Camden teens learn nutrition from the ground up
When the farmer’s market opened outside the Center for Environmental Transformation (CFET) on Ferry Avenue in Camden a few years ago, the center’s board President Mark Doorley said customers didn’t want to buy the green beans.
They were used to just opening a can, not cooking fresh beans.
To eat well, it is important to know how to cook and prepare whole foods.
That is the idea behind the classes CFET and the Food Bank of South Jersey have teamed up to teach. Camden teenagers, who are employees of CFET, take the classes and learn not only how to grow their own food, but also how to cook it in different ways.
On Mondays and Wednesdays, they split into groups in either the gardens or spacious kitchen, and come together at noon for a from-scratch meal made with mostly their own produce. Seated in a circle around three tables, they review what they learned that day, and how they made the lunch.
Their afternoons are spent in workshops on topics such as environmental justice and the food system.
On Fridays, they harvest food from the gardens and sell it to the surrounding community at affordable prices. They have formed an outreach team that rides around the neighborhood on bikes, passing out fliers advertising the market.
Last year, they even used a surplus of habanero peppers to create their own hot sauce, which they named “Kapow!” It quickly sold out.
Programs like this are important, said Domenic Vitiello, associate professor of city planning and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania, because they don’t just stop at providing the land or seeds.
“They train people in preserving food and cooking and getting to know food. They’re helping people build their own capacities, to meet more of their own food needs.”
CFET was founded by Sacred Heart Church parishioners who, inspired by their volunteer work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, wanted a place where people could volunteer and learn about Camden. They transformed the former Sacred Heart convent into a 24-bed retreat center and decided to focus on the transformation of Camden: the transformation of the land, of the Camden food desert, of the youth.
In Camden, said Teresa Niedda, director of the center, “there’s a lot of environmental degradation and injustice.”
A 2010 report by Penn’s Center for Public Health Initiatives, in conjunction with Camden City Garden Club, found Camden was a leader in urban gardening in the United States.
“Camden remains a vibrant city for community gardening,” said Vitiello, who contributed to the report, in part because of food insecurity in the city. People are more likely to garden, he said, when their neighbors are hungry, and the accessibility of land in Camden, particularly through the city’s “Adopt-a-lot” program, has allowed community gardens to proliferate.
But while the report found many gardeners in Camden were freezing and preserving their food, Doorley said waste from community gardens is still a problem.
“It’s really sad, because people need that food,” he said.
The teenagers who work with CFET have proven to be an important link to the community. They share the first-hand knowledge they gain in the program with their friends and family, said Raquel Moreno, senior manager of Food Bank’s Healthy Living Initiative. “It helped our staff drive home the lessons and really connect to the people of Camden,” Moreno said.
“They’re great ambassadors for promoting local produce in Camden.”
Learning healthy eating
Moreno pointed out people can be reluctant to cook foods they are unfamiliar with, and buying something they might not like could be a waste of money.
“I didn’t eat healthy before I came here at all,” said Zachiely Cruz, 17.
In her second year working for CFET, she has advanced from the eco intern job to the position of assistant farmer. All of the teenagers start as eco interns, which pays minimum wage, and work toward the position of assistant farmer and senior farmer. The pay increases at each level, and promotions are earned through acquired knowledge and hard work.
Cruz said she has learned a lot from the program, not just how to grow or cook vegetables, but also important business skills. She assists with the pricing decisions for the Friday farmer’s market, which are reached by the group as a whole, and depend on both the size of the harvest and of the produce. There is a focus on fair pricing.
She also has learned to like more vegetables.
“I grow them, so I know what’s in them,” Cruz said. “It’s a good feeling to eat what you grow.”
Dimitrius Eliza, also 17 and an assistant farmer, has been working in the gardens for five years. A resident of the Waterfront South neighborhood, he was invited to help out by the then-head farmer one day when he was walking by the gardens. He doesn’t remember what he did that day, but “I guess it was pretty fun, because I kept coming back.”
The interns and farmers pull weeds and pick bugs off the plants by hand, as the program employs organic growing practices in the gardens. Like the other students, Eliza has learned to appreciate, and even prefer, the produce from their plots.
“Last night, my mom bought tomatoes from the supermarket and I was, like, ‘These look so fake,’ ” Eliza said, explaining on the farm they grow multi-colored heirloom tomatoes, which he thinks taste better than the average supermarket tomato.
Helping the earth
Eliza said the lots where they garden had been empty for as long as he could remember.
Doorley explained the land was purchased by CFET through the Heart of Camden, a neighborhood revitalization organization, and the vegetable garden was once the site of Del Buono’s bakery.
The center is lucky, Doorley said, as the soil from their sites was tested by the USDA last year, and though some toxins were found, they were well below the minimum accepted levels.
“A lot of the soil in these communities is contaminated because of the industry that used to be there,” Doorley explained. Community gardeners have to be aware of this danger, and many urban farms and gardens test the soil, sometimes replacing several feet of earth, or using raised beds for growing food.
Doorley attributed the quality of their plots to 15 years of organic gardening practices, plus the regular addition of compost, that has allowed the soil to regenerate.
The plots of land the center uses total approximately one acre of space and are scattered around the neighborhood. The vegetable gardens are on a street behind the center, while a plot across Ferry Avenue is home to a small orchard of fruit trees and two beehives.
“It’s pretty awesome,” said Dean Buttacavoli, urban farm educator, about the hives. “People’s eyes light up when we say we have bees.”
He said it takes three years to be able to harvest honey from a hive, but that is not the primary function of the hives. The main reason the center keeps bees is to teach teenagers about the importance of pollinators to the food supply and about colony collapse disorder, which poses a serious threat to bees and, by extension, agriculture.
Some of the teenagers like working with the bees, and three of them eagerly donned the beekeeping suits one day recently, carefully opening the hives and checking the inside for signs of healthy bees.
Robert Nieves, 17, took a pass. He claimed the bees don’t like him, so instead he mowed a nearby public park the center helps maintain. He said while he wasn’t a fan of vegetables before he began working with CFET, he tries to cook healthy at home now, in part for his mother, who has diabetes. “I try to keep her as healthy as possible,” he said.
Nieves attends Dr. Charles E. Brimm Medical Arts High School and likes learning about the relationship between plants and health. While he didn’t know much about growing plants before, now “I almost know enough to be a farmer,” he said.
Niedda sees the CFET program as a great job experience.
The program is competitive, and those who are hired are held to high standards. The payoff is a diversified work experience, not typical of the jobs often available to teenagers.
“It’s the gardening, the marketing, the cooking,” Niedda said. “They’re learning a variety of skills that will serve them well for other jobs, or when they go on in their education.”
Shannon Eblen: SEblen@gannettnj.com or (856) 486-2475
For more information on the Center for Environmental Transformation, call (856) 365-8111 or visit http://www.cfet.org/
For more information on the Food Bank of South Jersey, call (856) 662-4884 or visit http://www.foodbanksj.org/