Urban vegetable gardens are sprouting up like mushrooms across the country. And, more amazingly, blooming in areas that experts warn are “food deserts,” a term used to describe communities with little or no access to affordable healthy food.
These gardens may sound like a novel project for schoolchildren or a volunteer initiative to plant “a little green” in desolate areas. But, these gardens are a source of healthy growth in more ways than one — specifically, nourishing children from low-income areas who are otherwise lacking necessary nutrients and growing up obese and diabetic.
In Camden, NJ — a city where nearly half of its citizens live in poverty and a city that, in 2008, had the highest crime rate in the United States — churches are leading the way to redeem wastelands and teach parishioners about not only their community, but the food they eat.
“Food is the most basic justice issue,” says Andrea Ferich, director of sustainability at Sacred Heart Church’s Center for Environmental Transformation in Camden, in an interview with the website, U.S. Catholic.
“If you don’t have it, what justice is that?” Ferich adds.
That same article describes land in Camden that was once a former trash heap and now boasts vegetables gardens, a green house and a farmer’s market.
A little over 300 miles away, Pittsburgh calls itself “America’s Most Livable City,” and with 21 community garden projects on display to the public this Saturday, no one can dispute that claim.
The city boasts its first online video to explain the goals and successes of its city growers.
The “Edible Schoolyard” component of Grow Pittsburgh has high-minded goals: to improve the students’ physical health, behavioral health and academic learning.
The Pittsburgh project’s three-prong approach directly tackles the major concerns for children who subsist on unwholesome and fatty food diets, which, according to the USDA, is responsible for a Dickensian phenomenon that has returned to urban areas called “food insecurity,” where access to nutritious, safe foods necessary to live a healthy lifestyle are limited or uncertain.
In inner-city communities where corner store junk food is often a meal for children, numerous studies show that today’s children will face life-threatening health challenges as early as their 20s and 30s if they continue to consume the volumes of processed and fast food now in their diets.
Regional battles to combat little or no access to healthy foods continue in the urban South. However, not all southern cities have access to abandoned lots and overgrown wasteland redeemable for agricultural opportunities.
New Orleans, before the devastations of Katrina, had just a few of such locations. However, recovering from one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history gave birth to a healthy food initiative called Market Umbrella, where mobile markets bring produce direct to communities in need, at a fair price.
The mobile food market concept has made its way, ironically, to the Garden State, where, last summer, the New Jersey State Assembly passed a bill to both combat the problem of food deserts and promote New Jersey’s farms and products.
The mobile markets will travel to underserved communities like Camden, selling fresh produce using a voucher system to provide low-income residents a chance to buy affordably.
“Camden is a place much like Nazareth, where people wondered if any good could come out of it,” says Ferich.
Indeed, there has.
