Edible Dallas & Fort Worth Spring 2022

EDIBLE COMMUNITY

Restorative Farms Tackling t he C hallenge o f L asting F ood S ystem C hange

STORY & PHOTOGRAPHY RICK BARAFF

Left to right: Rick Bar- aff ( YES, me!), Kelly Joy Freeman, Rihard Lee, Brad Boa, Owen Lynch, Doric Earle, Ty- rone Day, Criss Lee at The Hatcher Station Training & Community Farm

S outh Dallas used to be full of vegetable gardens. For generations, the elders in the community made sure that people ate and shared quality foods grown right in their own backyards. People also bought fresh greens or canned vegetables from local farmers mar- kets. “My granny would tell me it was fields, dirt pastures, and homes along the boulevards,” says Charles Bryant, a Farm Asso- ciate with Restorative Farms, a nonprofit dedicated to building a self-sustaining urban farm system in South Dallas. South Dallas still has a lot of fields: empty ones where many of these homes used to sit. “A big reason was the crack epidemic,” says Tyrone Day, Restor- ative Farms’ co-founder, referring to the cheap street drug version of cocaine that turned many cities upside down in the 1980s. “The generation that still grew food in their home gardens was

dying out as crack hit South Dallas. The houses, the parks, the community got run down. Instead of vegetables on the ground, it was crack bags and needles. And that knowledge and sense of community was mostly lost.” Simultaneously, fast food got a stranglehold on less affluent neigh- borhoods, providing calorie-dense but unhealthy meals for cheap. Today, the North Texas Food Bank and other national organiza- tions recognize South Dallas as one of the largest food deserts in the country, a USDA designation for a place where a vast percent- age of the population has to travel long distances to procure fresh foods and often lacks transportation to do so. “A food desert is also a job desert. South Dallas needed job

EDIBLE DALLAS & FORT WORTH SPRING 2022 | 15