Food Deserts: Jamie Rosenthal Of Roots Down On How They Are Helping To Address The Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options
There is so much work to be done and everyone has a role to play. I like to say, we’re in a big boat together and there are enough oars for everyone. So, grab some friends, find an oar and start paddling.
In many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. This in turn is creating a host of health and social problems. What exactly is a food desert? What causes a food desert? What are the secondary and tertiary problems that are created by a food desert? How can this problem be solved? Who are the leaders helping to address this crisis?
In this interview series, called “Food Deserts: How We Are Helping To Address The Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options” we are talking to business leaders and non-profit leaders who can share the initiatives they are leading to address and solve the problem of food deserts.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jamie Rosenthal.
Jamie Rosenthal began Roots Down after his experience as a farmer and owner of Wolf Scratch Farm, where he used his skills as a grower to create a flourishing 15-acre food forest to feed his customers at farmers’ markets and his CSA. His experiences on the farm sparked a passion for urban agriculture and Productive Urban Landscapes (PULs), which led him to start working with local governments to help them reimagine land use and create more equitable career pathways for future land stewards. Roots Down has created unique programs for urban land stewards and people in the community to get involved in creating a more abundant world for all of us to enjoy. Look for some amazing examples of this new paradigm at DeKalb County libraries and look for more PULs at Senior Centers in the near future.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
How much time do you have! My path to starting Roots Down is a little wild. It began when I was in my twenties and working with a variety of landscaping companies. I was trained in the old school way of doing landscaping — lots of pesticides, leaf blowers and loud gasoline-powered mowers. I eventually left the industry to get my art degree and started to carve out a fairly successful fashion photography career, but when my wife and I got pregnant with our daughter, I started to feel the pull of the land again. So, we packed up and moved back to Georgia where I started a permaculture farm called Wolfscratch. After eight years of growing the farm, it dawned on me that small-scale farming has a major equity problem. It’s virtually impossible for a small farmer to make enough money to retire, so you’re essentially on a hamster wheel for the rest of your life, or you have to eventually sell out to a larger farming business. I was getting burned out and looking for another opportunity to make an impact on our food systems, and that’s when I read The Permaculture City by Toby Hemenway. I saw the massive potential in bringing permaculture food systems back into our urban and suburban centers. So, we sold the farm, moved back to Atlanta, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
This is a hard one, because virtually every day on a farm is crazy. Once, I had to chase down a fox in my underwear because he was killing our chickens. I think the most interesting though has been seeing all of the interest in Roots Down since the start of the pandemic. It’s gone from a fringe idea to fairly broad support in a matter of 12 months. Honestly, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
Roots Down is only three years old, and I’ve run enough businesses to know you should never count your chickens before they’ve hatched. But, I believe the massive shift in public opinion around urban farming, edible landscaping and public land use since the start of the pandemic has been a tipping point. When I started Roots Down in 2018, I was met with a lot of glazed-over eyes when I’d start talking about building food forests on public land. But now, with all this emphasis on getting outdoors and investing in green infrastructure, the tide has definitely turned. Now, the question is less why we should build landscapes like this, and more how much, when and where. It’s been so much fun to see so many new people coming into this movement.
I think the number one lesson to be learned is that if you believe in what you’re doing and you have the funding to keep doing it, then stay the course. Sometimes, the market needs to change, not you.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There are too many to mention, but I’d be a total ingrate if I didn’t mention our angel investor, Kim Morrison. She took a chance on Roots Down when she had no reason to, and her confidence and capital has been such an incredible boost to the trajectory of the company. My business partner, Tres Crow, has also been a huge help. He came in and helped build a fun and engaging brand around the company, which has made us sticky in the marketplace. I also have to mention how incredibly supportive DeKalb County (Georgia) Commissioners Ted Terry and Mereda Davis Johnson have been. Our work can only be successful with solid government partners like the commissioners, and we couldn’t be more fortunate to have some great ones in our corner.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The strength of vision is incredibly important. I came back to my hometown of Atlanta with a new paradigm for public landscaping in mind, and it’s taken me three years to really start to crack the nut. I wanted to quit lots of times (especially after eight years running a farm), but I was absolutely convinced I had a good idea and had the capacity to execute on that vision. That strength helped carry me through to now when we finally have the financial and public support for these concepts.
The next trait is almost the exact opposite — leave your ego behind. While leaders need to be absolutely convinced of their vision, they shouldn’t get too attached to the actual execution. At best, a leader is merely a keeper of the flame, so you need to build a good, complementary team around you, or else you’ll never make it. Roots Down really took off when I met Commissioner Terry, Kim, Tres, and all the others who helped steady my confidence and brought unique skills to the mix that made the company a much fuller entity. I would have never attracted these talented people to the cause if it had all been about me.
Lastly, be a person of action. Doing is always better than talking, and I try to prioritize moving forward with projects versus spending too much time strategizing on their effectiveness. I like to say we live in spaghetti-throwing times, meaning there are so many existential crises simultaneously that trying to game plan solutions is futile. Sometimes, you just need to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I don’t know if this is my favorite quote, but I came across it recently and it’s really stuck with me. It’s from Buckminster Fuller.
“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’”
One of the key things we’re doing at Roots Down is showing how individuals, including those in government, can be trim tabs in their own backyards. You don’t need a big platform, or a lot of social media followers or even a desire to protest to change things. You just need a few friends and $500. That’s the ethos we want people to grasp onto. You can’t change the whole world. You can only change your tiny corner of it. So, start there and see what happens.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about Food Deserts. I know this is intuitive to you, but it will be helpful to expressly articulate this for our readers. Can you please tell us what exactly a food desert is? Does it mean there are places in the US where you can’t buy food?
Thanks for asking this, because there are some misconceptions about food deserts. They are not actually places where you can’t get food. In fact, oftentimes “food” is plentiful in food deserts, as in you can get lots of Twinkies, cookies, soda, and other highly-processed food-like stuff. A food desert is where you can’t get fresh, nutritious food easily, like fresh fruits and vegetables or high-quality meat products. The desert could be because there aren’t stores that carry those items, a lack of public transportation or the cost of those foods is too high for the average person living there.
Can you help explain a few of the social consequences that arise from food deserts? What are the secondary and tertiary problems that are created by a food desert?
The most obvious consequence of food deserts is obesity, which of course comes with a whole bunch of social, economic, and public health issues. When all you have access to are high fat and sugar processed foods, it’s possible to be both obese and suffering from malnutrition simultaneously. Food deserts are also correlated with higher rates of diabetes and heart disease. To add insult to injury, these processed foods are also generally more expensive per calorie because they’re often offered at retail prices at convenience stores.
Where did this crisis come from? Can you briefly explain to our readers what brought us to this place?
Food deserts developed through a multi-generational perfect storm of market forces, unintended consequences of our built environment, and good old-fashioned racism. It would take a huge book to tell the entire story, but, here are some of the highlights.
The first issue is a consolidation of the food market industry, from producers to distributors to markets, into a few large players. This has led to fresh food availability collapsing to only what is economically viable for these corporations. That means no stores in far-flung rural areas or dense urban areas where space is at a premium. For convenience stores, limited shelf space and narrow profits mean processed, pre-packaged foods tend to be the only economically viable foods they can carry. They simply can’t buy produce at the scale necessary to keep costs down.
There’s also the issue of America’s poor public transportation infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if there’s an incredible produce market in a neighborhood. If it can only be accessed by automobile, then that market is functionally unavailable to huge numbers of people.
Lastly, food deserts are the consequence of public and business decisions, which made localized farming illegal, eliminated fruit trees and shrubs from the public sphere, and deemed certain areas “sacrifice” zones where public and private services simply weren’t offered.
Can you describe to our readers how your work is making an impact to address this crisis? Can you share some of the initiatives you are leading to help correct this issue?
Our work at Roots Down is designed specifically to strike at the heart of the policies and market forces that created food deserts. We start by teaching city and county governments how they can turn vacant public land into food forests and pollinator gardens, providing a direct public amenity that offers free food. We audit government policies and make proposals on how local governments can better support urban agriculture solutions. We then follow up with education and workshops where we train government employees and maintenance vendors on how they can institutionalize these policies.
Lastly, we build and activate pilot projects that showcase how these types of landscapes can decrease food insecurity, look beautiful and serve as outdoor ecology laboratories for kids.
Can you share something about your work that makes you most proud? Is there a particular story or incident that you found most uplifting?
This past summer was a perfect encapsulation of why we do what we do. We had the honor of converting landscapes around six DeKalb County libraries, and throughout the summer we hosted several youth events. We partnered with Georgia Audubon, King of Pops (a local popsicle vendor), and library staff to give garden and bird watching tours, visioning exercises, and introduce kids to new books they’ve never read. We also had refreshments and music. Throughout the summer, we hosted over 100 kids, parents, and officials at these six libraries. Seeing all the smiling faces and excitement around our work was such an amazing reward for all the hard work.
In your opinion, what should other business and civic leaders do to further address these problems? Can you please share your “5 Things That Need To Be Done To Address The Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options”? If you can, please share a story or example for each.
The first thing leaders can do to increase access to fresh food is to simply make urban agriculture legal. In many places, it’s illegal to grow food in your front yard or have backyard chickens. That’s an easy fix.
Next, having multiple uses for land needs to be the norm and not an exception. Large swaths of grass are ecological dead zones and require huge inputs (from herbicide to water) to maintain. Perennial food and pollinator gardens require less water, gasoline, and in many cases labor to maintain, are just as beautiful, and have the added benefits of providing educational opportunities and public food sources.
Permaculture concepts should be taught in schools, and children should be given the opportunity to experience the wonder of ecosystem connectivity. Seeing systems as a whole is an important step to identifying localized ways you can make things better. That’s why we emphasize youth education as a big part of our programming. From climate change to pollution and ocean acidification, we’re living through the consequences of siloed thinking.
We also need to prioritize human-scaled development. While we focus on outdoor spaces, equally consequential for the creation of food deserts is the fractured, auto-centered development pattern we’ve embraced in the U.S. Auto-centric development atomizes societies, creates pollution and “sacrifice” zones, wastes enormous amounts of space, and makes it virtually impossible for whole groups of people to get access to the resources they need.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food deserts? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.
Atlanta is such an amazing wellspring of food advocacy. There are almost too many organizations to mention, but I’ll try to highlight some of the organizations that have influenced Roots Down. Food Well Alliance is leading the charge on embracing urban agriculture in the city. Wholesome Wave Georgia is doing tremendous work educating the public about SNAP benefits and ensuring that eligible Georgians get signed up. Truly Living Well and Sun Market are truly inspiring in their commitment to supporting, educating, and growing Black-owned farms across Georgia. And I have to mention Thyme to Party, one of our tremendous garden partners, who is installing beautiful gardens all around Atlanta.
If you had the power to influence legislation, are there laws that you would like to see introduced that might help you in your work?
The number one thing I would introduce is a comprehensive urban agriculture bill that eliminates obstacles to growing food on private property and increases funding for public food forests and pollinator gardens.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I am committed to the belief every single one of us is valuable in the fight against climate change and ecological destruction. We can all do something, no matter how small, and I want Roots Down to be a place where everyone can come, get inspired, and start taking action. There is so much work to be done and everyone has a role to play. I like to say, we’re in a big boat together and there are enough oars for everyone. So, grab some friends, find an oar and start paddling.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Wow, what a question!! I’m serious about solving food inequality in the country, and I’d love to share a meal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who believes food is a political issue. Bon Appetit published a wonderful article about her that discusses why she believes food is the most tangible indicator of our social inequities. She is the future of American politics and someone my daughter admires. I would love the chance to pick her brain about the inner workings of Congress. We need more young people like her in leadership positions. That will truly be the answer to a lot of the problems that plague today’s politics.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
The best thing is to join our newsletter through our website: rootsdownga.com. You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at: @rootsdownga.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
Food Deserts: Jamie Rosenthal Of Roots Down On How They Are Helping To Address The Problem of… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.