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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Good Food Evolution
  • Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 21:16:24 -0600


The Good Food Evolution
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/13-0
by Grace Lee Boggs Monday, September 13, 2010

"Every year 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses occur, leading to about
300,000 hospitalizations and 5000 deaths." (New York Times, Sept. 4, 2010)

That's because most Americans still believe we have no alternative to the
food produced by agribusinesses who care as little about our health as they
do about the health of the chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs, so tightly
packed in pens and cages on factory farms that the floor is scarcely visible,
and where visible, is covered with excrement.

Fortunately, another healthier agriculture has been emerging in the last few
decades.

This good food evolution has usually been started by grassroots individuals
who grew up in rural communities and now live in cities.

In Detroit, for example, African American elders raised in the South saw the
vacant lots in our deteriorating neighborhoods not as blight but as
opportunities to plant community gardens that would also give city kids a
sense of the time and patience that are a normal part of country life and
that human beings now need for our continuing evolution. Detroiter Gerald
Hairston, who grew up in W.Virginia. brought these elders together, and
called them "Gardening Angels."

When we started Detroit Summer in 1992, a program to involve Detroit youth in
rebuilding, redefining, and respiiriting Detroit from the ground up, these
Gardening Angels provided the agricultural experience and skills needed to
reconnect city youth with the Earth. Out of this reconnection of country and
city, of oldsters and youngsters, the Detroit urban agricultural movement was
born.

Now there are at least 1300 community gardens in Detroit, and almost every
week another producer or writer requests our participation in a news feature
or documentary highlighting the role of urban gardening in the rebirth of
Detroit.

The weekend of September 10-12, people from all over the country and world,
including a delegation of Detroit urban gardeners, attended a Good Food
revolution conference at the Wisconsin State Fair Park in Milwaukee, convened
by Growing Power.

Growing Power was founded by Will Allen, the son of a South Carolina
sharecropper and the first African American to play on the University of
Miami basketball team, who never forgot that the people in rural Maryland
where he grew up always had plenty to eat ,even if they lacked fancy clothes.
So when he retired from pro basketball, he bought a few acres in Milwaukee,
and founded Growing Power.

Today this farm and community food center provides fresh produce for
thousands of Milwaukee residents, attracts visitors from all over the world
to its workshops in urban agriculture and aquaculture, and has inspired the
many neighborhood gardens and small businesses that are at the heart of
Milwaukee's Renaissance.

The May 2010 issue of TIME Magazine included Will among the world's 100 most
influential people.

At the September 10-12 Conference, delegates shared information about how to
create a new food system that builds better health and more closely-knit
communities. Workshops were given in Urban and Small farming, Urban
Aquaculture, Brownsfield Development, Renewable Energy and Experiential
Education to involve schoolchildren in the movement for more nutritious food.

Among the speakers were Will Allen, Winona LaDuke, an Objibwe activist who is
executive director of Honor the Earth, Children's Health specialist Dr.
Judith Palfrey, and myself, who spoke via Skype from Detroit.

The Good Food evolution is an inspiring example of the "Next American
Revolution." It's been a "Quiet Revolution." People have been simply
exercising the power we have within ourselves to live more simply for the
sake of our own physical and spiritual health and the health of the Earth and
other living things.

But the Milwaukee conference makes clear that this evolution is gathering
momentum. It is an idea whose time has come.





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