Abstract
Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen’s Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City is a welcome and needed addition to the growing body of literature on urban agriculture. As its title suggests, Beyond the Kale uses New York City (NYC) as a window to shine a light on the intangible benefits of and overlooked gardeners engaged in urban agriculture. Specifically, the authors describe their aim as “examining the structural roots of inequity and contributing an action-oriented dialogue about how urban agriculture can be (and is being) used to create socially just urban systems” (7). After discussing the political, economic, and social history of urban agriculture in NYC, they draw from twenty-one contemporary urban farming and community garden groups to discuss a variety of underreported impacts of urban agriculture; the organizational structures and social spaces these groups create; ways urban agriculture practitioners are contributing to policy change; power and privilege differences within NYC’s urban agriculture community; and the role that academics have played, and could, in researching urban agriculture movements.
The book will be useful to educators aiming to introduce a structural lens into food systems studies and professional planners interested in learning how and why urban agriculture can be a key tool for advancing progressive urban and regional planning. It also offers long-time city gardeners and urban agriculture organizations more effective ways of framing the work they do in broader political and social terms, while reminding new generations of well-intentioned urban agriculture enthusiasts, donors, and researchers about the culturally embedded nature, historical legacy, and social justice potential of farming in cities. Beyond the Kale, however, is not for readers looking for a definitive account of the impact urban agriculture has on topics commonly studied by other urban agriculture researchers and food planning scholars, such as food deserts and food access, food security, public health, green space, and incomes. Instead, Reynolds and Cohen join a small number of scholars in asking different questions of urban agriculture.
In their chapter “Growing More Than Just Food,” the authors discuss how urban agriculture can be a mechanism to resist cultural oppression, to refute notions that people of color are victims with no agency, and to demonstrate demand for fresh, local food in low-income communities of color. While they do not pretend that urban agriculture can be a cure-all for structural racism or generations of political disenfranchisement, they describe how the urban agriculture organizations featured offer a “starting point for a self-reliant movement” (41). Building on this theme, the chapter “Embodying Socially Just Systems” shows how these organizations act as models for creating more socially and politically just systems. In contrast to capitalist, patriarchal, and top–down systems, for instance, Reynolds and Cohen offer examples of urban agriculture groups experimenting with collaborative leadership structures, using popular education and critical pedagogy to help residents speak about oppression in other contexts, and drawing connections between the act of growing food and educational, political, and economic reforms. They also describe how many urban farms and community gardens offer safe spaces for women, queer youth, and young black men to question societal norms, rethink the structure of their food environments, gain a sense of self-efficacy, and recognize assets in their community.
In the chapter “Addressing Uneven Power and Privilege,” Reynolds and Cohen go on to argue that potential supporters of urban agriculture should be more aware of existing power imbalances within the movement. They discuss how low-income gardeners, cottage food preparers, and small-scale urban agriculture organizations face many challenges to securing the capital to scale up their operations—that is, to acquire needed equipment, comply with business and food safety regulations, and build their record keeping, grant writing, and evaluation skills. Being underresourced and having less organizational capacity to begin with then creates a vicious cycle, as private and public funding tends to support and further strengthen entrepreneurs and organizations with greater capacity—those that too often are newer to (if not temporarily located in) the communities where they work, with white, middle-class leadership.
One of the major gaps Beyond the Kale fills in the urban agriculture literature relates to policy change. In the chapter “Cultivating Policy,” the authors show how many urban agriculture groups are reframing the food policy discussion—such as dominant narratives about food deserts and a lack of grocery stores—to one about poverty, unemployment, and historic disparities in public and private resources. Reynolds and Cohen also document a “cross fertilization of movements” (78)—ways that NYC urban agriculture groups bolster causes being led by other advocacy groups, including affordable housing, environmental racism, poverty, unemployment, and gender discrimination. Furthermore, the authors apply a useful framework of “everyday makers” (Bang and Sorensen 1999) and “everyday resistances” (Wekerle 2004)—the idea that day-to-day acts and community-level activities “either reinforce or challenge existing policies or normalize activities that might otherwise be considered inappropriate . . . [by] ignoring and bending rules to draw attention to ineffective or unfair policies” (87). As the book showcases, this can mean that individuals growing food on abandoned lots, composting, keeping bees, and carrying out other regular gardening activities may not intend to change policy. As these activities become more common and demonstrate multiple benefits, however, advocates can point to them as precedents to illustrate why policy should change to officially sanction and even expand urban agriculture.
Reynolds and Cohen’s chapter “Rethinking Scholarship to Advance Social Justice” completes the book by making the case for more collaborative research in urban agriculture. Their argument serves as a good reminder to scholars to advance more structural understandings of the food system and to give due credit to ideas emerging from practitioners in urban agriculture, building on a long history and theory of community-based participatory action research. It also points to important ways researchers could leverage their privilege to co-create knowledge, help diverse food system stakeholders find more common ground, and advocate for the support of more social justice–oriented urban agriculture work.
In sum, Beyond the Kale demonstrates what has been overlooked in much of the coverage and understanding about today’s urban agriculture movement. Efforts to increase the visibility of urban agriculture in the USDA Census of Agriculture, the more recent USDA Local Food Survey, and the Urban Agriculture Act of 2016, for instance, are still quite profit-driven to capture the long-existing and rapidly growing small-scale and social justice–focused urban farms and gardens that are the focus of this book.
If the growing number of interested foundations, academics, and urban planners could adopt many of the ideas put forth in Beyond the Kale, they could pick up where the book leaves off. For instance, while there are ideas scattered through the book that speak to the type of qualitatively focused indicators urban agriculture advocates desire—so they can better measure the types of intangible impacts highlighted in this book—the authors stop short of laying out an evaluation framework or the tools that could improve organizations’ evaluation capacity. And while the authors explicitly note that they approached the book “not as truth seeking but productive inquiry” (18), it is difficult to know how common certain issues or views are. Across the twenty-one urban agriculture organizations discussed, it remains unclear how or if their varied contexts—including the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Manhattan—result in similar or contrasting experiences. The authors also briefly compare their observations in NYC to two urban agriculture farms in Detroit and El Paso near the end of the book, but this makes the reader hungry for a similarly nuanced and comprehensive view of urban agriculture across the United States. Ultimately, the unique lenses Reynolds and Cohen use in this book raise the consequence of urban agriculture and offer inspiration for the broader potential that many urban farms and gardens can aspire to, that urban planners and foundations can actively look to support, and that future scholars can attend to. As they convincingly argue, there is much more to behold in urban gardens that requires looking beyond the kale.