Smack in the middle of a half-dozen shipping containers and striding up a mound of gravel, Johanna Gilligan, 31, can’t contain her excitement. “This looks so awesome!” She nods her head at an alcove between two containers, painted the pale color of new celery, with dry sinks attached. “That’s going to be for processing.”

Gilligan, co-director of New Orleans’ Grow Dat Youth Farm, traipses up the mound, which terminates at a deck of sorts and more containers, crowded with architectural students from Tulane University and local urban farm experts. Beyond the deck sits a bayou, lined with trees weeping Spanish moss into the water; the I-610 freeway buzzes along in the background. “I can’t believe how much is done! My office is going to be in a treehouse!”

She has reason to be excited. At four acres, the buildings’ site is just a sliver of City Park, 1,300 acres of green space on New Orleans’ north side. But come February, the buildings will be done, the beds will be ready for planting, and the second class of Grow Dat farmers will commence their work. The goal: one acre planted, 10,000 pounds of food grown, 20 jobs for student workers.

Pitched as the natural progression of programs like Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard (New Orleans is home to the first Edible Schoolyard affiliate outside of the Bay Area, and its founding director, Donna Cavato, sits on Grow Dat’s board), Grow Dat will welcome its second round of student workers in February. The project was founded in 2010 with the Tulane City Center, a community design and architecture initiative, and the Urban Innovator Challenge Fellowship, also at Tulane. The backing let Gilligan, a founding staffer for the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and a driving force behind Rethink‘s New Orleans School Food Report Card, bring in a small staff to work out kinks for the program’s first year. In its inaugural year, Grow Dat employed 13 student workers who grew a total of 2,200 pounds of food, donating nearly two-thirds of it to food banks, and selling the rest at a farmers market.

The effort, says Denise Richter, who coordinates gardens at five elementary and middle schools for Edible Schoolyard New Orleans (ESY-NOLA), solves a riddle that’s confounded ESY-NOLA since it was founded: how to keep students engaged with food after eighth grade.

“There was always this moment where it was like, ‘Great, we’ve been able to establish a culture and an understanding of how important it is to know where your food comes from and cook it,’” says Richter, who says ESY-NOLA works with more than 500 students each year. “And there’s always this regret, because what do they do [after ESY]? Go to a place where their cafeteria food looks like it did five years ago, eating slop. Grow Dat is such an asset, because our students can apply their skills and go even further.”

With an older–if much smaller–pool of students, Grow Dat is aiming to expand teenagers’ food knowledge while teaching even broader lessons about work and collaboration. “A key concept of Grow Dat is that you cannot do social change only in one neighborhood,” says Gilligan. She sees the program’s site at City Park as neutral ground for students, who this year will come from a mix of public and private schools, to learn “to communicate across race and class lines.”

That’s a heady goal, but if Aston Shields, 17, is any indication, Grow Dat may have some luck in meeting it. One of last year’s students–he’s angling to return as a crew leader this year–Shields didn’t start out interested in food. “I was just reading posters on the wall, and stumbled onto [the job listing],” says Shields in an urban drawl, adding that he mostly applied because it was a paid job. For a modest stipend, he learned how to plan and maintain food gardens, wash and prepare vegetables for market and track their sales, and even attended a handful of lectures on food systems at Tulane. “I came here and I was like, ‘Wow, I never even really thought about how people produced our food,’” says Shields. “It was just a whole new world.”

But in addition to being paid for his work, Shields was able to take home fruits and vegetables from plots he was helping tend at the Hollygrove Market and Farm–a special boon to a family living in the Hollygrove neighborhood where, says Shields, the closest thing to a supermarket is a Walgreen’s. “Once Grow Dat gave me fruits and vegetables, [my family] embraced it,” says Shields–even if the end results weren’t exactly what most slow food acolytes might have had in mind. “We had some shiitake mushrooms,” says Shields. “And my momma made sloppy joes with it.”

Photo: Top, Johanna Gilligan packs fava beans with a student from the Grow Dat program in New Orleans, by David Schalliol. Bottom, A young Grow Dat participant, by Andy Cook.

Originally published on Grist

In the last decade, food in America has gone from a lifestyle pursuit to serious issues, encompassing concerns about food safety, health and even industrial concentration. But the question of labor—just who’s out there picking all those vegetables anyway—has remained on the periphery, a silent and uncomfortable contradiction alongside calls to pay farmers premium prices for their food.

Enter last Friday’s TEDxFruitvale: Harvesting Change, a daylong conference at Mills College that was webcast to viewing parties across the country—and the first TEDx event focused on food and labor. Backed by national thought powerhouse TED and sponsored by the Bon Appetit Management Company Foundation, TEDxFruitvale sought to plumb the depths of America’s farm labor situation in the context of the sustainable food movement.“We talk a lot about farms, but we don’t talk a lot about farmworkers,” Bonnie Azab Powell, who helped host the event for the foundation, told the audience.

To remedy that, organizers brought together polished talks from some of the food politics world’s most celebrated voices (and providing running translation into Spanish): writers Eric Schlosser and Barry Estabrook; workers rights activists Arturo Rodriguez of the United Farm Workers and Gerardo Reyes-Chavez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers; and food justice leaders like Nikki Henderson of the People’s Grocery and Joann Lo of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. Within the 18 speakers and three musical groups (each of which closed a session of the conference), a few common threads emerged.

Speakers began with an exploration the daily realities of farm workers, bringing the expertise not only of farmers and their workers to bear but their doctors and chroniclers, too. Two documentary filmmakers screened powerful footage from their films interviewing farm workers, with Sanjay Rawal screening a work in progress while Roberto Romano showed clips from the award-winning La Cosecha, which profiles three teenage migrant workers. “None of them want to remain in the fields,” Romano said, pointing out that under federal law children can go to work in agriculture as young as 12. “It’s our responsibility to make sure they have equal rights under the law.”

But if there was a consistent theme, art historian Carlos Jackson provided it in his explanation of the iconography of the 1970s farm worker movement, which emphasizing the importance of identifying workers as actual men and women. (One poster, declaring “I am somebody,” echoed Jesse Jackson’s famous speech of the same name at Wattstax in 1972.) In the 1970s, said Carlos Jackson, growers told documentarians that “we literally did not see the workers as people, rather we just saw them as another item in the production chain that it took to produce goods.” 

The discussion then moved to organizing efforts, focusing on past victories and battles. Nikki Henderson of the People’s Grocery revealed a long-forgotten collaboration between the Black Panthers and the UFW—most notably in the Black Panthers’ boycott of the party’s favored drink Bitter Dog, a wine made by a company against which the UFW was battling.  Meanwhile, Andrea Cristina Mercado from Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a domestic workers rights group, explained the historic common ground of farm and domestic workers: “In the 1930s, for the National Labor Relations Act, domestic workers and farmworkers were excluded from those protections, and they were excluded to appease southern segregationists.” Eric Schlosser, in a pre-recorded talk, put it more bluntly, saying that when it comes to the farm labor problem, “at the heart of this is racism,” going on to remind consumers that “it’s really easy to blame the growers or the corporations…[but] if you eat, its your responsibility.”’

The final conversation of the day centered on the consumers’ relationship to farm work, skipping from experts in verifying labor practices within the garment industry (“People ask me, ‘What are good companies?’” said Heather Franzese of fair trade clearinghouse Transfair USA. “I ask then, ‘What are your priorities?’”) to workers from the nation’s only unionized organic farm (“I’m here to tell you we’re not special, but we do stand out in an industry with a history of exploitation and abuse,” said Sandy Brown, farm manager of Swanton Berry Farm.)

But it was Barry Estabrook’s tale of Lake Apopka, a once-pristine lake near Orlando, Florida that local growers turned into the state’s most polluted body of water, that summed it up neatly. After nearly 70 years, the growers have been bought out for $103 million, $50 million spent on cleanup, $2 million for wildlife research projects to determine the problems caused by the pollution. Meanwhile, a proposed $500,000 clinic for local workers—three-quarters of whom, in a 2006 study, were found to have health problems, most likely due to the pollution—was vetoed by Governor Rick Scott. “Maybe we’re being too hard on Governor Scott,” concluded Estabrook. “How can we expect our politicians to put more value on farmworkres than the people who elected them to office do?” He paused. “And the people who elected them to office? That’s us.”