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

Community is at the center of the good food revolution, and the Lower Ninth Ward section of New Orleans is home to one of the more extreme examples. Five years after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees–flooding the neighborhood and forcing its residents to decamp elsewhere–the area, largely frozen in time, has become home to a thriving community of urban farmers aiming to improve the quality of life of its residents.

I was in the neighborhood recently on a tour arranged by the Community Food Conference, a four-day event in October offering panels on different aspects of food policy. My tour guide, Jenga Mwendo, grew up in the Lower Ninth, but was living in New York City when Katrina hit.

“I quit my job, sold everything and moved out to New Orleans with the intention of finding some way of being a contribution,” she said. Mwendo had purchased a house in the Lower Ninth as an investment property just weeks before the storm, and so began by rebuilding it. Next, she decided to figure out who owned the abandoned properties near hers. “I decided that I was going to single-handedly revitalize my block,” she said.

Statistics reveal that only 25 percent of residents have returned to rebuild. As a result, abandoned houses dot the neighborhood, services and infrastructure are sorely lacking, and there is a lot of land. This has made the Lower Ninth prime for urban agriculture–which, for Mwendo, has been key to rebuilding and bringing together the community.

Through her work, she has brought back to life an existing garden, started a new one, and created the Backyard Gardeners Network, which connects gardeners to resources and to each other. She also helped facilitate the planting of 175 fruit trees. [You can read more about her work in an interview I did with her recently for Grist.]

“The more people that I spoke too, especially the elders, the more I realized that [agriculture] was really an integral part of the history of the Lower Ninth Ward,” she said. “This whole process has been an opportunity for me to reconnect with my past and know New Orleans in a way that I never knew it before.”

In communities of color, where one in two people is now predicted to become diabetic in their lifetime and where there is often a strong history of agriculture, community gardening projects can have a huge impact–especially in places like the Lower Ninth, which doesn’t have a single grocery store. “I see the gardens as opportunities to come together, work together, and do things that are going to be beneficial for our neighborhood,” said Mwendo.

Nat Turner also made his way to New Orleans from New York City in the wake of Katrina. First he came as a history teacher bringing his students there for volunteer projects, and then later he became a resident and founded Our School at Blair Grocery, a school housed in a former grocery store.

“There were kids falling through the cracks, so I said, let’s start an independent alternative school,” said Turner. Agriculture is used as a tool to help students, who have dropped out of traditional school settings, develop work skills.

As Turner tells it, the idea of using food as a teaching tool was originally about providing access to produce. “People in the neighborhood want bell peppers, okra, and shallots,” he said. So he built vegetable beds, chicken coops, and greenhouses where the students participate in a sprout-growing operation for local restaurants.

In addition, he saw that there was a need to create jobs. “There is nowhere for black teenagers in New Orleans to find a job,” said Turner. “There is probably a 70 percent unemployment rate in our neighborhood.”

Each day at Our School, in addition to studies geared toward passing the GED exam, students plant, harvest or deliver sprouts grown in their greenhouses to restaurants all around the city. The farm’s model is inspired by Will Allen–a Milwaukee, Wisconsin urban farmer who builds intricately diverse growing systems that provide fish, vegetables and rich compost year round to residents. Through their work, students learn business skills–and get to rub elbows with famous local chefs like John Besh of restaurants La Provence, Lüke and August. After he took a tour of the school recently, Turner said, Chef Besh said that he “wants to buy everything that we can possibly grow for his restaurant.”

The school benefits from around $2000 per week from these restaurant sales, which helps subsidize local sales, and the students take home a stipend of $50 per week along with other benefits like paid cellphone bills. As a result of this work, three blighted lots in the neighborhood have been turned into productive farmland. And they are expanding–having just received notice of a three-year, $300,000 community food project grant from the USDA which will allow them to increase their growing capacity, take on more students, and pay for building repairs.

Both Mwendo and Turner agree that the government has a role to play in improving the quality of life in the Lower Ninth. “It would be really nice if they could release some of those federal dollars around fresh food retail outlets in under-served neighborhoods,” said Turner, who is also looking for the government to make it easier for groups like his to access blighted land.

Volunteering for an afternoon at Our School, I found myself standing up to my ankles in rotting fruits and vegetables, cardboard, and coffee grinds at the giant compost pile that would become a new farm field in the spring. Four of Our School’s students–all boys–and one teacher explained the difference between “green” matter and “brown” matter (the green matter being the food waste, containing nitrogen, and brown matter the cardboard and wood chips, containing carbon). All four of the students were different sizes and ages, and all worked diligently together to complete the project.

Indeed, composting seemed like an apt metaphor for the changes happening in the Lower Ninth. Instead of standing by to watch a neighborhood slowly disintegrate, urban farmers are breaking down food waste into a productive medium in which to grow. While the stand-off continues between business owners who wait for the population of the neighborhood to increase, and people who wait for amenities like grocery stores and schools to open before they move in, activists like Mwendo and Turner will continue to grow community at the grassroots: starting with the soil.

Unsurprisingly, several meals that I ate at the event offered exceptional food from local farmers. The opening reception featured local goat and fresh green sprouts grown in the Lower Ninth Ward by students of Our School At Blair Grocery. Local potatoes and vegetables made a lovely breakfast. The tours of family fisheries and urban agriculture also impressed me.  One tour’s lunch was catfish caught, skinned, fillet and fried in front of our eyes by the Fonseca’s, whose families have fished the bayou for generations. Sustainable and delicious, the outing taught us about catfish’s critical role in the ecosystem and celebrated the brilliant convergence that only a small-scale producer can offer in taste, tradition, and environmental responsibility.

Wisely, organizers had planned to serve no lunch so that we could explore the city, support local businesses and “skip eating corporate food served by the hotel.”

But I had already connected with local food. When I’d checked into my French Quarter hotel the first evening, I was exhausted from flying, starving and had no patience even for my iPhone local food app. The gentleman staffing the front desk had a graceful and serious air, so I leveled with him and said, “Food is my first priority. I live for authentic, non-pretentious, affordable food that the locals flock to. Where should I eat?”

I found my food-soul-mate in Bruce Fritz, who gave me my first New Orleans food lagniappe when he recommended Coop’s Place.  One of my best experiences of the trip was Coop’s gumbo. It was intense, redolent with spices and rich with seafood and okra.  I talked to Jordan Cooperman, the son of Coop’s owner, assisting at the rough-hewn counter.  Hip, young, sincere and business-savvy, Jordan epitomized pride in his food culture. He enthusiastically described the restaurant’s passion for offering authentic, affordable food to locals and tourists.  He nonchalantly accepted my gumbo compliments, mentioning that they smoke their own pork for Tasso, and that local seafood is a given. But when I asked him, he couldn’t name one farmer or producer that supplied him, and doubted anyone else working there could.

Lunch breaks during the conference illustrated more contradictions. I had an unexpected meal at Muriel’s, an upscale bastion of tradition on Jackson Square. I hadn’t planned to eat there, but a conference meeting was next door, and I had arrived 45 minutes early, hungry. Elegant ladies in prim suits and heels whisked past my table as I grilled my gracious server about local seafood choices. He said all menu items were local except the mahi mahi. He didn’t know names of Muriel’s seafood providers, but he said his parents are friends with them, and that both families had been in New Orleans since the Spanish American war.

I told him about food conference I was attending and he seemed genuinely interested. I was even more impressed that the restaurant co-owner, Rick Gratia, came out to talk. He held up admirably as I quizzed him about sourcing, pointing out local products on the menu, mentioning current and seasonal standouts including the endangered heritage mirliton squash, local beans, local peas, blueberries, satsumas, and rabbit. Local seafood definitely was on the menu but he couldn’t name the fishing family. He sat with me until my salad arrived. I savored the crab salad with gulf shrimp, giving high marks for flavor and freshness. I had to give low marks for the out-of-season asparagus and the mango vinaigrette. But the restaurant’s deep pride of place produced a very satisfying plate.

Back at the conference, I checked in with food justice stalwart and veteran attendee Siena Chrisman of Why Hunger, an organization focused on hunger and poverty.  Her examples of conference food that bristled with irony came fast and furious. She mentioned afternoon snack candy from Mars and Hershey, and processed nutrition bars in which high fructose corn syrup was the first, third and fourth ingredients, noting that these were all items the conference emphasized not eating. Nature’s Gate packaged cereals at breakfast annoyed her too.

But the Sodexo sponsorship was her really big issue. The conference program featured a full-page Sodexo advertisement on the back cover.  Chrisman noted that A Service Employees International Union (SEUI) led campaign protesting poverty-level wages and the processed, unhealthy food on offer make the company a mismatch with the exceptional achievements and lofty ideals of CFSC.

“The bulk of Sodexo’s food is from the industrial food system,” said Chrisman. “I feel uncomfortable with CFSC giving them this huge platform to food-wash their company.”

Andy Fisher, Executive Director of CFSC, told me that corporate sponsorship provides scholarships to people who otherwise could not afford to attend. He believes Sodexo is trying to do the right thing, although he wishes the company would be more supportive of local food sourcing. He noted that Sodexo’s recent signing of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ agreement illustrated “an important commitment in the right direction.”

My quest for contradictions satisfied, I shared a shuttle to the airport with a Texan in town for an oil convention. His golf clubs, enormous diamond ring, and Tea Party reading material made me ready to rumble. I asked him about his food experiences. He said New Orleans pleased him, especially the Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. He then surprised me completely offering the biggest contradiction I found during my trip. “Write this down, young lady, for your report:  ‘Soft drinks are the cigarette butt of the millennium. They make our kids fat and sick. They need to drink healthy beverages like water.’ ”

My experience at the CFSC conference raised many questions, highlighted real contradictions and yet inspired me to continue to investigate the giant stew that is the good food movement. We still have far to go before our food is good, fair, and clean.  Next year’s conference is in my hometown of Oakland, CA. I’ll volunteer to help CFSC continue their pioneering work.

As a massive, growing oil spill threatens to crush the Gulf seafood industry, Louisiana locals are snatching up fresh, locally-harvested shrimp in droves.

The Crescent City Farmer’s Market in uptown New Orleans was out of seafood by 11 a.m. Tuesday. FOX News reported that Gulf seafood markets as far as Florida were selling four times more seafood than usual.

“I have no more seafood, sorry!” Clara Gerica, a vendor at the three-times-a-week New Orleans farmers market told a disappointed customer. “Come back Thursday or Saturday, I’ll set some aside for ya.”

“Today was extremely busy. I haven’t had a day like this since before Katrina,” explains Gerica, whose family is still rebuilding their house and three boats, all casualties of the hurricane.

From the minute the market opened, locals were lined up to secure their seafood. “People are afraid they aren’t going to be able to get it,” notes Gerica, adding that she is not worried about the local supply. “[The oil spill] will slow me down on crab meat, but everything else should be fine.”

“Unless something drastic happens,” she says, the rich fishing waters west of the Mississippi will likely be spared from oil contamination.

The hope that New Orleans will be able to keep a steady supply of fresh, local seafood is based on two assumptions: that the weather will continue to push the oil east and that BP will be able to stop the flow of oil in the next few days.

If the west side of Louisiana is spared from the “oilpocalypse,” it will be heavily relied upon to help fishermen keep up with demand, much of which is local.

As well-known New Orleans chef and local foodie John Besh wrote last week in The Atlantic, “We will have a supply of seafood, but that supply will be affected. In the short term our supplies will be cut in half–and that’s if we’re lucky. In the long term I’m afraid for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Texas, the Florida panhandle.”

“This is much more than about birds,” wrote Besh. “It’s about a culture, an economy, the livelihood of thousands and thousands of people–and wetlands that have been the most concentrated source of seafood production for our entire country.”

The Gulf oil spill and our plate

Around 40 percent of our domestic seafood comes from the Gulf of Mexico. The seafood industry there is not only economically important for the region–bringing in around $2.4 billion annually–but it’s also important for those of us who like to know where our food comes from.

Just look at shrimp, America’s most popular seafood.

Over 90 percent of shrimp consumed in the U.S. is imported, mostly from Asia, the largest portion coming from China. Much of that is wild caught by trawling–a practice that has some environmentalists concerned, as it that harms the ocean floor and often kills other sea life, like turtles. But a growing portion of the shrimp on our plates is actually from aquaculture farms, which bring a whole host of other problems ranging from the destruction of mangrove forests to unregulated antibiotic use.

As Ray Brandhurst, an inspiring Chalette, Louisiana shrimper, who’s family has been shrimping since the 1700s, told me this week, “Unfortunately these imports are coming in here unchecked. In most of the European countries they wont allow this stuff to come in, but it comes into the U.S. unabated.”

Imported shrimp should be avoided altogether, if you follow the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide.

“Our shrimp in the Gulf is antibiotic-free. We aren’t destroying mangrove forests,” says Ray.

Unfortunately the future supply of Gulf seafood continues to be threatened by a lake of carcinogenic oil the size of Delaware.

Adapted from an article originally published on Food Safety News, reported from New Orleans, LA.

“Friends don’t let friends eat imported shrimp.” As a homegrown New Orleanian who grew up on a steady diet of the freshest, local seafood from the nearby waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico, this has long been my mantra.

The culinary culture of New Orleans has become increasingly threatened by the flood of cheap, imported shrimp. Yes, even here it’s necessary to ask where the shrimp came from, despite the fact that we are blessed with two shrimp seasons making freshly caught shrimp available virtually year round.

In late spring, sweet, brown shrimp are trawled from our inland waters. Known as “Louisiana Gold”, brown shrimp inspired the classic dish, Shrimp Creole, that perfect marriage of Creole tomatoes and shrimp bound together by a dark roux. In fall and winter, the larger white shrimp that grace our tables throughout the holiday season appear, often enrobed with remoulade sauce.

Marketumbrella.org, the non-profit that founded the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans has long been aware of the plight of Louisiana shrimpers, who are a vital part of our market. In 2003 the White Boot Brigade was formed, named for the signature white rubber boots worn aboard shrimp boats. Wearing their white boots, shrimpers appeared at art markets and other community gatherings with ice chests brimming with freshly caught shrimp. Thousands of pounds of shrimp were quickly sold at prices that were economical for the shopper and fantastic for the shrimper, who realized profits often ten times over what was being offered at the dock.

As the fleet struggled to rebuild following the 2005 storm, the White Boot Brigade reached out across the United States where some of the nation’s most renowned chefs were eager to buy fresh, head on shrimp direct from the boat. With the support of marketumbrella.org, the shrimpers stormed New York City and found a friend in NBC’s Al Roker, who welcomed them and praised their efforts on the Today Show. Food Network hosted a “Shrimp Cocktail” event where Chef Emeril Lagasse demonstrated the fine points of cooking “Louisiana Gold” shrimp to fellow master chefs, Daniel Boulud and Floyd Cardoz. Famed New York restaurateur Danny Meyer jumped in, featuring wild caught Louisiana shrimp in his award winning restaurants, Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Café and Eleven Madison Park. Alice Waters began to serve wild caught Louisiana shrimp at Chez Panisse, making a special exception to her usually fanatically local menu as she recognized the threat to the Louisiana shrimper. FISH restaurant in Sausilito and other West Coast chefs and restaurants jumped aboard, buying directly from White Boot Brigade shrimpers. In this win-win situation, the shrimper gets a fair price and the chef and ultimately the customer gets a fresher product, all while saving an industry.

This year, only 1/3 of the 15,000 pre-Katrina commercial shrimpers were back in the water when the slump in the American economy dealt a blow to our seafood industry that could sound the death knoll for the local shrimping industry. Viewing shrimp as a luxury item, Americans ate less of them while shrimpers experienced an unusual bounty of spring brown shrimp. Unsold product was frozen and stored. The supply and demand factor at the opening of the 2009 white shrimp season resulted in a 10-year low price of 50 cents a pound at the docks. Shrimpers marched on the Louisiana State Capitol in protest. Many simply dry docked their boats and walked away.

How can you make a difference? Always ask about the origins of the shrimp before ordering in a restaurant or buying from your seafood market. Just like America’s great chefs, you can buy directly from the boat too! As little as fifteen pounds of shrimp can be delivered directly to your door. Eating fresh caught, wild shrimp is the most delicious way I can imagine of saving a culinary culture!