Story and Photos by Kat Li

Picture #1: All Are Welcome.

 

Just a couple of blocks east of the new South Campus dorms rests a beautiful community of growth and sharing. The community centers around the 61^st St Community Garden, a green anomaly in the wasted, industrial expanse of the south side of Chicago. The garden hosts over 100 families in  Hyde Park and Woodlawn; faculty from the university and long-time residents of the  neighborhoods bring their families and friends together to this free, open space.

 

Picture #2: All of the residents will have to uproot their plots and personal ties to the garden very soon due to the university's plan to use the area as a staging site for construction vehicles.

 

Every Saturday, a farmer's market is held in the streets, allowing local businesses and gardeners to meet and exchange. As the days get colder, the market is moved into the Experimental Station, a building that serves as a venue and a kitchen for gardeners, community members, and whoever would like to rent out the space. Connected to the Experimental Station is Blackstone Bicycle Works, an after-school program for kids in the neighborhood that incorporates them into the business of bicycle-recycling and -repairing. All of the bikes from the university's new "ReCycles" rental program were made at Blackstone, and my own old-fashioned but perfectly functioning bike was a bargain at $65.

Earlier this afternoon, my friend and I walked over to the Backstory Cafe, where we enjoyed a buffet brunch of fresh food and a live jazz duo. Berry scones, spinach and pecan salad, candied pears with cottage cheese, buttery croissants, and apple cake were only some of the options on the table.

 

The community is a beautiful fact of life for the residents of Hyde Park and Woodlawn, as well as for the students and for the faculty of the university. But every time that I walk through the garden,  meet a friend for a meal or a cup of tea at Backstory, or accompany a friend to peruse the market produce, I wonder if it will be the last time the community will really be a cohesive whole. With the garden gone and replaced by looming construction vehicles, transporting supplies in and out of the site, the area will be much less safe and much less welcoming. This community of neighbors is the only thing that brings the university and the south side residents together, the only consolidation for the university's dichotomous relationship with it's location. What will happen to our relationship after the garden is gone?

 

Picture #3: The garden community surrounds Andrew Carnegie elementary. These days there are always young neighborhood children running about, in and out of the bike shop, the cafe, and the garden. With the construction staging site, children will no longer be safe to play and explore in their own community.

 

 

To learn more about the garden visit the website dedicated to telling the stories of the garden and covering the issue with the university. This link will direct you to the video documentary interviews with the gardeners themselves: http://www.invisibleinstitute.com/stories/garden. And everyone keep an eye out for a special screening of a compiled documentary version of the story at Doc Films sometime in the near future.

 

Visit the garden. Eat at Backstory. Learn about bikes at Works. Say hi at the farmer's market. Become conscious of the beautiful community surrounding our campus; become a part of the neighborhood.

Students are learning how Chicago is fed in hands-on Environmental Sciences program

When fourth-year Peter Smutko got hungry during his summer job, he would simply pull a ripe tomato out of the ground, brush the dirt off on his shirt, and eat it. Smutko received a crash-course in where food comes from and farm life while interning at Sandhill Organics as part of the Feeding the City: The Urban Food Chain program.

Work-days at Sandhill, a small-scale, local operation, began at 7 a.m. and ended around 5. In addition to collecting data to share with his classmates and Professor Pamela Martin back on campus in Autumn, Smutko weeded, harvested and planted the 40-some acres of zucchini, cucumber, carrots, kale, beets and asparagus with several other seasonal farm workers.

"Kneeling all day on my knees made me sore, but by the end of the summer none of it hurt," he says. The jobs may have been menial, "but none of it seemed onerous by the end. I felt like I had done something more substantial with my day," when the families participating in the farm's co-op would drive up to the farm to pick up their boxes of fresh produce each week.

Smutko was just one of more than a dozen University of Chicago students to intern on small farms throughout the state last summer, collecting data for the Feeding the City classes and group research project on the energy uses of small, diversified farms using sustainable growing practices, according to Martin, the project's leader and chief instructor, and Esther Bowen, the graduate student who devised of the program with Martin after researching the energy efficiency of local food productions with Martin as an undergraduate.

"What are the environmental impacts of specific types of agriculture, like greenhouse gas emissions or nutrient runoff?" Bowen, AB '08, asks. "The idea with Feeding the City is that students are involved in real research, and putting together more information about metropolitan food systems."

The program began in Winter, 2009, and is currently accepting interns from throughout the University for the 2010-2011 program.

Real Research

According to Martin, the program will change and improve over last year, principally because the new class will be able to analyze the data collected by current students in the program. So far, Martin says, the data suggests that small, sustainable farms have comparable energy and land efficiency to conventional, mono-crop farms--farms that are not organic and only harvest one or two types of crops (usually corn or soy). This is good news for environmental science researchers like Martin, and any student who is interested in examining how local food systems operate in Chicago.

The program is targeted toward students who are looking for some connection to environment or food in their studies, she adds. "For the science majors, the connection might be wanting to experience more of an applied science, and most of the Social Sciences people [in the class] are interested in the social aspects of food and wanted to understand more of the physical and environmental aspects of food. The key is we really want to have an interdisciplinary class," from math and economics to public policy.

"I'm a public policy major," Smutko says. What made this program stand out for him was the ability to work on a farm all summer and engage "with like minded students who are also into agricultural issues in general."

"We're gaining lots of practical knowledge that I think we generally miss out on as students," he says.

Interested in Feeding the City? 
Please send (1) your resume, and (2) a page or less (double-spaced) describing your background and your interest in the program to:

Esther Bowen, Assistant Program Coordinator • eebowen@uchicago.edu

Materials must be received by 9th week Autumn Quarter. Decisions made as materials received. Please feel free to email with any questions about the program, or to discuss schedule flexibility issues. We look forward to hearing from you!

For more information, and to read students' blogs from their summers on the farm, visit Feeding the City.