known as the Black Wall Street.
As the cigarette manufacturing base eroded in the 1970s and ’80s due to reduced smoking rates and the loss of factories to lower-cost sites, especially overseas, our downtown turned into a gang-riddled wasteland. Many of the whites had fled to the burbs. Those that stayed in control of city government banned chickens and other livestock from within the city limits. Generally speaking, the upper-class whites saw banning livestock as a way of maintaining property values. The black community took it as an affront to their independence, yet another way of keeping them down. This all came to a head in the last few years when a mixed-race group of homeowners, albeit predominantly white, sought to overturn the chicken ban. Mostly people of both races didn’t have any problem with overturning the old law banning chickens, but a vociferous leader of a local African-American organization raised absolute hell about it. This ornery octogenarian woman screamed bloody murder about black people being barred from having chickens for decades but now that white folks wanted them, the law was going to change. The problem was, she was mostly right. She may not have done a good job of choosing her battles, but I understood her anger.
I bring this story up for a few reasons. The first is to point out that existing laws that get in the way of allowing potentially sustainable activities probably have complicated social reasons for their enactment. Challenging a law is generally much more complicated than just pointing out how ridiculous it is. Although I appreciate all the hard work the Durham group did to make chickens legal, part of me wonders if it was worth it. What if everyone who wanted chickens just went ahead and got them? What official would have spent the time to do anything about it? The second point is a random observation on what I’ve noticed can be a difficulty in bringing lower-income and/ or marginalized minorities into the sustainability movement. To the extent that living a sustainable life means operating within the confines of petty bureaucratic agencies and statutes that may historically have existed as means of segregation and constraint, it is likely to be unappealing to sections of society that have seen the law as a force of repression rather than as an agent of justice. It’s important to consider whether working within the existing system is of any inherent value, and whether doing so might potentially promote or hinder progress toward other laudable goals such as greater racial and income equality. Each case will no doubt be unique, but I think it is a question worth asking. I hope the reader can be tolerant of my rather simplistic thoughts on these matters. Being a Southerner, I’ve learned you have to acknowledge racial issues, even if you do it clumsily, rather than pretending they don’t exist.
My urban agriculture visit took me to a few community gardens, the biggest being D-Town Farm, run by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. That’s a mouthful and it’s almost impossible for me to remember this name without looking it up. I headed on over to their plot of land in River Rouge Park. Driving in Detroit is fun because even though there are No Parking signs all over the place, there’s so much empty road people don’t pay any attention to them. I followed their example and blocked an unneeded lane of traffic with my old Saturn.
Just inside the gate at D-Town Farm. This spot was formerly an abandoned park that had turned into a giant dump.
The two-acre spread was protected with seven-foot wire fencing for deer. A row of turned-out tires painted white and filled with flowers guides visitors through the main gate. It’s a lovely spot if you stay in the garden proper, flanked as it is on three sides by dense woods. Stout rows of kale and onions beckoned me onwards. I lucked out and soon found one of the board members, vice-president Jackie Hunt, just beginning a tour. D-Town Farm has pulled together solo gardeners into a community farm where they can share resources like tools and greenhouse space. At first they met reluctance from city officials about using the park for their farm. Historically, River Rouge Park was a city park in the traditional sense, like Central Park. It was laid out by landscape architects and was cultivated as a tame version of wild nature where city residents could escape the noise and bustle of the city. But then whoever was supposed to take care of it forgot to, or got fired or just never got paid, and the whole thing turned first into a colossal urban dump and then became so tangled with briars and broken bottles that folks couldn’t even dump shit there anymore. And then most everyone just forgot about the entire place because it was filled with mosquitoes and crackheads and was flat-out disgusting.
Jackie Hunt, vice-president of DBCFSN, with the day’s harvest of melons. One was a little too ripe and I convinced her we should eat it. Yum!
But then Malik Yakini, a local activist and owner of The Black Star Community Book Store, came in with a bunch of volunteers and cleared out their space and started planting veggies. Many of their concerns, such as high unemployment, lack of available fresh food, and abandoned lots coalesced around the idea of a vibrant local farm within the city limits. A few years on, they grow much of their members’ fresh produce and have a spot at one the many farmers markets in Detroit, selling their extras and creating a few part-time jobs for hardworking youth. I enjoyed my tour and visited their booth at the farmers market later that afternoon to buy some veggies. Like many urban farms in Detroit, on one level the place is still in violation of the law even though park officials eventually gave it their blessing — its primary purpose is for farming, something that is explicitly forbidden by the city’s ordinances. But there’s no one to enforce it, and even if there was, who would want to tell a bunch of hardworking folks that they can’t reclaim an overgrown eyesore and use it to feed their families? It’s a kind of deregulation by bankruptcy and apathy — not, in my opinion, the best way to go about things, but marginally effective nonetheless. As folks who are concerned about the well-being of our earth, we want laws that maintain the privilege of business-as-usual freight-train-to-planetary-annihilation dismantled, but not at the cost of those laws that help alleviate injustice, socioeconomic inequality and clean air and water. As resources dwindle and our consumerist economy continues to falter as a consequence, funding for our municipal, state and federal governments will be under constant strain, conceivably for the remainder of our lifetimes and beyond. Transitioning to a sustainable existence will mean taking a hard look at existing regulations and trying to weed out the good from the bad, unless things get so far gone that we all end up like Detroit, having to operate under a blanket of bureaucratic regulations that, even if they’re not enforced, do nothing but distract us and make us feel even more insecure.
HOW CAN FOOD BE ILLEGAL? It’s pretty easy to understand in our excessively property rights-oriented society how using land that isn’t legally yours, like D-Town Farm and some other gardeners in Detroit, would irk the powers that be, but sitting down and eating a meal prepared by a neighbor? Twice on my travels I had the opportunity to witness the inner workings of community kitchens and watch them prepare local and organic meals that would cause the finickiest of eaters to salivate. Eating the one clandestine meal I actually got to sink my fork into, in the living room of a foreclosed home in Detroit, brought to mind being a tippler during Prohibition, the experience that much more heightened by a feeling of silly misbehavior. My father’s grandparents had run a speakeasy in Prohibition Milwaukee, and I felt, just a little, that I was channeling their maverick natures.
Food is one of the most amazing ways of bringing people together. Growing food not only connects us with the earth, but like the community gardens I visited in Detroit, it connects us with our neighbors. We work beside each other, get dirty together, battle bugs and heat, and then marvel at the bounty of the earth.
But the community-building aspect of food doesn’t stop there. Its most important place in this regard is sharing a meal together. Spending time cooking and eating together is often the primary place and time for families to be with one another, share their hopes and frustrations, and enjoy the wonders of satisfying the most primal of needs. Its importance