities. Stories about local food without an eye for the way racism conceals the contributions of people of color gives a minor perspective about what is happening in local food.

Stories about local food, farmers markets and farm to school initiatives all indicate a desire to know food more intimately and responsibly. Many stories published by major presses are by white people from the perspective of the center, immersed in privilege and because of that have huge blind spots. These stories often describe the isolated actions of individual white people.

Manny Howard stayed in the city but tried it by himself. His feature in New York Magazine’s, My Empire of Dirt, tells of creating a farm in his back yard. Howard, “As far as I know, nobody has attempted to do it all by themselves…I planned to take (the local food) philosophy to its logical conclusion.” This is, however, not where the logic of local food goes. Local food weaves people together with economic development, lush public spaces and abundant affordable food where there was none before.

Howard writes “I spent about $11,000 to produce what, all told, is barely enough to feed one grown man for a month.” This is a sad fact seeing that Howard could have taken a train from his Brooklyn home to write a story about any number of community initiatives where people are growing food abundantly in skill sharing collaborations.

While white people are often cast in heroic roles where they single handedly (try to) solve something, The Green Guerillas have been transforming vacant lots into community gardens in New York City since 1973. This organization has grown into a resource center for community gardens in all boroughs of the city, providing annually 40 gardens with supplies, plants, and support in coalition building. The Green Guerillas work with the East New York Gardeners Association, the Central Brooklyn Gardeners Coalition, the La Familia Verde, and the Harlem United Gardeners in a coalition that advocates policy changes and the protection of city gardens. They support youth leadership with jobs and beautify garden spaces with community-designed murals.

It is a powerful exercise when people participate in creating the images and artwork around them. This is an anomaly in our understanding of what art is. More often we imagine a brilliant, eccentric lone figure creating masterpieces. We call him Artist.
Fritz Haeg is an anti-lawn artist. Haeg works as Artist, and within this role he is given access to resources with the ease communities struggling under the weight of food insecurity can only dream of. While usually working in the suburbs, in one of his biggest projects, as part of The 10 Global Cities exhibit at the Tate Modern in London, Haeg installed a food garden near the museum. The garden was put on a plot of land connected to an apartment complex in a working class neighborhood. In this small plot of a land Haeg had a stylized garden constructed in two days with the help of residents and volunteers.

This project begs the question, how long it would have taken the residents to gather the supplies for the garden had they not been bequeathed with the instant resources and legitimacy of high art? Because Haeg has the privilege of legitimacy and therefore the resources of fine art institutions he is able to appear in communities as miraculous bearer of gifts. With an edible installation Haeg is able to show up as savior of imagination and belly. But many groups of people are successfully innovating, strategically and collaboratively without the spotlight of high art.

When soil is not delivered so suddenly, people develop ways to build it. Growing Power in Milwaukee is working in partnerships with coffee shops, city landscaping agencies, and worms to turn high volumes of trash into nutrient rich soil. When I visited Growing Power’s new five-acre urban farm last August, it was the children of the neighborhood who were the stewards of the land. And since Growing Power has, in collaboration, secured a twenty-year lease these kids will grow up with the apple trees being planet outside their front doors. This is how the local food movement is weaving food into people’s lives, not just making it available to buy.

Treasured storyteller, Barbara Kingsolver writes in her new book of her family’s attempt to raise all of their own food for a year. She also writes of the challenges facing rural farming communities. Rural communities are engaged in major transitions to maintain sovereignty from corporations to ensure people are able to continue farming. While we should maintain conversations about rural communities we also need to have visionary conversations about the rapid urbanization of the planet. We must learn the methods that will allow us to live in cities justly, and vibrantly. There are people eager to demonstrate and teach these methods. Many of them live in cities.

Under-served urban communities often exist because of migration, the economic movement of people (often from agrarian roots) into cities from other countries and rural communities and the movement of white people out of cities into the suburbs. Kingsolver writes elegantly that, “When we walked, as a nation, away from the land, our knowledge of food production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial.” But this is not true, there are elders from many countries in US cities who are hungry for the feel of warm soil on their fingertips, thirsting to pour their magic into the land and feed the people around them.

Nuestras Raices in Holyoke Massachusetts is getting the farmers of the community back onto land and growing again. Now settled, the elders of Holyoke came to this country as migrant workers from Puerto Rico to pick tobacco and then work the factories. They brought with them generations of knowledge about horticulture, agriculture, medicine, cuisine, and sustainable living. By farming again they can provide for their communities in the culturally rich ways they did when they were in Puerto Rico. And they can teach the sustainable ways that living on the planet now demands. These urban farmers also serve as a vital conduit to an island that is far from the imaginations of the children who gather at their feet.

The farmers of Nuestras Raices grow at La Finca Farm, thirty acres of land with a stage for festivals, a petting zoo, and natural trails. Teens are employed to manage the market stand and farm store where produce is available to the community. There is a strong network of community gardens; full of growing children and a small-scale commercial kitchen from which local businesses producing savory sofrito and fresh bread emerge. The people of Nuestras Raices are changing what it means to eat locally.

It is important that we uncover the stories about food innovation coming from the communities most weighted with racism and poverty because the people who live in these communities have the most to teach us. Perhaps especially those of us who live with the privileged misconception that we can get by alone, or cook up social transformation all by ourselves.

All over the country people are clearing abandoned lots, healing and building soil, and training each other to tend crops. In the process they are feeding communities that have suffered food scarcity; where people have to ride multiple buses to the nearest grocery store. And they are creating jobs with viable nourishing businesses. These people are radically transforming food production, economic cooperation and urban ecology. These new farmers are harvesting possibilities of how we can live in cities and on the planet. They are the local food movement vanguard.

The local food movement is--in its bravest, most potent manifestation--an antiracist movement for collective liberation. We must frame the food movement as part of a greater social justice movement, which champions the intrinsic talents of people and communities, and their knowledge’s', specifically historically oppressed and exploited people. We must guide the growth of the food movement—and the stories told about it—in this context.

There is the possibility for economic and social liberation in the local food justice movement. In his article “Green Should Not Equal White,” in Colorlines September-October 2007 issue, Van Jones writes about how communities of color should be embedded in the flood of economic opportunities inherent in green technologies. Because these communities have suffered the effects of aggressive environmental racism, they should be the primary beneficiaries and entrepreneurs of the 250 billion dollar green economy. At The Dream Reborn Conference in Tennessee, many creative and powerful people joined Van Jones in celebrating and actualizing this vision. Food is an integral part of the green economy because it creates sustainable economic and ecological systems.

The stylish and profitable Edible Communities magazines are being successfully franchised for foodsheds all over the country. What is possible if this successful business model was used to support libratory local foods rather than individuals with the capital to purchase a franchise publication. What if the Edible Community magazine for a region was housed at an organization working for food justice, green renewal and job creation in underserved communities? This would funnel advertising monies to community initiatives and provide a forum for food justice organizations while educating a general population about local foods and resources. These partnerships are available to us if we recognize and embrace them. If we make a commitment to shape the local food movement as a social justice movement.
As energy costs become more pressing, for example oil for trucking food all over the world, the intensive highly productive methods, being innovated in communities of color, will become more crucial for everyone. And information about those innovations will be crucial as well.

If we make a commitment to the abundant possibility of local food to lift us all up…if we demand to know the stories of justice filled collaboration…if we continually reinvest our energies in the service of liberation…and if we seek to see what we are not shown…then we will find our cities full of food and justice for all.