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Holistic living
Cleanse Your Liver; Transform Your Life
by Lisa Jones
“All healing comes from the divine within. Hate, malice and jealousy only create poisons within the mind, soul and body. To be sure, attitudes do influence the physical conditions of the body; no one can hate his neighbor and not have liver trouble.” - Edgar Cayce
Young people in Southeast San Diego have been re-imagining what their school environment can look and feel like. As creative visionaries, they have been transforming the cement and asphalt canvases that they interact with everyday into verdant, edible landscapes. They have been busy reshaping the conditions of their community so that folks can learn about and have access to fresh, locally-grown food.
In partnership with San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project, The Seeds of Leadership (SOL) Youth Garden Program at Morse High School is an after-school gardening program connected with the Terra Nova Academy, which is a small learning academy focused on environmental science, nutrition and culinary arts. Every eight weeks, a new group of interns is accepted into the program where they learn how to care for a 4,000 square-foot organic garden. In learning how to build sustainable food communities, they also develop leadership skills in public speaking and cultural nutrition. The first year’s interns were paid for their work in the garden through a generous grant from the Women’s Foundation, and we hope to secure future funding so that young people can continue to be paid doing meaningful work in their community.
The teenagers range in age from 15-18 and come from the Southeast San Diego communities of Paradise Hills and Skyline, where there is little or no access to fresh, local produce, as there are no farmer’s markets nearby. The community is culturally diverse, comprised primarily of Filipino, Latino and African-American families. Over 25 percent of the households earn less than $20,000 annually, (based on a family of four), resulting in limited discretionary funds to travel to other areas of town to purchase fresh produce outside of their neighborhood.
As a part of the internship, SOL youth learn about food justice, or the right of every person, regardless of class, to have access to fresh, healthy and culturally-appropriate food. They also speak at neighborhood planning meetings and local schools to talk about this issue and encourage others in the community to participate in creating a more sustainable and equitable food system in Southeast San Diego. When these young people speak to the elders in the community about the garden they are growing and their vision for a healthier world, the adults are impressed by their knowledge and grasp of sustainable agriculture. Many of the adults remember the Victory Gardens grown during WWII to compensate for the food shortages at the time. This synergy of dialogue and hope is an artistic act and what happens in places such as school gardens and farms are stories waiting to be unearthed.
This summer, six interns planted Heirloom Tomatoes, Middle Eastern and Marketmore Cucumbers, Summer and Winter Squashes, Sweet and Hot Peppers, Chinese Eggplants, and various beans such as Royal Burgundy, Kentucky Blue, and Dragon’s Tongue. Words come alive and young people learn that there’s more than one kind of carrot you can grow. A teenager’s eyes widens when pulling a carrot out of the earth, exclaiming slowly with awe, “coooooool!”
What happens when food literacy gets reintroduced into the school curriculum? It is an empowered and artistic act of intention when something that we do three times a day without much thought becomes sacred again.
The SOL team gets an introduction to starting transplants from seeds and learns about propagation in our small, on-site greenhouse where many of the vegetables, culinary herbs and flowers get their start. This is a great space that really helps to focus the kids as they plant miniscule lettuce seeds into the seedling trays. When the weather is unusually warm, SOL interns run in and out of the greenhouse as the timed irrigation mister goes on for five minutes at a time throughout the day. Not only are they planting a garden, they’re in a safe place where they can experience the sensations of being alive on a spinning planet.
Once the seedlings are a couple of inches tall, the interns transplant the vegetable starts into various beds that are at least four feet wide and four feet long. They learn how to prep the beds by digging in compost made on-site from food scraps garnered from the campus restaurant, Hungry Tiger. Planting vegetables and herbs that will be used by the interns and other Morse High School students in cooking classes, as well as sold on campus at a weekly farm stand, encourages youth to think of themselves as producers rather than just consumers. In a society that teaches young people to be passive spectators rather than participants, growing food is a basic invitation back into a world that is full of creative and democratic possibility.
Morse High School students learn about buying seasonal produce when they ask for basil in the winter and the interns tell them they’ll have to wait until the summer when it can be grown. The vegetables, herbs and flower bouquets are sold at a reasonable price so that everyone can afford to buy fresh, healthy produce. The school would eventually like to see a weekly farmer’s market on campus where other growers can sell their produce as well. When the interns aren’t selling the produce to the community, they prepare meals in the Hungry Tiger restaurant, Terra Nova cooking classes, and for “Farm Feast” days in the garden where SOL interns sit down and share a meal after a long week of working and tending the soil together. This act of sitting down and sharing a meal has been called “revolutionary” by chef Alice Waters. In the collection of writings on sustainability, Ecological Literacy, Waters says: “Change the curriculum and teach children how to garden and how to cook, and we can show that growing food and cooking and eating together can give lasting richness, meaning, and beauty to our lives.”
What’s happening at Morse High School is part of a much larger social movement in this country that is bringing children back into the conversation that asks: what kind of world do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a world that teaches us that processed junk food, french fries, and sodas are actually good for us? Or do we want to nurture values of family meals, diversity, sustainability and local farms?
The only way we’re going to fight malnutrition and diet-related diseases is by calling forth the creative efforts of our young people. What can be more of a creative act than planting beans in freshly tilled soil and watching them grow?
We are all being called to flex that imaginative muscle of re-envisioning the world so that everyone can be invited to a table of fresh, locally-grown food and energized discussion about how to restore the land with school and community gardens. The SOL Youth Gardeners are helping to lead us in this delicious revolution.