Veterans Grow Food for Profits and for Themselves
In the shade of a towering fig tree, a florist’s order is ready for pickup from the Vets’ Garden: one bucket of ivy, one of silver-dollar eucalyptus, three scented geraniums and one of white-flowered buddleia. Further back on the lush property are rows of spicy red mustard, delicate gourmet lettuce and late-blooming basil, which veterans sell to local restaurants.
At the 15-acre garden in West Los Angeles, about 30 outpatients from the nearby Veterans Affairs Medical Center are paid for their work out of garden profits, gain job skills and are allotted their own small plots to farm as they wish. Some sell their crops independently of the Vets’ Garden, others take the produce home to their families.
To organizers of what is billed as a national conference on food security today at UCLA, the Vets’ Garden is an important success story.
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More than 200 people, from farmers to government policymakers to anti-hunger activists, are scheduled to attend the three-day conference addressing issues as broad and complex as the lack of supermarkets in inner cities, the effect of welfare reform on hunger and food banks, and pressure on small farmers to surrender their land for suburban development.
Conference organizer Andy Fisher, director of the 3-year-old Venice-based national Community Food Security Coalition, defined the notion of “food security” as universal access to adequate food without reliance on handouts.
“It’s kind of a economic development approach to addressing food needs,” Fisher said. “It’s not about charity or about giving away food, it’s about how do we build people’s own capacity to meet their own food needs.” Gathering in Los Angeles to address the burgeoning problem of food security makes sense, he said.
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Robert Gottlieb, a professor of urban environmental studies at Occidental College who will moderate a panel on federal food policies, said Los Angeles is an ideal site for the conference.
“L.A. is playing a very special role as an incubator for the innovative things that are going on” regarding food security, he said.
Among the city’s efforts was the creation in June 1996 of the nonprofit Los Angeles Food Security and Hunger Partnership. That organization is concentrating on the potential crisis of an estimated 100,000 county residents--most of them legal immigrants--who lost their federal food stamp benefits Sept. 1 under welfare reform.
The partnership’s chairman, Steve Saltzman, said the conference comes at a crucial time for his organization, which is awaiting word on how the mayor’s office wishes to be involved in a city- and countywide effort to fortify supplies at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.
Conference participants can also tour several projects today that combine the goals of community-building, access to quality food and job training. Besides checking out the Vets’ Garden, conference-goers will visit Homeboy Bakeries in Boyle Heights, which employs at-risk youths, and Fine’s Market, also in Boyle Heights, which provides van service to and from the market for those without transportation.
