Reclaiming Our Food tells the stories of people across the United States who are finding new ways to grow, process, and distribute food for their own communities. Discover how abandoned urban lots have been turned into productive organic farms, how a family-run sustainable fish farm can stay local and be profitable, and how engaged communities are bringing fresh produce into school cafeterias. Through photographic essays and interviews with innovative food leaders, you’ll be inspired to get involved and help cultivate your own local food economy.
Reclaiming Our Food tells the stories of people across the United States who are finding new ways to grow, process, and distribute food for their own communities. Discover how abandoned urban lots have been turned into productive organic farms, how a family-run sustainable fish farm can stay local and be profitable, and how engaged communities are bringing fresh produce into school cafeterias. Through photographic essays and interviews with innovative food leaders, you’ll be inspired to get involved and help cultivate your own local food economy.
Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement Is Changing the Way We Eat
320
Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement Is Changing the Way We Eat
320eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Reclaiming Our Food tells the stories of people across the United States who are finding new ways to grow, process, and distribute food for their own communities. Discover how abandoned urban lots have been turned into productive organic farms, how a family-run sustainable fish farm can stay local and be profitable, and how engaged communities are bringing fresh produce into school cafeterias. Through photographic essays and interviews with innovative food leaders, you’ll be inspired to get involved and help cultivate your own local food economy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603427692 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2011 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Tanya Denckla Cobb is the author of Reclaiming Our Food and The Backyard Homestead Guide to Growing Organic Food and is director of the Institute for Engagement & Negotiation at the University of Virginia, where she co-founded and chairs the Sustainable Food Collaborative and has taught food system planning. She co-founded and serves as faculty for the Virginia Natural Resources Leadership Institute. At home, she enjoys the restorative energy of gardening and cooking. She lives in rural Virginia.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Food from Home Supporting Backyard Gardeners
If you are a food gardener, you are a member of an increasingly popular and widespread activity in America. More than one-third of America's households are growing and serving food from their very own gardens. Why are so many people gardening? The National Gardening Association (NGA) estimates that a well-maintained food garden yields on average a $500 return, based on average market prices of produce. Though an economist might wonder whether the effort is worth the return, an NGA survey indicates that most gardeners are motivated to grow their own vegetables because they believe they will have better quality, taste, and nutrition.
What isn't commonly discussed in gardening surveys are all the other possible motivations for people to grow their own vegetables, raise their own honey, pick their own berries, or gather their own eggs. The reasons offered by people I have met are many and varied – teaching children where their food comes from, destressing, leading a more balanced life between being indoors and outdoors, becoming more healthy by getting outside and working in the garden, even connecting with a larger spirit and meaning in life.
The stories that follow are rich in lessons. Perhaps one of the most important lessons is that, despite our growing romance with and dependence on technology, twenty-first-century communities can support home food gardening, and more are choosing to do so. Sometimes people just need a helping hand. Perhaps they have the space for a garden but no resources and no idea how to start a garden. Or perhaps they have the resources and desire but no personal time to start a garden. Here you'll learn how communities can provide that helping hand.
And let us not forget fun. It's true that gardening can be hard work, causing long-unused muscles to groan in legs, arms, back, and hands. But like basketball, bicycling, jogging, soccer, and other sports that often require people to break a sweat, gardening today has become for many people more of a hobby sport than the necessity it might have been during the World War II victory garden era. As such, it should be no surprise that food gardening is becoming more of a community social activity – with fun activities to celebrate different seasonal and garden events, as well as activities intended to educate people about where our food comes from. In this and later chapters, you'll learn how people are using food gardening as a tool for whimsical, educational, and artistic fun, while also renewing our sense of community.
Giving Gardens to People in Need The Home Gardening Project Foundation
The Home Gardening Project Foundation, based in southern Oregon, got its start by providing free raised-bed vegetable gardens to those in need, from the disabled to the elderly, single-parent mothers, and large families. The HGPF now also assists community garden groups across the nation that would like to do the same.
Occasionally, you have the luck and privilege of meeting someone whose depth of passion and commitment is a point of light almost too blinding to see. The world of community food attracts people who are naturally caring, passionate, and authentically committed; after all, there's no glitz or glitter in a garden, only black gold. In only a few minutes of talking with Dan Barker, you figure he is either a crank or the real deal. And as the conversation progresses, it all comes clear: He is refreshingly direct, yes, and deservedly so, as a Vietnam veteran still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But far more, Barker is a philosopher, poet, writer, artist, student of the Tao, wacky humorist, and most definitely the real deal. He is our generation's Johnny Appleseed of home gardens, responsible for thousands of free raised-bed home gardens, giving the poor, the disadvantaged, and the disenfranchised a place to grow flowers and food.
"They ask me why I do this, and I say it needs to be done," Barker writes in Queen Jane, a winding story of his experience with giving away home gardens. With a clarity so rare in these days of careful political speak, Barker readily discusses the inherent spirituality of his work.
The work is religious, there are three sides to it: one involves arduous physical labor – building soil frames, wheel-barrowing soil, four gardens a day, four days a week, until the goal is reached or surpassed. A second side absorbs the incessant tales of suffering, sees the misery and despair, the rotted teeth, the heart problems, the amputations, the disfigurements of body and soul. The third side demonstrates the capacity to run a business dedicated to the alleviation of that suffering. The books and the reports must be straight, so I can circle in with a garden where there wasn't one before, and with a bit of work a new occupation of time and spirit is opened.
Barker started small, driven by an encounter with a gun against his head during a convenience-store robbery. The robbery – followed by stern advice from a friend to quit feeling sorry for himself and, if he wanted to change the world, just go ahead and find a way – propelled Barker to action. He had fallen in love with the language of seed catalogs. And though community gardens had taken off in the 1970s, he didn't think they catered to all people who might benefit, such as the elderly, single mothers, and the disabled. In 1983 he obtained a small $5,000 grant from the City of Portland to build 20 gardens for free for people in need.
Installing Free Vegetable Gardens
Barker's formula works. He builds two or three 5-foot-by-8-foot raised beds for each family, making them "double-highs" for people who would have trouble squatting or bending. He fills the beds with top-quality soil, builds a trellis, gives the family packets of seeds, and instructs them in succession and intensive gardening. He returns in a few weeks with plant starts, and through the summer he stops by now and then to see how they're doing and to offer mentoring. He also sends them a newsletter with tips.
"The gardens are a particular benefit to older people and for people in wheelchairs," says Barker. "These folks are often sorely impoverished, as they are paying so much for medical care. Older people are between a rock and a hard place." He says that in Portland 90 percent of the participants in the Home Gardening Project were women – usually older women who were either widowed or caring for their sick husbands, or young single mothers.
In his first year, Barker says, 95 percent of the participants were able to produce food for their own table. He says success is high with his program because participants are self-selecting and want to succeed. When he started, people were suspicious of the idea of a giveaway garden. He distributed two hundred flyers and waited. No calls came. Finally, after convincing a friend with muscular dystrophy to host the first garden, his phone started ringing. And it hasn't stopped ringing since.
The main expenses in giving people home gardens are materials for raised-bed wood frames and paying a living wage to an "executive builder," or the person who picks up the shovel. If someone wants to start a Home Gardening Project, Barker estimates it requires a minimum start-up fund of $25,000. While that might not be enough to actually pay yourself, it is at least enough to get started and pay the executive builder, who, he says, should be paid at least three times the minimum wage. With $25,000 you can put in about 25 gardens, says Barker. And it also enables you to rent a tractor for loading, buy insurance – a must, he says – and file for nonprofit status, as well as buy the lumber and soil. He says that second-year seeds can be scavenged easily from hardware store leftovers.
Barker's method of advertising by flyers and local media is part of his formula for success. Communicating to his intended clients that this will be their garden, once installed, and that they will need to go out and work it – water, weed, fertilize – turns around their perception of the project. "Nobody believed that anybody would be interested in this," says Barker. But instead of seeing themselves as recipients, people begin to see themselves as producers. "Now there is a physical object in their yard," he explains. "So if they are going to walk outside at all, they are going to run into it! We call it a 'significant occupation,' as they're contributing to it themselves."
In his first year Barker built 21 gardens. "People were amazed by the gardens and started talking with each other," he says. In the second year Barker provided all the first-year gardeners with a start-up kit of seeds, manure, and composters. He says that 85 percent continued gardening and became better gardeners in their second year.
A Good Idea Takes Hold
Every year afterward requests for gardens increased until, in 1989, with additional unexpected funding, Barker was able to install as many as 117 gardens. Word of his work was spreading, and people in other cities began calling to seek help in starting their own similar projects. The media, including Smithsonian magazine, began covering his work. He estimates that, thanks to hundreds of organizations in the United States and elsewhere that have taken his idea and run with it, as many as 50,000 gardens have been built. Barker points to a project in Flint, Michigan, where the Flint Urban Gardening and Land Use Corporation transformed abandoned and unkempt yards into block gardens, as an example of how a community can adapt his model to its own needs for social and physical sustenance.
Barker is particularly proud to point to the successful offshoot effort of Richard Doss in Olympia, Washington. While still a student at Evergreen College, Doss wanted to interview Barker for a paper. Barker wrote back and said, "I don't write people's papers for them." But Doss ventured down anyway. When he returned to Evergreen College, Doss did write the paper, but he also was inspired to start the Kitchen Garden Project, a college-based approach to giving away gardens.
Barker explains how Doss transformed the idea into a course for college credit, with students building the gardens. Since 1993 the Kitchen Garden Project has built over 2,200 gardens for low-income people, and it continues to give away between one hundred and two hundred gardens each year. The Kitchen Garden Project follows Barker's original model by giving recipients three raised beds, a trellis, fertile soil, seeds, starts, a gardening guide, and the opportunity to work with a garden mentor. "They have a real working board, a rarity for nonprofits, and a huge number of contributors," says Barker. "It's like the whole town is behind the project." Under Doss's direction the project has grown into a successful nonprofit organization called Garden-Raised Bounty, or GRuB, which has garnered national acclaim.
Barker is a firm believer in the therapeutic value of a garden for individuals and for the community. "A lot of people in the scarier neighborhoods are agoraphobic. They don't go outside. Giving them a garden gives them a reason to go outside, and it also helps to quiet down the neighborhood, as the bad guys don't like to be seen."
Eventually, however, the stress of working in distressed neighborhoods took its toll on Barker. "People get edgy and assume you're there for other reasons, not building gardens." He had been threatened, shoved, shot at, and insulted until in 1996 he decided that Portland was the wrong place for someone with PTSD. He still may not be able to sleep without nightmares, but the rural life in his new home in southern Oregon is a little slower and safer. After he passed the torch of the Home Gardening Project to a new director, the organization evolved into the Portland nonprofit now known as Growing Gardens, which continues his vision of installing home gardens for free. (For more on Growing Gardens, see page 17.)
Seeding Free Garden Projects
Barker is nothing if not peskily persistent. After 15 years of driving Portland's streets with a truck full of wood and soil, bags of seeds, and starts of broccoli, tomatoes, and eggplant and receiving hundreds of calls from around the nation from people inspired to start their own free garden projects, Barker realized he could multiply the providence of free home gardens by providing start-up funds to other projects. So today Barker is at work raising money and giving it away to free garden projects in places of need. With funding from the Wallace Genetics Foundation in 2003, Barker supported projects in Boston; Portland, Oregon; and Flint, Michigan.
Barker will never grow a big nonprofit organization. He is all about action at the grassroots level. Hejust wants to build gardens. So if someone were to drop $5 million in his lap, he told Biography Magazine in 2003, he knows exactly what he would do: he would distribute checks for $25,000 in two hundred cities.
"We're going to be stuck in this deflationary pickle a long time," says Barker. "And we're also changing our general attitude toward what constitutes well-being in this country. Hopefully, this change will be disseminated throughout the rest of the democratic world, as well as those places where tyranny reigns." And Barker believes giving away home gardens to people in need is a form of community preventive medicine. "Gardens are a way to raise the quality of life in a way that does no harm." Nearly 30 years after he started in 1983, Barker is still trying to change the world, one garden at a time.
Cultivating Gardeners at Home and at School
Growing Gardens
with research by Robin Proebsting
Growing Gardens' mission is to promote home-scale organic food gardening to improve nutrition, health, and self-reliance while enhancing the quality of life and the environment for individuals and communities in Portland, Oregon. The group works primarily with low-income populations and schools, assisting them in cultivating gardens, increasing awareness of and interest in fresh local produce, integrating gardening into classroom curricula, and offering practical courses in cooking, preserving, and other aspects of garden-related living.
Some people think of gardening as an upper-class hobby, enticing only to those who have the time and money for it. Some think that lower-income people simply can't be expected to be interested in growing their own food because they lack the land and resources or, as they often work two or more jobs, because they must also lack the time and energy to tend a garden. And if they have kids? Well, they must be too busy running between work and child-care duties. But in northeast Portland the nonprofit organization Growing Gardens, which promotes organic home food gardening, is blowing these stereotypes away. Since 1996 it has installed more than seven hundred home food gardens, and it is unable to meet the demand for home food gardens among the low-income population it serves.
"Growing Gardens is all about making sure that people have access to good, fresh food – healthy fruits and vegetables," says Debra Lippoldt, executive director. "The neat thing is that people are actually growing for themselves, and we're just helping them get the resources – whether it's learning about something, or just getting the materials."
"This is the biggest stress reliever in the world," says Monique, a single mother of seven children, who lives in a small apartment in north Portland. When she started, she had no gardening experience and was interested only in growing cucumbers. Now she grows much more in her garden and has even progressed to starting her own plants indoors – a process that enchants her children. "It was instant joy," she says, "because it made me realize they weren't just going through the motions with me."
"My garden is like my kids," says Isabel, a young immigrant from Mexico City who grows food for family and to share with neighbors. Growing Gardens helped Isabel and her neighbors plant a container garden, but Isabel soon got permission from her apartment building's manager to expand and plant a larger garden. She is proud that her tomatillos are not grown with chemicals like the ones she used to buy in Mexico City. She talks to her plants and says they can understand Spanish or English. When she's sad, Isabel says, the garden cheers her.
"If it wasn't for Growing Gardens, this beautiful life of our flowers and plants and raspberries ... I would give up, really and truly," says Violet, an elderly woman whose backyard is now brimming with plants. She says that she and her husband rarely shop for groceries because their garden is so productive.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Reclaiming Our Food"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Tanya Denckla Cobb.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ForewordFood and Community: Growing a Grassroots Movement
1: Food from Home: Supporting Backyard Gardeners
2: Community: Coming Together around Food
3: Urban Farming: Growing Food in the City
4: Empowerment: Food Movements in At-Risk Communities
5: Education: Food, Nutrition, and Agriculture in Schools
6: Food Heritage: Preserving Cultural Identities
7: Sustainability: Food for the Long Term
8: Infrastructure: Building Local Food Networks
Notes
Acknowledgments
Resources
Contributors
Index
What People are Saying About This
If Michael Pollan convinced you that we’ve got to do something to repair our relationship to food, land, and water, then read this book. Tanya Denckla Cobb will inspire you to act. She takes you on a journey all over America, up and down the food chain, and shows you dozens of ways that people are taking plants and animals into their own hands, and producing better food, better land, and better relationships. You’ll come to admire the genius, passion, and hard work of dozens of food innovators. More importantly, wherever you live and whatever your lifestyle, Denckla Cobb shows you simple steps for reclaiming your food.
— Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, and author of The Happiness Hypothesis
People constantly ask me what kinds of things they can do to get involved in the food movement and where to start. Now I can just hand them Reclaiming Our Food. The projects it describes, from growing-it-yourself to public health, should inspire readers to get busy doing similar projects in their own communities.
— Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and author of What to Eat
If Michael Pollan convinced you that we’ve got to do something to repair our relationship to food, land, and water, then read this book. Tanya Denckla Cobb will inspire you to act. She takes you on a journey all over America, up and down the food chain, and shows you dozens of ways that people are taking plants and animals into their own hands, and producing better food, better land, and better relationships. You’ll come to admire the genius, passion, and hard work of dozens of food innovators. More importantly, wherever you live and whatever your lifestyle, Denckla Cobb shows you simple steps for reclaiming your food.
"The reason I use Reclaiming Our Food is because it has the same lush, visual appeal as many of the current coffee table books, but unlike so many of those books, it is so much more than a few stories with a bit of text about the ails of our food system. Instead, this book goes far deeper, profiling both prominent and little-known food activists, farmers, and gardeners, and drawing out key lessons from these profiles. Readers are drawn in by the photos and the stories told about farms, gardens and more, but they are challenged to think about the broader meaning of these case studies, as well. I find that students who are unfamiliar with the food movement are amazed to discovery the diversity of people and programs around the country; students who are already on fire about food will be challenged to reflect on the weaknesses and obstacles that are also presented. No knee-jerk rah-rah polemic, this book would help anyone fall in love with the food renaissance.
Food - growing it, eating it, sharing it - has pretty much been the whole story for the last ten years. Reclaiming Our Food takes that story to yet a higher level with its superb collection of photos and clearly written "how-to" tales of local food heroes and their epic achievements. From cover to cover one feels like you have just opened a tantalizing menu well-provisioned with a dazzling selection of tasty morsels. Join the movement, dig in, and enjoy the feast!
— Mark Winne - author of Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture
If you ever wondered about the depth, breadth, and creativity of the local sustainable integrity food and farming movement, this book dispels all doubt. I've known Tanya for years as a fearless advocate for regenerative food systems, and this is truly a crowning jewel in that agenda that I'm honored to share with her. Insightful, empowering, emotional, Reclaiming our Food is awonderful boost to our collective healing.
— Joel Salatin, Polyface Farm, author of You Can Farm and Salad Bar Beef
In the last decade we have seen the budding efforts to transform our food system emerge into a full blown movement. As complicated and multi-faceted as the food system it seeks to change, the movement takes many shapes and differing strategies to “reclaim our food.” With a keen ear and thoughtful insight, Tanya Denckla Cobb not only showcases some of the most promising work, she explores the motivations and theoretical models that are leading the charge to fundamentally and permanently transform the way we grow and eat food.
— Charlie Jackson, Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project
This broad survery of actual people, doing actual work to build a more sustainable agriculture highlights the diversity of approaches that we will need to take back control of the process all the way from seed to table. The many voices of Denckla, her collaborators and subjects are in harmony on the central theme of returning the humanity to an overly industrial food system.
— Shepherd Ogden, Adjunct Lecturer in Sustainable Agriculture, Shepherd University, and Agricultural Development Officer, Jefferson County, WV
Now is the time for bravery. Seize your destiny. Join the fleet of farmers, makers, doers, eaters and connectors who are reclaiming America, one shovelful at a time.
— Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, Greenhorns
This is one-third chicken soup for the soul, one-third chicken poop for the soil, and three thirds great stories of real people doing positive practical and transformative work with food.
— Wayne Roberts, Canadian food policy analyst and writer, former manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council
It is always a delight to read the stories of people engaged in redesigning our food system at the grass roots---farmers, ranchers, gardeners, chefs, educators, community organizers---all demonstrating how we can work together to build a more resilient, healthy, community-based food system. The stories are all here in Tanya Cobb’s book. Together they tell---as Gary Paul Nabhan puts it in his introduction---a “refreshing story about America.” Especially heartening is the way these new food adventures are addressing the problem of making healthy, affordable food available to people in many of our resource-poor communities. If you want to feel good about America again, read this book!
— Frederick Kirschenmann, Author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays From a Farmer Philosopher
Food - growing it, eating it, sharing it - has pretty much been the whole story for the last ten years. Reclaiming Our Food takes that story to yet a higher level with its superb collection of photos and clearly written "how-to" tales of local food heroes and their epic achievements. From cover to cover one feels like you have just opened a tantalizing menu well-provisioned with a dazzling selection of tasty morsels. Join the movement, dig in, and enjoy the feast!
— Mark Winne - author of Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture