In the Weeds

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In the Weeds Page 21

by Daniel Browne


  He rapped his fists together, then spread his fingers—boom.

  “And now you have to deal with the fallout,” I said.

  “That’s the fun part.”

  “You should take the job with Crop Top. John said it himself. Everything he does succeeds.”

  “I told you, I’m not feeling the whole working-for-the-man thing anymore. As long as I can still get comped at Rita’s, my relationship with John is right where it should be.”

  “If Dante’s going to do the watering, I can still write grant proposals. Seriously, anything you need.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to be stuck in the background writing proposals.”

  I did say that, didn’t I? I was about to tell Elliot that was the old me—the old new me. The new me (the new old me?) had gotten enough dirt under his nails for the time being. I didn’t have a chance, though, because just then Sal came charging towards us, his Playboy medallion swinging, his face red with sunburn, rage, or a mix of the two.

  “What did you little fuckers do now?” he said, his hoary chest heaving.

  “There a problem, Sal?” Elliot asked with what I took to be genuine curiosity. I wasn’t sure what was eating the guy either.

  “Don’t get cute with me. What’s with the fucking boulders?”

  “Oh, right,” Elliot said. “That’s not us. The Parks Department’s reclaiming the space.”

  “They are, huh? And where exactly am I supposed to park? Do you know what it’s like trying to find street parking around here? Everybody and their mother is looking for a spot near the hospital. The one thing that made my working conditions tolerable was knowing I always had a place to park.”

  “You should go to the next community meeting,” I said. “Better yet, volunteer for the steering committee.”

  Sal squeezed his fists as though he was imagining them gripping a couple of stress balls or, more likely, our balls. “I know you two are behind this. The hoods scared you off their turf, so now you’re moving in on ours. But you listen close: I’m the union rep for this dump. By the time we’re through, their little act of vandalism is going to seem like a love tap. You’ve been warned!”

  With that, he scuttled off in a hurry; his eggplant-colored PT Cruiser was parked in front of the fire hydrant.

  Elliot laid his hand on one of the new decorative hedges like it was the head of a loyal dog. “You sure you want to quit?” he asked me. “Things are finally getting good.”

  The Next Evolution

  Fast-forward a year-and-a-half or so, and before me is a tableau of abundance: cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach, radishes, carrots, peas, beans, even melons—all being tended by a crew of tweens and teens with serious expressions. A girl—at least I think it’s a girl—in full beekeeper’s regalia inspects a frame of honeycombs. An older boy shows a couple of newbies how to turn compost; they wrinkle their noses but do their part without complaint.

  It would warm my heart me to tell you I was making a return visit to Peter’s Place, but alas, I wasn’t. I was taking a tour of Miss Lorraine’s Farm, a project of The People’s Pantry of Bed-Stuy, in my capacity as a program officer for the Prometheus Foundation. It felt good to be outside again.

  After months cooped up in the apartment ghost-writing for Vivienne’s opinionated friend; cranking out policy briefs for my Career Center instructor Mr. Clark, who’d finally decided to run for City Council; making funny faces at baby Pete, the offer from Prometheus had sounded like just the ticket. Brad remembered me, of course, and while he was intrigued by my experience in city government, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have landed the job if I hadn’t spent the past year “in the field,” building a nonprofit from scratch. Never mind that what I’d built had all but collapsed around me (and that we’d never technically registered as a nonprofit). My mistakes just served to prove I was entrepreneurial, that I could relate to the typical Prometheus grantee; hell, Raise the Roof was a Prometheus grantee. You’d think the scant return on that planning grant would have disqualified me, but Brad didn’t see it that way; on the contrary, it was my logic model that sealed the deal.

  Now I’d been sent to shepherd the People’s Pantry through the Prometheus trial by fire. There was a lot at stake, this being the foundation’s biggest urban agriculture award since In It Together.

  The People’s Pantry was founded by a local reverend in the ’70s. It was a typical food pantry, distributing provisions to the needy, until a few months ago, when Pastor Leo received a call from a fired-up woman named Suzette who was deeply concerned about the lack of positive outlets for young people in Bed-Stuy. For years, she’d been trying to organize basketball tournaments and poetry slams on shoestring budgets, but recently a vision of the future had come to her: young people of color going back to the land, learning to nourish themselves and respect Mother Earth. She’d seen it happen in other communities. Why not theirs? Pastor Leo was sold; the People’s Pantry would begin growing its own fruits and vegetables, with youth from the church’s afterschool program doing the weeding and hoeing. The legendary Miss Lorraine had died earlier that year; naming the farm after her was a natural. As one of the largest neighborhood hunger prevention programs in the city, the pantry already had a grant from Prometheus, so it was just a matter of asking for an increase. Prometheus, however, had other ideas. It usually does.

  Rather than adding a zero to the pantry’s anti-hunger grant, Prometheus saw an opportunity for an innovative (dare I say disruptive) economic development project: the food grown on the farm wouldn’t be given away to the poor; it would be sold. The kiddie farmers wouldn’t be volunteers; they’d be paid employees, not only earning a fair wage but developing the first line on their resumes. It was the In It Together model with a twist: rather than setting up a farm stand or selling to local restaurants (a market Crop Top had pretty much cornered in that section of Brooklyn), Prometheus had brokered a deal with the finally open Whole Foods in Gowanus. The site had been scrubbed of every last speck of toxic waste, and the shelves were overflowing with local products, more than a hundred of them.

  Many of those items, as it happened, came from the Broadway Triangle. Pfizer had finally sold the largest building in its old factory complex to a developer, the same developer, in fact, who hosted Crop Top. Apparently, he’d acquired a soft spot for the new breed of Brooklyn entrepreneur. The big idea this time: turn the factory into an incubator like the one in Gowanus where Seth hung his shingle. The Pfizer incubator would be a more exclusive club, though, leasing only to Brooklyn’s pluckiest food start-ups—the granola makers, the jerky curers, the taffy pullers, each a likely candidate for a Savory Brooklyn centerfold. Where once antidepressants and laxatives had flown off the assembly line, now a new generation of wares was winging its way onto shelves: KomBushwick DIY brewing kits, Ashkenummy small-batch gefilte fish, three rival brands of pickle.

  The goods hatched from the Pfizer incubator joined a cornucopia of similarly hyper-local items: Flake, our former haunt, now had its own cookbook, Bake Like a Flake. Rita’s was hawking frozen pizzas, John’s first foray into packaged foods. It was a crowded field (Tommy Brutti’s line of products alone could fill an aisle), but John had a competitive edge: his pies were baked and then flash-frozen, sealing in the old-world flavor imparted by Nonno Arturo’s brick oven (or, more likely, a reasonable facsimile thereof). I picked one up the other day when Tricia had her hands full with little Pete; I have to admit, it wasn’t terrible.

  Nestled among these wonders were the fruits of the People’s Pantry farm. Their bestseller was the People’s Pluot, a plum-apricot hybrid. Prometheus had hired a product research firm to analyze the market for locally grown produce and identify any gaps. Money well spent (at Prometheus, there’s no other kind) because the data pointed Pastor Leo to the pluot. The wisdom from above is full of good fruits, as the Bible says. I asked the analysts about the market potential of locally grown fraise de bois, knowing full well that if there were any, John would be all over it.
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br />   Actually, John had handed off the day-to-day decision-making at Crop Top to Greta. There were even rumblings that Crop Top may cut ties with Rita’s and become a 501c3 after all. One rumor was that John had lost interest when it failed to turn a profit; another was that it was turning a profit, and he was seeking a more favorable tax arrangement. Either way, it was clear the farm was just one of many pots he had simmering on his crowded cooktop. The most intriguing of these was that John had quietly bought up the entire block around Rita’s, lot by lot, and rather than expanding the always-teeming dining room, he was building the largest, most state-of-the-art kitchen in Brooklyn, a culinary laboratory to rival the fabled El Bulli in Spain. The kitchen would contain one table, where Francisco and visiting chefs from around the world would dish up their latest inventions to an invitation-only assemblage of trendsetters, string-pullers, and Page Six bait—hand-picked apostles of the legend of John Cardini. It would be the most exclusive table in the city.

  The funny thing is that, even as he was ramping up his empire-building intrigues, John seemed to be losing interest in the hijinks that had been Rita’s original raison d’être. Word was he only showed up at the restaurant once or twice a week, and only partied with the old abandon if there was a VIP who expected it. He spent the rest of his time holed up in the Rockaways where he’d bought a beach bungalow and (supposedly) opened a modest clam shack for local surfers, filing all the papers under an assumed name so no one in the business would catch wind of it. The subterfuge may have been for naught, though. The Times has reported sightings of waxed mustaches and kitchen implement tattoos on the boardwalk.

  Meanwhile, Crop Top had established itself as the mecca of urban farming. Profitable or not, it was widely hosannaed for the many innovations it had introduced in its brief existence—everything from sunset yoga among the crops to the first mushrooms cultivated within city limits, a science project that started in one of the old Pfizer factory’s abandoned chemical labs. As I understood it, many of these ideas came from Kat. She was like a shoot rescued from a withering vine and grafted onto a thriving one. Her latest stroke of inspiration was a program for refugees from war-torn countries. For the refugees, growing beloved foods from their homelands served as a kind of therapy. For the Crop Top team, the program was an opportunity to learn the refugees’ native farming techniques and drum up a market for fruits and vegetables still largely unknown in the city. Genius. When I first heard about it, I got wistful about what might have happened if she’d come up with the idea while she was still working for me and Elliot.

  I was getting wistful a lot in my first few months with Prometheus. The world, which is to say Brooklyn, had changed. Crop Top was just the most formidable in what had become a crowded field of competitors. All of a sudden, everyone was a farmer. In It Together was still around, though I’d heard rumors that Duncan was taking time off to write a book. Linda Light had cut the ribbon on the Living Classroom in Gravesend and was proud to announce plans for twelve more throughout the city. To help raise the funds, she was introducing a line of hand-forged egg-coddling spoons for $250 a pop. There were new organizations devoted specifically to beekeeping, poultry, and fish (Kat had been ahead of the tilapia curve, too). Every church, daycare center, and school—I mean every school—had a vegetable garden at least as big and well-designed as Raise the Roof’s.

  That urban farming was a boon to society was now considered self-evident. An article on the latest players and trends appeared every other week. Upstanding liberals were just as likely to donate to the vegetable plot around the corner as to the local animal shelter or soup kitchen. Elliot and I had never heard of Kickstarter when we were rounding up donors for Raise the Roof; just a few months later, it was an essential tool of the trade. Sometimes, when I was stuck at my desk, futzing with a PowerPoint presentation on “moonshots” and “strategic linkages,” the knot of my tie pressing against my Adam’s apple, I found it hard not to think of myself as a victim of bad timing. But then an intern would stick her head in my office to let me know there were croissants in the Cronus Room, and I’d remember I’m not a victim of anything.

  I never went out to our farm again after the day it was moved to the parking lot. Whenever I asked if Elliot needed help, he and Dante and the usual neighborhood suspects seemed to have it covered. For a while, it looked like my absence really was going to prove the key to Raise the Roof’s success. Then came the start of school. Sasha and Miss Marcella brought their classes out a few more times and gave Elliot’s tricked-out curriculum a spin. But he was never able to rally the parents. The first round of standardized testing that semester was a bloodbath, and the Schlossers decided the time had come to oust Principal Jenner; there were factions for and against, and the ensuing tussle sucked up all the oxygen at the school. Elliot had to scrap his plans for a harvest festival fundraiser when it became clear no one was going to show. The money to pay Dante ran out. Vivienne was busy shaking down her friends for a new endeavor: VIV Academy Charter School. Marnie’s idea, of course. Baruch was still dragging its heels on that endowed chair, so why not cut out the middleman and start a school of her own? Better yet, why not a chain of schools? The name stood for “Vision. Initiative. Victory.”

  On the bright side, Sal never made good on his threat of old-fashioned union action. Contreras and his bloc, too, kept their promise to leave the farm unmolested. By October, Elliot had a good two hundred pounds of bell peppers on his hands. The problem was what to do with them. He couldn’t donate them to the Begin to Win cafeteria; it was too late to secure the necessary permissions from the Department of Education’s Office of School Food. Distracted by all the drama with the handball court, we’d never gotten around to investigating the process. Nor had we tackled the paperwork to apply for a farmers market permit. So every morning for a month, Elliot showed up at the front office of Begin to Win and left a basket full of peppers for parents, students, and staff to take as they passed by. He brought another daily basket to the adjoining special ed school, but it was barely enough to make a dent. Sasha, Xander, Henry, and the few other card-carrying members of the farm each took home a share, and still Elliot was buried in peppers. He tried to sell off the rest to Rita’s, but thanks to Crop Top, they were fixed for product.

  Here at last was a chance to do my part. That fall, Elliot was our personal CSA. Every weekend, he’d bike over to our place with a crate strapped over his handlebars, mostly peppers with a few surprises mixed in: a smattering of lima beans, a bunch of basil from Henry’s plant. We’re still slathering our English muffins with the pepper jelly we canned for winter. I must say, it’s delicious.

  I was proud and a little jealous of Elliot for seeing the project through, but I suspect he was a little jealous of me, too. While I was hanging pictures above my desk (the only place Prometheus permitted personal decorations) and choosing a retirement plan, he was picking peppers, plotting a course out of the Triangle. He bided his time till Principal Jenner’s last week on the job, then showed up to tell him how sorry he was to see him go. There was one piece of business he was hoping they could square away before the new principal took over, a formality really. Elliot needed his signature on the form that would transfer proprietorship of the farm from Raise the Roof to Begin to Win, legally recognizing its conversion from a community garden into a school garden. Principal Jenner’s recollection of our first meeting was hazy, but Elliot assured him that this had been the understanding all along. Raise the Roof’s model was to provide schools and communities with the resources they needed to start sustainable farm projects, then leave those projects in their partners’ capable hands. Having built Begin to Win’s capacity to manage the farm, Elliot’s work here was done. Of course, if the school needed additional support, technical assistance was available; his consulting fee was negotiable.

  Who knows whether Jenner bought this or just wanted to stick it to the Schlossers. Whatever the case, he signed. Elliot helped Sasha with the application for a three-year gr
ant from the Pepsi Foundation (they were on a PR offensive in the city at the time, part of their campaign to defeat Bloomberg’s ban on jumbo sodas). So began his career as a nonprofit farm consultant.

  It was a masterstroke, really. Elliot had the ideal set of assets for a consultant in this brave new world. First, he had the curriculum—vetted by experts, piloted in an esteemed charter school—just the thing for a fledgling nonprofit farm looking to attract philanthropic dollars. Second, he had the connections. Need help securing a permit? He still had Vivienne on speed dial. Looking for an in with funders? His former partner just happened to be a program officer for the city’s most prominent foundation. How about branding and public outreach? He was close with a leader in the field of strategic communications. That’s right. He’d made nice with Marnie, for whom new business always trumped old beef. He’d even buried the hatchet with Seth—I gave him permission to blame me for everything—just in case a prospective client needed an architect. Other than Sal, not a single person who’d crossed Elliot’s path was on bad terms with him.

  That more than anything was what made him the perfect consultant. Everyone liked the guy. Clients were willing to pay just to have him around for a while. Pastor Leo was a believer. All it took was one conversation—and a recommendation from his friendly Prometheus program officer—to seal the deal.

  There he was waiting for me by the pluot nursery, his beard trimmed to a professional length but his tan so deep now it seemed permanent. He had the look of a man who’s gotten used to being his own boss. I finished up my confab with Pastor Leo and headed his way.

  He picked a pluot and tossed it to me. “Like what we’ve done with the place?”

  The bite I took was tart. The pluot wasn’t quite ripe yet. “Could use some more strategic linkages,” I said.

 

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