DeVanie Jackson: We Can Make a Huge Impact

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on May 19, 2009

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY WORKSHOP
Other BFC Speeches:  Patel | Redmond | Prof. Louie

Reverend DeVanie Jackson. Photo courtesy of DeVanie Jackson

The Reverend DeVanie Jackson is a co-founder of the Brooklyn Rescue Mission and serves as a member of various task forces, committees and community collaborations including Brooklyn’s Bounty, a collaboration of urban farms, farmers’ markets and community gardeners. She spoke at the Food Sovereignty North and South workshop.

Christina always makes it sound so nice, and we all know farm work can be very dirty work, even dirtier than in the political system. When I was listening to our local politicians, I was sitting there thinking, “Do they get it? Do they not get it?” [Man in audience: "They don't get it!"] Yeah, I’m on camera. I was listening, and I was like, “Mmmmm, so close.”

Let me tell you a little bit about the Brooklyn Rescue Mission. We have an emergency food program, so we deal with a lot of low-income people. We have a farm we call Bed-Stuy Farm, and we have a farmer’s market because everybody doesn’t need emergency food, but everybody needs good food. We have a lot of neighbors. The neighborhoods look good, the buildings look pretty, but people don’t have food. People have to get in their cars and drive to other neighborhoods to get good food. That’s not food access.

We serve a lot of senior citizens in our emergency food program. One of our senior citizens said to us, “I’m getting older now. I can’t drag my shopping cart on the subway to go to Union Square, and I shouldn’t have to.” It was such a poignant moment to me. We’ve got to figure out how to get a better and a nicer market because no senior should have to drag a shopping cart on a bus, because they’re not driving. They want to live. They want pesticide-free food. They want food without knowing the mystery of where it came from. We’re entitled to have this food here in Brooklyn. It shouldn’t be, “Well, I live in Park Slope. I have more choices.” But when you look at some of the choices, some choices will fool you. Like the chef [Dan Barber] said this morning—it may sound like it’s good and healthy and organic, but when you dig a little deeper, there’s a surprise inside that food.

When I said I don’t know if the politicians get it, it’s because I think that we need to know our farmers and we need to be able to grow our own food.  That knowledge lives with our seniors. That’s why we like seniors. They still remember how to grow things. Why should that knowledge be lost?

Why should our youth—we run a youth program where they farm—why should they not have any clue what a vegetable is in a garden? They can’t connect it at all. They’re looking at the plants, and they’re like, “Okay, when is it going to turn in to food?” They’re looking at fruit. We have a fig tree, which is our farm’s pride and joy, and we say, “You know—Fig Newtons.” Then they get it. They don’t get it right away. Once they get their hands in the soil, and they actually work, they get it. They’re fast learners. Once they get over the fact that it’s grown in dirt, they’ll eat it.

You laugh. I know you someone who doesn’t want to eat anything that’s grown in dirt. (I’m picking on you because I don’t want to embarrass anybody.) They’ll get it from the supermarket where it’s nice and clean. I guess they think that food is grown in other things besides dirt.

I’m looking at this, and I’m like. “You know, we have to be a part of this movement.” I believe I’m in this movement by accident. I started off because in our emergency food program we were getting really bad food. We were getting a lot of canned foods. We were getting a lot of foods from all different parts of the country. The foods were donated, so we didn’t know if they were fresh. We didn’t know how long it was in transit. We got pink tomatoes. We got food that made people not want to eat vegetables, and when people are not eating vegetables they get sicker. We got super-super-processed foods. We had people at our door who were like, “I’m eating these vegetables from the can. Why am I sick?” Or “We’re eating the vegetables from the supermarket. Why are we still sick?”

I think there’s a greater work that needs to be done—a greater work in education—so that people understand that not all food is created equal and that food should come from farmers that we know. John (Kinsman) said, “We know the milk.” When he said he has 36 cows, I was impressed—not thousands of cows. My husband couldn’t drink milk. Then one time he drank a little organic milk and he said, “Maybe it’s not milk that’s making me sick.”

I think people are having a lot of Aha! moments in the educational process of what makes them sick and what makes them healthy. We were at another conference, and one lady said that she recently lost her job, and since she couldn’t afford health insurance, she decided she’d shop at Whole Foods and better-quality super markets. I thought, “Wow, what an innovative way of thinking. Start before you get sick, before you eat it.”

I said, “I’d like to catch up with her and find out if that’s actually working.” Because we hear so much about what you eat is connected to the state of your health, but many of us don’t know how to fix that.  I go to my doctor all the time. “Lose weight,” “Eat this.”

I’m like, “Where? How? Tell me. What am I supposed to be doing?”

“Okay, go to the nutritionist.”

Yeah, go to the nutritionist. When I’m in the supermarket is when I need help. It’s not just on paper that I need help. It’s when my supermarket has scary-looking produce, and the frozen Green Giant produce looks better. I’m like, “I really want that frozen produce,” because it’s what I grew up on. I won’t eat the canned stuff so much. I’m still attached to the frozen stuff. I’m looking at the fresh stuff and it’s hard.

That’s part of the reason we got into to growing our own vegetables. I don’t know how many of you grow vegetables or have access to fresh vegetables. They’re awesome. I recommend fresh vegetables that you grow yourselves. You can’t even compare. If the kids are eating them straight out of the garden, you know they’re awesome, because kids don’t like anything.

I was talking recently to a chef—his name is Noah and he works for the government—who was telling us about all these fabulous recipes. I was saying to myself, “Wow, if I had someone like you cooking my vegetables I would eat vegetables and only vegetables.” At Bed Stuy farm, we’re like bohemian. We rip the vegetables out of the ground, spray them with the hose and eat them right there, and that’s all we know. So there’s a little disconnect. In the winter time we got to cook them. Kids are out there just eating. Sometimes we let the rain wash it. The good thing is that hopefully it’s making us healthier. I’d like to advocate that learning how to cook them would be better, but knowing people like us we’d cook them all in butter and salt. So I think we’re better off staying with the raw vegetables out of the ground.

So just to tell you a little about our program…we opened our doors in 2002 to help the poor and the needy in Brooklyn. Our mission at the Brooklyn Rescue Mission is to promote healthy living and neighborhood revitalization for central Brooklyn residents through an innovative food system with a focus on families and youth, because we found that our people were getting sick. The people who come to us in the food pantry are people we know by name. We know when they’re sick. They talk to us. After listening to story after story after story, we knew that handing them candies (we’d get palettes of candies and palettes of dented cans) or handing them unhealthy breads (you know the breads that are almost moldy? They’re not quite moldy but they’re going to turn moldy tomorrow?) That’s the kind of stuff we were giving our people.

I said, “How can we help these people? How can we help change the food system?” Just talking to politicians and administrators of programs is not really helping. These people are poor. It’s like Raj Patel said, “Who cares about their opinions?” One kid we know, his mother was a drug addict. He loved his mother. When ACS [New York City Administration for Children's Services ] was taking him and his sister away, he was like, “If she only didn’t feed me moldy bread.”

It was such a poignant moment of how people are really dealing with hunger and why we need to get people fresh foods. People are eating food that’s not fresh and not healthy, because it’s food and they’re hungry. And we know that food that’s not fresh and healthy can make them sick. And then they suffer and they die, right? So as we’ve worked to introduce the farm into Bed Stuy, we had a lot of excitement and opportunity around it. And we had a lot of lessons to learn.

We are working to change the food system in Bed Stuy and that’s why we don’t like to label ourselves as just an emergency food system. We have beautiful buildings around our farm, but we have people in there who might have jobs, but they’re still suffering from the same diseases. Our urban farm and our food program produce about 7,000 pounds plus a year, depending on the weather, the rain, some years more and some years less.

Last year, white flies attacked our collard greens, but, when you’re an organic farmer, you have to learn to deal with pests. Collard greens are one of our most popular products. I watched a special about all the pesticides that go on fruit–on strawberries and things. I was just appalled. You think you’re eating so healthy but you’re not really. When you’re trying to grow your own strawberries and you’re watching to make sure pests don’t attack them, then you understand why farm work is so hard. You understand what a struggle it is. You have to try to beat nature to your crop because if your crop is looking really beautiful, then other things find it attractive too.

We know there’s plenty of land in New York. We know there’s plenty of land in Brooklyn. If we join our voices together, we can empower each of us to be able to grow our own food, even in pots, even in our backyards. If you just raise the consciousness, the knowledge won’t die out.

I have hope when I see so many people in the room who are concerned about what they eat and growing it. I know from going to conferences that people on family farms say their kids are leaving. Now we have generations of young people who will probably want to go back soon. So I think this is amazing. The more people we can get excited about farming and growing, the more little ones in elementary school (who would never ever in their life consider being a farmer) that we can motivate to understand why we need to farm, why we need to eat well and why fresh food tastes better, I think we really can change the system we have that’s broken. And not spend our time talking about food stamps and other things that are helpful but that don’t help everybody, right?

We can actually make a huge impact across the United States, across New York City, across Brooklyn if we really just get everyone understanding that they can take control of their food system. They can take control of what they eat. Food sovereignty can happen right here in New York City, right here in Brooklyn, right here in Bed Stuy, right here in Park Slope. It can happen right in your backyard, right in a pot on your fire escape. We can take back control of our food system.

Workshop: Food Sovereignty North and South: People’s Control over their Own Food. Food sovereignty—a people’s right to decide their agricultural and food policy—has become a guiding concept of farmers’ efforts to transform the world food system. Learn about organizations that are leading these efforts internationally.

Other Speakers: Débora Nunes da Silva (Landless Peasants of Brazil), John Kinsman (Family Farm Defenders). Moderator: Christina Schiavoni (World Hunger Year)

—Paige Churchman