A toast to those who grow their own food
The collard greens my family ate on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day — or at any family gathering, because there seemed to be an endless supply in the freezer — were from my Grandma Nat’s small garden. My grandmother tended her plot until she died in 2012 because this is what she knew: To feed her family, she had to use the land.
She came to mind as I toured an exhibition at Oakland Museum of California that explores the cultivation of food and urban gardening in Oakland.
And on this Christmas Day — as you read this, I’ll be in South Carolina, most likely getting ready to feast on my mother’s baked macaroni and cheese, sweet yams and darkmeat turkey — I’m going to toast my Grandma Nat.
The show at the Oakland Museum, “Take Root: Oakland Grows Food,” is an inspiring look at how and why lowincome people, people of color and refugees grow their own fruits and vegetables.
It’s because growing food is rooted in social justice and culture.
One of the groups featured in the exhibit was Love Cultivating Schoolyards, an East Oakland youth program that teaches gardening as a step toward reaching a greater goal.
“We’re just using this as a tool to do other things,” said Matthew Linzner, the program manager. “We’re doing youth leadership development through garden education. Not
only are they learning to take care of themselves, take care of their community, they’re teaching the next generation.”
The students, mostly in high school, also learn to prepare the vegetables they grow. That means they’re consuming a lot of greens — kale, collard greens, chard, spinach and arugula.
“Not only do we give it to our young folks to bring home, we teach them how to prepare certain things,” he said.
The museum show didn’t make me hungry to score seats at a popular, farm-to-table restaurant. Urban farming, after all, is trendy. No, the exhibit made me realize that we’re not that far removed from having to farm to feed ourselves.
It also reminded me that the reality some people face is too often overlooked: No matter how hard they work, some people simply don’t have enough money to feed themselves and their families.
According to Healthy Alameda County, an Alameda County Public Health Department website that publishes population data and community health information, the food insecurity rate for the county population was 14.3 percent in 2015. While it has decreased, the rate, which measures the lack of access to nutritious food, remains higher than state (12.5) and national levels (13.7).
In 2016, there were 1.6 million people living in Alameda County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That means almost 230,000 of my neighbors are worried about how they’re going to eat.
There’s a wall at the Oakland exhibition where children can leave their answers on a Postit Note. The question: Why do you grow food? “So we can live,” one child wrote.
One section of the exhibition showed that immigrant newcomers also grow food as a way to dig into their new home. And gardening can help maintain a sense of culture in a new world.
“The families that we work with are growing really substantial amounts of food for their home economy, but also to share with family and friends,” said Zack Reidman, the program coordinator at the International Rescue Committee’s New Roots garden program that was featured in the show. “We have a very low turnover rate. The gardens, they’re not a hobby. People are very serious and devoted. It is a way of life for a lot of the people.”
Vanessa Martinez, 17, a senior at Arise High School in East Oakland, told me she joined Love Cultivating Schoolyards three years ago because her cousin was involved.
Her favorite vegetable to grow is dinosaur kale because of its rough texture. And it’s sweeter than regular kale, she said. When she brings home vegetables, she can hardly get through the door before her younger brother reaches for the bag.
“My little brother loves peas, so whenever I get home and I have a bag of things we take home, he just digs through it and picks out the peas.”
Wait until he figures out that he can grow the peas himself.