A Garden Is The Frontline In The Fight Against Racial Inequality And Disease

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Princess Haley, co-founder of a group called Appetite for Change, picks an artichoke to go into supply boxes of fresh produce. The group’s mission is to improve the diet of families in Minneapolis.

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Haley co-founded Appetite for Change as a way to improve access to healthy food and better the health of residents in her community. «I feel like the garden is truly a healing space,» says Haley.

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Appetite for Change teaches others to grow their own food in the absence of available healthy options in North Minneapolis. Throughout the pandemic they have also provided free produce to 300 local families.

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«For people to constantly die in my neighborhood every day and a lot of that having to relate to the diet that they have is not OK,» says LaTasha Powell, another co-founder of Appetite for Change.

Growing up in North Minneapolis, Powell says she could walk to five grocery stores from home. As a child, she shopped, cooked and ate together with her sprawling family, which often included a network of friends and neighbors. Today, she says, local food culture revolves around fast, fried foods. She says she counted 38 fast-food stores along or near Broadway, the main commercial avenue cutting through North Minneapolis.

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LaTasha Powell, another co-founder of Appetite for Change, grew up in North Minneapolis. She says that as a child she could walk to five grocery stores in the neighborhood. Over time she saw the culture shift towards fast food. She lobbied grocery chains to bring in more diverse produce but it didn’t happen.

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Carl Childs works after school with Appetite for Change, helping provide produce to families who can’t easily access it. «It’s really important and I love it, giving back to the community,» he says.

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Carl Childs works after school with Appetite for Change, helping provide produce to families who can’t easily access it. «It’s really important and I love it, giving back to the community,» he says.

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One of Haley’s converts is 17-year-old Carl Childs, who shows me how to properly pluck fronds of Dino kale so as not to damage the plant. Childs says he wants to become a dental hygienist one day. He discovered a love of snap peas working after school with Appetite for Change, and lately feels huge satisfaction providing produce to those who otherwise can’t access it.

«It’s really important and I love it, giving back to the community,» he says. Haley’s daughter, Princess-Ann, watches Childs eat a speckled tomato, similar to the one she told her mother she hated. Curious, she bites into one too.

«OK, this is good,» she admits, with her mother out of earshot.

«We used to grow a lot of carrots,» she volunteers. «That’s when I learned you can eat stuff straight out of the garden. I ate purple carrots, green carrots, yellow carrots — straight out of the ground. Those are like the best foods ever.»

And that’s how the convert becomes the preacher.