Building Community through Healthy Food
BY AMANDA CATHER photos by Rebecca Drobis
Tope Fajingbesi likes her food with character . She meets us in Brookeville at Dodo Farms , which she manages alongside her husband Niyi Balogun , on a balmy early summer day . Carrying a delicious-looking green smoothie , she is a small , energetic hurricane in a colorful headscarf and elegant , angular earrings , laughing at herself for eating breakfast so late . Her smoothie is made in part from what she calls white or purple kale , distinct from the more common curly kale . “ The whole health thing about kale ,” she says , “ is that people these days say you ’ re drinking or eating kale or you ’ re dead . But you find this variety of kale that has such character , and it ’ s so good for you . That is how I like Dodo Farms to be in the market .”
Niyi and his experienced helpers are harvesting for tomorrow ’ s farmers market , pushing wheelbarrows stacked with crates full of immaculate greens from the field to the walk-in cooler 100 yards away . They keep a steady but not frantic pace , carefully picking and washing the vibrant kale , cabbage , and tokyo bekana , a lettuce-like green that Niyi first encountered during his decade in Japan . They talk quietly at the wash station or on their way to and from the cooler . All the while , Tope and I watch from our straw-bale seats in the shady corncrib . I start to see , as Tope already knows , that this farm is calm , vital and palpably productive .
Dodo Farms is well known at the Dupont Circle and Silver Spring farmers markets , where Niyi and Tope sell a wide variety of Certified Naturally Grown vegetables and herbs from their one-acre plot . They have “ customers who have become like family ” at the markets , says Tope , because one of their primary goals is to “ use food to break down barriers : ethnic barriers , racial barriers , gender barriers .” They want to build community through healthy food .
Tope is passionate about the potential for Dodo Farms ’ s food to
help people create healthy lifestyles for themselves . In a culture where “ there are all kinds of health problems emanating from food ... for people of African descent and some other cultures as well ,” she is proud of the opportunity to make a living growing crops like broccoli greens , sweet potato greens , and Nigerian spinach : “ these things that are native to Africa , to some of our ancestors , who didn ’ t have the privilege of farming free that we have now and braided these seeds in their hair .” Tope explains that during the centuries when millions of Africans were forcibly enslaved in the colonies and the United States , many preserved the crops of their homeland by weaving the seeds into their hair and carrying them across the Atlantic Ocean , cultivating them in their gardens to nourish themselves with familiar flavor and nutrients .
All the crops at Dodo Farms
plenty I autumn harvest 2022 7