This Community Garden in Brooklyn Is Breaking Down Food Barriers
Volunteers farming a half acre of land try to provide fresh vegetables to the neighborhood, and highlights a bigger struggle for access to healthy food.
By Belle Cushing
Vice
Mar 8, 2021
(Must see. Mike)
Excerpt:
Beneath a noisy 3 train stop in Brooklyn, kale, bitter melon, and okra grow on a half acre of land.
This is East New York Farms, an urban garden in a predominantly Black neighborhood, overseen by 25-year-old Iyeshima Harris. She works with a network of student interns to grow and sell fresh produce at their own weekly markets. Community members who grow food in their own backyards are invited to sell at the market as well.
When Harris moved to East New York from Jamaica at age 12, she was struck by the difference in what kind of food was available.
“I’m used to going out in front of my yard and I have mango, soursop, June Plum,” she said. “And those are things that I could just pick from off the tree.”
The USDA estimates 39 million people across the U.S. live in neighborhoods like East New York, without easy access to healthy, fresh food — a pattern that largely follows racial lines.
Black neighborhoods have fewer supermarkets and more fast food joints than white neighborhoods. That trend can’t be explained away by differences in income alone. Instead, researchers are increasingly understanding lack of access to fresh food as a symptom of segregation. For decades, Black people were systematically denied loans and excluded from certain neighborhoods across the country—and food trends followed. Grocery store chains chased white folks out to the suburbs, and stayed away from minority neighborhoods in what became known as “supermarket redlining.”
