Cook County Jail Garden Harvest Fest 2010
This year the sales of the produce generated $3,000 in profits
Mr. Brown Thumb
Chicago Garden
09.09.10
Excerpts:
Gardens are great equalizers; they’re also places where people can get a second chance. Today was the annual harvest festival and graduation ceremony at the Cook County Jail’s garden. Really, they need to start calling it an urban farm, a working urban farm. As I blogged about last year, the jail garden constructed a greenhouse and moved ahead with plans to sell produce grown at the jail garden. Charlie Trotter’s and The Publican are two local restaurants that purchased produce grown at the jail garden this year. The bulk of the edible plants grown at the Cook County jail garden were started by detainees from seeds donated by Renee’s Garden, who sells culinary herb and vegetable seeds.
After the speeches the detainees, their family members and chefs from Charlie Trotter’s walk through the jail garden and talked about plants and how they’re used in the restaurants. As they talked family members were given bags and harvested some vegetables and herbs. These tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, melons will not grace the menu of a fancy restaurant; they’ll be taken home by family and enjoyed while they wait to be reunited with their loved ones.
This year the detainees who graduated from the Master Gardener program were outnumbered by members of the press. Was Mike Flannery there because he has an interest in urban farming? The press was there because they wanted to know if Sheriff Tom Dart would toss his hat in the ring and announce that he’ll run for mayor. He didn’t rule it out, but there was no official announcement
Read the complete article and more photos here.
Urban prison farming and the difference between reform and revolution.
By Lisa Yun Lee
In These Times
Dec 8, 2010
Excerpt:
Consider this uncanny photograph of the thriving urban farm located behind razor barbed wire at the Cook County Jail in Chicago. It demands and resists interpretation. The image calls to mind, in a perturbing manner, the histories of slavery, plantation life and sharecropping. The Caucasian chef in the background dressed in classic “chef’s whites” and the two prisoners of color in the foreground are a visual representation and reminder of the appalling statistics that document the dramatic racial disparities between those people in the United States who are locked up and those who are not.
Yet we celebrate and embrace the idea of the urban farm. It seems to signify self-determination, local empowerment, sustainability and environmental justice. But without the specificity of site and the particular stories of the people who work on and are nourished by the land, an urban farm is but an abstraction, an empty concept.
1 comment
It’s good to read that there are still some jail/prison urban farms … just too bad that they are now only in the U.S.
In 2010 the current Conservative government dismantled the seven (I think) that remained in Canada – including one in Kingston, Ontario that had a highly-respected herd of dairy cows that was the result of almost 100 years of careful breeding.
Brings to mind that old tea commercial say, “Only in Canada, you say? Pity!” … yep, our Canada has become very pitiful under the current regime.
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