The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities

When Allen met Hope Finkelstein, she was simply interested in a tour of his greenhouses. Hope’s interest was piqued, and she brought her experience working in “museums and community art centers in New York” (131) to the growing community garden culture in the Midwest. She created a non-profit organization called Growing Power in Madison, Wisconsin, that enabled community gardens to collaborate and to work together to apply for grants and to share everything they learned. Allen offered to be a board member, and soon, Farm-City Link and Growing Power decided “to merge and become partners” (133). Allen’s goals extended even further when he decided to become part of an effort to “intercept organic waste before it reached the landfill and grow it into healthy soil” (136).

In the meantime, Allen’s relationship with the Parker children, DeShell and DeShawn, deepened as “Karen Parker continued to be [his] main employee” (136). Allen noticed that DeShawn, who was in eighth grade at the time, was struggling with adolescence as well as “questions that were at the core of his identity” (137). A close relationship with a boy his age concerned his mother, Karen, but she told him affectionately that she didn’t “care if you love a man or a woman, your momma’s always going to love you” (138). Karen gradually grew to trust Allen with more of her difficult history with men, abuse, and drugs. From Karen, Allen learned that “[p]eople find a way to persist even when they are provided the narrowest possibility” (141).

Allen’s greenhouses were underused, so Hope and Allen worked together to design “[their] future use of the space” (141), creating classrooms and spaces for the fish and worm systems, as well as “a year-round organic vegetable garden […] where youth and adults could come to learn simple planting and harvesting” (142). 

Allen reflects on the difficulty that resulted when “the local agricultural system was dismembered piece by piece in the twentieth century” (143) as he contemplates what it means in an urban area to eat locally. Now, the local food options for many urban communities are “deceptively cheap,” as “health cost associated with obesity have been estimated at nearly $150 billion annually” (144). This awareness keeps Allen motivated to “help provide affordable alternatives to junk food in inner-city communities” (145). When Hope Finkelstein introduces Allen to Jerry Kaufman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he learns that Jerry and his brother, Arnold, both have goals similar to Allen’s. Jerry, who became a father figure to Allen, “believed in what [he] was doing, but [Allen] knew that he also maintained a healthy skepticism” (148) regarding Allen’s lofty vision.

In July 2000, Allen received the news that his mother, Willie Mae, had passed away. 

Before Allen’s mother passed away, Hope gave him the news that she would be moving with her family to Anchorage, Alaska, where her husband would be a research professor. Allen’s own family worked with him to cultivate food, and he often “woke [his] kids as early as 3:30AM” (154) so they could help him sell vegetables at the market at 6AM. Allen’s eldest child, Erika, grew up and went to college in Chicago. She returned home in the summers to work at first, but soon, she, like many children of farmers, revealed that she had “no desire to stay in agriculture […] [even though] [t]he survival of small and medium-sized farms is often dependent on the transfer of farmland from one generation to the next” (155). Erika chose a career in art therapy, but she did help Allen write grants, and soon, her work experiences with impoverished urban children led her to dream of “her own urban agriculture project in Chicago” (156). Like her father, Erika’s community doubted her abilities, but the need was clear.

After working with social service organizations, Allen developed his own sort of youth corps, made up of “young people in challenging circumstances” (158), which Karen Parker led. The children and adolescents transformed when they worked with the land, and Allen’s belief that “early experiences with fresh food cab shape a person’s diet when that person is older” (180) solidified. A friendship with Robert Pierce, a fellow black farmer from Madison, Wisconsin, “reinforced for [Allen] the lesson that a love of healthy food is something that can be planted in people when they are very young, only to bloom late, after many seasons” (163).

Allen worked hard to develop multiple income streams to keep his business as a small farmer going. He delivered market baskets, sold his organic compost fertilizer, and raised bees for urban honey. By the time Hope left for Alaska, “[they] had grown to have a staff of seven people, with more than a hundred volunteers” (167). A couple named Sharon and Larry Adams, who lived in a neighborhood of Milwaukee called Lindsay Heights, met Allen and spoke of their ideas “of restoring the homes and healing the land there” (169). Allen helped them and other residents build gardens and improve the land in Lindsay Heights, and “when the community started to heal the land,” (171) even more positive changes began to take place.