[Scpg] Kind'ave Makes You Want to Move to Detroit...

Wed May 18 07:44:05 PDT 2011

<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/>
Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web

May 17, 2011, 8:30 PM

Imagining Detroit

The New York Times

By <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/mark-bittman/>MARK BITTMAN

Mark Bittman
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/mark-bittman/>Mark 
Bittmanon food and all things related.

TAGS:

<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/cities/>CITIES, 
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/communities/>COMMUNITIES,<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/detroit/>DETROIT, 
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/farms/>FARMS,<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/gardens/>GARDENS, 
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/urban-renewal/>URBAN RENEWAL

Detroit was once called the Paris of the West, 
but at this point it’s more reminiscent of 
Venice. Like Venice, its demise has been imminent 
for some time, as crucial businesses and huge chunks of the population flee.

And, like Venice, it has a singular look. Not 
everyone will find Detroit beautiful, but with 
its wide, often empty boulevards, its abandoned, 
ghost-like train station and high-rises, its 
semi-deserted neighborhoods and its 
once-celebrated downtown now jumbled by shuttered 
storefronts  and the hideous Renaissance Center 
 it creates a sense of disbelief bordering on 
fantasy. It’s either a vision of the future or, 
like Venice, an impossibly strange anomaly, its best days over.

But after spending some time here, I saw an 
alternative view of Detroit: a model for 
self-reliance and growth. Because while the 
lifeblood of Venice comes from outsiders, Detroit 
residents are looking within. They’d welcome 
help, but they’re not counting on it. Rather, to 
paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, they’re turning 
from seeing things as they are and asking, “Why?” 
to dreaming how they might be and wondering, “Why not?”

Food is central. Justice, security, a sense of 
community, and more intelligent land use have 
become integral to the food system. Here, local 
food isn’t just hip, it’s a unifying factor not 
only among African-Americans and whites but 
between them. Food is an issue on which it seems 
everyone can agree, and this is a lesson for all of us.

“The idea,” says Malik Yakini, a school principal 
who runs the two-acre 
<http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/>D-Town 
Farm, “is to help black people stand up, to 
demonstrate that creating reality is not the 
exclusive domain of white people  without 
pointing fingers at white people.” The farm, 
located in Rouge Park  the city’s biggest  will soon double in size.

Yakini, the chairman of the 
<http://www.detroitfoodpolicycouncil.net/>Detroit 
Food Policy Council, which is holding its first 
conference this week, gave me a tour on the eve 
of spring planting while a dozen African-American 
volunteers steadily raked a sizable plot. “The 
farm can empower, drive the economy, reduce our 
carbon footprint and give us better food,” he 
said. “And we’re influencing young white people 
too, because they can see that.”

And how. During the 48 hours I spent in Detroit, 
I met enthusiastic black, white and Asian people, 
from age 10 to over 60, almost all of whom agreed 
that food is the key to the new Detroit.

I was driven around the city by Dan Carmody, 
director of the 120-year-old 
<http://www.detroiteasternmarket.com/>Eastern 
Market, whose huge sheds are crammed with vendors 
on Saturdays, when as many as 50,000 shoppers buy 
everything from Grown in Detroit vegetables to 
Michigan asparagus to flats of flowers to 
hydroponic tomatoes. In other words, a typical big-city covered market mash-up.

But if the market is familiar, the rest of 
Detroit is anything but. Read the paper, and you 
see a wasted landscape; go there, and you see the 
sprouts emerging from the soil.

Imagine blocks that once boasted 30 houses, now 
with three; imagine hundreds of such blocks. 
Imagine the green space created by the city’s 
heartbreaking but intelligent policy of 
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35767727/ns/us_news-life/t/detroit-wants-save-itself-shrinking/>removing 
burnt-out or fallen-down houses. Now look at the 
corner of one such street, where a young man who 
has used the city’s “adopt-a-lot” program (it 
costs nothing) to establish an orchard, a garden 
and a would-be community center on three lots, 
one with a standing house. (The land, like many 
of the gardens, belongs to the city and is 
“leased” for a year at a time. But no one seems 
especially concerned about the city 
repossessing.) A young man who adopts eight lots 
and has bought another three has an operation 
that grows every year and trains eager young 
people. A Capuchin monastery operates gardens 
spanning 24 lots, five of which they own; at one 
of them, I meet Patrick Crouch, who’s supervising 
10 gardeners-in-training and reminds me that 
“community gardens are not just about ‘gardens’ but ‘community.’”

The gardens are everywhere, and you almost can’t 
drive anywhere without seeing one  a corporation 
named <http://www.compuware.com/>Compuware is 
establishing one downtown  but it goes beyond 
that. Carmody has plans to expand, modernize and 
re-unify the Public Market, which was split in 
half by a freeway in the heyday of urban renewal. 
Gary Wozniak, whom I meet over breakfast at the 
<http://www.russellstreetdeli.com/>Russell Street 
Deli and who runs a program for recovering 
addicts, has plans to start an indoor tilapia and 
shrimp farm near the market, using a combination 
of investment money, loans and grants.

Back in the neighborhoods, I talk with Lisa 
Johanson, who, with the aid of a church group, 
started 
<http://www.centraldetroitchristian.org/Peaches_and_Greens_Vision.htm>Peaches 
and Greens, a small fruit and vegetable store in 
a neighborhood that boasts 23 liquor stores and 
one grocery. Daily, Peaches and Greens sends out 
a truck that sells to residents in a two-mile 
radius, providing produce to a neighborhood in 
which only half the households own cars. The 
truck also sells wholesale to five of the liquor stores.

And so on. Over good, old-fashioned lasagne at 
<http://www.giovannisristorante.com/>Giovanni’s, 
Betti Wiggins, who runs the food services 
department for the public school system, talks 
about using more and more local food; Phil Jones, 
a chef who’s on the 
<http://www.detroitfoodpolicycouncil.net/>Food 
Policy Council, talks about training kids to 
cook; Mike Score talks about plans for greening 
300 acres, including forests, tree farms, a demonstration center and gardens.

As Jackie Victor, co-owner of the 
<http://www.avalonbreads.net/home/>Avalon Bakery, 
an unofficial meeting place for the Detroit food 
movement, says to me, “Imagine a city, rebuilt 
block by block, with a gorgeous riverfront, world 
class museums and fantastic local food. Everyone 
who wants one has a quarter-acre garden, and 
every kid lives within bike distance of a farm.”

Imagine. If the journey is as important as the 
destination, Detroit is already succeeding. And 
we can all learn from what seems to be the city’s 
unofficial slogan: “We can do better than this.”

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