Forward by Mark Winne

As a kid growing up in northern New Jersey, I acutely felt the tension between urban development and the fleeting remnants of a pastoral landscape. Living at the retreating edge of the Garden State’s former agrarian glory, I often wondered how Mother Earth could survive the onslaught of macadam, concrete, plastic, steel, and rubber. I would eventually find a kind of perverse solace in those hearty blades of grass and indefatigable dandelion shoots that muscled their way through the fissures in roadways and parking lots. They told me better than any science textbook could that no matter what abuse humankind may heap upon our planet, nature will not only survive, it will one day triumph.

But rather than wait (or in our bleaker moments hope) for some kind of Armageddon to wash away our mess, the satisfying and edifying stories told in Breaking Through Concrete make it abundantly clear that not only is it nature’s will to survive that matters, it’s humanity’s need to allow nature to flourish that may matter more. Urban farming, gardening, and growing – or whatever you want to call the phenomenon that is turning conventional food production on its head – is catching on faster than veggie wraps. Turning over manicured sod at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, removing rubble and covering old parking lots with compost in rust-belt Detroit, or raising growing beds on Brooklyn rooftops the way a community used to raise barns are the stories of the day.

Skeptics of course abound. Spokespersons for Big Farming and Big Food have turned their noses up at these so-called “urban aesthetes” and “utopian farmers” whose acreage is so small it can barely support a rototiller.  But with a billion of the globe’s people hungry, a billion undernourished, and another billion obese, conventional and industrial forms of agriculture have hardly earned bragging rights. Urban food production may not feed a hungry world, but as Breaking Through Concrete amply demonstrates, it certainly can feed a hungry spirit and a hunger for both nature and human connection. And as the world becomes less food secure every day, growing food in unconventional places will no longer be thought of as a nicety, like a flowerbox of petunias slung from a brownstone’s windowsill, but as a necessity born out of the looming realization that there will be 9 billion of us to feed by 2050. At the very least, one can think of urban farming as an insurance policy with a very small monthly premium  or a hedge fund with no downside risk.

As a child of the sixties, my world view was shaped as much by the devastation of the moment as it was by a wild, fantastical notion of the future. While Joni Mitchell may have told us, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” Breaking Through Concrete reminds us that we can also rip up the parking lot and liberate paradise.

I have to put documentary food films in the same category. Like food books, there are way too many food films, many of which I willingly and unwillingly have sat through because I’ve become an obedient slave to the notion that pictures are the only way to get people to act or eat differently. Unfortunately, like many books out there, too many food flicks just don’t satisfy my hunger for wisdom, insight, or entertainment. That is until I saw ”Food Stamped,” a tale of the charming Potash husband/wife filmmaking couple who turn the camera on themselves while taking on the challenge of eating healthfully and locally on a food stamp budget. They are funny, self-deprecating, and delightfully human in the way they stroll through the supermarket aisle, past farmers’ market stands, and stand shoulder to shoulder in their own kitchen trying to make it all work.

So before this blog turns into a film review, let me urge you to give “Food Stamped” a chance. I think it will help you end up in a better place. Enjoy!

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD! FOOD STAMPED is a first-person documentary on the challenge of eating healthy on a food stamp budget. Called ENTERTAINING, EDUCATIONAL, and INSPIRING by the San Francisco Chronicle, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, has been featured on CNN Money, and was a recommended film for the first annual Food Day. Order your DVD today! http://www.facebook.com/l/ZAQGnOxElAQEt7xVyPV-SNwsUO7cowLDOFXLDsZbvTKTcKg/www.foodstamped.com/buy-the-dvd

Maryland’s eastern shore is the heart of Big Chicken country. Here, Perdue and Tyson manage the devil’s workshop where chickens come off the factory line looking like McNuggets with legs. Sharing a pulpit with Baltimore public radio host Marc Steiner, two local farmers, and another journalist, we showed Food, Inc. to a SRO crowd at Salisbury University. As someone who has seen the flick a dozen times, I was surprised that this was its first showing on the Eastern Shore. But I soon learned why. Not only were half the buildings and streets named after members of the Perdue family, rumor was that Perdue executives had asked the University to not screen the documentary. Not only do animals sometimes suffer at the hands of Big Ag, so does the First Amendment.

The audience was roughly divided between benighted representatives of the poultry industry and outspoken numbers of sustainable food advocates.  When the house lights came up, the feathers flew. The poultry people gave as good as they got, and absolutely nobody turned the other cheek. While I may rain fire and brimstone down on factory farming, there is a part of me that prays for a way to heal communities like Salisbury.

There was far less conflict in the liberal bastions of Bethesda and Boston. At the Cedar Lane Unitarian-Universalist Church I delivered a lecture to a large audience of metro-Washingtonian alternative food believers whose national denomination had recently adopted a statement of ethical eating. Though I was clearly preaching to the choir, it was heartening to know that hundreds of thousands of Unitarian-Universalists are united in the good food cause.

In Boston (more precisely Cambridge), I stood nervously before an assemblage of Harvard Law School students who had invited me to speak on local and state food policy. While addressing the future masters of the universe can be intimidating, they are just like students I encounter everywhere, in thrall to food and food issues. They have established the Harvard Food Law Clinic which is sending the best and the brightest to places like the Mississippi Delta to unravel ancient local food codes to better serve a bourgeoning local food movement.

Moving from the blue states to the red, I arrived in Oklahoma. My mission: enable 50 people who had been invited to a full-day workshop to establish a state food policy council. While not exactly a mission impossible, my hope for a positive outcome were severely shaken by some chilling remarks. One farmer complained about those “lazy housing project residents who won’t work on my farm.” I then overheard one redneck farmer warn a state legislator that the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) was the only way to deal with “invasive gov’mint regulations.”  And I was firmly upbraided by one Oklahoma State University economics professor who told me that it was capitalism that should be thanked for making so much cheap, safe food available to Americans.

Iowa proved to be more fertile ground for progressive thinking. There, I had the opportunity to share some words at the one year anniversary meeting of the Iowa Food System’s Council. The group is a newly formed non-profit organization that wants to ensure “that Iowa has a just and diverse food system, which supports healthier people, communities, economies and the environment.” As I was signing books, however, I was confronted by a plant science professor from Iowa State University who wanted to make sure that I understood that GMOs, CAFOs, and agro-chemicals shouldn’t be blamed for anything. I smiled, listened, and wondered to myself why, with all the energy across this great land of ours to build a new food system out of the shell of the old that the old guard continues to fight a rearguard action.

Admittedly, food justice and sustainability are still but a distant glow on the horizon for many. Those with a vested interest in the industrial food system retain a tenacious and sometimes hostile grip on the status quo. As the numbers of advocates for sustainable, local, and healthy food grow, so it seems does the gulf between us and them. Though this preacher has not yet found the words to mend the rift, I’m not ready to wall myself off from the world in my organic garden. Keep the faith!

If anything, the industrial food system has become as ornery as an old mule and angry as a penned up bull. We see it in the American Farm Bureau that has assembled a $30 million war chest to persuade our fellow citizens that factory farmed, genetically modified, and antibiotic-infused food is not only good for us, but necessary to feed a hungry world. We see it in the food industry’s attempts to preempt local regulations (Cleveland) to ban trans-fats by reserving that right exclusively for the state (Ohio). And we see it in the actions of Wal-Mart and Pepsi who are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars on food charities to use them in the same way that terrorists use women and children to shield them from their attackers. The battle, in other words, is no longer only for healthy food, clean air and water, and a just and sustainable food system; it’s now a fight for freedom and democracy.

Karla Cook, editor of The Food Times, said it well in a new blurb that adorns the paperback’s backcover: “Mark Winne lays out the battle lines for democracy itself….Reasserting our control in the face of power, relearning skills that have atrophied, and rediscovering a triumphant kind of individualism that embraces both the self and community are the goals.”

As I say in Food Rebels, the time has come to get our hands in the soil, our veggies on the chopping block, and our voices down at city hall. The time has come as well to occupy Wall Street, but you’d be remiss if you didn’t also occupy your bookshelf with a copy of Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas.

Damn, just as I was starting to enjoy this place my social conscience kicks in!

Motivated – though somewhat reluctantly – to find Hawaii’s contemporary oppressors, I accepted an invitation from Derrick Kiyabu to visit MA’O Organic Farm on Oahu Island’s west side. The drive took me past Honolulu’s cheek-to-jowl ocean view condos and the Pearl Harbor Naval Base before the H1 Freeway deposited me onto Highway 93. This is the approximate place where the sign “Now Leaving Paradise, Welcome to Poverty” would be placed if tourist officials chose to acknowledge such things. But lacking most of what vacationers are looking for from a tropical getaway, the Wai’anae Coast, as it is commonly known, can only offer fast-food joints, scruffy commercial buildings, and residential housing that rival the worst of third-world Asia. I guess this is why the Lonely Planet guidebook refers to the region, almost quaintly, as “a little bit of Appalachia by the sea.”

My pre-farm tour reached a crescendo when I happened by a homeless encampment cobbled together along a one-mile stretch of state beach. Late model cars – many rusted and in various states of disassembly – jerry-rigged shelters, and a mish mash of makeshift camping and cooking gear presented such a scene of utter destitution that even knuckle-dragging conservatives would advocate for immediate relief.

As I moved inland a couple of miles, the landscape and impressions changed. Small sections of dry, flat farmland intermingled with vast tracks of military land – securely fenced and sporting giant arrays of submarine-tracking sonar towers capable of detecting a flushing toilet in a Russian sub north of Okinawa. It is here though, amid palm and banana trees, that you’ll find the peaceful acres of MA’O Organic Farms, armed with nothing more dangerous than wholesome organic produce and 40 or so farm interns between the ages of 17 and 24.

Like almost all the interns and staff, Derrick is wearing the farm’s “No Panic, Go Organic” t-shirt. Noting some of the underlying principles of the program, he reminds me that “pre-contact” Hawaiians were 100% food self-reliant and that their traditional farming methods were totally organic. In a more pragmatic vein, he also explains the program’s business model: “Organic produce generates the most revenue from our customers such as Whole Foods, numerous natural food stores, CSA members, and Honolulu’s high-end restaurants.” As a self-described social enterprise, the non-profit farm generates 40 percent of its million-dollar-plus annual budget from produce sales. This is how they support the youth development and leadership program that is at the core of the farm’s mission. Promoting food security in the surrounding region is secondary to the need to generate funds for instructional costs, community college tuition, and stipends for the workers.

Without a doubt, the produce is top-notch. The packing sheds – two retrofitted chicken coops – are filled with interns washing and packing perfect heads of green and white bok choy, glowing red radishes, and gorgeous greens. A big whiteboard lists all the customers and the number of units each will purchase that day. As the young people pack each order in MA’O Farms custom boxes and load them on to the refrigerated delivery truck, the pride is evident in their smiles; after all, they grew it, picked it, and packed it. From the sales revenue, they’ll be paid a monthly stipend by it. Moreover, the produce will help send them to college.

But MA’O isn’t just another scheme to reconnect kids to land, food, and a little income. According to Kamu Enos, MA’O’s Social Entrepreneur Director, the farm is a training and leadership development program designed to overcome the poverty and social dysfunction that was so evident on my drive in. He tells me that “this region of Oahu has the highest concentration of native Hawaiians on all the Islands. We also have a 20% poverty rate, which is disproportionately higher for Hawaiians. Over 40% of our kids drop out of school and only 10% of our graduating high school class goes to college, and many of those leave during the first year.” Derrick puts the problem more succinctly, “Our public education system has ripped off our kids.”

When I noted the unusually high number of very heavy people I saw in Wai’anae, Kamu explained that, like other Native American communities, the ravages of Spam, loss of land, and the decline of traditional practices have taken their toll on peoples’ bodies as well as their souls.  In what might be called the second wave of white man’s disease (the first, as Sarah Vowell makes clear, was the 19^th century smallpox and measles epidemics brought by missionaries and seamen that reduced the native Hawaiian population from 300,000 to 40,000), the American fast-food diet and the paucity of fresh fruits and vegetables are degrading the community’s health. “The root problem,” said Kamu, “is the disconnect between our land, people, and economy. Instead [of controlling these things], we exist under the predatory practices of the military.” Not only does the Defense Department control most of the land in the region, military recruiters find local Hawaiians easy targets for enlistment because good civilian job opportunities are so few.

Getting control of land, especially for farming, is a daunting challenge for Hawaiians – there’s not much affordable, arable land that developers don’t already have their mitts on.  But sugar daddies do show up, and they are not always the kind that operated sugar cane plantations. In MA’O Organic Farms’ case, the sweet guy is none other than Pierre Omidyar, founder of E-Bay. He generously dropped a cool million on the program, which, with assistance from the Trust for Public Land, bought the 11 acres that are now the heart of the farm.

Pua, 21, is a MA’O youth leader and the first member of her family to go to college. She recently received her associate degree from Leeward Community College and is scheduled to start at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in August. She tells me that high school didn’t prepare her for college, but with her mother’s encouragement and MA’O’s help – counseling, remedial instruction, and peer support – she’s climbed some pretty steep personal cliffs and is now ready for bigger challenges. While she’s not likely to pursue farming as a career she credits the farm program with giving her the emotional tools she needed to succeed. “The farm experience is an inspiration. Like college, it’s hard work. The farm grounds you because you have to manage your time, you have to work as a team with others to succeed, and you have to face the consequences of your actions.”

For other young people like Pua, the path out of poverty starts with a walk down the farm’s vegetable rows. Many start to eat better and lose weight. Kainoa is one youth worker who actually lost 130 pounds by exercising and changing his diet. But what the program cultivates even more than the farm’s well composted soil is the interns’ state of mind. Disempowered, brought up with low expectations, some homeless, they were staring at a future that promised little but a swift descent into diabetes and a life in the unemployment line. Now the steps out of poverty are more visible.

To grow and sell a half-million dollars of organic fruits and vegetables every year is no small feat. But to raise dozens of young leaders who can challenge the dominance of the condo kings and restore the economic and physical health of their people would no doubt bring a smile to the ancient kings and queens of Hawaii.

Peggy Bailey, Ballard’s Operation Manager, is one of those dedicated, unflappable souls whose work holds the lives of others together as the larger universe spins out of control. Her recitation of statistics is the “growth” story that you’ll hear from any of the 60,000 emergency food sites across America. “In 2001 we were serving about 350 people per week; four years ago it was 450; now we’re serving between 1,100 and 1,200.” Peggy escorts me past tattooed skateboarders, young women clutching babies, and unshaven men for whom a good night is a dry patch of grass underneath a bridge.

Like all the 25 volunteers (out of a total of 100) on hand this day – good neighbors who keep the flow of people safe and dignified – Peggy beams with pride over the food, large walk-in refrigerators, and the recently retrofitted 6,200-square-foot machine shop that’s been their new home for only a year (after relocating from their cramped, dilapidated home of nearly 40 years). Almost half of the available food is produce, some of which comes from nearby Pea Patch community gardens and local fruit tree gleaners. An abundant supply of artisan bread, fresh dairy products, and even enough frozen meat to give each person two packages, fill the shelves. Not only can you select from a rather remarkable range of products: e.g. microwaveable entrees that retail for $9.00 at Trader Joes, there’s also a “no-cook” section that, in an average month, serves 350 people without kitchens. In addition, nearly 100 bags are assembled and delivered weekly to shut-ins and people with special dietary needs.

Unlike food banks in days of yore, Ballard does more than give away food. If you don’t have a permanent address, they’ll act as your personal post office box, a service currently used by 480 people. Case workers from the Department of Social and Health Services try to connect food bank users with SNAP (food stamps) as well as medical and dental services. Need help paying your rent or electrical bill? You can apply for a $300 voucher for the former and $200 voucher for the latter.

When I asked Peggy how she keeps up with the demand for food, she told me, almost blithely, that enough food was not a problem. In a comment that would make her the envy of every food bank worker in America, she said, “We’ve never had to turn anyone away due to lack of food. This is a very generous community. We have Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Safeway and dozens of other food donors.” While supporting five paid staff, three trucks, and a good-size modern facility, the food bank gets 95% of its operating funds from private donations, receiving only $40,000 per year from Seattle city government. One anonymous individual, for instance, gives the Ballard Food Bank $2,000 each month just to buy fresh dairy products.

In contrast to the generosity of the surrounding neighborhoods, you have the U.S. House of Representatives. If the miracles that these Seattle residents pull off every day make Christ’s feeding of the 5,000 look like a cheap card trick, the House majority’s proposal to slash $3 billion from SNAP, WIC, and TEFAP makes Scrooge look like a Salvation Army volunteer. At a time when the nation’s economy is still on life support and when a record 43 million Americans are receiving food stamps, the House Republicans want to hack the safety net with a machete while leaving the silver cutlery of hedge fund operators untarnished. Take from the poor, but don’t touch a dime of the rich.

Ballard is a human-scale urban environment whose sloping landscape gently lowers you to the shores of the Puget Sound. On street corners, food bank volunteers greet the homeless people by name, who, in turn, respond in a friendly manner, pleased that there are people who don’t avert their eyes. Stroll a few blocks north of Market Street, and you’ll come to a lovely park where grassy slopes and park benches are populated by homeless men catching a ray or two of Seattle’s stingy sunlight. In the opposite corner is a small skateboard tunnel where young dudes, hat brims cocked at precise angles, practice their chutes and curls. Between the skaters and the homeless are several fountains that spray giggling toddlers cheered on by happy moms.

The park reflects Ballard’s values: there’s room for everybody, diversity is encouraged, and the community does its darnedest to meet everyone’s needs. But, beneath this cloak of tolerance, there is a creeping sense that there may be limits to what any group of caring people can do. Perhaps it’s symbolized by the police cruiser stationed just across the street from the “homeless end” of the park. Maybe you hear it in the voices of the young men at the food pantry who were too ashamed to give me their names, but did say that in spite of a couple of years of college they couldn’t find jobs. “We’re not trained for anything.” Or perhaps you can smell it on the breath of the middle-aged drunken man, who according to Peggy had been “doing so well up until now.”

If the House Republicans have their way, the Ballard Food Bank’s waiting room could very well become so crowded that the smiling volunteers will be replaced by stern-faced security guards. When I asked John, an 87-year old food bank volunteer of 12 years, what he thought was behind the ever rising number of clients, he said emphatically, “It’s all about the economy. I see how embarrassed people are who are asking for help, but you can either sleep on the street or come to the food bank.” One has to ask if that is the vision that the budget cutting, non-taxing conservative minority have for America. If that is true, and every statement from the Republican leadership seems to suggest that it is, then one has to ask where the rage is at this time in our nation’s history.

How big must food banks get to contain the ever-swelling legions of un- and underemployed workers? How much food will Ballard’s neighborhood grocers have to donate to ensure that all the young mothers can feed themselves as well as their babies? Is there indeed a tipping point when community compassion can no longer clean up the mess made by mean-spirited politicians who avert their eyes from the growing victims of a failed American dream?

Evelyn, 87, has been volunteering at the Ballard Food Bank for 15 years, longer than anyone else. She’s a feisty, retired machinist who worked for a Boeing Aircraft subcontractor. Sitting at a table where she was sorting nuts into small plastic bags for the home delivery sacks, Evelyn shared the most commonly expressed reason for volunteering at food banks. “If you’ve been blessed, you have to give back.” Yes, I said, I’d heard that sentiment from many people in the emergency food world, but I wondered if there wasn’t something else. At that point the fiery machinist union member took over from the charitable grandmother. Growing up during the Great Depression on a Minnesota farm, she did not need the reason for rage explained to her. “Things have to change in this country,” she said, eyes narrowing and pronouncing each syllable more distinctly. “The idea of not taxing the rich is ridiculous. We have to stop farm and oil subsidies. We got to get politicians to care about people all the time, not just when they’re trying to get elected.”

Compassion and “giving back” may not be sustainable when one class of Americans lives under the House Republicans’ Golden Fleece, while bourgeoning flocks find shelter under highway overpasses. So that compassion may live, we must sometimes release the rage.

Link: http://www.nourishlife.org/perspectives/food-policy-councils/

To say the scene was surreal is to say Bruce Springsteen is only a singer. In a cavernous space sometimes used for Barnum and Bailey’s circus elephants to take warm-up laps, there were now no more than a dozen humans. Miami Steve, Max Weinberg, Garry W. Tallent, Patti Scialfa, and Nils Lofgren – wearing requisite black garb, guitars slung rakishly from shoulders – talked quietly among themselves. A couple of clipboard-toting handlers, eyes searching nervously for the prescribed cues, flitted in out of this otherwise placid assemblage. Jon Landau, rock manager extraordinaire, calmly surveyed the scene waiting for the appearance of his boss, the “Boss.” And then there was me, my 15-year old son, and two Hartford Food System volunteers, aching with anxiety as we awaited our one-minute of face-time with Bruce.

The occasion of this unearthly gathering was Bruce Springsteen’s generous commitment to ending hunger. As the local non-profit organization chosen as the recipient of his charity, the Hartford Food System was given front-row seats to auction off (one pair went for a cool $7,000), free tickets for the tour’s two-night stand in Hartford, and of course the backstage meet-and-greet with Bruce that was now turning my legs to jelly.

If I was at all capable of thinking clearly, I would have realized that I was standing there at that moment in 2001 because of Springsteen’s 1975 “Born to Run” album cover. The image showed a scruffy white kid from New Jersey (I was also from New Jersey!) leaning on a bad-ass looking Clemons who was in the process of “torturing” a tenor sax. It was black and white, the cover photo that is, but the black and white racial theme was as clear and sublime as a golden summer day at the Jersey Shore. I would soon discover that the eight song tracks inside would change my life, but it was the cover that sent shivers up my spine.

As a child of the sixties I had lived through the civil-rights movement, race riots not more than 10 miles from my lily-white suburban town, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. My only black childhood friend was abruptly removed from my sandbox for reasons I still don’t understand. I’ve been called a racist, I’ve participated in anti-racist training, and I’ve read a dozen black authors who explained everything I needed to know about racism except how to stop the pain. But with Bruce Springsteen’s sweet smile directed at the soulful visage of Clarence Clemons, I sensed a transcendent moment. Could this flagrant display of humanity be the beginning of the end for America’s 300-year old nightmare?

My son, who was then playing saxophone in his first garage band, approached Clarence with an innocence I had lost 35 years ago. He slowly shifted his giant stogie from his right hand to his left and enveloped Peter’s hand in his meaty paw. With precociousness that has served my son well throughout his life, he said, “I play tenor sax too. Can you give me any advice?” The Big Man sized him up for a second or two, pulled long and deep on his cigar, and lofted a plume of smoke skyward to the Civic Center’s ceiling. He replied, “Play with soul, son. Just play with soul.” And with that, he lifted his immense self from the chair and joined his band mates on stage.

Rest in peace, Big Man.

By Mark Winne

Over the years I’ve come to lean on Ralph Waldo Emerson the way a drunk leans on a lamppost.  When my frustration with politics, society, or even the weather surpasses all understanding, I go running for the shelter of my Emerson-only bookshelf, a privileged nook that no other literary form is permitted to occupy.

“Self-Reliance” gets me out of my funk over society’s impulse to commit mass suicide via mass conformity. Recent readings of “The Fugitive Slave Law” and “Letter to President Van Buren” (concerning the forced re-location of Native American tribes from the Southeast to the Oklahoma Territory) have steeled my resolve to fight today’s injustices. But where I found surprising relief from more personal matters came from a lovely piece titled “Farming.”

You see, it’s springtime in northern New Mexico, which I’ve come to learn over the course of my seven-year probationary term here means absolutely nothing. As a transplanted New England gardener I’ve yet to fully adjust to the unpredictable path our Santa Fe de primavera takes before it settles into a reliable pattern of warm, relatively wind-free days. Forget the lack of water; I learned early on that unless you “bring your own” in the form of a decent irrigation system you might as well find another hobby. No, I’m talking about those bewitching, blue sky days of May that are followed savagely by 25 degree nights and winds so strong you have to scrape the cat off the barn door.

Seduced by air so sweet that it is a “luxury to draw the breath of life,” I fling myself at my garden to poke seeds and plant seedlings in beds diligently prepared only a week before. But as soon as the sun sets beneath the Jemez Mountains to the West, a cold blanket of air slips down from the snow-peaked Sangre de Christos Mountains to the East. The soil – so friable and warm during the day – turns crusty and unforgiving at night. The coup de grace is administered by 50-mile per hour wind gusts that rise up from the plains to scour the ground into submission. The seeds retreat into dormancy and the plants are left splayed across the drip tape.

Experience is supposed to be a buffer to surprise. The impact of so-called unpredictable events should be mitigated by a reasonable application of probability. The prudent gardener slowly accumulates numerous actuarial tables in his head that check the urge to act only because the calendar tells him to. But when the gardener’s original experience base is New England and his actuarial tables were compiled on the banks of the Connecticut River, he may find himself proceeding before his own biological systems have fully adapted to the new place. And maybe more importantly, what if his circuitry had always been wired for action over contemplation and patience viewed as the weak sister to initiative?

The farmer, “bends to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops, as the sails of a ship bend to the wind,” writes Emerson. Most farmers I’ve known, particularly the smaller ones whose methods are sustainable and markets local, move slowly and deliberately. The farmer learns “patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water and times himself to Nature.”

In my rush to plant my garden, have I become like the consumer who must have tomatoes year-round, or the industrial farmer who works outside the normal limitations of the seasons and seeks to out-smart nature at every turn?  You would have found me in my garden this May cussing out the peas that never germinated or waving my angry fists at the New Mexico gales that had reduced my tomato plants to burned-out matchsticks. Staring down at the once beautiful asparagus tips whose life had been cut short by the heartless frost I swore vengeance on the gods who had wrought such devastation.

But a sweeter notion is now pulsing through my veins. The slow drip of Emerson is taking effect; my heartbeat slows to a more natural pace; I’m learning to tack with the wind instead of forcing my way into it. I take a deep breath, stand still and quiet so as better to hear, see, and smell nature’s signals. “Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.” And I will too.

By Mark Winne

Highland Hills is one of those down-and-nearly-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large and shining across the hazy north Texas horizon and is linked to this poverty-plagued neighborhood by a seven-mile ribbon of light-rail steel. Ledbetter Avenue crosses the train line passing by vacant buildings, vast stretches of empty parking lots, and a dizzying array of “For Sale,” “For Lease” and “For Jesus” signs. Named for the renowned guitar picker Lead Belly who did time in these parts – both in and out of prison – the Avenue speaks little in the way of promise, but wails the blues of poverty loud and clear.

Like cockroaches in a post-nuclear winter, the neighborhood’s only commercial survivors appear to be pawn shops, Dollar stores, and fast-food joints. One supermarket, a Minyard whose cinder-blocked and windowless façade is about as inviting as the entrance to Stalag 13, is the only retail food source in the several surrounding miles of food desert. But a lifeline from an unlikely source has been tossed Highland Hills’s way by a group of innovative academics. Paul Quinn College, a historically black college that sits just off Interstate 45 at the neighborhood’s eastern edge, is committed to lifting its neighboring community’s physical and economic health with a combination of food, farming, and servant leadership.

There’s no little irony in this partnership. To drive by the Paul Quinn campus is to, well, keep on driving. There are no signature ivy-clad buildings or tree-shaded quads to invite college-shopping families for a leisurely tour. In fact, the first roadside buildings you see are in various states of demolition. Student enrollment had plunged from 600 to 100 (it’s now climbed back to 200) and the school has experienced on-going accreditation problems. At first glance anyway, and like the adjoining neighborhood it wants to help, Paul Quinn appears to be hanging on to life by no more than a pea tendril.

But first glances are deceiving, and pea tendrils are stronger than they look. And when your backs to the wall and nobody, even your own government, will help you, you fight like hell, you do the unexpected, and you take risks.

In Paul Quinn’s case, not only did the college take risks, it committed a grievous sin, at least by Texas standards – they terminated their football program and turned their field into an organic farm. Yes, in the shadow of the Super Bowl, with the specter of Tom Landry looking down, and the holy glare of Friday night lights forever dimmed, Paul Quinn ripped up its sacred turf where football cleats once tread, and planted – goalpost to goalpost – peas, lettuce, carrots, strawberries, and more, lots more.

While the roar from the football stands may have subsided, it doesn’t mean that the field has fallen silent. When Andrea Bithell, the farm manager, announced to student and staff volunteers that the kohlrabi had gone in last week, everyone cheered. Showing a group of farm visitors where the corn would be planted later this spring evoked a round of applause from several students who proclaimed their love of its sweet kernels. Indeed the competitive spirit and enthusiasm so much a part of college athletics is hardly lacking at “Food for Good Farm,” the name chosen to denote it’s larger mission of education, community service, and healthy food for all. Sounding more like a coach than a farmer, Andrea uses words like hustle to describe her student crew’s hectic effort to plant and seed the two-acre field. When the volunteers complained about working in the cold and the rain, they were reminded that football games are played in all kinds of weather. Even the plants are forced to compete in a set of 12 trial beds located in the field’s south end zone. Here students will test different growing methods and evaluate their potential financial rate of return.

Elizabeth Wattley, Paul Quinn’s Director of Service Learning, proclaimed with pride that the farm’s tomatoes were better than anything she’d ever bought in a grocery store (she confessed that until her introduction to the farm during its first spring in 2010 she had been afraid of dirt). One student, biology major Symphonie Dawson, giggled when she described the farm’s mascot that they had temporarily borrowed from Delta State University. “It’s the ‘Fighting Okra,’ an image of the vegetable wearing boxing gloves. We borrowed it because last year’s okra crop seemed to go on forever.” The “Rah-rah, Go Team, Go!” energy previously reserved for football games has been channeled into the end-zone to end-zone planting of 1500 strawberry plants, 6600 onions, a new asparagus bed, and dozens of varieties of vegetables. “The farm is the light of the college,” is the assertive way Elizabeth put it.

For a school that was on the ropes, Paul Quinn has gained a reprieve by discovering the multiple benefits of farming while also turning its attention outward to the community. One prominent need that the farm is already addressing is healthy living and eating, no small concern on today’s college campuses, especially one that is surrounded by a food desert. “Before their work on the farm, students wouldn’t eat carrots unless they were smothered in Ranch dressing,” noted Andrea. But by getting their hands in the dirt – a task that usually took two or three visits to the farm to get past the “yuck” declaration – students started eating carrots right out of the ground, dirt and all. “They actually taste,” said Elizabeth, pausing for a moment to find the right adjective, “carrot-tee.”

By engaging students enrolled in the school’s biology and social entrepreneurship courses, the farm gives scores of people in their late teens and early twenties a chance to get hands-on laboratory experience at the same time they get their hands in the dirt. Even the students who don’t care to venture into the world of bugs and compost get a taste of the farm’s output. Paul Quinn’s cafeteria now offers a monthly feature designed to showcase the farm’s harvest and introduce students to food that is healthy, tasty, and oh-so local.  But Jasmine Wynn, a freshman legal study major, may have summed up the farm’s health benefits best. “I’m a city girl from Dallas, and for me the farm was something new. I liked being out there. I also started getting serious about my diet last year and decided that organic food is better for you. It’s just part of a healthier lifestyle, and I want to stick around for a long time.”

The lack of farming experience or a farm background has not been a deterrent to anyone’s participation, including Paul Quinn’s President Michael J. Sorrell. With public policy and law degrees from Duke University, his stellar resume indicates he has represented American Airlines and Morgan Stanley, served on numerous prestigious commissions including an assignment at the White House, and was selected in 2009 as one of the 10 Best Historically Black College and University presidents.  Notably lacking from Dr. Sorrell’s career synopsis, however, are any agricultural credentials, and ironically, his business achievements include representing top-flight athletes like Utah Jazz All-Star Deron Williams. So why did he eliminate the football program and then have the audacity to convert the field to a farm?

A big part of the answer no doubt lies in his personal commitment to the concept of servant leadership, which, like the farm, he brought to Paul Quinn. With such simple but difficult to live by ideas like putting others before self, leaving the world a better place than you found it, and maintaining a spiritual faithfulness, Dr. Sorrell not only preaches what he practices (he personally teaches a freshman course in servant leadership), he practices what he preaches. And the farm is at the center of that practice.

Isaiah 58: 9-12 gets prominent mention on the College’s website which also touts the school’s Christian underpinnings. The scripture admonishes us (some would say “teaches us”) “to pour yourself out for the hungry…then shall your light rise in the darkness…and you shall be like a watered garden.” Holding aside the self-interest in doing good (and why not?), The Food for Good Farm has its heart and mind set on serving the hardscrabble community that surrounds it. Though a share of the harvest goes to the school’s cafeteria, 10 percent goes to a local food pantry, a sizeable share is also sold on a weekly basis to the community from the field’s former hot dog stand, and just to preserve some historical symmetry, the Dallas Cowboys buy a small share of the farm’s organic veggies, which, if sustained over time, will no doubt catapult “America’s Team” into a Super Bowl.

The school’s initial attempt to solve the community’s food access problem was to offer free land to any supermarket that wanted to build a store there. But there were no takers in a marketplace where nearly 40 percent of the residents lived in poverty. So like in days of old when the nearest general store was 100 miles away, and your only choice was to shoot or grow your dinner, Paul Quinn took to farming. The “adaptive re-use” of the football area has been impressive under Andrea’s and Elizabeth’s leadership. Not only are the hash stripes gone but so are the top four inches of sod and dirt that were replaced by dump truck loads of pure organic matter. Reflecting the program’s absolute commitment to organic farming, there was simply too much distrust of the chemical residues from years of maintaining a perfectly green gridiron. The goalposts remain as do the blocking sled, scoreboard and the entire set of bleachers running the length of both sides of the field. But the former press box is about to be turned into a chicken coop and Elizabeth retains some hope that the bleachers can be retrofitted as a greenhouse. Acres of adjoining and nearly vacant land are already being eyed for farm expansion, especially if a recently applied for federal grant comes through. On the day this reporter visited, a local apiarist was scouting out locations for nearly a dozen beehives. And according to Symphonie, the campus’s coolest guy, a very sharp dresser from Brooklyn, NY, wants to join the “bee program.”

None of this extraordinary progress has come cheaply. The school has made significant capital expenditures to accomplish this conversion, and the on-going operating costs –Andrea is on the payroll half-time as is a variety of students who receive some compensation, especially during the summer season – are only marginally offset by farm sales. An upcoming April fundraiser featuring urban farming rock star Will Allen will hopefully swell the coffers sufficiently to enable the farm to buy its own tractor (it now pays for contract equipment services).

But the rapid development of the farm and the rising fortunes of Paul Quinn College have come with a price – small or large depending on your perspective. The Food for Good Farm is the result of a fifty/fifty partnership between the college and PepsiCo’s Food for Good Initiative. The college makes it clear that this is an equal partnership and that PepsiCo has not placed any strings on their giving. Other than cleaning up its tarnished image, one cannot detect any sinister covert or overt motives in PepsiCo’s support. Yet the contradictions can’t be ignored. After all, Pepsi and other soda manufacturers have contributed more than their fair share of calories to America’s obesity crisis. With 11 teaspoons of sugar in each 12 ounce can of Pepsi-Cola and the corporation’s unrelenting and ferocious attempt over the decades to hook children on their iconic brand, one can’t help but confront the ethical questions: where does the greater good lie, and when does one begin to slide down the slippery slope? Though the Bible offers little in the way of guidance when dealing with the PR strategies of modern corporations (obesity, for instance, having not appeared on the world stage for another 2000 years), the college might choose to at least make the topic grist for future classroom discussions.

In the meantime, it’s hard to argue with the outcome of the Paul Quinn/PepsiCo partnership. Texas has one less football field and one more organic farm, clearly a net gain for humanity. Students from the captain of the basketball team to entering freshman are eating better, getting over their aversion to bugs, and getting their hands in the dirt (Symphonie noted that her nails looked healthier now that she regularly jams them into the soil). And the Highland Hills neighborhood is enjoying the health and aesthetic benefits of living adjacent to Dallas’s closest farm.

Under Dr. Sorrell’s able leadership Paul Quinn is rising from the ashes, or should we say compost pile. Elizabeth and Andrea are guiding the growth of what would be considered an ambitious venture at a major university let alone a college as small as Paul Quinn. When the NCAA has the sense to recognize collegiate farming as a healthy athletic endeavor, the Food for Good Farm just might be on their way to a national championship.