2011 Farm Stand Now Open!

We'll be selling fresh veggies beginning August 6th:
25th and Arapahoe, 10 a.m. to Noon
Every Saturday August 6th through October 22nd
Name your own price for produce! Help GreenLeaf Grow and thrive! Take home fresh organically grown veggies!

This week we'll have lots of lettuce, basil, zucchini and summer squash, kohlrabi, beans,  peppers, and more!

Re(posting): Re(doing) Food Justice

 Tomas, Andrew, and Mohamed weighing produce in Summer '10

I love this piece by Leticia Garcia, about (re)defining Food Justice in terms that celebrate the complexity of urban life and communities, and acknowledge the vital leadership coming from communities of people who are most impacted by poverty, racism, and food injustice.

Garcia challenges us to move beyond the "framework that defines 'healthy food' in proximity to euro-centric food values. Such race and class-blind projects encourage dependency on the dominant culture, rather than revolutionizing food access for communities on their own cultural terms."

It's an applied project, and requires more than just thinking about food and food access from the dominant perspective. In fact, as so often, operating from the dominant perspective won't result in the kinds of action or make the kinds of changes that are needed, because of the inherent bias and blindness that reinforces dominance. So working on Food Justice must be a community project:

"Changing how we perceive poverty can revolutionize how we approach food justice. It can change how activists (re)do food justice as a form of social justice. This (re)doing of food justice emphasizes two things: first, that food justice is an action or a form of social activism rather than just an idea; second, that being critical activists affords us an opportunity to call for a “redo” and change how food justice is done."

Check it out!

And let us know how YOU are (re)thinking and (re)doing food justice.



http://beyondthefarm.org/exploring/redoing-food-justice/

Wanna help GreenLeaf? Start the new year with a donation!

Happy New Year, everyone!

We're excited to make 2011 a very GreenLeaf-y year, and need your help to do it. Youth Agri/Cultural intern and GreenLeaf board member Grecia Saenz wrote this letter, asking for your support:

Dear friend,

I come from a family of cultivators. My mom started working the fields at age 8. She planted corn, beans and pumpkins. Over the course of her teenage years, her family depended on her and her smaller sisters to work in harsh fields with no shoes or tools.

While my mom grew up in an environment with little but organic food, I was raised in a fast food metropolis. The meals were made fast and cost so little. My mother wasn’t accustomed to that food so she avoided going to restaurants. She was, however, animated about so much food available anytime of the year and for so little.

In 10^th grade, I watched Food Inc. Learning where my food came from and who made it angered me. The produce is genetically engineered and the farm animals are raised in their own waste. But what hurt me the most was to see how the undocumented immigrants were treated. My mother worked in a farm where pesticides were used. The company would spray them while the immigrants worked. Many of the workers (including my mom) got sick. That this abuse was being practiced in the United States was wicked.

I wanted to fight this injustice but didn’t know how. In early weeks of June 2010 I was told that GreenLeaf was accepting new people. I was thrilled at the opportunity to join and spent a few days volunteering at GreenLeaf. I was an official employee a week later. Since then I have made new friends and learned more about food justice. I changed my eating habits and started educating my family about where the food we eat comes from.

I am ecstatic that GreenLeaf is expanding and creating a relationship with the communities around it. Being an important element in its success gives me something to be proud of. I hope that it grows into something much bigger escalating to different states and eventually to different countries. GreenLeaf reaches out to the youth in low-income neighborhoods. We educate people about the food they are eating and what they can do to eat healthier. We have participated with other organizations like Seed to Seed and taught them about the farm.

Building a relationship with our community and others allows us to expand. Our goal is to help people have access to healthy and organic food. To keep our little organization up and running we need donations. Please contribute to our farm and the youth in it and become a fighter against food injustice.

Sincerely,

                 

                  Grecia Saenz

Please donate to GreenLeaf today! We don't have web contributions set up yet, so please contact us at GreenLeafDenver@gmail.com  to learn how.