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Gardening as a Radical Act

Photo: Kynala Phillips

“Gangsta gardener” Ron Finley, singer Kelis Rogers, farmer Leah Penniman and artist Linda Goode Bryant discuss finding freedom in growing their own foo

By Kynala Phillips
Wall Street Journal
Aug. 19, 2020

Linda Goode Bryant will be the first to tell you she didn’t know much about farming when she decided to open a community garden in Brooklyn, New York back in 2009.

“I have actually never been very good at putting seed in soil and watering it,” said Goode Bryant, an accomplished artist and filmmaker-turned-agrarian who founded Project EATS, a circuit of small plot, high-yield farms in New York City.

Determined to transform a local Brownsville lot into a sprawling farm, Goode Bryant endured a season of swiping her credit card to support her vision and relied on her trusty hammer and bucket for her daily chores. As community members slowly opened up to the farm and they began to lend their tools and their time. “That’s power,” Bryant said. “A belief in our own power to do for ourselves.”

Urban gardening has taken on the spotlight, as quarantine gardens sprout in the windowsills and back patios of homes across the country. It’s a skill of practicality and patience, perfect for people seeking to reclaim agency over their lives by growing plants during a global crisis.

But for Black farmers and urban stewards of varying skill levels and means, it’s about more than localized agency—it’s a rejection of a food system that routinely causes harm to marginalized people and an attempt to redistribute that systemic power to those who need it most.

A 2018 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that at some point during the year an estimated 11.1 percent of households did not have access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle. More recently, limited food access has been exacerbated by the pandemic with over 17 percent of mothers with young children reporting their children weren’t eating enough food because they couldn’t afford it, according to a study done by the Brookings Institution in April 2020.

Some of the solutions to these deep-seated issues can be found in America’s soil. Whether upcycling wooden pallets into lush herb gardens or transforming a city lot into an urban homestead, gardening has become what activist and self-described “gangsta gardener” Ron Finley calls a silent protest. In 2013 Finley, best known for his advocacy in South Los Angeles, won the right to plant vegetables in the forgotten plots of land between the sidewalk and street. He’s since emerged as one of many leading figures in a movement to literally sow the seeds of revolution.

“Possibilities, solutions, freedom—that’s what I’m growing. That’s what the gardens represent,” said Finley, who also teaches gardening through the online lecture company MasterClass.

Finley and Bryant are part of an informal growing vanguard of planters and activists which also includes classically trained chef and recording artist Kelis Rogers and author and farmer Leah Penniman. Rogers, best known for her 2003 song “Milkshake,” traded her Spanish-inspired home in Glendale for a small farm in Temecula, California to take control of her food and culinary endeavors. Penniman is the author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, and the head of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. Soul Fire Farm equips Black and brown farmers and aspirants through workshops on stewardship and farming techniques.

Together, Finley, Rogers, Penniman and Bryant discuss reclaiming control of an eroding food system, building stronger communities and finding freedom in soil.

When did you decide to pivot to growing your own food? What was the determining factor?

Kelis Rogers: Looking at my children and looking at their little innocent faces, I wanted to give them more. As a woman of color, as a chef, as an artist, it kind of spoke to me in so many ways. How do I take control back? How do I create wealth for my children? What legacy am I really trying to give them? I can sell all the records in the world or whatever, but at the end of the day, what can I really give them? And for me, I just felt like it was a lifestyle. We can get back to basics in a really dope way. There’s something extremely gratifying about growing your own food and you don’t have to be an expert.

Leah Penniman: My two siblings and I grew up in a very small rural town in Massachusetts and our family was the only family of color in the town. So to say that our peers were cruel to us would be an understatement. In absence of a peer community, we really turned to the earth as our source of friendship and solace. We spent a lot of time in the woods you know, we spent a lot of time in nature. So when I became a teenager, it was time to get a summer job. I naturally wanted to do something related to nature. And so I got hired at a farm called The Food Project and fell in love from the first day—the satisfaction of clearing a row of carrots from weeds and feeding the community. And that was 24 years ago. So I’ve been farming ever since.

Ron Finley: One of the linchpins was when I went to the store and saw the tomatoes said, “coated with shellac,” you know, to preserve freshness. It took me back to junior high school, where I was in woodshop class where we made cabinets and things. I was like, damn, shellac is what we put on the wood to preserve the wood. Why the hell do I need shellac, even though it’s so-called food grade, why do I need it on my food? That was one of the points but it was just so hard to get any kind of food in my neighborhood. We would have to travel and you didn’t think anything of it ‘cause you knew where the good food was. Then one day you just wake up like why the hell do I have to travel outside of my neighborhood to get any kind of healthy food? I remember the depression that they kept calling a recession in 2007 and 2008 was happening at that time and my clothing business was deteriorating. So it’s like, OK, do I use my AK or do I use my shovel? I figured I’d use my shovel.

Linda Goode Bryant: As a child, we had family members that had either land or small farms, just outside the city. We would always go there at least once every two weeks and visit the farm and bring back food. I always loved the way everything tasted. It was just so much fresher than the food my parents bought at the grocery store. But I actually got involved when I was working as an independent filmmaker. I wanted to do a web series that was responding to the 2007-2008 food crisis that occurred around the world, when food prices spiked. At that time I’d been working on a project in around six cities around the country that allowed me to send video cameras to youth and adults who were participating in immigrant advocacy groups, youth development programs, and public schools. I asked them how this global food crisis is affecting them and to use the cameras to document it. That footage was coming to me and it occurred to me that it would be really good to look at this more closely worldwide—to juxtapose what’s happening in the U.S. [with] people who are living on limited incomes and people around the world who have limited finances.

Have you seen interest in your work rise since the onset of the pandemic?

LP: As an educational farm, we have received a lot of people reaching out, wanting to learn how to farm. We’ve built 50 gardens for people just the past couple months.

We built a garden for an African-American woman with seven children. She said that if it wasn’t for the garden, not only would they not have any fresh food to eat, but she’d be cooped up in this house with these children with no activities. And here they are, each with their own plant that they take care of, getting an opportunity to be outside and to contribute to family life. And of course, long game, our main work is we actually train farmers. Thinking about that bigger picture of the food system, how do we make sure that we never encounter the kind of situation we have during a pandemic where you have grocery store shelves empty, you have people dumping food because they can’t ship to markets fast enough. So we’re trying to not just do like the short term stopgap of the gardens, but also this bigger reinvention of a food system that actually is local and resilient and diverse, so that everybody knows that they’re going to have access to food even in times of crisis.

LGB: We have had a tremendous response in the community and throughout New York City. Certainly our relationships are deeper in the communities that we’re in because we’re providing food for free, any time. We deliver to seniors and to undocumented residents who can’t get food from the food pantry. We created a community-specific newspaper, called The Companion. We have gotten individual donations from folks at a level that we’ve never seen before to help support us providing this food for free, which is fantastic. I don’t think I really believed in the power of small donations until people started donating to us in April. We also continue to get applications from folks who want to volunteer, so we now have a volunteer program where people are coming every week to work with our farmers and to help us in our programming.

What role do you feel that food sovereignty and food security play in the current fight for equality?

LP: Because the food system is so vast and touches everything it really intersects with a bunch of other issues. And so by organizing real food, you invariably are organizing around systems of change. Take, for example, food apartheid. This is that insidious system of segregation that relegates certain people to food opulence and others to food scarcity, often on the lines of race. It has everything to do with a history of housing discrimination and redlining in this country, with urban renewal and with gentrification. So while those issues of housing segregation and divestment and community may not seem to be connected to food, they’re very connected because they underpin people’s ability to have a grocery store in their neighborhood or farmers’ market or afford the food if there is a grocery store in the neighborhood. I think that food is also a very relatable issue, everybody gets it. Everyone knows what it’s like to be hungry even for a few minutes and then doesn’t want to imagine what it’s like to be hungry for a really long time. So I think it can galvanize and connect people who might not otherwise feel connected to the certain issues that seem more abstract to them if it’s not their life experience.

With stay-at-home orders in place, space and land are even more of a commodity than it was before Covid-19. Can you speak to the power in occupying space and cultivating land?

LP: Hopefully by now, folks are aware that the entire food system—and one could argue even the whole nation—is really based on a history of white supremacy and racism. The way that impacts land, in particular, is that the continent itself was first wrested from native folks through attempted genocide and the annihilation of people. But it wasn’t only indigenous people who were excluded from that right to belong to lands. Despite the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, Black farmers actually purchased about 16 million acres of land by 1910. But almost all of that is gone. And it’s not gone by choice. It’s gone because the federal government has a habit of discriminating against Black farmers in terms of its distribution of loans and crop allotments and technical assistance. It’s also gone because the Ku Klux Klan and white cops lynched people for having the audacity to leave behind the plantation and to no longer be sharecroppers and a number of other reasons related to systemic racism. Now, Black farmers have only around one and a half percent of the nation’s farms, which has been in this precipitous decline since the turn of the last century. As Ralph Paige, one of the longtime leaders of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives[/Land Assistance Fund] said, “Land is the only real wealth in this country and if we don’t have any we’re out of the picture.”

KR: Owning land and growing your own food kind of go hand in hand, to a degree. You don’t have to own your own land. But I think that it’s a way to gain control, not just about what you eat, but how you’re eating, how you’re looking at yourself and what your time is spent on. We’ve become so disconnected from our food—even as a chef, I have too. You just get so spoiled and you forget that, everything is connected. Every single part. We’ve really been just trying to understand our own ecosystem that we’re building here. I think there is such power and such control and wealth in growing your own stuff.

RF: Our food and our soil have been taken away from us. If you’re in the city, you don’t need a big piece of land, you don’t need gigantic plots. First, establish community gardens in the city. Second, get boxes, put them wherever you can. If you got a terrace, put it on your terrace. If you got a window sill, put something on your window sill. The bottom line is: start somewhere and it’s going to expand because the soil winds up seducing you. The biggest thing in this is creativity. We have to be creative with our spaces. If it can hold soil, grow something in it. The hell with what it used to be, what could it be now?

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