The World Grows Smaller

American teenagers from suburbs and inner-city neighborhoods gather in Boston for the Food Project Summer Youth Program, where they labor to plant, harvest and sell their goods while also building the life skills of teamwork and open-mindedness required to make their efforts a success. Participants witness hunger and poverty firsthand and see how people in need benefit from their hard work.

The World Grows Smaller

Story and Photographs by LAUREN WILCOX | World Ark Contributor

Boston - On a sweltering morning in July, on a plot of land in a low-income neighborhood, a 15-year-old named Lennie Johnson stands on a small mountain of compost, holding court. Shovel in hand, kerchief on head, he looks like a modern-day American Gothic, anomalous but somehow at home. “Everyone remember the basics on how to shovel compost?” he asks his crew, half a dozen 14- and 15-year-olds, most of whom have never farmed before this summer. Everyone is looking a little wilted in the heat.

“I’ve never shoveled compost,” says a girl in a red headband.

“OK,” says Lennie encouragingly. “You’re just going to grab a bucket and shovel, fill the bucket”—he demonstrates swiftly—

Lennie Johnson, wearing the white head scarf, supervises his crew members as they collect compost.

“and voila.” He dumps the bucket onto what will become a row of beans.

Lennie is an assistant crew leader for the summer program of the Food Project, in which teenagers from suburbs and inner-city neighborhoods work together on urban farms, running farmers markets and serving their produce at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. The program is an intensive, hands-on education in sustainable farming and local food systems. It is also designed to forge a close and productive community out of this disparate group of teenagers, which includes those who have never set foot in this kind of down-at-the-heels neighborhood, and those who haven’t spent much time anywhere else.

It is four weeks into the eight-week program. The 60 high school students, who at first tended to socialize with people from their own neighborhoods and schools, are beginning to find friends across those lines. As assistant leader of Crew C, a group of 12, Lennie has the delicate job of keeping his charges on task as well as creating, as he puts it, “a safe space, so everyone feels loved and cared for.” He is good at it. A program alumnus himself, he can summon the easy authority of someone much older as well as the friendly magnetism of a naturally confident 15-year-old, and he relates easily to everyone.

When his crew finishes with the compost pile, Lennie moves briskly on to the next task. “Who wants to demonstrate forking?” he says, taking up a garden fork.

Ralph Corgain, a slight, soft-spoken boy, raises his hand and steps forward. “What you want to do,” he says, quietly but clearly, “is stick the fork in the ground, step on it and turn it over.” He inverts a clump of dirt with a flourish. “Right?” he says, glancing at Lennie. “Good detail,” Lennie says approvingly. The crew falls to forking. It is hot and nearly time for lunch, a quiche Lennie made from the farm’s tomatoes.

CULTIVATING CONNECTIONS

Like all good local agriculture projects, the Food Project creates a community out of its workers and supporters, who become linked to each other through the raising and exchange of food. But the Food Project may be unique in the scope and depth of its

Members of Crew C plant beans under the hot summer sun.

dedication to its mission statement, “creating personal and social change through sustainable agriculture.”

Founded in 1991 by a local farmer named Ward Cheney, the Food Project aimed to bring teens from the city and suburbs together to farm and donate much of the harvest to charity. Today, the project farms 31 acres outside the rural town of Lincoln. It has also rehabilitated and is actively farming several plots around Boston, including the one Lennie’s crew is working in Dorchester, which was previously an abandoned lot filled with junked cars. More than a hundred teens participate each summer, and thousands volunteer year-round. Together, they produce a quarter-million pounds of vegetables annually, half of which is donated to hunger-relief organizations.

Throughout the summer, the social change component of the program’s mission statement becomes one of its most salient characteristics, as participants learn more about food sovereignty and industrial versus sustainable farming and encounter hunger and poverty firsthand.

Tyree Saunders, 14, is from the neighborhood of Mattapan, a predominantly black neighborhood home to many families who recently emigrated from the Caribbean. He says he applied to work with the Food Program because his mother wanted him to get a summer job. (Participants are paid a stipend, which makes the program competitive with other summer jobs the kids might take.) “I thought I was going to be with cows,” says Tyree, a wiry, voluble young man with his hair in cornrows, who wants to be a veterinarian, and whose first choice was getting a job at the zoo. “But then I walked out and there was this huge field. I thought we wouldn’t be doing back-crushing labor, but we did.”

That back-crushing labor, however, gives participants a much closer look at things they might not otherwise see: the amount of labor required to grow food and the many ways fresh produce can be prepared. Each week, a chef from a well-known local restaurant teaches participants how to prepare some of the food they are growing. The crews use these lessons, along with part of the harvest, to make a meal for a local shelter or soup kitchen.

Since beginning the program, Tyree says he has considered becoming a chef. One of his most recent dishes, using carrots from a recent harvest, was a carrot, peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. Recently, his crew prepared lunch for the residents of the Pine Street Inn, one of Boston’s largest homeless shelters. “I’d never really seen homeless people before,” Tyree says. He was impressed by how ordinary everyone seemed. “People could be rich and high society and then their lives could go straight down.” It also gave him a context for the group’s hard work. “The Food Project seems so little but does so much,” he says. “One day’s harvest can feed everyone in this shelter.”

By spending time with the people they are helping to feed, participants begin to understand how food is directly connected to the well-being of the body as well as of the community. Rudeana Silas (known as Rudy), 16, of Dorchester, says that the program helped her learn more about healthy eating, which had never been a priority in her family.

Like Tyree, she feels that taking their food to service agencies brought home a certain truth about the fundamental necessity of their work. “I think that doing the shelters is like full circle,” she says. “We do the growing, the harvesting, the wash stations, and then to the shelter. And so you see: This is how it happens.”

MAKING THE SALE

While Lennie’s crew finishes cultivating the bean patch in the sun, the crew of a young woman named Lynette Corea huddles in the shade of a giant tree, brows furrowed, trying to distinguish between bunches of purple basil, lemon basil and Thai basil.

Rudy Silas sells squash to an eager customer

In addition to fieldwork and working at local shelters, each crew takes a turn running one of the project’s weekly farmers markets, for which they are given a crash course in the rudiments of vegetable identification, customer service and making change. Today Lynette’s crew will be taking a turn, and over the course of the morning, they rotate through several stations tackling such challenges as whether someone can pay for produce with WIC, or Women, Infants and Children Program for nutrition benefits (yes), or what to do if someone speaks to you in a language you don’t understand (“Just point to the price on the price board,” offers Lynette).

“What do you do if the customer complains that you’re going too slow?” Lynette asks.

“Say, ‘Sorry ma’am, we’re going as fast as we can,’ ” suggests a lanky boy with a baseball cap on backward.

“What if people complain that the prices are too high?” Lynette asks.

“Tell them that the farmers have to make a profit, too,” says one girl.

“Tell them that the food is grown with sustainable methods,” says another boy. “We’re offering a different product than you would get in the grocery store.”

“Right, and tell them the food was just picked this morning!” Lynette says. “This is a good time to educate them.”

The group has a couple of hours before it is time to set up for market, and after lunch they return to the plot for a little last-minute work with the Hulahoe, a hoe with a blade in the shape of a loop that makes weeding much faster. Their upcoming stint at the market weighs on some of them, however, like Arcadio Leonard-Campos, 15, a shy, handsome teenager who says he is reluctant to strike up conversations with strangers.

Rudy Silas, working a row with Arcadio, absorbed enough basic economics over the past few weeks to support farmers markets in principle. “We learned how farmers and supermarkets don’t really work together,” she says, worrying the Hulahoe back and forth under the soil. “If a farmer brings a head of lettuce to a supermarket, the market will sell it for $1.50 and the farmer will only make 12 cents.” So the farmers market, she says, with its higher profit margins, “is a good hustle for farmers.”

But like Arcadio, she admits to a bit of anxiety over actually working at one. “I’m kind of scared,” she says. “The whole idea of trying to get people interested when their mind is focused on something else?” She raises her eyebrows skeptically.

The market is held at a local plaza, a small concrete peninsula at an intersection not far from the urban farm. By 3 p.m., as the crew bustles around putting the finishing touches on buckets of wildflowers and fragrant bundles of basil, a knot of curious onlookers is already prodding the vegetables and inspecting the price chart. So eager are they to begin shopping that the market’s official opening slips past unnoticed, the crew members feverishly bagging and weighing produce and bantering with the customers like old hands.

“It’s pretty hot, huh?” says Russell Weiss-Irwin, 16, to an elderly man with a handful of cucumbers. A woman who waited for half an hour for the market to open flags down Rudy. “I want a bunch of collard greens,” she says, and Rudy scoops up a dewy bunch from atop a pile.

“You know how to cook them, right?” Rudy offers enthusiastically, without a hint of her previous nerves. “With a bunch of butter and vinegar?”

“That’s a great shirt, ma’am,” Russell says to a woman wearing a T-shirt that reads, “Save the Planet, It’s the Only One With Shopping Malls.” At the edge of the stand, Arcadio tallies shoppers’ totals on a pad of paper, peripheral yet still a part of the action. He is sweaty and wears a smudge of topsoil on his nose, but he looks utterly content.

SOWING SUCCESS

While the Food Project is a terrific education in local food systems, the other part of its mission statement—“creating personal change”—is also remarkable. In addition to their training in sustainable farming, youth program participants take workshops in diversity, gender and sexual orientation, money management (for many, this is the first time they

Crew D members show off their homegrown greens.

have received a paycheck) and public speaking. They are held to a set of rigorous standards for behavior and attitude—no swearing; no horsing around with equipment or food; no wearing sunglasses at work, to encourage eye contact—and may be docked pay or even fired for transgressions.

They also participate in weekly “straight talk” sessions with their crews, in which the entire group gives “direct, constructive feedback” to each participant in turn, says Michael Iceland, the project’s outreach coordinator. Staff enforce the rules while encouraging open-mindedness (“Disagreement is not a bad thing, even though it can be uncomfortable,” reads one set of guidelines. “Not everyone can or should share the same point of view.”)

This combination of structure and openness, along with the shared goals of fieldwork, has a striking effect on the program’s teenagers. It manages to unify an age group not known for tolerance and to create a culture of acceptance among its various participants—upper and lower class, with different races and ethnicities, from public and private schools—one that not only tolerates such differences but also appears to warmly embrace them.

The differences are evident even from casual observation. For teenagers, the crews are exceedingly harmonious, without cliques, social jockeying or the constant low-grade hazing that often goes with that age group. And there is something else, a sense of relief almost, that emerges in conversations with participants, as if they feel the freedom, finally, to begin to articulate who they are.

Arcadio, who says he applied to the project because he “wanted to build up my vocal skills,” and who recently completed one of the Food Project’s workshops in public speaking, says that he found it much easier to overcome his shyness here than at his high school. “The Food Project is a really welcoming environment,” he says. “It’s very supportive.” On the other hand, he says, “School is a social structure. If I mess up there, they’re going to see me that way.”

Russell says he appreciates how the program mixes participants from many backgrounds. “Even though there are kids of color in my school, it’s still white-dominated, so the kids of color assimilate,” he says. “Here, there’s assimilation, but it happens both ways. It’s a cultural exchange.”

The project’s website includes a quote from the writer Wendell Berry: “There is another way to live and think: it’s called agrarianism. It is not so much a philosophy as a practice, an attitude, a loyalty and a passion—all based in close connection with the land.” Indeed, the program’s premise is quite Berrian. “Connection is health,” Berry wrote in “The Body and the Earth.”

And that is precisely what these kids are learning: the many ways that food is connected to daily life, and the ways that they themselves are connected to this system, but also the ways that they are connected to each other. In the context of farmwork, the lofty goals of social and personal change seem as attainable, and as ordinary and essential, as the crates of tomatoes and eggplants hauled in from the fields.

Lennie, assistant leader of Crew C, says it another way. “When you work in the field with someone, you see the physical side of that person. In diversity training and workshops, you see the emotional side.” Through both of these, he says, you get to know someone in ways you might never have otherwise. “You see what to say to that person,” he says, “how to talk to them. You see how you would trust them.”

CHANGING OVERNIGHT

On a Friday morning midway through the summer, the entire program—some 60 teenagers, as well as interns and staff—gather at the farm outside of Lincoln, Mass., for a sleepover. The train car on the 30-minute ride from Boston, for which the MTA donates part of the fare, is stuffed with sleeping bags and outdoor gear, and spirits are high. Tyree Saunders has brought a fishing pole.

Members of Crew C serve lunch made with ingredients they grew themselves.

Half of Lennie’s crew is on lunch duty. They spend the morning in the kitchen of a church in nearby Concord, meticulously dicing zucchini and squash and slathering chicken breasts with honey-mustard sauce. Ralph, whose task is to prepare the cilantro, delicately picks apart a stalk, leaf by leaf, scowling in concentration.

“Ralph, you can probably go faster than that, right?” Lennie says. “Can I ask you to? Just remember,” he adds, “you’re going to be eating this later.”

“That’s true,” Ralph mutters after a moment.

At the end of the morning, when the chicken emerges from the ovens, golden and steaming, Lennie cuts up a piece for his crew to sample. A 15-year-old named Keron Cruz, who spent most of the morning painting chicken breasts with sauce, is ecstatic. “We made that!” he crows. “I made that!”

Ralph snaps a towel in celebration. “We made the main dish!” he says.

After lunch, which is served by the chefs, all the crews gather in a field for what the staff calls “the ice cream game.” Without knowing what the game entails, each participant picks the flavor of ice cream they prefer—chocolate, vanilla or strawberry. But the game is actually an exercise in community dynamics, not just dessert.

Teams are grouped based on their flavor preferences and given the goal of building model communities out of paper, tape and cardboard. They are allotted varying amounts of space and resources to mimic the percentages of the global population who are wealthy, middle class or poor. So a very few receive most of the group’s resources and have a large space to work in, while the majority receive very little and are cramped into small spaces. They’re also hassled by “police” and “housing authorities,” played by staff. At the end, the staff judges the quality of the results. As Henry Masters, academic year program coordinator explains it, “The wealthy, white community with the most space, materials and money always wins.”

As the game gets under way and teams begin to assemble, the group that drew the poverty card sits shoulder-to-shoulder on the ground, in a small square delineated with tape. They are leaning on each other and chatting seriously but easily. As they prepare for their role as a microcosm of global socioeconomics, they have about them an air of unified determination. They look ready.