The Soul Power of Food: Feeding Dreams and Unity in a Food Desert

By Sarah Allen

Introduction:

I wrote this story when I worked as a part-time, assistant farmer’s market manager at the Fondy Farmers Market in the inner-city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin from 2008-2011. The story is timeless, and timely as history roars and racial injustice gives rise to revolution with the murder of George Floyd and so many other people of color.                                                                                                                           Surrounded by barred store fronts and boarded up homes, the Fondy Farmers Market is not your typical market. Set in a neighborhood with its share of societal ills in what is considered the most segregated city in the nation, Milwaukee, also one of the most impoverished and crime-ridden, this market serves an important mission. In an African-American area stripped of sufficient economic viability, there are simply not enough grocery stores to feed the people.                                                                                                             The Hunger Task force conducted a Food System’s Assessment study in 1997, investigating Milwaukee’s most impoverished areas and uncovered an inadequate supply of nutritious affordable food in the area; worse yet, there was a food scarcity, forcing many inner city residents to rely on overpriced, junk food corner stores as their main food supply, costing about 24% more than the average grocery store. This area was officially classified a ‘food desert.’                                                                                                                                                    The solution? Capitalizing upon an existing market in the community. Dating back to 1930, it originally opened as Milwaukee’s “Haymarket” where farmers brought and sold wagons of hay to breweries, dairies, and tanneries of the city. Though its face has changed - gone are the European American pillars of this market, replaced by the Hmong who now comprise the majority of farmers. Coming to the U.S. as refugees after serving as the CIA’s “secret army” during the Vietnam War, the Hmong farmed by trade and means for survival in in the mountains and highlands of Laos and in refugee camps in Thailand. And though their lives were ripped apart by war, they have successfully preserved their livelihood in Milwaukee, renting land in the surrounding areas, still planting, tending and harvesting their crops manually, bringing their produce every week to the Fondy Farmers Market to sell. Seeding hope, wealth and change for this struggling neighborhood, Fondy became the first and still one of the few markets in the state to accept Wisconsin QUEST, allowing customers to pay for produce with their FoodShare benefits, helping customers and farmers alike.                                                                                                   The Fondy Farmers Market was one of my favorite jobs of all time and I wrote extensively about it. It’s raw, edgy and real. And apart from that, I love food. I love being around it. I love the farmers and the customers who love it, too. And I love the people of the neighborhood. It was especially rewarding to work with these farmers, as I taught Hmong children for over 10 years when I worked as an English as a Second Language teacher in Milwaukee. I became extensively involved with their families and spent several years attempting to learn Hmong language.                                                                                                                                                                                      Additionally, this was not your typical farmer’s market geared for middle-upper class whites. This was an urban market, serving people who had limited access to food, any food, let alone fresh and affordable food. And personally, I was privileged to experience a part of society to which most middle-class white people would never be able or maybe would not want to see. I learned so much. It was like being transported to another world. And through the muck of crime, poverty, and racial divide, this market illuminated all colors of the rainbow, coming together in peace towards a deeper understanding. And the most beautiful thing about it, it was done simply, organically, through one of our most basic necessities in life: Food.                                                                                                                                                                I hope to bring to life the beauty of this market, as seen through my eyes, a story of integration and hope. Thank you to the farmers, customers, colleagues and community of the Fondy Farmer’s Market for enriching my life with yours.

A Sweet Story of Sorghum

By Sarah Allen

Racing down Fond du Lac Ave, on the North side of Milwaukee, that’s how I start every Sunday. There are no cops here, and everyone flies. I pull into the lot and pass two older guys sitting on the wooden benches facing the street, sitting back to back, each of them with a 20 ounce can of Miller Lite in their hand. They eye me up. I eye them back. There's usually someone in this empty parking lot, but I haven't seen these two before. The guy with the bib overalls facing the street has a bag of Wonder Bread in his hand. The other man swivels around and joins him as they swing their feet, drink their beer, and share bread with the flock of sea gulls floating above swooping in for breakfast. I park my car and wonder, have they gone to bed yet?                                                                                                                           It’s a cool 48 degrees at 7 a.m., pleasant and calm. The farmers are already in action, unpacking vans, dragging produce-filled rice sacks across the floor, setting up tables and sweeping stalls, moving in collective rhythm as they set the stage for the flurry to come. As the assistant manager for the market, I must get ready, too, and set up my information booth next to the bathroom across from Ser Thao’s stand. His produce is full and plentiful thanks to a generous fall. His wife arranges cut flowers into colorful bouquets - zinnias, gladiolas, daisies, and bright yellow chrysanthemums - dressing them neatly around tall stalks of sorghum.                                                                            Sorghum. It shows up occasionally at this market, a few farmers bring it in when in season. Most people don’t even know what it is. The first time I saw it, I thought it was sugar cane. It’s pretty, the tall ten-foot stalks propped among the colorful array of fruits and vegetables. But what do you do with it? Maybe make molasses?                                                                                                                                I started to do a little research. My father told me that his father, my grandfather, used to grow it on our dairy farm in Minnesota, chopping, stripping and heading it with a machete, loading it up in the pickup truck, hauling it to Iowa to be milled and then bringing back to our milk house on the farm where it was cooked in big, long pans to make syrup, cooled, bottled, then sold directly to the townspeople along with the milk from our cows, delivered in the same glass bottles labeled, Jersey Milk is Better - Allen Farms, Inc. Caledonia, Minnesota.     This ancient grass is a staple in much of our world’s past, dating so far back, archeologists aren’t even sure which part of Africa it originated. Growing its way around the globe, from Africa to India, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, finally making its way to the U.S., the seeds transported in the pockets of slaves, becoming the ‘poor man’s’ sweetener when sugar prices were high. Ten thousand years later, this heat and drought-tolerant crop has maintained its global presence: used as sweetener; eaten as a cereal; produced for livestock feed, paper, and alcohol; and most recently grown for ethanol, serving as a cleaner and more profitable source of biofuel than corn.                               And here today, it’s a specialty item at Ser Thao’s vegetable stand. If only his customers knew what care and effort he put into growing sorghum cane, purchasing the seeds from a company in the South, planting them in Styrofoam cups in his home in early February, then transplanting the seedlings to his fields in the spring, all to accommodate the long-required growing season. Like all the farmers in this market, who are primarily Hmong refugees, Ser has masterfully cultivated an eclectic mix of Wisconsin produce and exotic fare to accommodate customers of different ethnicities and different lands, growing the supply to meet the demand. Ser knew that sorghum was one crop that tied them together, and that is why he grew it.                                                                                                                                        African Americans from the South dressed in their Sunday best, men in brightly colored suits and women in ornate dresses and hats with colorful plumage greet each other. “Have a blessed day,” they say with sincerity, leaving with full bags of greens and okra to complement their soul food dinner. Refugee women from Liberia traipse through the market wearing colorful sarongs speaking in their native tongue, sweeping the tables clean of medicinal bitter melons and sweet potato leaves, culinary cuisine of their country. The Burmese refugees, too –families pooling together, piling out of minivans, scouring the market for their own Asian greens such as Yu Choy or Chinese mustard. All of these people were accustomed to growing and eating sorghum in their homeland. And the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman from the East Side who comes every week to fill her recyclable bags with kale, chard, and spinach to supply her rigorous vegan diet, did not yet know about sorghum, but quickly learned, and now buys stalks for her golden-locked children in place of a candy bar. And in a city infamously known as the “most segregated in the nation”, in a neighborhood coined a “food desert”, surrounded by boarded up homes and barred storefronts, there is one simple thing that brings everyone together: Food.                                                                                                          As morning brighten and the market swells, the sorghum stalks attract nearly every customer that passes by. I walk over to admire the long, fibrous stalks. Ser’s face spreads into a smile as he reaches over and gives me one. “Here! For you!” he says. I drag the stalk back to my table and set it against the bathroom wall.                                                                                                                                                A man comes to my table and points to my new find. With round wire-rimmed spectacles, dark freckles spotting his brown cheeks, and a shaved head with a full white beard, he resembles a shorter version of actor Morgan Freeman, not just the look of him, but his carriage—distinguished, soulful and Southern.  “I used to grow that,” he says matter-of-factly. “I used to grow all that, tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, watermelons, collards, yams, and cotton. We had big, big fields. That was 50 years ago, now, but I still think about it.” He looks off in the distance, remembering. “Name’s David. I’m from a little town called Louisville, Mississippi.” He’s a long-time customer and has told me before.                                                                                                                                                                                                                      In his distinct way of speaking, with little inflection in his voice, each word deliberate yet gentle, hinged with sweet Southern twang, he rambles back in time, reliving his life story in minutes - how he moved to Milwaukee from the South, worked thirty years as factory supervisor, married a woman from Mexico, and will soon retire to his birthplace. “Guadalajara is nice to visit, but I prefer Mississippi. It’s my home. I like the nature and growing my own food. I enjoy working my hands in the soil. Twelve of us kids worked that farm, three generations back. I go and see it time and again, though it’s all changed.”                                                                                                                  He looks up, fields of memories filling his eyes. “A lot of people say they don’t want to farm anymore. A lot of people say they never want to go back. I don’t understand that. All I understand is I love it.”                                                                                                         Ser listens attentively, and then shares his own story. Growing up farming as child in a small mountain village in Laos without electricity or machinery, he recalls having to make his own tools. “In Laos we grew rice, corn, bananas, pineapple, sugar cane and sorghum. We farmed to survive. There was no need for money.”                                                                                                                                            Ser came to the U.S. in 1989 a s a result of the Vietnam War and has lived in Milwaukee ever since, working a factory job, farming on the side, supporting a wife and six children. “They help, too…Farming is our culture. I want my children to know how our people lived, how to grow their own food. I want them to understand the harder you work, the more you earn. You can’t do that in a factory. I like farming. I like growing my own food and being outside and getting exercise. I will always farm.”                                                                                                 Like many Hmong refugees who fought and served as the CIA’s “secret army” during the Vietnam War Vietnam War, Ser continues his livelihood as a farmer, renting land on the outskirts of the city in Mequon, where he manually tends to an eight-acre plot. “In Laos we made syrup with sorghum and we also grew it as a grain, like rice.”                                                                                                                                  “We made syrup with it, too.” David adds. “That’s what we called it anyway, syrup.”  He explained how his mother milled it down by hand and evaporated the juices making it into its rich thickness. (Sorghum is similar in appearance to sugar cane, and sorghum syrup is often confused with molasses which is usually made from sugar cane or beet sugar).                                                                                                        “Or you can just eat it.” Chevis pipes in from behind, a generation younger, but a Southern black, too, from Fort Worth, Texas. Chevis is the maintenance man at our market and lives in the neighborhood. Though spending most of his life in the city, some of it during hard times being on the streets of homelessness, he dreams of being a farmer and has even tried raising chickens in his basement. Dumpling and Spice were their names and he walked them around the neighborhood on leashes for exercise until the city took them away, after he and his clucking chickens were anonymously interviewed on WUWM public radio for a story about backyard hens. His next goal: to buy a goat for milk and cheese.                                                                                                                                                                                                       Chevis reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of sorghum he got yesterday at the market along with a small pocket knife. He demonstrates where and how to cut, sectioning it at the knuckles, peeling off the outer layer and chopping it into bite-sized chunks. He hands me a small wedge to try. “Now chew!”                                                                                                                                                                        I examine the thick, green chunk curiously then stick it in my mouth and chomp through its course fibers, feeling the release of its the sweet juices. “Don’t swallow it!” Mr. Thao shouts.                                                                                                                                                Chevis comes up with a garbage can and holds it in front of my face. “Spit! It’s like tobacco.” The three observe me closely, bursting into laughter as I spit the mauled up sorghum into the garbage can.                                                                                                                                    “It’s good!” I am finally able to say.                                                                                                                                                              “It’s good for the teeth,” David continues. “There’s a mechanism in the stalk that releases when you chew and it cleans them.”                      “Yep, we do that in Laos, too, because we don’t have toothbrushes,” Ser adds.                                                                                            “It’s good for ya, too. It’s got vitamins,” Chevis chimes in. It certainly is. With a healthy amount of B vitamins, magnesium, iron, calcium, potassium, and protein, doctors historically prescribed sorghum to nutrient-deficient patients.                                                                     I head back to my information table to attend to a waiting customer. Chevis leans up against the wall next to me with his broom and rolls a cigarette. A middle-aged man limps painstakingly through the market wearing tattered clothes and patched up boots and stops at my table on his way to the restroom. His weary eyes grow bright and wide. “Is that really sorghum?!” he asks in disbelief. “I grew up eating that in the South. How much is it?”                                                                                                                                                                              “Yes, it sure is! It’s one dollar a stalk,” I answer.                                                                                                                                          “I’m staying at the shelter and there’s a kid from Nigeria there. I was tellin’ him we used to eat it like candy. He ain’t never heard of it. I’m gonna see if I have enough to give ‘em one.”                                                                                                                                                     He rummages in his pocket for change as I am reminded of a Mexican saying I learned from the novel Esperanza Rising: ‘The rich take care of the rich and the poor take care of those who have less’. He gathers enough, pays, and carries the long stalk of sorghum out of the market tucked through straps of his knapsack.                                                                                                                                                  At the end of the market day, Chevis and I carry our bags of vegetables out, each balancing a stalk of sorghum over our shoulders. He looks back at the farmers piling in their vans to head for home, then spans his arms wide and twirls into a long, slow spin to survey his neighborhood, nodding his head in smug satisfaction. “We got a lot of livin’ to do sista’! There’s a WHOOOOLE world out here and you never know what you might find.”  He taps his shirt pocket and smiles with a cigarette dangling from his lips and looks down at his small notebook of poems. I know he has more to write. I push the stalk of sorghum through the hatch of my VW Beetle, barely making it fit tip to tail and close the hatch. Chevis pats me on the back and smiles with laughter dancing in his eyes. “Now take that stalk home, cut it down and chew on it like a little panda.”

Sorghum is a highly nutritious super food, packed with B vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and protein. If you’d like to learn more about how you can incorporate sorghum into your diet, here’s a good article from HuffPost including recipes. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sorghum-syrup-grain-super_n_6063016#:~:text=Sorghum%20is%20a%20cereal%20grain,because%20it%20is%20drought%20resistant.