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i 17 1: { 3: i i i { FRUITS AND VEGETABLES CULTIVATED, SOLD, AND CONSUMED IN CITIES GIVE A NEW MEANING 1� 15 1 NE MORNING LATE LAST AUGUST, I WAS CRUISING ACROSS the south side of Detroit in the Veggie Rover, the mobile head- quarters of Brother Rick Samyn's city farming venture. Samyn, a Capuchin friar, was wearing overalls, a baseball cap, and a long ponytail; the Rover was really nothing more than a glorified, beat- up Ford pickup with a cargo bay filled with a makeshift wooden stand and chard, tomatoes, garlic, and lettuce. Samyn grew the . vegetables in three gardens on unused land. Our destination was a clinic for young mothers and pregnant women in an Arab neigh- borhood in the struggling suburb of Dearborn. The sky gradually darkened and turned to rain, and the view out the windshield was an interminable sequence of vacant lots, oil refineries, gas stations, abandoned houses, trailer parks, and convenience stores. We got lost twice. Of all the things that Rick Samyn intended to be, an urban farmer was not one of them. But after enduring a painful divorce and losing confidence in the drug- interdiction work he did dur- ing the Reagan era, " I changed politically, I changed socially. I realized that for me'the American Dream was dead. We live on the backs of poor people and the environment, and we are exploit- ing that partnership." As his way of responding, Samyn joined Detroit's Capuchin religious order in 1988 to work on behalf of needy people. He remembered with fondness that when he was a boy, his father had started a garden on a vacant lot across from their grocery on Detroit's east side, so he decided to start a similar vegetable garden. He soon expanded the project to encompass sites on three unused Detroit lots covering two thirds of an acre. These Earthworks Gardens, tended by Samyn's group of volunteers, now produce food that is distributed at a Capuchin soup kitchen, a local community food bank, and clinics for low - income clients like the one we were visiting. Two thirds of an acre is hardly a farm in the conventional sense. Samyn's enterprise is only a few steps above a private garden; it's agriculture at an elementary level. But for an increasing W number of people who advocate eating food produced locally, pretty much the opposite of how Z American agriculture has worked in recent decades, Samyn's project hints at how fruits and veg- o