Urban Farming: Will Allen and Growing Power, Inc:

Will Allen

All too often, I say that I want to run off and live on a farm for awhile.  My desire to “run off” comes from wanting to leave the city for a bit, but farms are not just limited to isolated, country settings!  Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine’s “Street Farmer” features Will Allen, an urban farmer, and founder of Growing Power, Inc. Farm.  In the middle of the city (where it gets cold mind you), Allen is revitalizing the food system by growing fresh food in 14 greenhouses.  Allen believes that “if people can grow safe, healthy, affodable food, if they have access to land and clean water, this is transformative on every level in a community.  [He believes] we cannot have healthy communities without a healthy food system.“  In an effort to transform the community, “Growing Power develops Community Food Centers, as a key component of Community Food Systems, through training, active demonstration, outreach, and technical assistance.“  Growing Power works with youth, school children, facilitates community gardens, runs workshops and tours, and provides sustainable, fresh food to the greater Milwaukee area.   Also, the experience and efforts of Growing Power help influence food politics.   Become a fan on facebook!

For urban people without access to a lot of land, container gardening is a good solution.  Check these out! 

Excerpts from the NYTimes piece:

Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

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If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”

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“Not everyone can grow food,” Allen acknowledged. But he offers other ways of engaging with the soil: “You bring 30 people out here, bring the kids and give them good food,” he said, “and picking up those rocks is a community event.”

Of course, if rock picking or worm tending — either here or in a community garden — doesn’t attract his Milwaukee neighbors, it’s easy enough for them to order a market basket or shop at his retail store, which happens to sell fried pork skin as well as collard greens. “Culturally appropriate foods,” Allen calls them. And the doughnuts in his truck? “I’m no purist about food, and I don’t ask anyone else to be,” he said, laughing. “I work 17 hours a day; sometimes I need some sugar!”

This nondogmatic approach may be one of Allen’s most appealing qualities. His essential view is that people do the best they can: if they don’t have any better food choices than KFC, well, O.K. But let’s work on changing that. If they don’t know what to do with okra, Growing Power stands ready to help. And if their great-grandparents were sharecroppers and they have some bad feelings about the farming life, then Allen has something to offer there too: his personal example and workshops geared toward empowering minorities. “African-Americans need more help, and they’re often harder to work with because they’ve been abused and so forth,” Allen said. “But I can break through a lot of that very quickly because a lot of people of color are so proud, so happy to see me leading this kind of movement.”

See, no one’s trying to take away your treats!   It’s just about curbing consumption of processed foods that are not as micronutrient-rich as whole foods.  And if the current food system does not ensure everyone access to fresh food, well let’s grow it close to them.  After all, food does come from the earth and not from the grocery store…