By Shane Young
As a kid, every time my family exited the highway toward home, we passed a very well-positioned McDonalds. I would always hope my parents would stop so I could get my go-to: two crispy chicken snack wraps with honey mustard and fries. My younger self loved fast-food—a carefully-marketed, easy solution for a family without the time, or in many cases, financial means, to assemble a healthy and comprehensive meal.
But beneath the golden arches lies a food system has failed us. In a global quest for the cheapest labor and lowest-cost production, large multinational food conglomerates have commodified something that should be sacred: our right to eat well, to eat in community, and to eat in connection with the earth. Instead, excessive fertilizer use, toxic antibiotics, poverty wages, and overprocessed foods are the norm.
Although I eat far less fast food these days, I still rely heavily on groceries from supermarkets with long supply chains, and mass-prepared meals from fast-casual restaurants when looking for something quick. For many families living in food deserts—areas where access to fresh, affordable food is limited—mealtimes pose an even greater challenge. These neighborhoods, flooded with fast food options and little else, are disproportionately Black, resulting in increased rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Rather than being a coincidence, this is the product of a long, deliberate effort to sever Black communities from the land and agricultural practices that once sustained them. During the Great Migration (1910–1970), more than six million African Americans left the farmlands of the US South in search of safety and opportunity in northern and western cities. But their departure was not only a response to racial terror, it was also fueled by government-faciliated policy violence. Predatory loans from the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) forced many Black farmers into unpayable debt and foreclosure. Meanwhile, the USDA systematically funneled resources and information to large white-owned farms, locking Black farmers out of institutional support. Between 1940 and 1973, the number of Black farmers in the U.S. declined by a staggering 93%.
Today, generations of Black people live without the knowledge and spiritual connection to land cultivation that our ancestors, while brutalized and battered, carried and sustained. This wisdom is in our blood. To abandon it in favor of capitalist notions of success—or to accept food systems that are exploitative, unsustainable, and disconnected from the earth—is to reject an ancestral blueprint for collective restoration. I want to reclaim this history, and in doing so, reconnect with a practice that nourishes both land and lineage.
Of course, working a strenuous job and living in a climate-restrictive city like New York limits my capacity to grow all my own food. But after reflecting on the exploitative and extractive nature of industrial agriculture, having conversations with my partner, visiting some incredible farming collectives, and engaging with transformative works like We Are Each Other’s Harvest and Braiding Sweetgrass, I felt inspired to begin my own harvesting journey.
This journey has allowed me to explore more sustainable, small-scale methods of growing food that resist the industrial agriculture system. Even in dense, unpredictable environments like New York City, there are ways to creatively harvest: community gardens, window boxes, fire escape beds, hydroponic lights, or DIY rooftop gardens, like I am attempting this summer. If you’re looking for some direction or inspiration, here’s a broad glimpse into the steps I took to grow broccoli, sweet purple basil, parsley, and thyme on the rooftop of my Brooklyn apartment.
Step 1: Plant Adoption
My neighborhood greenmarket has a wide range of herbs and food plants, sourced from local farms, to choose from. The selection process is an important one, which felt surprisingly intimate. Fundamentally different from grabbing a plastic pack of pre-washed herbs at the supermarket, choosing a plant to care for felt slower, more intentional, like a starting point of a deeper relationship that will be built on reciprocity: the plant providing sustenance and me facilitating its growth.
When you grow your own food, even at a small scale, you’re reminded of how thoroughly industrial agriculture severs us from the process. The parsley on grocery shelves is often freeze-dried, packaged, and shipped thousands of miles before it lands in your cart. You’ll never know the soil it grew in, who tended it, or what was sprayed on it. Choosing to grow your own food is a way to restore the connections that industrial agriculture has torn.
Step 2: Tackling the Learning Curve
Since this was my first time gardening, I leaned on YouTube tutorials, gardening websites, and calls with family members to piece together a workable approach to the replanting process. There is a lot of competing information, but identifying throughlines from various sources was helpful. The education process taught me things about how plants interact with each other, as well as with the elements (water, sunlight, etc), that gave me a much deeper appreciation for them.
I also realized this knowledge should’ve already been ours. Why don’t I know the basics of growing the food I eat every day? We’ve been systematically distanced from these skills, especially in urban environments. When we don’t know how to grow our own food, we are forced to rely on corporate supply chains that profit from our dependency, forcing us to spend on groceries, takeout, meal kits, and convenience. The learning process gave me a deeper understanding of the effort and coordination behind food, and made clear how much industrial agriculture relies on us not knowing.
Step 3: Polyculture Planting
Most industrial farms plant one crop across huge plots of land—monoculture farming. It’s efficient for machinery, but terrible for soil, biodiversity, and long-term resilience. Native American wisdom, on the other hand, understands companion farming. For example, corn, beans, and squash (“The Three Sisters”) each offer their own gifts to support the growth of the other two. The industrial farmer asks, “why rely on a bean’s ability to naturally convert atmospheric nitrogen into productive nitrate for squash and corn, when a tractor can automatically dispense ammonium nitrate across a uniform field of corn?” In this question lies a collision of values: the market economy’s quest for efficiency versus the rich history of companion farming that, for millennia, has cultivated symbiosis and interdependence.
Drawing on Native American practices of The Three Sisters (and constrained by the number of pots I could afford), I planted the sweet purple basil in the same bed as the parsley. The two herbs are excellent companions as their complimentary scents attract insects that are beneficial to each other’s growth.
Step 4: The Labor of Tending
Tending plants requires attention: checking soil moisture, tracking weather, observing leaf changes. Every morning, I kneel beside the planter box and check in. It’s not especially glamorous, but it reveals something critical: growing food is labor. Hard, daily, often invisible (to us) labor.
That labor is still being done—just outsourced to the Global South or immigrant workers in the U.S., often under exploitative conditions. The convenience of a quick lunch is subsidized by poverty wages and unsafe working environments for people of color across the world. When I grew up eating snack wraps, I didn’t know that the Brazilian poultry workers who processed the meat were paid too little to afford the food they produced. Growing my own food won’t fix that, but it does make the labor visible again and force us to confront the system we’re complicit in. By harvesting a few herbs and vegetables in my small rooftop garden, I am building the toolkit to gradually shift the majority of my palette away from industrial agriculture, and the exploitation of workers that underpins it.
Step 5: Respectful Harvesting
By the end of the summer, if all goes well, I’ll be harvesting broccoli from my Brooklyn rooftop. This step will include me simply walking up to my roof and detaching the broccoli from its roots. Through this process, I won’t be involved in a long energy-intensive supply chain moving food across borders and oceans, wreaking havoc on our planet. I also won’t be participating in the overcropping of land in Asia, Africa, or Latin America for the benefit of Western supermarkets. And I won’t be wasting food I didn’t ask for, since I planted just enough for myself and a small group of friends. Growing small-scale and local is not a full solution, but it’s a tangible way to reduce dependence on an unsustainable model.
Step 6: Celebratory Feast
When I finally gather friends to eat the food I’ve grown, we’ll begin with gratitude. We’ll give thanks to the parsley and sweet purple basil for their partnership. We’ll give thanks to the sun, soil, seeds, insects, and rain for their gifts. We’ll give thanks to the land for reminding us that everything we need to sustain our lives is already here.
Industrial agriculture wants us to believe it’s the only option. But it isn’t. Even on a rooftop in New York, there are ways to engage differently that make a different relationship to food not just possible, but practical.
I’m just beginning this journey, but I’m so excited for what’s to come. Land cultivation for restorative purposes is an ancestral practice that has sustained Black and Indigenous communities across time and space. Returning to respectful harvesting practices is a first step to restore our fractured relationship with the land, all while resisting the capitalist exploitation at the heart of industrial agriculture. Wherever you are, growing can be an accessible first step in reimagining our relationship to the earth, and our collective power in caring for it. As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, “people and land are good medicine for each other.”
P.S. The good news is, we don’t have to do it alone! Farming projects like Soul Fire Farm (Grafton, NY), Sweet Water Foundation (Chicago, IL), H.Earth (Bronx, NY), Dream of Wild Health (Minneapolis, MN), and Sankofa Farms (Efland, NC) are already showing us what’s possible when we grow in community.
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