Sowing the Seeds: Connecting to communities fighting for food justice during a pandemic
It all started with a Pinterest account, Youtube videos and a free garden bed, according to Camielle Howard, a Cincinnati resident turned urban farmer. The free raised garden bed was courtesy of 500 Free Gardens, a local initiative that strives to “change the landscape of a community one garden at a time.” Since getting the OK from her landlord to install the garden, her passion for food and self-sufficiency has now sprawled into a .10 acre urban farm.
Howard is one of an estimated 23.5 million people living in a food desert in the U.S. A quarter of Cincinnati’s population live in food deserts. In Milwaukee, where I am currently based, the USDA estimates that 9 percent of the population live in food deserts. And as the world settles into the reality of living through an ongoing global pandemic, it’s expected that these numbers will only increase unless they are addressed.
For this reason, I am interested in working with (and reporting on) communities that live in these food deserts. I want to understand how or if they are connected to local community initiatives (such as gardens and pantries) and where these programs miss the mark.
I am most interested in this idea of self-sufficiency — a concept that has proved even more useful as families are ordered to hunker down in their homes during viral outbreaks. What are the keys to securing access to resources and what else is needed to become resourceful all on your own?
“There are lots of community gardens in the city but I don’t see anything being done to actually teach self-sufficiency on a broad scale,” Howard said. “The hood doesn’t have community gardens.”
Black folks are 50 percent less likely to have access to supermarkets chains and Latinx communities are a third less likely to have access to those chains, according to a joint study by the New York Law School and the ACLU.
According to the study, grocery stores in Black and Brown neighborhoods are also 2.5 times smaller than the average store in higher-income areas.
To combat these realities, Howard’s neighborhood installed a community garden, but it eventually fell out of touch with the community it was meant to serve.
“The one that was in my neighborhood wasn’t broadly marketed even though it had a decent farmers market, and now it’s under the control of the school district so it’s lost the community aspect.”
Howard, a Black woman, started gardening with her first garden bed five years ago. She said she expanded her garden last year to rely more on her own yield for food. When the pandemic rendered her jobless, she said the choice to expand felt like a blessing. Howard is still unemployed but is now pursuing a Master Gardener certificate through Ohio State University-Extension.
I was able to connect with Howard in a Facebook Group dedicated to Black women with edible gardens. Howard said the Facebook group has been her primary resource for over a year. The group is apart of a growing network of support groups for Black agrarians and sovereignty activists. Its mission is to serve as a space for women of color to learn about growing their own food and sharing their garden “wins, losses, and lessons.”
I intend to work with communities living in food deserts while in the Social Journalism program at Craig Newmark’s Graduate School of Journalism — a program that focuses on serving communities through solid journalism. I am largely interested in working with Black communities (with an emphasis on Black women) in weakened Midwestern food systems.
For background, I am a Black girl from Madison, Wisconsin. During the height of the 2008 financial crisis, my working-class family relied heavily on food pantries and can goods to make it by each week. The 07'-08' food crisis was a result of a bunch of colliding ills — including bad weather, the Great Recession and increased demand for food, according to a Reuters report.
As the pandemic rages on, these ills will bear their heads again, threatening an already fragile food system. The novel coronavirus disease disproportionately targets Black and Brown low-income communities. These same communities work harder to put food on the table and are more likely to battle comorbidities (that are linked to a lack of fresh food and accessible grocery stores, according to a study by the University of California.)
Some communities have found urban gardens to be an effective solution to this problem. A study that examines Cleveland’s ability to become food self-reliant, says urban gardening could be the key to producing enough goods for the city. For background, Cleveland like many Midwestern cities has been hit badly by foreclosures, leaving the city riddled with empty lots and abandoned buildings. The scenario from the study suggests that if the city uses 80 percent of each vacant lot and 9 percent of every occupied home the city could yield 31 to 68 percent of all the produce needed to feed its population.
In addition to growers, I am also interested in looking at innovative solutions and initiatives such as community fridges, donation-based restaurants and mutual aid so I can understand which of these methods is most useful to any given community in need of immediate aid.
However, I am interested in how cities like Cleveland support these kinds of urban initiatives and how those initiatives communicate with the most marginalized members of their communities. How does the working mom with three kids find out about these initiatives? How does the underemployed 30-year old afford enough soil to start a garden bed or gas to go to the pantry? And most importantly, how do these municipalities and community centers promote a culture of self-reliance? So when things really hits the fan, certain members of society won’t be overlooked.
