Urban farms have emerged in some of our most distressed cities. In Milwaukee, former NBA basketball player Will Allen established Growing Power, an organization that raises millions of dollars’ worth of food in former vacant lots, providing produce for fine restaurants and jobs for hundreds of urban teens, moving many out of gangs. Michael Howard has done the same with Eden Place in Chicago, and added a nature center where inner-city kids can connect to living, growing things.
Organic farmers, like my friend John Tecklin in Nevada City, California, provide internships for city kids wanting to farm. He gets a hundred volunteers each year, many times more than he can accommodate. Craig McNamara, the son of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and an organic walnut farmer in Winters, California, runs the Center for Land-Based Learning, which introduces dozens of inner-city kids to summer work on farms. Many want to become farmers.
Some Americans have had great success promoting natural foods. Michael Funk was a garbage man in Sacramento, California, in the early 1970s, “the only job you could get as a long-haired hippie,” he now says. He started picking organic fruits and selling them to health food stores and started a small organic food distribution company called the Mountain People’s Warehouse. Today, his once-tiny company is the publicly-traded UNFI, the largest distributor of organic food in America, providing much of the produce for Whole Foods. But he never expected such an outcome. “I just thought selling fruit was better than being a garbageman,” he told me recently.
These are great beginnings that should be brought to scale throughout our nation. That’s where the gratitude comes in. It costs more to grow food in sustainable ways, with more hand labor and without chemicals and pesticides. And with little gratitude for food, we Americans want it cheap. Our average bite of food travels 1500 miles. Somehow, given the strange and narrow logic of American capitalism and the fact that we don’t pay in the market for the long-term environmental costs of our purchases, it’s cheaper to buy machine-grown, chemicalized, long-distance food than locally-grown organic produce. But, in reality, we all pay for the destruction wrought by industrial agriculture, whether it be in the pollution of water sources or the loss of topsoil.
As a start, gratitude for food would fund a national college program to train young people to become effective sustainable farmers—our STEM programs would turn to STEAM, realizing that if anything, agriculture is even more important than science, technology, engineering and math.
Let’s give thanks for our bounty by assuring that our land and our farmers can keep going.