TED Talk by Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA

This is fantastic. I dabbled in guerrilla gardening this summer, rather poorly, as you can see here. This guy is my hero.

Bio

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”

Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central L.A.’s food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating.

Our Broken System…

“Many of our country’s systems are in need of repair…education system…health care system…energy system…financial system…

But there is another system that gets much less attention than it deserves, even though we all rely on it to keep us alive – if we are lucky, three times a day: our food system. When a system we depend on to meet essential needs isn’t working, the consequences are enormous.The food system that evolved to bring us abundant food at low cost has grown out of control, nourishing us by destroying some of what we hold most precious: our environment, our health, and our future. The problems it has engendered – from agricultural chemical runoff in our rivers, streams, and oceans, to soaring rates of diet-related illnesses (such as diabetes) in our inner cities, to the loss of prime farmland due to urban and suburban sprawl, to corporate conglomeration that concentrates 80 percent of our meat supply in the hands of only four companies – are not isolated issued to be solved one by one. Rather they are symptoms of a food system that is broken and needs to be redesigned.”

That’s the first page of Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All by Oran B. Hesterman, the founder of the Fair Food Network. Well said. I’ll let you know what the rest of the book has to say.