That's because most Americans still believe we have no
alternative to the food produced by agribusinesses who care as
little about our health as they do about the health of the
chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs, so tightly packed in pens and
cages on factory farms that the floor is scarcely visible, and
where visible, is covered with excrement.
Fortunately, another healthier agriculture has been emerging in
the last few decades.
This good food evolution has usually been started by grassroots
individuals who grew up in rural communities and now live in
cities.
In Detroit, for example, African American elders raised in the
South saw the vacant lots in our deteriorating neighborhoods not
as blight but as opportunities to plant community gardens that
would also give city kids a sense of the time and patience that
are a normal part of country life and that human beings now need
for our continuing evolution. Detroiter Gerald Hairston, who
grew up in W.Virginia. brought these elders together, and called
them "Gardening Angels."
When we started Detroit Summer in 1992, a program to involve
Detroit youth in rebuilding, redefining, and respiriting Detroit
from the ground up, these Gardening Angels provided the
agricultural experience and skills needed to reconnect city
youth with the Earth. Out of this reconnection of country and
city, of oldsters and youngsters, the Detroit urban agricultural
movement was born.
RC
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