A Problematic Industry Joins the Climate Change Movement, Much-Needed Health Care Reaches the Latino Community and More

 
U.S. Agricultural Secretary Thinks Farmers Can Help Solve Global Warming, Scientific American
Those that work the land inflict some of the worst harm on it. But as a recent report reveals, members of the agriculture community — farmers, ranchers, foresters — are beginning to change their planet-damaging ways. As they reform what they grow and how they grow it means that farmers soon could cease being one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution.
Students Fill a Gap in Mental Health Care for Immigrants, NPR
For immigrants in need of mental health care, a lack of documentation or insurance often means illnesses remain untreated. Across the nation, understaffed health clinics and universities are joining forces to improve access to services for depression, anxiety and more. Through these partnerships, Master’s and Ph.D. students play a vital role in treating mental illness in the Latino community.
Vermont Becomes First State to Require Drug Makers to Justify Price Hikes, STAT News
Last year, the pharmaceutical industry got a bad rap when Martin Shkreli hiked up the price of an HIV drug by more than 5,000 percent. In response, the Green Mountain state passed a law holding drug companies accountable for price increases. Could this move stunt medical innovation or will it protect citizens from unreasonable costs?

Allergy-Friendly Food Is Expensive. This Pantry Feeds Families That Can’t Afford Special Diets

At just 12 months of age, Emily Brown’s daughter was diagnosed with allergies to peanuts, eggs, dairy, wheat and soy. Because allergy-friendly food can cost two to four times the price of regular food, Brown’s family quickly became overwhelmed by its ever-increasing grocery budget.

Neither the federal nutrition program Women, Infant & Children (WIC) nor a local food pantry provided any financial relief to Brown since few of the available food products were safe for her daughter to eat. After meeting Amy Goode at a food-allergy support group, the two mothers launched the Food Equality Initiative, aiming to make food that’s safe to those with allergies more affordable and accessible to those in need. In 2015, the inspirational duo opened Renewed Health, the country’s very first allergy-friendly food pantry. In just a year, it’s provided assistance to more than 70 clients and has distributed more than 12,350 pounds of allergy-friendly food.

Watch the video above to learn how the pantry provides a safety net to low- and middle-income people with food allergies or Celiac disease.

MORE: One in Five Baltimore Residents Lives in a Food Desert. These Neighbors Are Growing Their Own Produce

This Is How You Reduce the Amount of Organic Waste Tossed in Landfills

Many people know Jack Johnson as a musician. But far fewer know of his commitment to sustainability and green touring practices.
Recently, NationSwell and Sustainable America visited Johnson at the Lanikai Elementary Public Charter School on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. He was there with his Kokua Hawai’i Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to connect local students and communities to their food through gardening and proper waste management, giving composting lessons to a third grade class.
NationSwell also visited Hawaiian Earth Products, a composting facility that contracts with the City and County of Honolulu to handle green waste. Although proper organic waste disposal is important everywhere, the issue is particularly acute on Hawaii since the majority of its food is imported and food waste is either incinerated or landfilled.  Hope is on the horizon, though.  The Big Island recently announced it would build a composting facility for food waste and compostable packaging.  Hopefully, Oahu won’t be far behind.
Watch the video above to see how to instill good sustainability habits at a young age.
MORE: This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown

This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown

After working as an industrial fisherman for decades and witnessing the devastating effects of mass-fishing, Bren Smith decided to look for more sustainable ways to feed the planet.

A few years ago, he developed an unique, vertical 3-D ocean farming model: a sort of underwater garden composed of kelp, mussels, scallops and oysters. Those species are not only edible and in high demand, Smith explains, but they also act as a filter for nitrogen and carbon dioxide, rebuilding natural reef systems and restoring our seas. In 2013, Smith launched the nonprofit GreenWave to help other fishermen replicate his innovative farming model. “This is our chance to make food right and agriculture right,” he says.

Learn more about Smith’s journey and his vision of what tomorrow’s seafood plate looks like by watching the video above.

Special thanks for The University of Connecticut and Professor Charles Yarish.

MORE: Will Cars of the Future Run on Algae?

Dine Out, Feed the Hungry

In New York City, nearly 235 million meals are missed every year due to poverty, but one former bartender in the Bronx has a technological solution to end that.

Spare, a mobile app launched last September, allows diners to automatically round up their restaurant bill and donate extra change to one of the city’s major food banks. Developed by Andra Tomsa, a onetime cocktail waitress and financial advisor, the app has 7,000 users who are each donating an average of $15 a month through their small change. While the user base is still small, Tomsa is aggressively pursuing partnerships with restaurants to offer loyalty coupons (think: a free drink for every third donation) to get to 400,000 users — the magic number she believes can end the meal gap in the Big Apple.

“The overwhelming majority [of those who are food insecure] are working poor. They have two to three jobs, trying to support their families, the elderly and their children on a minimum wage,” Tomsa explains. “The last week of the month, they are choosing between the electricity bill and groceries. They are going to the food pantry to supplement their budget.”

As a student at Fordham University in the Bronx, Tomsa studied the “extreme poverty” of the developing world, but only later did she realize some of those living on less than $2 a day included her neighbors in New York’s poorest borough. In December 2012, she decided to focus her attention on her immediate surroundings, including the area around Yankee Stadium where she lives. Knowing “even millennials who have no money, have money to buy beer,” she started with an analog version of Spare, by collecting dollars at six bars through an extra line on the bill (in addition to tips). But with a newborn son, collecting cash from these nightlife establishments posed logistical problems.

In November 2013, on a date nonprofit workers now call the “Hunger Cliff” because federal budget cuts to food stamps resulted in more than 1 million New York City residents having less to spend at supermarkets, Tomsa’s project took on new urgency. She decided to scale her idea by going virtual. Developing an API (a for-profit venture that her nonprofit Spare leases for a small fee) that tallies donations based on a bank statement, Tomsa was able to automate the collection process.

For those who have money to spare on restaurants, the least they can do is remember those who can’t afford dinner that night.

Homepage photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

MORE: Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change If One Cooked and Served You Dinner?

Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change if One Cooked and Served You Dinner?

In the far southern outskirts of Dallas County, Chad Houser pulled off the I-45 highway, drove onto a dead-end road leading to several shooting ranges and made a quick right turn to his final destination: the Dallas County Youth Village, a non-secure juvenile detention facility for 10-to-17-year-old boys. Stepping out of his car, Houser, a chef at the acclaimed Dallas bistro Parigi, noticed a putrid stench rising from the nearby landfill and water treatment plant. He grabbed a bundle of fruits and herbs from his car and strode into the compound, where he planned to teach a class on making ice cream.
The whole ride over, Houser fretted about the disrespect and back talk he was about to endure, and he steeled himself as he signed in. But when he arrived in the kitchen, none of the eight boys were the tattooed toughs he’d expected. “I had stereotyped them before I even met them,” Houser recalls. “All eight looked at me when they spoke. They said, ‘Please,’ ‘Sir,’ and ‘Thank you.’” They all listened closely, he adds, eager for “a first-time feeling” of crafting something they could take pride in and savor.
After class, Houser hosted the kids at Dallas’s central farmers market, where all their ice cream flavors were entered into a competition. One of the boys took home first place and the $100 prize, beating out culinary students and trained professionals. The young man ran up to Houser and told him, “I just love to make food and give it to people and put a smile on their face.” “Wow,” Houser thought, amazed at this teen’s desire to use food to give joy to others. The young man continued, “When I get out of detention, I’m going to get a job in a restaurant.” But he had one question for which he wanted Houser’s input: “Sir, where do you think I should work?” Fast food like Wendy’s or casual dining like Chili’s? he asked. Houser paused before saying, “Sir, I think you should work for whomever hires you first.”
That exchange occurred in 2007, and Houser pondered it for more than a year, feeling helpless at first, then angry at the lack of opportunities for the young men trying to leave their mistakes behind. One night in 2009, as he was closing up Parigi after dinner service, he told his business partner he felt dishonest. A year had passed, and the boys at the Youth Village weren’t any better off. He felt like he’d broken a promise. “I just want to open a restaurant and let these kids run it,” he confessed. He wanted a place where kids were could learn “more than how to cook.” He wanted them to gain life skills like personal responsibility, social skills and financial management. “I wanted them to be exposed to things they had never been exposed to,” Houser says. When his partner told him it sounded like a pretty good idea, he devoted all his energy to making the establishment a reality.

Chad Houser wanted a place where kids were “learning more than how to cook.”

In 2011, Houser hosted his first pop-up dinner cooked by former juvenile offenders, a long awaited-moment where he “put knives and fire in front of these kids.” Within 15 minutes of prep, the fish he’d ordered was ruined and the smoke alarms were sounding. The staff recovered, and at the end of service, each one of the patrons shook Houser’s hand or gave him a hug and mentioned how closely the young workers resembled their own children. By late 2012, these 50-seat dinners, where proceeds went towards the boys’ wages and a mentoring program, were selling out within minutes, and Houser sold off his ownership in Parigi to pursue opening a restaurant that would employ young ex-offenders full-time. Café Momentum, which can host 150 diners nightly, opened in January 2015 with a baguette-cutting ceremony. This month, nine formerly incarcerated young men became the first to graduate from its first yearlong training program.
For almost all of them, the world of fine dining is an eye-opening experience. For one, there’s some sticker-shock that comes with glancing at the menu: a family ordering three mains (wagyu beef, $26; pork chops, $26; seared scallops, $23) spends as much in an hour as the employees earn in a full day’s work. But the more lasting impression is the taste of cuisine the boys never knew existed.
An appetizer prepared at Bolsa, a Chad Houser pop up restaurant from 2012.

“Most kids come from parts of town that are federally recognized food deserts, which means they don’t have access to grocery stores. These kids literally think that raspberry is a flavor of candy. They’ve never tasted it fresh,” Houser says. “And if raspberry was foreign, imagine having them smell fresh tarragon. It’s absolutely mind-blowing.”
That exposure to luxury may be foreign to these young ex-convicts, but Houser assures them that they deserve to be there. In addition to paying a $10 hourly wage (more than the state’s $7.25 minimum) over the 12-month post-release internship, Café Momentum offers intensive social services, including identifying permanent housing, medical attention, parenting classes and other case management. With those obstacles taken care of, Houser believes he’ll see the young men rise to the demanding expectations he set, which includes making everything from scratch — from the vinegars to the goat cheese. Even the bacon and pork chops are butchered from a whole pig, cut right from the whole animal in the kitchen. As the young men pick up various techniques, they also learn how to glean as much as they can from produce. Take a beet: it can be diced and cooked with coffee grounds, its root grounded up into a sugary powder or its leaves can be fermented into kimchi.
From the very first pop-up dinner, Houser realized that large receipts and fabulous food were well and good, but the most important aspect of dinner service would be breaking down stereotypes, in exactly the same way his conception of juvenile offenders was shattered the first time he met any. And that process, he adds, needs to happen on both sides of the table. Diners need to see that, with some support, these young men aren’t career criminals, and the workers need to see that the rest of the city wants them to succeed. In a city that has a long history of racial segregation, interaction between these two groups of people is rare outside the dining room. Yet, in the ritual of a multi-course meal, a bond is forged between the wait staff and customers and barriers come down.
For the young men in the program, however, needs are more immediate. Two interns working in the kitchen recently took a break from prep work to talk with NationSwell. They said the program’s most significant benefit was a stable income — something that’s hard to come by for most ex-offenders. “As long as I got money in my pocket, I don’t got no worries. That’s been the hardest thing, to even have a dollar in my pocket,” says Raymon, a 19-year-old who lives with his mom and four siblings. He politely declines to talk about why he ended up in jail in the first place: “Different person” was all he would say of his past. Today, he’s staffing the pastry station at Café Momentum. He doesn’t eat a lot of the restaurant’s food himself (“I’m really a burger type of person”), but he enjoys being around other employees who’ve gone through “the struggle.” To him, his boss, Houser, is “a cool dude,” he states. “He’s trying to make sure I stay out of trouble.”
So far, of the 150 youth who staffed the restaurant over the past 14 months, only five went back to jail (two because of a prior charge), Houser reports. That low recidivism rate is unheard of in Texas where 71.1 percent of juveniles are rearrested and 25.5 percent are reincarcerated within three years, according to state data. (Among the 172 kids who staffed Houser’s pop-up dinners and didn’t receive the same intensive social services, a slightly higher 11 percent were reincarcerated, still about half the state average.)
That’s not to say that getting a job at Café Momentum fixes all the problems. After release, the interns are usually living in the same neighborhoods, where they committed their first crime. Jose, 18, another intern living with his mom in West Dallas, started work in February, but says he faces a constant temptation to slip back into his old ways whenever he isn’t working. (When his friends seem interested in causing trouble, he tells them he has to go home.)
Houser says that self-doubt is common after the first few months of working in the program. Akin to the sophomore slump, the high of a brand new job has worn off, and the young men often begin to question whether the program is all it claims to be. “They’ve used to being deceived. They’re used to people overpromising and underdelivering,” he says. Once that phase ends, the boys become self-sufficient, Houser adds.
Chad Houser speaks to a restaurant full of family, friends and long-time supporters during Cafe Momentum’s inaugural graduation ceremony held April 3, 2016.

It’s important to note that Houser has taken a key first step in employing these young men during that difficult year of post-release, but it remains to be seen whether their experience cooking at Café Momentum translates into long-term employment. When Jose finishes the internship, he is planning to look for a job in a hotel. Raymon is saving up for a place of his own. For his next job, he knows he’s a “good waiter” or “servant.” (He struggles to pick the right word, one without racial overtones.) But he also says, “That’s not a dream job.” At night, he thinks about being a cardiologist. Only time will tell whether the recidivism rates stay low for the entire three-year period over which they’re normally measured.
In talking with the boys, however, Houser believes that even the most hardened of the bunch seem to benefit from working at Café Momentum. The boys who were thrown back into jail for a second offense have all written Houser letters, explaining where they “tripped up” and how motivated they are not to return to jail a third time, he says. And earlier this month, a boy Houser thought would never make it through the program graduated with the first class. Twelve months ago, Houser helped him off the streets and into stable housing. He made sure the young man had groceries and money to get to work. But for much of the first month, the employee wouldn’t show and didn’t call to explain why; when he did arrive, he was either stoned or defiant, Houser recalls. As the months went on, he grew more dependable. But there were still slip-ups, like the time he asked Houser for help after he got his girlfriend pregnant. A few days before graduation, the boy pulled Houser aside and asked if they could have another talk. From experience, Houser expected the teen was back in hot water.
“What’s going on?” Houser asked.
“Well, the boy said. “I want to give you a hug.”
“Okay,” Houser answered, unsure where this was leading.
“You’ve changed my life,” the boy said. “I’m serious.” He went on, “Last year, I knew I was going to prison, so I was preparing myself to go.” He confessed to Houser that, shortly after his release from juvie, he sold as many drugs as he could to ensure his mother’s finances would be sound, and he made gang connections to ensure he’d be protected once he was back in the slammer — a return he once believed was imminent. “But, you know, I’m never going to go to prison,” the boy said. “I’m not. I’m going to succeed, and I just wanted to say thank you.”
For these young men, life once looked like a series of lockups. But as Houser’s argued and as the graduates are now making clear, working in the kitchens of Café Momentum has given these young men a taste of a better future.

Thanks to One Mom, Schools Join the Farm-to-Table Movement

In New York’s Hudson Valley, farm-to-table food is no longer limited to upscale restaurants like Blue Hill Stone Barns. Because of mom Sandy McKelvey, fresh food grown on local farms is now bettering the fare in school cafeterias.
The Farm-to-School movement took off in this rural, scenic region north of New York City in 2009, shortly after McKelvey and her family moved to Cold Spring. At Haldane Elementary, her daughter’s new school, she volunteered to introduce a new curriculum centered on a new vegetable each month. For each lesson, kids plant or harvest the produce themselves from a garden, and with instruction from a local chef (often a student from the Culinary Institute of America in nearby Hyde Park), they prepare a hands-on recipe like asparagus and cheese tarts or Delicata squash salad, to be served in the cafeteria that week.
“Over the years, I’ve sensed a disconnect between kids and their understanding of where food comes from. When it’s prepackaged in boxes, they do not realize that everything comes from farms,” says McKelvey, a longtime CSA customer, in which she received weekly shipments of crops from a local farm. “Farm-to-School helps them better understand where food comes from, and it also really encourages healthier eating.” She adds, “It’s making cooking and growing food part of their life.”

Chef Nick Gonzalez, an intern chef from the Culinary Institute of America, makes a recipe with third and fourth graders.

If you asked any child in the country to recall the last food advertisement they saw, there’s a 97.8 percent chance that it was for a product high in fat, sugar or sodium. The fast food industry as a whole spends $12.6 million every single day marketing what public health advocates call “calorie-dense, low-nutrient” foods. The Farm-to-School lessons try to undo these commercials by getting kids interested in how fresh produce grows and tastes. McKelvey acknowledges that sugar occasionally slips into the menu, as in her pumpkin bread or strawberry-rhubarb parfait, but she says it’s all a part of getting kids to try something they wouldn’t normally eat, “whether it’s sweet or savory or kind of hidden.”
Happy to spend a day outside, the kids are enthused about the project; some of their teachers, on the other hand, have been harder to convince, as they worried it would take away from precious class time. But after seeing the program work, McKelvey says, even these naysayers relented. One crafty teacher even turned the recipes into a math lesson by changing each ingredient’s amount to a complex fraction.
A chance to learn while cooking? Sure beats mystery meat.

The Zero-Energy Way to Produce Food, How to Build Hope in a Poisoned City and More

 
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth
On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation.
Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report
In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair.
Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change
A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics.
MORE: Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead

The Resurgence of the 1950s Dinner

Nobody wants to think about how an animal goes from roaming in a pasture to meat on a plate, let alone talk about the actual process. But for small-scale farmers (not to mention those that want to know where their food comes from), access to slaughterhouses and how meat is processed is crucial. Local meat isn’t local, after all, if livestock have to be driven miles away, or even to another state, for processing.
In Lynchburg, Va., Seven Hills Food has turned a century-old slaughterhouse into a $3 million, state-of-the-art, humane processing facility for Virginia-grown beef, hogs, lamb and goats. The 40,000-square-feet of brick, concrete and steel is a USDA-inspected facility capable of processing 75 to 100 cows or 300 to 400 hogs each day — filling a gap in the Chesapeake foodshed infrastructure and making local beef and pork more accessible to consumers and growers in the state. Intertwining the age-old art of butchery with modern software, Seven Hills can trace a carcass all the way down to a finished primal cut back to original lot it came from.
Owner and native Virginian Ryan Ford tells NationSwell that the idea behind Seven Hills Food started over a dinner table conversation about the difficultly of sourcing local meat. Turning a cow from a farm into a steak served at a restaurant can be a challenge. While the state’s abundant forage resources and topography is ideal for beef production, livestock farmers still have a hard time getting their product onto local places. That’s because, for food safety reasons, federal and state regulations require that red meat be cut in a USDA-inspected facility — something that Virginia has a real shortage of.
“We’re still trying to solve the same problem that existed for years,” Ford says about the lack of regional processing. “There’s a real bottleneck in that regard.”
Food that’s directly farm-to-table not only supports local farmers and processors, but it also cuts down on transportation and fuel usage, reducing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the environment. A shorter distribution chain also means fresher food since it spends less time in a warehouse or in transit.
But in general, the days of mom-and-pop butcher shops have been replaced by the Big Four — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — that slaughter roughly 80 percent of the country’s cattle and can process 300 to 400 beef cows per hour. This consolidation of slaughterhouses meant that local butchering, like many other skilled-labor jobs in the U.S., became a dying trade. As Dr. Jonathan Campbell, associate professor and meat extension specialist at Penn State in University Park, explains, family-owned shops are going out of business because “they don’t have the labor force to keep up with changing demand and specialized markets.” The industry funnels a staggering $894 billion to country’s economy (about 6 percent of the GDP), and there’s even more growth potential in this market as emerging economies, such as China and India, demand more meat.
“The U.S. and other industrialized nations have been charged with the task of feeding the growing global population. And so it’s very difficult to do that with small, niche markets,” says Campbell, who helps advise Pennsylvanian meat companies on processing, food safety and cost-efficiency. Despite this, it is possible for an independent slaughterhouse to stay competitive in the meat market: by carving out specialized demand since they’re not driven by volume.
Seven Hills Food has been officially open for a month and currently has 15 employees. When asked about the challenges of running an independent slaughterhouse, Ford laughs, asking, “Do you have all day?”
“Every day is a challenge,” he says. “We’re starting from scratch. There are very few models to follow.”
Yet Ford remains ambitious about his goal of getting Virginians much closer to their food. “There’s an eighth generation family cattle business in the state of Virginia,” he says, referencing one of his clients. “As a consumer, wouldn’t you like to know that story?”
If you’re someone that cares about where your food comes from, it’s a tale worth hearing.

See the Seeds of Change Grown by One Bronx Woman

“The first plant that changed my life was a tomato,” says Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx. “It was the one fruit that I used to hate.” But after watching one that she’d grown shift in hue from green to yellow to red and taking a bite of it, she was instantly hooked. “When I tasted that tomato, when it was red and it was ripe, and I picked it off the vine, [it]…changed my world because I never tasted anything so good, so sweet. I wanted to grow everything.”

For a quarter century, all manner of trees and flowers, fruits and vegetables, have thrived across abandoned lots in the Bronx because of Washington. Deemed “the queen of urban farming,” she’s an African-American woman who’s dedicated her life to greening New York City’s poorest borough. Since 1985, Washington has assisted dozens of neighborhoods build their own community gardens, taught workshops on farming and promoted racial diversity in agriculture.

Your food “is not from a grocery store, it’s not from a supermarket. It’s grown in the ground,” she says. “You have to understand where your food comes from. It gives you power.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Washington grew up in a public housing project on the Lower East Side. She moved up to the Bronx in 1985 and bought herself a newly built home, which she viewed as, “an opportunity, as a single parent with two children, to live the American dream.” While some gentrification occurred, other parts of the low-income neighborhood looked “like a warzone,” dotted with abandoned buildings. Some of Washington’s windows looked onto an empty lot filled with garbage and rusting cars.

One day, she noticed a man walking by with a shovel and a pick — an unusual sight in Gotham’s concrete jungle. “What are you doing here?” Washington asked. He told her he was thinking about creating a community garden. “I said, ‘Can I help?’”

“I had no idea about gardening. I didn’t have a green thumb,” she recalls. Despite that, a city program that leased undeveloped lots for $1 gave Washington and her neighbors lumber, dirt and seeds, “and we gave them power — muscle power — and hopes and dreams to turn something that was devastating and ugly into something that was beautiful.” Within days, the first seeds of the Garden of Happiness and Washington’s lifelong activism were beginning to sprout.

Ever since, Washington has helped others in the Bronx locate empty neighborhood spaces that are prime real estate for something to blossom and led volunteers through the process of opening a community garden — earning her respect throughout the Big Apple and beyond. She holds positions on almost every board imaginable, including the New York Community Gardening Coalition, Just Food and the New York Botanical Garden. “Can you imagine, a little girl from the projects on the board of the New York Botanical Garden?” she asks in disbelief, her smiling face framed by her dreadlocks.

And then there was the time she met First Lady Michelle Obama. Washington describes feeling, “the elation of the spirits of my ancestors. I just felt them clapping and cheering, because here I was, a black woman, standing in the presence of the First Lady.”
Blooming with daffodils, tulips and hyacinth, the original purpose of Washington’s first community garden — the Garden of Happiness — and others like it was “beautification,” Washington says, “about taking away the garbage” from a disadvantaged minority community. Only later did she start to think about greenery beyond being decoration or as a food source. “When I first started initially in the food movement, I was focused on growing food. It wasn’t until I was in that community garden that I started hearing social issues like low employment, poor health, people who couldn’t afford rents,” Washington says. She learned she had to “feed people’s body and mind.”
To promote equity and fairness, she’s recently been focusing on boosting the number of African Americans in agriculture through BUGs — or Black Urban Growers. The most recent agricultural census figures show 55,346 farmers in the Empire State are white and only 113 are black.
It’s always been a dream of Washington’s to purchase land upstate for a farm, but every time she counted all the zeros in the real estate listings, it seemed impossible. Drawing on her connections, Washington met a businessman interested in launching a farming co-operative in Chester, N.Y. They started growing veggies on three acres of black dirt in January. Located just an hour from the city, Washington hopes the rural-urban relationship will help African-Americans have a better understanding of how food systems work and have a chance to participate.
“Farming’s in our DNA, but [we] never have that conversation, always being pushed to the side as the consumer or the person with their hand out, never the type with their hand in the conversation,” Washington says. “There’s no agriculture without culture, so having people understand that slavery was part of our life, it doesn’t define who we are. … [We’re] trying to have people understand that. Don’t be afraid to put your hands in the soil, don’t be afraid to garden or farm because that’s who you are.”