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Food Dallas is planning to use a portion of the proceeds from its
upcoming $100 per plate benefit dinner to help launch a community
garden in a Vickery Meadows area apartment complex.
The local chapter has traditionally
raised money to send delegates to the biannual Terra Madre conference
in Italy, but co-leader Chris Tuck said he wanted to find a worthy
supplemental project “that was close at hand.”
While the organization’s still
working out details, the concept calls for putting a garden on a
one-acre plot near a complex housing hundreds of immigrants from
Thailand, Ethiopia, Liberia, Bhutan and the Congo.
“My thought was that we could assist
in clearing the soil or building raised beds,” Tuck explains. “I’m
just thrilled the complex is willing to support it.”
Tuck hopes the garden will be a place
where newly arrived immigrants can teach their children how to tend
herbs and vegetables.
“A lot of them have been excellent
tillers of the land in their home countries,” he says.
In a much-debated Atlantic
article earlier this year, Caitlin Flanagan argued that immigrant
children would be better served by spending more time in the
classroom and less time farming school gardens. But Tuck says
community gardeners aren’t doomed to lives of manual labor.
“It makes their transition so much
more enjoyable,” he says. “If in assimilating into a new culture,
one is forced to give up everything native, I think diversity is
lost. And diversity is what makes this country great.”
Tuck, who emigrated from the U.K., says
the garden will benefit apartment residents who don’t have the
means to travel to a grocery store or who might have trouble finding
the ingredients they’re seeking.
“It will help these people
enormously,” he says. “If they can grow their own lemongrass, why
ever not?”
Feast 100, featuring chef David Uygur,
is scheduled for 6 p.m. October 17.
