Jeffery Betcher was clear — he and his fellow organizers consider themselves community, not food, activists. Betcher, co-founder of the successful Quesada Gardens Initiative in the Bayview Hunters Point Neighborhood of San Francisco, was joined by fellow co-founder and board co-vice chair James Ross as featured presenters at Kitchen Table Talks’ third installment: Community Organizing: Addressing Food Access and Security in Bayview Hunters Point.

For decades, Bayview Hunters Point (BVHP) has been much maligned for regular reports of violence, environmental hazards and poverty. Betcher, a 10-year BVHP resident, believes the neighborhood doesn’t deserve its negative reputation. It has many strengths, including the highest rate of residential property ownership in the entire city, and many of its residents are thriving despite enormous environmental and economic injustices.

Ironically, this neighborhood that now processes 80 percent of the city’s waste, used to be the primary food shed for the city; a lively patch work of pastureland, vegetable farms, breweries, slaughter houses and food processing and shipping facilities. Studies show that there’s a $30 million potential for profit from food production in BVHP Hunters Point, said Betcher.

As its landscape shifted from breadbasket to toxic industry and waste processing, its residents increasingly suffered the highest rates of cancer, asthma, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. While asthma and cancer rates have been tied to environmental conditions, all other health-related issues prevalent in BVHP are food related. “All the –isms are there here,” said Betcher. “Poverty is the fundamental problem.”

While the problems are obvious, solutions are harder to come by, said Betcher and Ross. For solutions to stick, they need to be not only accepted by residents, but owned by them. This is the secret to Quesada Gardens’ success. “If people are involved in change, they will reinvest in community,” said Betcher.

Ross and Betcher believe that once you gain consensus, people will not only accept an initiative, but work hard to advance it. This was why a food survey, led by Quesada Gardens as a project of the Southeast Sector Food Access Working Group in 2007, was a critical step to help organizers understand what residents really wanted. “We know there’s a lack of fresh produce options in the neighborhood, but how do we know the residents want a supermarket?” said Betcher. Of the 562 residents surveyed, 95 percent said they would “actively support new food options,” 58 percent said they wanted a co-op market and 53 percent said it was important to have foods free of pesticides and chemicals.

Started with one garden on the median of Quesada Street, the initiative has grown to include 14 individual backyard gardens and nine community gardens. Residents are relishing in the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables they are growing and readily sharing it with elderly and hungry neighbors. But something even more fundamental has sprouted that is changing the fabric of the neighborhood. “People are coming out of their homes. They’re meeting their neighbors. They’re looking out for each other,” said Ross.  He has lived intermittently in BVHP since the 1980’s. “This is the first time that I know everyone on my block. The garden has become a safe place for people; a place to gather instead of the street corner.”

When asked about how they avoid vandalism and other forms of destructive resistance, Ross pointed to the community’s feeling of ownership of the gardens. “When there is vandalism, it comes from outside the neighborhood. Everyone on the block is looking out for the community gardens and their neighbors’ gardens because they feel a sense of pride and involvement,” said Ross. “People are more aware now. They will come outside and spend time with their neighbors instead of closing their doors.”

After hearing an overview of the Quesada Gardens Initiative from Ross and Betcher, a lively conversation among a record crowd of Kitchen Table Talks attendees followed.

When the question was asked, “what happened to SLUG,” — the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners — Paula Jones, Director of San Francisco Food Systems and former SLUG Director of Urban Agriculture, pointed out that the urban agriculture movement is thriving, but an organizing framework for all the disparate groups such as the one that SLUG once provided would be ideal.

The million dollar question of the night: if so many people want supermarkets in BVHP, why aren’t there supermarkets? “There is a misconception that there’s not enough money in poor neighborhoods. Corner stores gouge their customers with a huge mark up,” said Oriana Sarac, founder of Neighborhood Fruit. Oakland’s HOPE Collaborative Project Manager Hank Herrera offered the insight that structural racism keeps supermarkets out of poor neighborhoods. He said this is true in every city across the country. “The most important thing we can do is support local ownership and local supply chains.”

“What about the cooking factor,” asked FarmsReach Founder Melanie Cheng. This Sunday’s New York Times magazine feature article by Michael Pollan, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, drives this point home. Betcher told the group that there are cooking classes being offered in BVHP, but more are needed. Hai Vo, who worked on UC Irvine’s Real Food Challenge, stressed the importance of youth engagement.

The importance of commercial kitchens was brought up and Betcher told the group the BVHP mainstay Eclectic Cookery was considering shutting its doors. Susan Coss, Kitchen Table Talks co-founder and catalyst for bringing this conversation on community organizing together, stressed that a commercial kitchen must pay for itself to survive.

Betcher offered, “While other sectors of the economy are bleeding, social entrepreneurship is alive and well. BVHP really needs businesses committed workforce development.”

Despite the progress Quesada Gardens has made, Betcher stresses that the organization is in the “infrastructure building phase” and that while the project is mitigating climate change and health issues, the real focus of the initiative is community building. “We need people, especially funders, who get community building,” said Betcher.

Quesada Gardens is an inspiration, not just for other blocks in BVHP, but for all urban dwellers everywhere, starving for community in the neighborhoods where they live. Even if a community garden isn’t possible in your neighborhood, the simple act of spending a little time with your neighbors can yield fruit.

Things you can do:

• Learn more about the people working to make fresh, healthy food more accessible to underserved neighborhoods:
  • Quesada Gardens Initiative
  • The City’s Southeast Food Access Workgroup
  • The Oakland HOPE Collaborative
  • People’s Grocery, Oakland
• Get involved in the social media dialog for food accessibility and community development in BVHP at the portal-in-progress www.bayviewfootprints.org
• Volunteer, donate funds or in-kind items for a Quesada Movie Night being planned Sept. 12-13, contact info@QuesadaGardens.org
• In addition to dollars and volunteers, Quesada Gardens is in need of regular in-kind donations such as plants, seeds, lumber, and mulch. Sponsorship from local garden supply and hardware stores would be greatly appreciated. contact info@QuesadaGardens.org
• Start a garden in your yard. Talk to your neighbors who also garden. If you have a community garden, volunteer to help. If you don’t have one yet, talk to your neighbors about starting one
• Support local ownership and local supply chains
  • San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance
  • Buy Local Berkeley
  • Oakland Merchants’ Leadership Forum
  • Directory of networks beyond immediate SF Bay Area
• Add a comment to this post with a suggestion, resource or idea to keep to conversation going and forward it to friends, family and especially neighbors

This food task force is but one example of a groundswell of interest among churches. For a faith whose central sacrament is the Eucharistic meal, a number of Christians are seeing the far-reaching implications of that meal for how they eat. And they are beginning to ask some hard questions. Why, for example, must that old warhorse known as The Church Potluck still feature tables brimming with Jell-O, high fructose corn syrup, and other “food products” we know to be bad for us? And why should our food supply be so dependent on fossil fuels which are quickly disappearing? Why has the number of malnourished people in the world (one billion) been surpassed by the number of obese? Clearly our eating habits are destructive. How, then, do we rethink the way we eat and what resources for that re-imagining do we already have within our faith tradition?

Before meeting we all read Michael Pollan’s instant classic “Letter to the Farmer-in-Chief” as well as a recent essay by agrarian theologian Norman Wirzba on his work with Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson to develop a 50-year farm bill.

Bishop-in-chief of the NC Methodist Conference Al Gwinn referred to these articles as places where the church needs to perk up her ears, and began the discussion on a sobering note: “We know that our society is going down an extremely treacherous path that does not have any potential of a good ending given the way we’re traveling.”

The bishop was followed by Dr. Ellen Davis, professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School and author of the excellent Scripture, Culture, Agriculture—Reading the Bible Through Agrarian Eyes (foreword by Wendell Berry), who said that one of the best resources for thinking about the way we eat and grow food is the Bible:

It’s difficult to go more than a few chapters in the Old Testament without seeing reference to land or food. The biblical writers were particularly interested in arable land. They were remarkably attuned to the incomparable value of land and its fertility. Situated in a semi-arid climate with erosion-prone soil, Israel had no margin for error. A point of connection here in the U.S. is that while we had a huge margin for error a few centuries ago, we’ve used it up. We’re like ancient Israel in that we now occupy a marginal ecological niche.

Dr. Wirzba, also present at the meeting, then asked,

How do we envision an economy in which the health of land and people together can be established? We need practices in which we can reestablish our relationship with the land. This is where church gardens are so important. To be in a garden is to learn that we need a new relationship with creation. It’s where our own lives become a gift to be given to others. Gardens can be a powerful witness to the world for the church to be able to say, ‘this is how you receive the world, this is how you receive each other, and this is how we share God’s goodness. This is how we resist treating each other as commodities.’

Stan spoke up to encourage our group to think about land use. “The local re-design of our food system requires land, any and all kinds, for gardens, local market space, and supporting storage and handiwork,” he said. “Churches need to actively seek donated land wherever it is available, and provide that space to community partners to nurture local food alternatives.”

Rev. Jeremy Troxler spoke next. Jeremy is a former tobacco farmer. Despite his awe-shucks demeanor he is an elegant spokesman for the agrarian way of life and is now director of the Thriving Rural Communities program at Duke Divinity School. “We need our parishioners to see that sustainable farming is not a liberal agenda,” he said. “In fact it’s really the way my grandfather lived. We need to use the deep wells of scripture to find ways to express that clearly to our congregations.”

Lunch that day was an all-local menu of onion and broccoli quiche, a salad of Jericho lettuce and sugar snap-peas, and fresh strawberries for dessert, all grown in the church’s community garden and on neighboring farms.

Before we ate Stan said something that’s stayed with me. We had been talking about the recent groundswell of interest in agriculture among churches. Shaking his head slightly and speaking in a hushed, almost reverent tone Stan said, “There are 830 churches in the NC Methodist conference. Think if every one of those started a garden or produced their own food. Once they are in motion—that’s an unstoppable force.”

Heads around the table nodded in agreement. The bishop blessed the food. And then we feasted.