Intro to an EJ movement in Atlanta
Good Food Green City
Good Food Green City is an organization that I worked with for years and is a wonderful example of an environmental justice movement in Atlanta. Working with the community's youth it aims to combat food deserts by working with Teenagers, mainly in the Summerhill and Pittsburg areas, to teach them how to cultivate food and community. There are a number of varying activities such as working on raised beds and food forests, learning various methods to compost, learning what good soil looks like and tests to ensure quality and even learning how to grow mushrooms. Today we are here with Jason Rhodes, a director at GFGC and the main person the youth in the program interact with.
My favorite quote from this interview is “But I didn't wanna spend my whole career just, you know, showing, you know, proving why things are the way they are. I was interested in, you know, being a part of community-based solutions to the problems that I was documenting.” - Jason Rhodes
Transcription:
Kio:
<music> Hello everyone. This is Nature! The Serious, The Fun, a blog page on Good Food Green City and today will be adding to our environmental justice page. I'm Kio Whitten I am the person that runs this blog, a student at Emory University and a manager and planner at Good Food Green City. And today we are joined by my director who can introduce himself.
Jason:
Hey, Kio. And hey everyone, it's a pleasure to be here. My name is Jason Rhodes. I teach geography at Kennesaw State University, and I'm the director of Good Food Green City, which is an environmental justice project here in Atlanta. We pay young people, primarily high school students to, to learn how to grow healthy food in our communities.
Kio:
All right. Could you tell me a little bit more about how Good Food Green City got started and how you originally got involved and like was it a difficult or fun process? I would just like to know more about it.
Jason:
Sure. So I'm an urban geographer and my dissertation research deals with the roots of redlining in the city of Atlanta. And probably most of your listeners are familiar with redlining, but, but basically redlining is a process where, I mean, essentially in the, in the 1930s, the federal government looked at every city in the United States, big cities, small cities, and what neighborhood by neighborhood asking the question, which neighborhoods are, are good risks or are suitable for, for mortgage loans.
Jason:
And if you look at these maps, there's a map for Atlanta that was set in 1938. They divided Atlanta into 111 different neighborhoods and gave them a, gave each neighborhood a grade A, B, C, or D, And the government's logic about which neighborhoods were considered good risks for mortgage loans was exclusively, was literally the, the question the government was asking is how socially exclusive is your neighborhood?
Jason:
I mean, they, they, they're so blunt about this in the report so that the neighborhoods that were considered good for mortgage loans were, were exclusively white, but not just exclusively white, but also made up only of single-family residential homes, apartments. If you had apartments in your neighborhood that meant you were not a good, you know, a good candidate for, for mortgage loans. And this became really crucial after World War II, when the government guaranteed mortgages and basically told the, the banks, we want everybody to, you know, buy a home.
Jason:
If you make a loan and the people pay it back, that's your profit. If they don't, we'll guarantee your failed mortgages. And that's what made homeownership. If you were white, it became very easy, it was actually cheaper to buy a brand new home than it was to keep paying rent on your old home.
Jason:
And, and what the reason why that's significant to Good Food Green City is because if you look at maps today that show you where the food deserts are in Atlanta, and food deserts are communities where people live, you know, more than a mile away from a place that sells fresh produce. So if your community is one where if you're trying to get food, it's gonna be a convenience store on the corner as opposed to a grocery store with lots of fresh produce. If you look at where the food deserts are in, in Atlanta today, those neighborhoods are the exact same neighborhoods that were redlined back in the 1930s.
Jason:
And so, you know, it's been said that those redlining prophecies about neighborhoods where the ultimate example of self-fulfilling prophecies, you know, if you shower one neighborhood with, with federally guaranteed mortgages and starve the other neighborhood of of home loans, it's not really, it's pretty obvious, you know, what's gonna happen.
Jason:
And so at, you know, as a professor at Kennesaw State, you know, I was interested in Yes. Demonstrating, you know, kind of trying to come to the root, look at the roots of why we have the geographies of privilege and exclusion that we have here in Atlanta. But I didn't wanna spend my whole career just, you know, showing, you know, proving why things are the way they are. I was interested in, you know, being a part of community-based solutions to the problems that I was documenting.
Jason:
And, you know, while doing that, you know, I became increasingly interested in the potential of sustainable agriculture to, you know, address climate change and water security and food security. And so the idea that we could, you know, find money to pay students to, to try to transform these landscapes of scarcity in food insecure neighborhoods in Atlanta into landscapes of abundance and have fun doing it, was something that I got excited about.
Jason:
There was a great opportunity, I guess it was about five years ago, maybe six years ago when, when the Atlanta Braves sold Turner Field to Georgia State University. There was a lot of community organizing around that and basically saying, you know, our neighborhoods, you know, through redlining and through all of Atlanta's, you know, basically racist development practices, every time there's a major development in the city, neighborhoods like, you know, where we work, Summer Hill and Pittsburgh and Mechanicsville have always, you know, basically taken it on the chin and the, the residents of these communities said, there's gotta be something for us in this.
Jason:
And so they created a 5 million dollar development fund called the Stadium Neighborhoods Community Trust Fund. And that was to fund projects that were done by and for people who live in these neighborhoods. And so, because I live in Summerhill, I was able to, you know, basically write up the idea of let's, let's pay young people and let's grow healthy food.
Jason:
And I was able to get a grant. And you know, since then we've, it's always, I'm always trying to find money, but we've always been able to do it. And I'd also, you know, I'd like to say that I think it's crucial that we, that we do pay young people. I think by, you know, by paying young people, it, it means, I mean, for one, it's of course saying that we value their time, but also there are students who, if it wasn't a paid position, they might be at Chick-fil-A or McDonald's, you know, in other words, they, they need to make money.
Jason:
And you can simply by not paying for people's time, you can wind up skewing who winds up participating so that you wind up with more privileged students participating and excluding people who may, might be the ones who would benefit the most from it. And we didn't wanna replicate the kinds of exclusionary practices that, you know, that we're trying to address in the first place. And so paying, you know, paying the students and making it a good paying job is something that has been, you know, has been important to us from the, from the beginning.
Kio:
Wow, that's really amazing to hear. Like how it all started. Of course, I joined in a bit late [but joined]due to another student who joined, her name was Zanobia and she told me about it, I believe senior year of high school. 'cause definitely after Covid and stuff, I was semi-missing. Being with people in the outdoors instead of just like alone. And to be able to join a program like this was extremely helpful for me just because I wasn't, I haven't been able to work on a garden with people except like middle school.
Kio:
We had a gardening program at my school. So I was definitely craving that type of community. So I'm really, really grateful that a program like this was here and that you would be able, that you were able to be my director as well. I think, I don't know, I think I see you more as like a, a mentor and a friend. I've been really grateful to have worked with you all these years. I wanted to ask, like, I think that Good Food Green City has accomplished a lot in the time I've worked there. What else do you hope for Good Food Green City to accomplish like in the next few years?
Jason:
You know, I mean, for one, I always always feel a huge sense of accomplishment. Just, just being able to raise the money and keep it going. And I, and I do feel like, I think we've planted now seven small food forests and I don't, I don't know if all of your listeners are familiar with what a food forest is, but the idea of a food forest is that you're attempting to replicate the ecosystem and the nutrient cycling system of a natural forest. You know, not, not, it's not an exact replica, you know, for, for good reasons, but it's basically noticing that, you know, you look at forests and they, they produce such an abundant, such an abundance of plant life and they're able to keep going without the intervention of human labor.
Jason:
And the idea is, well, what if we can take lessons from the way that works and, and do that with an edible landscape?
Jason:
So, you know, a forest has multiple layers. You have the overstory of tall trees and the understory of shorter trees and bushes and vines and fungi and root crops. And, and so it's, it's looking at those layers and how they interact with one another and then creating an edible landscape, know root trees, nut trees, berry bushes and so on. And I think, you know what, what I really want to see happen with Good Food Green City is, you know, our approach especially, you know, for the first few years has basically been, you know, we worked a lot in the Southwest Atlanta neighborhood of Pittsburgh and kind of saying to people, you know, raise your hand if you'd like a food forest planted in your backyard.
Jason:
And then we come and we do that, you know, we want to continue to do that. We have so much fun doing it and it connects us to the community, but we also want to invite people to learn what we're doing and, and go do it themselves in their own backyards.
Jason:
So instead of, you know, having it be that, you know, now we have seven food forests and maybe next year we'll get to nine and 10, we, we'd like to have some community, you know, I dunno if you wanna call it a festival or, but a place where people can come and we can kind of showcase what we've done, teach people how to design a food forest for their own yard and then help them get the plants at no cost. You know, people who can afford to get the plants and make a donation to Good Food Good City, that's great. The people who have money to contribute, you know, would certainly be encouraged to do so.
Jason:
But we wanna make this freely available. But we'd, we'd love to have kind of educational days where 25 people go home and plant food forests in their backyard.
Jason:
I mean, we've been doing this for a few years and I think we've planted seven, which is a great accomplishment, but I think we can scale that up considerably, not by trying to, you know, now I think we've got 17 students in good food, Green City. It's the largest we've ever been. But for me, the goal is not to say, let's get 50 students, let's get a hundred students. 'cause I, you know, I can't manage that. I'd love for someone to come and look at what we're doing and say, I'm gonna go start my own. You know what I mean? I, but I can't, we, you know, the way we work and the kinds of projects that we operate on, it's not like we're trying to double the number of students or triple the number of students, but what I would like to do is to improve the way that we share our knowledge with the community so that people are basically taking the knowledge and getting plants in their hand.
Jason:
And, and we can see this multiply much more quickly in the next five years than, than we've done in the first, the first few years that we've been active.
Kio:
Right. That is amazing. I do believe that I would also love for Good Food, Good City to expand the same way. I really enjoyed that. Our last semester that we had, we had a kind of like a mini kind of learn tabling, like little event. We talked about chocolate justice, which we'll talk about later in this interview. We learned how to do or taught how to do verimi-composting, how to start your own mushrooms, those type of things. I think that is really helpful for the community.
Kio:
And I think more events like that would definitely have people learning how to cultivate their own food at home. And then I hope it spreads and spreads and spreads around Atlanta and hopefully around everywhere. Speaking about chocolate justice, I wanted to talk about how you, yourself are involved in multiple environmental justice movements around Atlanta, and specifically talking about chocolate justice as well.
Jason:
So I teach a class that kind of south state called resources, environment and society. And we do one unit on, on chocolate and specifically looking at cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate and where it comes from. And you know, the two countries that are the biggest producers of cocoa in the world are Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa, those two countries account for about two thirds of all the cocoa grown in the world. And you know, some other West African countries contribute about another 10% of that.
Jason:
So overwhelmingly, you know, the main ingredient of our, the chocolate that most of us eat from time to time comes from West Africa. And the, and you know, the, you can't understand the chocolate industry, you know, without understanding its roots. And, you know, it was in, so it was around 1900 that at that time the biggest cocoa producers in the world were these two islands off the coast of West Africa called São Tomé and Príncipeand the western newspaper reporters discovered that the cocoa was being produced under conditions of slave labor.
Jason:
And that was a huge scandal, especially because, for example, Cadbury, which is still one of the largest chocolate companies in the world, that's a British company, the Cadbury, the Cadbury family is a Quaker Christian family. And they, they, you know, presented themselves to the world as, you know, good capitalists. And there was some, you know, there was some truth in what they, you know, in other words, they had a company town, you know, which on the one hand of course, is everything owned by the company. It's paternalistic. It's, it's hardly like freedom, but they paid workers more than, you know, their, their wages were higher and they invested in nice schools for the children of the workers.
Jason:
And, you know, their company town had a beautiful park. And, you know, so they, they tried to show that, hey, you know, capitalism doesn't have to be miserable conditions that, you know, that it's so easy to find both then and now.
Jason:
We're, we, we do things differently was, you know, it was kind of their message, but then it was discovered that the main ingredient of their product was actually produced by slaves and people who have kind of dug into this at, you know, Cadbury's response was, oh, we didn't know. We're shocked. And actually it turns out that the family had been wrestling with that issue for like 15. They were well aware of what was going on and didn't, didn't know how to deal with it. But, you know, so it was like in 1900 that there was this international scandal of, you know, did you know that the chocolate you're eating is made being made by slaves?
Jason:
And the, the industry responded by moving cocoa production from those two islands to western Africa, which is where it still is. And, you know, switch, switching the method of labor from just literally straight up slavery where you bought people and you know, put them to work and to one that was still very much unfree because under colonial conditions, basically the colonial governments had strategies that, you know, the, the biggest one was by saying that you had to pay your taxes in cash or else you would lose your land.
Jason:
And the only way you're gonna get cash is by selling the cash crop cacao. So you couldn't just grow food for your family anymore. And they also used, you know, violence and if you were trying to grow something else, they might destroy your crop. I mean, so, you know, but, but it wasn't just, it was exploitation, but it was a, a different shade than the, than, you know, what had been discovered in São Tomé and Príncipe.And then that went on for, you know, a hundred years later so that, you know, it was 1900 that you had the scandal.
Jason:
It was the year 2000 that there was a BBC documentary that discovered that children were working as forced laborers in, in West Africa, in Ghana and Ivory Coast. And that, again, a huge scandal. And the chocolate companies are, you know, oh, we're shocked. And, you know, politicians were involved and, and there was a group time put forward by hungry people and signed by <inaudible> in West Africa's called The Problem by 2005, we're gonna get rid of this child labor problem.
Jason:
And in 2005 they said, well, we need more time. We close to 2010. And 2010. We said, you know, it didn't until 2020 and before we even got to 2020, the industry just kind of started to say, you know, this problem is, you know, we're just chocolate companies and this problem is a problem of poverty. You certainly can't expect us to solve that a problem that big. You know, and, and so they've kind of backtracked and you know, just to, to be blunt, yes, it is a problem of poverty.
Jason:
And the poverty is the result of the fact that companies like Hershey's don't pay enough for their cacao beans. You know, they could rectify that. They're, they're the cause. But, but anyway, so yeah, I became interested in this issue and, and then there's a, there's a great young adult fiction novel called the Bitter Side of Sweet by Tara Sullivan.
Jason:
You know, it's fiction, but it's set in Ivory Coast and it centers on three children who are working as forced laborers who a cacao farm. And it's a story of their escape. So it's kind of an adventure story, you know, it's a story that a a ten-year-old, fifteen-year-old can, can read anyway. And so I got money and created, you know, started a, a book club where students who can come get paid to be there, and you know, they read the book, we eat Ethical Chocolate at every meeting and, and learn about where chocolate comes from.
Jason:
And, and then the students we did this last year, they created displays that, you know, illustrating what they learned over the course of reading the book and learning about chocolate. And we put those displays in some coffee shops and in one little grocery store, you know, in our communities and, you know, basically, and with a QR code to our, the social justice page of Good Food Green City's website and kind of inviting people to, to join a campaign for justice in the chocolate industry.
Jason:
And, you know, we're basically asking people to do three things. And one is, you know, when you, when you buy chocolate, don't buy chocolate that is, you know, made by the big chocolate companies. There are companies, one is called Tony's Chocolate only. You can easily find Tony's chocolate. And it's not that expensive. So make an ethical decision when you buy chocolate is one. And then if you really wanna make a difference, then when you do buy chocolate, you know, let a company like Hershey's know, Hey, I bought chocolate today and I didn't buy Hershey's because I don't wanna support the, you know, your practices in West Africa.
Jason:
I made a different choice. I think if, you know, if people can figure out a way to, to get a message to Hershey's, and on our website, we have their contact information, whether you wanna do email or Instagram or, you know, however you wanna reach out to them and let them know.
Jason:
And then the last thing is we've connected with a project in Ghana also, you know, started by a high school teacher there. And I think very similar to Good Food Green City, because he is paying high school students or he money to pay high school students to grow oyster mushrooms, which is something that we've done at Good Food, Green City and Ghana has a big coconut industry in addition to their cacao industry. And the industry just throws the, this, the coconut husks into landfill.
Jason:
But those coconut husks are actually a great growing medium for oyster mushrooms. And so this teacher and students are, are growing oyster mushrooms using the waste from the coconut industry. So anyway, on our, we've got information about their project , but we also have a fundraiser for them. And you know, we also ask that when people buy chocolate, they think about sending just a dollar to that project so that, you know, what we typically do when we buy chocolate is unknowingly without, you know, without thinking about it or without being aware of it, we're actually harming people inWest Africa by participating in this exploitative industry.
Jason:
And instead maybe when we buy chocolate, we can actually consciously help people make a connection them. And so that's that we're, we're doing <inaudible> same <inaudible> what we're doing our second one, now we've got our students, I think 12 or 13 students show up every time. And, you know, we, we have fun and I think the students also appreciate getting paid to read a great book and eat chocolate.
Jason:
It's not, it's not a bad deal.
Kio:
Right. Well thank you so much for joining today, Jason. I think that concludes our interview. You gave wonderful information about Good Food, green City and Chocolate Justice, and I definitely hope people will take a listen and join either of our movements, especially donating for the Chocolate Justice movement. But yes, thank you so much for joining.
Jason:
Thank you. So this was, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
Kio:
Of course.