Mixte Communications, a San Diego public relations agency, has a free food garden planted on the sidewalk outside our office. It is one of the results of Jamie’s three-year Mixte anniversary present to her employees: $300 and an extra vacation day to go on an adventure.
Now, anyone can grab a cherry tomato off the vine or a snack of arugula as they walk by. But more importantly, our neighborhood gets the taste of a new idea: planting free food in public space that belongs to everyone.
Free food landscaping is building momentum worldwide. Problems with industrial agriculture and food scarcity are encouraging people to see every patch of dirt by the sidewalk as a new opportunity.
Seattle is building a free food forest in a city park. Issaquah (Washington) City Council maintains fruit and nut trees along city streets. Los Angeles passed an ordinance to explicitly allow edible gardening on sidewalk planting strips. Local governments from Stellenbosch, South Africa, to Gippsland, Australia, to Boston and Wisconsin fill their parks, street corners and pedestrian medians with continually harvestable leafy greens.
Gardens Bring People Together
People around the world that plant free food in public spaces all tell the same stories. Unexpected friendships spring up between rich and poor and neighbors of different languages and backgrounds. Communities fall in love with their neighborhoods and take new pride in the ownership of their streets.
Gardens Instill Hope
In areas of South Central Los Angeles with high gang activity, every kid knows which blocks to avoid on their way home from school. Community group LA Green Grounds turned an empty lot on a block with constant criminal activity into a community garden. Now kids ride their bikes and pick berries on the same block they used to not dare pass. Something about the hope of watching vegetables grow day by day and the vibes of sharing just made the space seem too friendly for crime.
San Diego Needs Us To Bring This Magic to Ocean Beach
OB is already world famous for our laid back, open-minded tolerance and our unique people with weird ideas. Our counter culture is the status quo. Public art, OB bumper stickers and people being unashamedly themselves wave like flags all over our town, proclaiming our pride in being different. If San Diego County’s year-round sun is going to grow free food for everyone, the rest of our region’s more cautious neighborhoods will first need to see another town do it successfully. It’s time for Ocean Beach’s weirdness to shine.
Ocean Beach Needs This Magic, Too
There’s never been a better time for OB to reinforce its identity. Our local culture has always celebrated our tolerance of people who might not fit so well in other neighborhoods, including people in poverty and states of homelessness. It’s part of what makes OB such a rare, special place in the world. But about six years ago, frustration with a rise in public drug use and crime got the better of a few people, and gave birth to some prejudiced behavior. Someone dispersed leaflets calling homeless people “trolls” and telling them to earn their own money and “get lost.” Then “Please Don’t Feed Our Bums” stickers appeared on car bumpers, street signs and bus stop benches. The stickers gained some significant media coverage and then the buzz died.
Of course, during the brief frenzy and to this day, most of OB stuck to its old routine: treating people as individuals and with respect, especially the people who would be stereotyped as dangerous, criminals, or just less worthy, everywhere else. Since homeless people have always been a part of OB’s community, able to live less hidden away and sectioned off than in other places, residents have an uncommon ability to treat people in poverty as individuals, not stereotypes.
Yet five years later, the stickers remain in our daily view, scattered as graffiti and in a couple remaining shop windows. At this environmentally and socially conscious pr agency, I experience the power of well-crafted messages repeated over time. We get the pleasure of using them to help our environment clients do good things for the world. Of course, repetition of the right language and imagery is just as effective as pushing public attitude towards bad things. I worry that after five years of repetition, it would only take another spark to reignite another wave of prejudice.
What’s The Solution?
Using our San Diego-based environmental communications business to make a living and make our community better is kind of our thing. So I thought about how I would tackle this messaging challenge if OB was one of Mixte’s San Diego PR clients. In public relations, you can’t control what other people do in the media, only how you respond and your own message. In some instances when an argument surfaces in the media that’s not aligned with our client’s goals, we choose not to respond with direct arguments, which creates two sides pitted against each other. Instead, we create a more compelling, positive message about our client’s vision for something better, presented alongside, instead of in opposition to, the other message.
For OB, that message could be free food gardens. Our garden lives directly next to a Jack in the Box parking lot, a common place for homeless people to gather in the early morning. Some people told us “they” would ruin our garden. We planted anyway. Now we get to watch our neighbors without homes share food and conversation with our neighbors with homes. Each one of those moments sends a powerful repeated message that OB’s public spaces are for tolerance, sharing and friendship.
Let’s plant free food everywhere.
My New Year’s resolution is to plant one new free food garden each month in 2016. Want to join me? Buy a $1.85 herb sprout from Baron’s Market, plant it within arm’s reach of the sidewalk in front of your home or job site.
OB’s first free food garden became a reality only because our CEO Jamie Hampton gave the project the time, money and space it needed. So if you want to plant a bigger free food garden in Ocean Beach or Midway District, I’ll pay Jamie’s gift forward to you with a free planter complete with seeds and soil. If it’s close enough to my bike commute, I’ll even help maintain it.
