“I live in a food desert,” declares Jim Dobbins, my friend and former neighbor. He’s in his late seventies and leases his Northeast Kansas farmland and pasture, where he grew up and farmed for decades. We enjoy catching up. I sit near his and his wife Freda’s wood-burning stove to chat. We met first in 1950 as neighbor kids on each side of Highway 9. “9” was gravel then. Our families’ farms lay on a broad upland, their watersheds lowering gradually into each of the four directions.
The land supported a wide diversity of crops and animals and our big gardens.
How ironic: “food desert?” Our six-mile by six-mile townships—Jim’s farm in Harrison, my family’s in Reilly—each contains 23,040 acres of fertile, unglaciated soil devoted to food production for over 160 years.
But in 2024, only two local grocery stores remain in the western half of Nemaha County, one twelve miles away and the other fifteen from Jim and Freda’s farm. Neither offers fresh local produce.
The standard definition of a “food desert” is a neighborhood—rural or urban—with poor access to an affordable and healthy diet.
On Denver radio this morning, a Kaiser-Permanente nutritional health researcher was quoted: current research indicates one in every five dollars of healthcare expense in the United States could be avoided if
everyone consumed a nutritionally appropriate diet. This number could be conservative; recent research indicates that 40% of us Americans are obese.
In my December 28 op-ed about urban gardener Faatma Oné, I promised an introduction to James Grevious. Faatma admires how he’s rallied his community and its youth to learn to fill their food desert gap. An Air Force fighter plane mechanic, James, like 1.4 million other people, happened to watch Ron Finley’s ten-minute TED talk “A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA.”
James was the last person expected to be caught farming—his parents are from Brooklyn and Queens—but Finley’s talk eight years ago got him started. He’s become a leading BIPOC urban farmer with a township-size center-city claim staked out right next to Denver, in center-city Aurora.
He’s mining both soil and community there to create healthy neighborhood self-sufficiency by leading and training his young and older neighbors to home-grow their produce and market it cooperatively to residents within a six-mile radius. Ron Finley’s talk was vital for him back in 2015:
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“Like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert: South Central L.A. — Home of the drive-thru and the drive-by.
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“The drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys. The obesity rate is five times higher than in, say, Beverly Hills, eight or ten miles away… wheel chairs bought and sold…dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks.
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“Food is the problem, and food is the solution! L. A. owns 26 square miles of vacant lots, enough space to grow 725 million tomato plants.
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“See, I’m an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. You’d be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas.
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“To change the community, you have to change the composition of the “soil.” Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. You’d be surprised how kids are affected by this. Plus, you get strawberries!
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“If kids grow kale, they eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. If they’re not shown how food affects the mind and body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them.
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“I see kids of color, and they’re just on this track that’s designed for them, that leads them to nowhere. We can train these kids to take over their communities to have a sustainable life!”
Struck by Finley’s manner and message, James went into action with his kids. And their friends. The time was right. He tells me, “In 2015, my two teenage sons and I had been searching for something meaningful to do together following the 2012 shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. I wanted something that could teach them lessons and principles.”
But, as an Air Force Master Sergeant and F-16 mechanic, James was deployed to Japan, just as the new gardening, socializing, and healthy snacks he got off the ground with his kids and their peers were entering a second year. Still, returning to Aurora in 2017, he found a home in the Highland Park neighborhood with a backyard perfect for a one-acre urban farm.
His children started identifying themselves as “rebel gardeners.”
“By 2018, the rebel kids had painted fence and planted greens, tomatoes, basil, radishes, and other veggies and herbs,” James recounts. “I began contemplating a farm stand so the kids could make a little money.”
But he was deployed again to Spain in the middle of the 2019 growing season. So, 2020 became the first season the rebel kids could sell to the public. The COVID-19 lockdown affected Buckley Air Force Base and gave James and his rebel kids time for both marketing and growing.
To be continued: In two weeks, I will detail how James and his young garden rebels took advantage of that lockdown. He has a suggestion about Jim and Freda’s rural food desert. It’s an opportunity for us to learn how they deal with their challenges. I hope to “see you” then!