COMM243: Food Sovereignty in Southwest Philadelphia

Most stations are run by various farm employees/interns, and people involved with Penn nutrition programming, the Philadelphia Orchard Project, and some partenrs from outside organizations (e.g. the Vetri Community Partnership, which had healthy cooking demonstrations with tastings). The farm’s youth interns sat at the welcome table, showing guests all the festival had to offer; air-popped and served seasoned popcorn; taught people how to seed save; and helped run the apple cider press with the Philly Orchard Project. There were a few planting demonstrations and tours of the field, and someone from Bartram’s Garden was driving a tractor for hay rides up the hill. That was nice to see, and made me think of all the trips I made to Linvilla Orchards as a kid, yet many kids who grow up in Philadelphia don’t get this opportunity.

At our station, things went slowly. This in part because we had so much competition: if I could out a form and then give an interview, or could decorate a pumpkin/ eat a snack, I would probably choose one of the latter. It was also difficult to gain people’s trust because we looked like obvious floaters, not like we really belonged. Yes, there were a fair amount of Penn students who visited the Harvest Festival, but I felt like we really seemed out of place standing at a station looking around for someone to talk to.

The first person who we got to film was Maitreyi, the Executive Director of Bartram’s Garden. She was happy for us to interview her, but understood that the goal was not to interview us. She suggested that we walk around, perhaps with our phone cameras rather than trying isolate people to sit down with us and face two big official cameras. That was our next tactic: a few of us walked around the festival gathering short participant responses while the rest of us manned our station.

Eventually, when children found our drawing materials, we got some traffic. While the purpose of our markers and paper was really for people to draw maps or food systems or gardens, the drawing station helped us generate traffic. In general, adults were averse to answering our questions, especial if it meant going on tape. But they were immediately more likely to talk to us if we had some way to distract their children. They would then sit while their children drew, and might agree to answer some of our questions.

I had one such interview with a father of two young children. He agreed to be interviewed (and could see that I was taking notes), but declined to have is photo taken, and gave a hard “no” to video recording. His name was Earl(name changed). I framed my few questions around the theme we’d talked over with Ty, about the participant’s connection to the farm via food. Earl told me that a soul food for him was fried chicken because his mom made the best (and gave him her recipe, and because it was representative of his mother’s southern culture and of a shared Black American culture.

This opened up some more overall comments on Black culture and food: he mentioned that he finds black patrons at places like KFC, but very rarely Asian patrons. He cites the close-knit nature of Asian communities around him, that in his experience Asian people in Philadelphia have their own food and cook it together / stick together in general, while black people do not stick together. After I ask, he agrees that part of the reason black communities do not seem to have agency over their food is because there is a lack of access. He says there is a difference in quality of food you can find in a supermarket in a black community (he mentions Sav-A-Lot) compared to in a more resource-rich community (mentioned Acme, Wegmans) (“difference in the quality of food put out to black people”).