Food Justice in the City

Garden Pedagogy, Part 1

Pancho McFarland

Teaching local youth appropriate methods for harvesting turnip greens (tops) and other crops is something I will long cherish from this past season's work at the Roseland Community Peace Garden. 

Chicago, IL. The intergenerational urban garden is a vital hub of teaching and learning.  Through hands-on interaction with human and other life, young and old persons develop knowledge across a number of content areas like horticulture, community organizing and development, and deep ecology. They pass on and receive traditional knowledge of gardening, foodways, and the broader culture and norms of life. Participants communicate with one another in a community setting, controlled by community members, and largely unencumbered by dominant institutions. 

My experiences during the 2010 growing season in Chicago were ripe with learning.  In a number of gardens in Chicago I was taught by people of all generations and I shared what I know with people from all generations in a mutual exchange of knowledge and information.

Picking turnip greens as a pedagogical moment

“Come over here and pick these turnip greens.  No, not like that.  Come here, Antonio.  Like this.  Get down, like this.  All the way down to the ground.  And snap it off. Right there, where the stem meets the tuber.” 

Control of one’s food is an essential aspect of a culture's resilience and survival in an era of deep social and ecological disturbances.  

Teaching local youth appropriate methods for harvesting turnip greens (tops) and other crops is something I will long cherish from this past season's work at the Roseland Community Peace Garden.  This passing on of traditional knowledge concerning gardening is important if a community or an ethnic group is to achieve food sovereignty.  Control of one’s food is an essential aspect of a culture's resilience and survival in an era of deep social and ecological disturbances. 

In essence, if a culture is to exist it must be able to make autonomous decisions about its production, distribution and consumption of food. The people comprising the cultural community must have requisite knowledge of horticulture, hunting and foraging, food preparation and canning, recipes, and the cuisine methods and techniques of previous generations.  Otherwise, communities of subordinate ethnic groups and colonized people forfeit their independence and become or remain food colonized.  The loss of food sovereignty and autonomy is a key cause of hunger, malnutrition, and related maladies in many working-class urban areas.

The ubiquity of fast-food and pre-packaged industrial agriculture food in many urban communities of color in Chicago and other large cities tears at the fabric of Black and Latin@ foodways.  Horticultural, food and seed saving, food preparation and household economic knowledge are lost in an urban food desert marked by the (dis)array of fried and processed, sugar-laden, fat-saturated, and preservative-tainted industrial foods. 

The pace of life in the city and the effects of poverty and food policy all contribute to the loss of knowledge and therefore the social and political resilience and sovereignty of Blacks and Latin@ communities. By tilling, planting, watering and harvesting, Antonio and two dozen other boys and girls at Peace Garden began learning how to provide for themselves in an ecologically and culturally appropriate manner without reliance on the capitalist market or governmental handouts.  They were learning and at the same time practicing community autonomy. 

“Tell your Mom what three things a plant needs to survive and bear fruit.”

“Water…the Sun,…. and food from the soil.”

DeShaun, of the night watering crew in the Roseland Garden, had been watering the crops with a hose and harvesting and eating broccoli for most of the summer when his Mom came to the garden to bring him home.  His Mom was impressed by her son’s knowledge of gardening.   His almost daily walks down the block to the community garden provided him an opportunity to interact with elders in his community and learn how and why to care for the garden. 

Through the spreading of love, good intentions and important community survival knowledge, youngsters like DeShaun and Antonio have the opportunity to appreciate and care for the life of their community as well as individual human and non-human life.

Biking to the garden: pedagogy on wheels

My sons and I spent much of the Summer and early Fall biking to our community garden.  Biking through our neighborhood taught us about alternative energy, health, community problems, urban policy, ecology and community empowerment.  The three of us learned so much from these learning moments, which are the focus of this blog series, that I must now refer to this as “pedagogy on wheels.” 

The ten-minute bike ride showed us how neighborhoods are spatially arranged including the way in which institutions such as schools, the police, and liquor stores circumscribe neighborhood life.

The underground economy determines a lot of the patterns of community life around our garden. Many aspects of life are affected by the competition between illegal and barely legal activity. On the one hand, we have the typical drug dealing, gang violence, and prostitution. On the other hand, we have the banality of the market in the form of poor quality retail and food outlets and the presence of the state especially through minimal social services and the ever-expanding police force. These forces hold community members hostage.  There are few spaces we can transform into places that provide opportunities to learn and practice community autonomy and empowerment. 

The bike ride demonstrates governmental neglect.  While the police seem to have an bottomless budget for containment and surveillance of the community, fewer public resources are invested toward efforts at community-building and the maintenance of tradition and culture.  Nor do public resources, in the form of governmental programs and institutions, monitor public health in light of how food choices are too often constrained by a lack of access to healthy food. Governmental neglect means taking structural violence for granted.

From the vantage point of our bike seats, we see things differently than from a car.  We experience, literally, every bump on the road.  We see firsthand the effects of urban policy and corporate greed.  After seeing evidence of the devastation wrought in poor neighborhoods we discuss what we see.  We read about the concept of food deserts and issues related to ecology, poverty, and race.  The core ideas of an alternative curriculum develops through an organic process of direct lived experience, dialogue, and participatory and collaborative research. 

This deep pedagogy is a wholistic undertaking and an approach akin to Freire’s generative pedagogy whereby the situation and participants determine the content and nature of the course.  This approach also incorporates a biocentric perspective, deep ecology, critical race analysis, and anticolonial and antiauthoritarian positions.

It is deep in that it tries to get at fundamental questions and solve keystone problems at the same time that the teaching and learning is democratic and the act of learning challenges hierarchical organizational models.  Each participant is student-teacher and teacher-student.  Each person holds responsibility for the entire group’s learning.  We are learning through discussion, reading, and research about anti-hierarchical modes of community organization, the forms of the exchange of knowledge through a horizontal anti-authoritarian organization.

These and many more experiences shaped an incredibly diverse and organic learning experience at the Roseland Community Peace Garden.  In subsequent posts I will go into details of the pedagogy outlined here and describe different examples of transformative learning including how adults from the nearby university participated in the community learning at the garden.