Slivers of mid-morning sun shone through the windshield of my family’s ancient minivan as we pulled up to an unfamiliar driveway just past the interstate highway in South Salt Lake. My mom turned down the radio and reached for a crumpled Post-it with an address scrawled on it in cursive.
“Well…” She hesitated. “I think this is it.”
I craned my neck to look for a sign somewhere along the sidewalk, and just as we started to get out of the car, a woman appeared at the gap in the fence, strawberry-blonde hair tucked into a dusty baseball cap. “Hi!” she exclaimed. “Are y’all here for the farm tour?”
Amidst scorched asphalt accented by patches of grass and a chain-link fence, a flourishing oasis came into view: rows of fresh compost, a buzzing apiary, and raised beds overflowing with eggplant, Thai basil, peppers, and garlic. This is Real Food Rising, a community garden tucked away on just over an acre of restored urban land. Though it might seem a little out of place, Real Food Rising has, over the past three years, begun to open pathways for otherwise disenfranchised youth to shape their environment by growing and harvesting sustainable produce.
A group of teenage crew workers stand in the Real Food Rising farm plot; photo courtesy Kitchen Gardeners International.
Despite the fact that it is housed mere minutes from my old high school, my path to Real Food Rising started not in Salt Lake City but in Boston, where an organization called the Food Project has been running sustainable agriculture and youth development programs for high school students since 1992. The Food Project hires young people from a wide range of backgrounds and neighborhoods to work on urban and suburban organic farm plots throughout the Boston area, providing more than 250,000 pounds of fresh produce each year to local residents through farm stands and community-sponsored agriculture shares. Headquartered in historic Dudley Square, a predominantly Black neighborhood that has experienced numerous forms of intense disinvestment, the Food Project aims to increase access to affordable, healthy foods, and donates about a quarter of their annual harvest to hunger relief organizations. On top of all this, youth involved in the Food Project participate in workshops on the food system, developing a critical understanding of their own diverse cultural, racial, class, and gender identities before going on to lead similar conversations amongst their peers and community members.
Mike Evans believes fiercely in the Food Project’s model – so much so that after spending six years as the organization’s Youth Program Coordinator, he brought the idea to Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah. Evans sees the field of urban agriculture as a unique microcosm that illuminates – and grapples with – the deep connections between social justice and sustainable food. In a country where farming is inextricable from a history of African slavery and where food access falls along lines of racial and economic privilege, examining structural oppression as it relates to agriculture seems inevitable. Yet Evans senses resistance to such discussions among many White food activists, who often see the food system and social justice as two separate issues. “For some folks, they’re like, well, we’re actually pushing the envelope as it is, and you’re asking me to push it in this other direction,” Evans says, noting that those involved in sustainable agriculture tend to consider themselves fringe thinkers to begin with.
Program director Mike Evans leads Real Food Rising youth in farm work; photo courtesy KSL News.
When Evans began his work with Urban Roots in Austin and Real Food Rising in Salt Lake, he noticed that there was less willingness to delve into these complexities: his co-founders and new colleagues were far more comfortable talking about food cultivation separate from any broader social implications. Few were prepared to consider the role of race, class, and gender at the level Evans had wanted to see. Partly, this reflects a different timeline – each of these programs is new, while the Food Project has had two decades to get its bearings – but it also speaks to staff demographics. Over the years, the Food Project has been able to secure enough funding to ensure that its staff members mirror youth in terms of socioeconomic status, gender, and racial and cultural identities. Real Food Rising and Urban Roots, on the other hand, have so far had to rely significantly on programs like AmeriCorps. These financial challenges often mean that Real Food Rising and Urban Roots are staffed primarily by upper middle class White women, like the ones I met on my visit to the farm that summer morning. “Not that that is bad,” Evans says, emphasizing that there is a place for all people in the movement to build a better food system. “But I think it’s our responsibility to think deeply about it…think deeply about it regularly.”
Evans’ dedication to conscientiously supporting the youth in these programs – privileged and marginalized alike – stems from a long-term interest in dismantling various systems of oppression. When Evans got to Dartmouth College in 1996, he had one goal: “I wanted to major in anti-discrimination.” Having been inspired in his high school days by a summer youth program designed to teach students about the impact of racism, sexism, homophobia, and cultural diversity in society, Evans ended up pursuing a degree in African American Studies. After four years studying Black history and Black issues as a White man, he was familiar with the inevitable skepticism, raised eyebrows, and refrains of “what are you gonna do with that?” But what happened next took him by surprise: when a job with a social justice-oriented afterschool program fell through, he found himself on a farm. After that fateful summer, Evans began work as a crew leader for the Food Project – and the rest, as they say, is history.
In his own journey, from Dartmouth and Boston to Austin and Salt Lake (and back East to Williams College, where he now works in the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives), Evans emphasizes the role of personal growth when it comes to productively recognizing inequality. He believes a lot of his progress has come from actively choosing to attend conferences, workshops, and classes where anti-discrimination is central to the overall mission. For Evans, navigating these issues means going against the mainstream. From his own experiences taking that risk, he has learned to be attuned to other people’s capacities for growth in these conversations, as well as to his own needs as a lifelong learner. But he also recognizes that in order to sustain this kind of learning, community is essential: “Find someone, or a culture, to fall into to get that continual training and that continual support.”
Though Real Food Rising and Urban Roots have a lot of room to grow, it’s clear that they are already starting to develop this critically supportive culture in their respective food scenes. As for Mike Evans? He is bringing what he’s learned to the terrain of educational administration, pushing for an intersectional approach to Environmental Studies, and thinking deeply about all of it, regularly.