Artist Linda Goode Bryant on Creating Food Sovereignty with New York Communities: “Let’s Find the ‘Can’ in ‘Can’t’ ”

In 2020, Utah State University reported that while following government's dietary nutritional guidelines would cost a family of four between $1,000 and $1,200 a month, the average low-income family in the US only spends about one fourth of that on their total monthly food budget.  

With that in mind, hunger is only one potential outcome of food insecurity. Access to healthy food and disengagement with healthy eating are underlying causes of chronic diseases and health disparities disproportionally affect income insecure, people of color, older adults, and people who are disabled. How might we disrupt this cycle? 

In 2009, Linda Goode Bryant, a trailblazing artist, activist, and gallerist, founded Project EATS in response to the ongoing crisis in New York City. In partnership with community residents, nonprofits, and landlords, Project EATS uses art, urban agriculture, and social enterprise to produce and distribute fresh, plant-based food in marginalized communities. On a constellation of plots in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan, the food is often grown in and by people from the very communities that benefit. Project EATS also operates food pantries, farm stands, and a healthcare provider-subscribed “Farmacy” food distribution. Recently, it made new inroads into healthy and affordable prepared meals.

We sat down with Goode Bryant to discuss how co-creating food sovereignty with communities became the focus of her art. 

When you founded Just Above Midtown gallery in 1974, was that your first artist-led enterprise?  

Actually, I began my first artist-social enterprise when I was seven or eight. It happened when my request to my father for a nickel to buy a popsicle and he said, ‘No,’ and for some reason I asked, ‘Well, why not?’ He replied, ‘Because it’s my nickel, and I get to decide what I do with it.’ I had this idea inspired by everything from The Little Rascals to the Peanuts comic strip and Pippi Longstocking (she was my ‘best friend’ and a character in a children’s book who had no parents). I really identified with the idea that children could do these things ourselves.

I decided I was going to create a musical with the kids in the neighborhood and invite our parents for free, but charge them a nickel for lemonade. I approached all the kids on the block, and they were like, ‘You can’t do a musical.’ Then, I went back to my house and came up with melodies and lyrics, and so that made them go, ‘Well, she did do that. Why don’t we try it?’ And so, we did. The front porch was the stage and we used blankets to make the curtains and card table folding chairs for seats. We did our musical and raised enough money to buy popsicles for two summers. It was like let’s just raise our own nickels. I’ve been doing that ever since, to be honest!  

How does this carry over to food sovereignty and founding Project EATS? 

Here in New York City are communities that don’t have access to fresh, organically grown or otherwise-grown nutritious food. Instead of stamping them as ‘deserts’ I thought, ‘No, wait a minute: the desert is Park Avenue where there are actually no plots where you could grow your own food. But, we could grow our own food in these other communities, because there are empty lots. People should be able to grow their own food, even if they live on concrete. I like challenges like how to grow food on the concrete.

In Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, there was a nonprofit that we continue to partner with, Help USA, that oversaw temporary housing and a vacant lot across the street. I went onto to the lot and a security guard asked, ‘What are you doing?,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I’m just looking at wanting to start a farm!’ He goes, “I’m gonna take you to my boss,” who was willing to see me. We began there. Then we started doing it on school grounds because it was always the concept for Project EATS to work with youth and adult residents in communities to manage these farms. We teamed up with high schools wherever we were looking to farm as they tended to have lawn space. From schools, I said: What about other nonprofits that have land? So, I started looking for nonprofits that we could partner where it served their work to have a farm. That’s when I came up with the idea of “farmacies” and began partnering with community-based medical providers. We partnered with New York City Housing Authority, to farm within their housing long before Project EATS became the model for NYCHA to create the farm programs they have since created.

Many of us look around New York, and we see concrete and garbage—a void or absence of “green.” But you saw fertile ground for creation and partnership. How? 

I’ve had the fortune, especially with the show at MoMA, to talk to people. It reminds us that we are uniquely wired as a species that can transform what we imagine into something tangible, that others can experience. Artists do that as our process, but we all are wired to do that: to create social connections among huge groups of people through that ability to imagine and transform.

We have to see what’s in front of us, but we’re socialized not to see what’s in front of us: we are socialized to respond to the distractions. When the Highline first opened, I was walking along it, and, at some point, I stopped, and I looked out. It hit me for the first time: every shape was a rectangle!  Everything was a rectangle! I stopped strangers that were walking by and said, ‘Stop, stop, look: what do you see? What do you see? What’s the shape?’ And they’re going, ‘Uh, rectangles.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ This is something that we have allowed ourselves to believe is absolute, that there is no other shape that might be a more effective to live in. And that makes me then wonder, ‘How does that rectangle affect how we relate to one another? What if we were living in a circle that seems to be endless? Would we apply a binary approach to almost everything?’

With Mellon’s grant support for Project EATS, you’ve launched a pilot project called Prepared Eats. Can you tell us more about that? 

The goal is to create community-based food systems that promote health and provide an economic engine in the communities where people live. For that to happen, it means people need access to eat fresh, plant-based foods. More and more around the world, people are eating food prepared outside the home. This is happening no matter how much money you have in your pocket.

We went to community health providers in Brownsville initially to develop the Farmacy, a prescription program where doctors provide the patient with a prescription of the vegetables they should be eating, and then we find ways to subsidize the cost of their vegetable prescriptions and supply it from what we’re growing in the community. That worked very well for a while. After a while it became apparent to me was that it wasn’t going to be enough to provide patients with prescriptions and that it wasn’t going to be as effective as I thought it would be in increasing resident consumption of fresh vegetables. We have so many moms that come by the farms with their kids, and when we’ve offered them vegetables, their response was, ‘Oh, no, I don’t eat that. I want my kids to eat it, but I don’t eat that.’ So, how do you address that? Fast forward and we decided to develop plant-based prepared meals because there should be an option for people who eat meals that are already prepared and don't want to go through a whole life change in order to make enough time to cook food.

How do you see Project EATS as co-creating work in and with communities?  

Part of being an artist is that we’re just really curious, and I think we all need to be more curious. It shouldn’t just be artists—we should all be really, really curious. And what I mean by that is, to not work from our title and role in a hierarchical way. Just be interested in people and find common ground. You can’t know what’s better for them if you’re only looking at it through your role, area of expertise and responsibility, or lens. You have to really work as a partner who is a catalyst, where you’re triggering the curiosity of someone to look and see that, ‘Oh, yeah, we do live in a world of rectangles...

Reconnecting people to their imaginations, and their creativity and ability to use what they have whatever resource they have to create the resources they need and want to create the conditions in their communities that make it possible for them to live healthily and thrive. This belief, mission, and goal is the essence of everything Project EATS does. We grow food but to support change we do more than food. We do art (act as a catalyst and support for people to imagine and make what they need). We do food (so everyone has access and the ability to eat healthy, fresh, nutritious food) and we do life (partner with people to create ways they can thrive where they live).