What the heck is National Food Desert Awareness Month about?

There are no grocery stores in the food desert. When you're driving or walking past fast-food walk-up after fast-food drive-in hawking greasy burgers, chicken, fries and high fructose corn syrup (hfcs) colas, and there's not a grocery store or produce bin in sight, you know you're in a food desert. People who live in food deserts tend to die younger, and they die of diet-related illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, according to researcher Mari Gallagher.

In Brother, can you spare an apple?, Gallagher says "If an apple is further away than a burger, then the chances of choosing fresh food more often than fast food is a mirage,"


Image courtesy freefoto.com; Photographer: Ian Britton


So in the interest of getting more healthy produce, particularly organically grown produce, into the hands and mouths of people at high risk for developing diet-related diseases, Gallagher, Growing Home, Inc., Goodness Greeness and the National Center for Public Research kicked off National Food Desert Awareness Month in Chicago earlier this month.

Why the Chicago launchpad? Because half a million people on Chicago's south side live in a food desert, and they're hungry for things that crunch.

Perhaps in all the rhetoric about cutting our taxes, bailing out Wall Street, and keeping America secure during this election season, the candidates should add "and a grocery store in every neighborhood." Or, dreaming wildly here, "and a pesticide-free garden in every neighborhood!"

Wouldn't that be Ordinary?

Growing home with green jobs

For sixteen years, Chicago's Growing Home has been teaching homeless people to grow their own pesticide-free food. People living on the fringe grow new lives for themselves while working with the soil. They gain self-confidence and hope while they nurture tender seedlings into mature, fruit-bearing plants. Their health improves when they eat the wholesome foods they've grown, and they gain life and job skills when they sell their premium organic produce to high-end restaurants and at Chicago's premier farmer's market.

Recently, the program set up a local farmer's market on Chicago's south side, making delicious locally-grown produce available to people, many of whom are themselves one minimum-wage paycheck from homelessness, who live in the food desert.

We need a green economy that honors the earth ... but not a green economy only for the eco-chic. ... The people who are struggling for bus fare--they have a place too.

Van Jones, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Growing Home is part of the Green Jobs Revolution. Learn more about it from the people whose lives are changing because of it:

The good stuff that you put into the earth, you get right back out the earth in a better way.

Participant, Growing Home, Inc.

How perfectly Ordinary is that? What are you growing in your garden today?