Webinar explores backyard solutions to urban hunger

LOUISVILLE — During a webinar on Tuesday, Dr. George B. Brooks Jr. showed a Presbyterians for Earth Care gathering that sustainable and resilient food systems can, with just a little help and know-how, help prevent ongoing food shortages and limit the injustice of food deserts in the nation’s urban areas. Watch the webinar here.

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Brooks is founder and president of NxT Horizon LLC, the aquaponics partner for the backyard garden program in Phoenix, Arizona. He labeled his talk “Responding to Urban Hunger Through Earth Care.”

The son of a Presbyterian pastor, Brooks used John 21:17 and Gen. 2:15 as the scriptural basis for his presentation. He then defined food insecurity as “the limited or uncertain, household-level economic and social condition of having inconsistent access to adequate, nutritious food. It does not always cause hunger, but often forces households to reduce food intake, skip meals, or buy lower-quality food due to a lack of money or resources.”

As early as 1980, Brooks said he “formulated the dream” of bringing aquaculture to the people of Phoenix.” Ten years later, he became the aquaculture extension specialist for the University of Arizona. “I was hired to explore fish farming,” he said. “It was my first university job.”

Then he displayed a pandemic-era photo depicting a long line of cars stopped along a Phoenix roadside. He wondered: why were all of those cars stopped? It turns out the drivers were waiting for a complimentary Thanksgiving turkey.

“I had never seen anything like that in the United States,” he said, referring to empty shelves in grocery stores and long lines at churches and other places distributing food during the pandemic. “It struck me hard.”

Forty percent of the food we eat can be grown in our backyard, Brooks noted, “given enough space and the right environment.”

Phoenix, like many other U.S. cities, has numerous food deserts, where residents live more than a mile from the nearest supermarket or healthy, affordable food retail outlet. Thirty percent of the city’s 4.8 million residents live in a food desert, and many are unaware of that fact, he said.

“I didn’t understand that because I was never short of food,” Brooks said. “I could get in my car and drive a mile and a half” to the nearest new supermarket, “and I was fine.”

But then he’d notice “the elders,” who had to walk half a mile to the nearest bus stop, often in sweltering heat, and ride the bus for a couple of miles to purchase their groceries, then make the reverse trip laden with bags from the store. “This was the definition of a food desert, the definition of what food insecurity can be,” he said.

The city of Phoenix stepped in with its general plan, which Brooks helped to craft in 2015. The current plan builds on that earlier plan, he said, including zoning laws that “allow people to grow our own food and for the city to assist where they can.”

For Phoenix, that meant helping 178 residents install backyard gardens, which Brooks said were reminiscent of Victory Gardens — vegetable, fruit and herb plots planted at private homes and public parks during World War I and World War II to relieve food shortages, boost morale and support the war effort. By 1943, these gardens produced about 40% of the nation’s fresh produce, with about 20 million gardens active.

Victory Gardens “worked, but came out of favor once the war was over,” Brooks said. Now “they’re too large to have in our back yards,” which for the most part are smaller than they were 80 years ago.

What’s needed today are new techniques, he said, including raised bed gardens and integrated aquaculture, called aquaponics, which his company helps provide. Brooks showed photos of children’s backyard pools being transformed into food production centers, which also feature catfish that can be grown in residents’ backyards.

“We even played with giant freshwater prawns. They get huge and they taste like lobster,” he said. “Unfortunately, they are mean and evil and cannibalistic.”

Brooks quoted “The Guerilla Gardener,” Ron Finley, who said during a 2013 Ted Talk that “growing your own food is like printing your own money.”

“Aquaponics can do that,” Brooks said. “The cost of food is less than food from the supermarket.”

But city leaders have to make it easy for residents to be innovative, and for Brooks, George Washington Carver — “an expert on divergent thinking” — is an inspiration. Carver told sharecroppers that peanuts would invigorate the soil that cotton was depleting, and that “if you can turn peanuts into a wide variety of crops, it gives sharecroppers increased viability,” Brooks said.

At Southminster Presbyterian Church, Brooks’ church home, church leaders are considering adding food crops to a prayer garden already there. “Many churches are starting to grow food in these gardens,” Brooks said. Some include landscaping and benches, statuary and food plants.

“This is the kind we are looking for, including catfish,” he said. “They taste terrific.”

“There is so much to all of this,” he said. “I just wanted to give you a few ideas of where your church can go.”