Finally, this is exactly what liberalism and the progressive movement should be about.

When relatively affluent liberals only march down the street to protest oppression halfway around the globe or to secure organic food for their own kitchens, they aren't helping the less fortunate and cant expect their co-operation.

This kind of local action could be the beginning of a movement that could actually make things better for everyone.

The Alice Garden, the Edible Garden, is at MLK middle school. Many of the other Berkeley schools, including Malcolm X, have different gardens with local people, not international foodie stars, putting in hours and hours to work with the children. LeConte even has farm animals, (at least they did when my kids were there). Many vollunteers beyond Alice bless the Berkeley/Oakland schools with gardens, salads and valuable lessons. Even Semifreddies the bakery teaches kids about good breads and how to bake with whole grains.

PS, the Berkeley schools are not segregated, the Berkeley neighborhoods are, but not the schools. We fought for many years to keep them integrated.

Urban Saints do this sort of thing. Quietly, but steadily, let's keep this up in Oakland and Detroit and Grand Rapids and everywhere else. Let us keep busy, and help out, and never feel guilty about our leaders' sins. Let us stay below their radr, and keep on keeping on.

God bless you, and all the other nice, busy people.

Isn't this what Cary Tennis is talking about in his recent "Racist ditty" column? Just doing something, participating in some small way, to make the world better.

When it's at home and in my community, it can bring about change in the only person I really have control over: Me.

If everyone worked for small changes in their own backyards, I think it'd be a lot easier to face the big challenges with some sense of solidarity.

I was 29, white, in the middle of a divorce, and desperately poor. I'd left my husband in the middle of the night while he was passed out drunk. I DID have a job, but no clothing, no car, nothing but a place to stay down in Richmond. I'd used all my paycheck to pay for that safe haven, and I had a bus ticket for work.

A young neighbor couple in my apartment house spoke to me in the halls. The woman and I talked about how scared I was to come home from work at night through the tough drunks that lined the sidewalk.

She asked me, "Why don't you come to the Panthers? They'll help you." I mentioned the sort of obvious fact that I was white. "You poor - that's all they care about!" And she hustled me down to the Center in Richmond.

They gave me two dresses, underwear, shoes. A table, a bed and a chair. Food. And the man delegated several of the youth to take turns meeting me at the bus stop and escorting me to the apartment door.

I will never forget, and I will never be able to repay enough.

Novella Carpenter ignores (deliberately?) the fact that Alice Waters set up the Edible Schoolyard in a nearby school of mixed race and economic status whose schoolyard was a wilderness. The fact that good food is so overwhelmingly an enthusiasm of the prosperous is merely a reflection of the food industry's total control of our food production and of the way that it is sold to the consumer.

Carpenter also perpetuates another myth. Gertrude Stein's remark, "There was no there there" was not a comment on Oakland, but a reaction to going back to the house where she had lived and finding that it had been destroyed.

To date, the most beautiful thing I've heard is a passage from the Narada-Bhakti Sutra:

"The World will be saved by people with tears streaming down their faces, voices choked with emotion, telling of their Love for each other."

Cheers

Salon should publish much, much more like this.

Trucker, thanks for sharing your story. It's a grey, murky day where I am, and suddenly it feels like the light has come in.

Why can't they pick their own damn greens? This organization should have long ago been shamed out of existense for its support of killing cops. I'm glad there are only last vestiges of this organization to write about. If it was your husband who'd been shot, you wouldn't go to the garden for these folks.

Please, please, please, check out this website and then purchase the two-volume set, either from the author or from Amazon.com:

http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/

I just ordered this book and received it last night, and was completely blown away by the time I got through the introduction. This is not just a gardening book, this is a bold vision for the future of the human species.

If you are looking for a low-maintenance, pesticide and fertilizer-free way to feed urban populations, open your eyes to a completely new concept of agriculture. Edible Forest Gardens operates on the concept that you can plant a carefully-chosen collection of perennial trees, shrubs, vines, and low-lying ground cover, or annuals that re-seed, that are specifically chosen for their ability to complement each other in a self-sustaining ecosystem, and that are ALL EDIBLE. It doesn't mean planting *in* a forest, it means creating your own forest by mimicking the self-sustaining aspects of a wild forest but doing it with edible plants.

It was written with the eastern US in mind, but it seems to me that the potential for this concept is even greater in California, where you can grow virtually anything. That said, the author freely admits that it will take years more of widespread experimentation and more scientific research on a wider variety of plants to perfect the methods described.

In other words, some plants "fix" nitrogen from the air and fertilize the soil, while other plants need nitrogen from the soil. So you plant those two varieties together--and we need to learn more about which varieties are which.

Many edible plants do not actually need full sun, so you don't need to uproot trees in a given area to grow food. You can grow food on vines that grow up into the trees.

Forestry gardening does mean you have to be willing to let go of the concept of growing the same things you typically find in a grocery store. It means embracing foods that were once the source of sustenance for pre-colonial Native Americans, foods like hog peanuts, purslane, and pawpaws. It also means letting go of neat little rows of vegetables all carefully labeled. But if you can get on board with that, it also means planting urban gardens that don't require hours and hours of maintenance, not to mention pesticides and methods of gardening that bear a large carbon footprint. The time and money expenses are all up front, in terms of research and planning. Take a couple of years or so planning and designing a space, and once you get it up and running, there's little else to do besides harvesting your food.

Please, if you like gardening and are interested in how to get fresh produce to the urban poor, you will not regret looking into this. And you might just save the planet in the process.