Detroit’s Good Food Transformation

“One of our goals is to present healthy eat­ing to peo­ple,” says Malik Yakini, Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), which runs D-Town. “We think that healthy eat­ing opti­mizes a good life gen­er­ally. A diet close to nature allows the human body to func­tion the way it is sup­posed to function.”

D-Town is set in one of the city’s green­est areas, a for­mer tree nurs­ery in the 1,184-acre River Rouge Park. It’s a cou­ple of miles down­river from Ford Motor Co.’s famous Rouge plant (that once employed 100,000 work­ers) and about a mile upriver from the Brightmoor, a for­merly dev­as­tated neigh­bor­hood that boasts no fewer than 22 com­mu­nity gar­dens. The Detroit City Council granted use of the land to DBCFSN in 2008. Deer ate up most of the first crop: Volunteers who planted 750 tomato plants har­vested only about five pounds of toma­toes. Now a fence keeps deer out, and other pests such as rac­coons and pos­sums are trapped and released far from this feed­ing ground. There are even a few apple trees on the grounds that are tended by folks from Can-Did Revolution, a recently estab­lished fam­ily can­ning company.

Detroit renais­sance

Nowhere in the United States has urban agri­cul­ture taken root as pro­lif­i­cally as in Detroit. Earthworks Urban Farm, Feedom Freedom Growers, GenesisHOPE, Georgia Street Collective, and other com­mu­nity gar­dens have stepped up to help cre­ate a health­ier and more self-empowered food sys­tem. The Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women runs a small farm on the school’s grounds to teach stu­dents about nutri­tion and self-sufficiency. This gar­den­ing renais­sance has been grow­ing for over two decades since the Gardening Angels, a group of southern-born African-Americans, began grow­ing food and pass­ing their agri­cul­tural knowl­edge on to another generation.

There are more than 1,200 com­mu­nity gar­dens in Detroit—more per square mile and more per capita than in any other American city. The num­ber of com­mu­nity gar­dens is just a frac­tion of the num­ber of kitchen gar­dens that fam­i­lies grow in yards and side lots. Locals are learn­ing more about nutri­tion and feel­ing the health effects of eat­ing the food they grow.

“You’re only as healthy as the food you eat,” says Latricia Wright, a natur­opath who cham­pi­ons nat­ural, uncooked, unprocessed foods. “It’s all about the min­er­als in the food.”

Better tomatoes—with a bonus

Kesia Curtis began gar­den­ing with her par­ents, Wayne and Myrtle Curtis, at Feedom Freedom Growers com­mu­nity gar­den. The 29-year-old had suf­fered from debil­i­tat­ing aller­gies since she was 17, often miss­ing work, unable to sleep, and suf­fer­ing from sinus infec­tions. “I was pretty much liv­ing on Benadryl or other allergy med­ica­tions year round,” says Curtis.

About a year after she started gar­den­ing, Curtis began eat­ing a vegan diet—no ani­mal prod­ucts at all. She reports that her allergy prob­lems have gone away except for some mild symp­toms in the spring.

“My par­ents started the com­mu­nity gar­den, and it felt like a nat­ural thing to do with my fam­ily,” says Curtis. “The more I became involved with it the more I started ask­ing a lot of ques­tions about food from the gro­cery store as opposed to what you can grow. Tomatoes that you grow taste and smell dif­fer­ent from what you get at the store. I had tasted toma­toes before but a local tomato had so much more fla­vor. … I can’t imag­ine some­one being a farmer and it not chang­ing your health and mak­ing some kind of pos­i­tive impact on your life.”

Food in the desert

DBCFSN’s goals include empow­er­ing African-Americans within the food sys­tem and pro­vid­ing fresh, healthy foods in an area where access is not a given. Detroit was among the com­mu­ni­ties declared food deserts by researcher Mari Gallagher in 2007. Food deserts are com­mu­ni­ties where the kinds of foods nec­es­sary to main­tain a healthy diet are unavail­able, unaf­ford­able, or dif­fi­cult to get to.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at YesMagazine.org.