10.19

It is outrageous when urban planners draft up designs to green Skid Row sidewalks. Several businesses have taken to hiring guards to watch their gardens. Read between the lines, this greening is yet another insidious political tool designed to uproot neighborhoods and weed-out houseless people. 

I want to share about another kind of greening that roots people to land, body, and life force. Growing food and making herbal medicine from a garden immerses us in the rhythms of the earth-–and the cycles of life, death and rebirth. The People’s Medicine Project is a food-as-medicine program that merges justice and wellness organizing at LACAN. This program lives in the Food & Wellness Collaborative at the intersection of health, poverty, and racism. With Skid Row residents as our culinary educators, we grow empowerment through advocacy, self-reliance, and hands-on garden / kitchen workshops. We believe that healthy food is a human right and that by growing nourishing food, we are growing community health. 

Since our program launch this Spring, LACAN has hosted four packed workshops and folks have learned how to make plant-based foods with crops harvested from our rooftop permaculture garden. While eating together, we explore the connections between the broken parts of the food system; soil science and gut health; and climate justice; as well as the links between diet and preventative health.

117 million Americans suffer from an epidemic of preventable, chronic food-related diseases: (obesity; type 2 diabetes; cardiovascular, liver and kidney diseases). These diseases are amplified, in part, by a food industry and a homeless industrial complex that distributes cheap, highly-processed food baked with unhealthy ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, and trans-fats. When such ingredients are served to a population that is battling chronic health conditions with limited access to health and wellness services, that is a recipe for disaster.

My friend, Dr. Maya Shetreat, (author of The Dirt Cure) teaches that gardening amps up your mental, physical, and spiritual health. She references studies that show how organisms in the soil can make us feel less anxious, improve focus, and kick our problem-solving skills up a gear! Did you know that soil bacteria increases serotonin in parts of the brain that control mood and cognitive function? Check it out: touching soil actually makes you smarter while bolstering your immune system, lowering your stress, and releasing endorphins. By remembering to slow down and breathe oxygen from the plants, we weave back into a healing relationship with Mother Earth. 

It is by design that much of the food accessible in the neighborhood is GMO, and not organic. It is by design that you are dehumanized in a medical system that treats chronic food-related diseases with expensive pharmaceuticals. And, it is also by design that you can’t touch the soil in fenced-off gardens that were landscaped to keep the community off public sidewalks. This strategy of systematically denying land to urban poor is employed around the globe. Green is never meant to be fenced-off, but to be connected to and ingested as it co-mingles with our DNA. Consider touching soil that is fenced-off as a radical act of civil disobedience. From the soil to the soul, we root down to rise up.

Do you have an idea for one of our upcoming People’s Medicine workshops? Join us, and transform produce direct from our LACAN gardens into real-time healthy meals that feature Latinx, Middle Eastern, and pan-Asian food as medicine.