Fighting Food Insecurity

Chef Chris Williams, owner-operator of Southern cuisine mainstay Lucille’s/Lucille’s Hospitality Group, founded the farming program of his multipronged nonprofit Lucille’s 1913 in 2022. After researching the African American history of Fort Bend County and Kendleton, specifically during the Reconstruction era, he noticed a problematic present in this farming community of the past.

“Kendleton to this day is still [predominantly] African American. They’re not poor. But when it comes to food resources, they’re 15 miles away, round trip,” he says. “Fresh food is expensive, and then you add in a 30-mile commute…it’s almost cost-prohibitive for anybody.”

It took a little over a year of working with the City of Kendleton and Fort Bend County to access up to 54 acres for use as a farm, educational center, and kitchen to address food insecurity. Since its founding in 2020, Lucille’s 1913 has distributed more than a million meals to over 30,000 people, and the new land will allow the operation to scale up.

“We’re only growing what we know will be utilized by the community. We’re not trying to experiment and introduce new things,” Williams says. “The foods that my community knows and loves and celebrates are collard greens, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, okra, radishes, cucumbers, peas. We don’t need to worry about educating and introducing new things, we just need to provide access to the standards.”

Finca Tres Robles operated, and will continue to operate upon reopening, in an East End food desert. During the transition, 92 households are still receiving fully subsidized Neighborhood Produce Program boxes full of staples and produce from the Common Market, a national nonprofit that assists local farms with food distribution. The CSA (community-supported agriculture) boxes will resume once the new farm reopens.

“When our culture is saying [that] health is going to the clinic, visiting the doctor every year, and they tell you that you need to eat better, exercise better. It’s like, ‘Well, how the hell do I do that in my community?’” Garcia-Prats says. “I think as cities move forward, at some point they’re going to realize that this kind of system that we set up isn’t sustainable and doesn’t work. If these young people who are receiving these [Neighborhood Produce Program] boxes don’t become prediabetic or diabetic, we’re saving the system potentially half a million dollars over the course of that kid’s life. I see that as a solution.”

Commissioner Adrian Garcia believes that the lack of access to fresh produce contributes to many of the major health disparities in Precinct 2, though is not the only source. Sharpened carrot spears and sweet potatoes loaded onto trebuchets can’t storm the walls of Chevron’s Pasadena and LyondellBasell’s Houston refineries, which the Texas Tribune revealed to have exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s benzene emission guidelines in 2021 (exposure to the chemical is linked to higher cancer risks).

“Precinct 2 is mostly [occupied by] the oil and gas industry. That’s why this makes the conversation even more important,” Garcia says. “I have the highest number of children of families without health insurance. I have the highest rates of cancer in some areas in the county, and in other areas I have the highest rates in Texas. And then I also have the highest mortality rate by 20 years. So dealing with and understanding ways to… improve the quality of life and the life expectancy of people that live in my precinct is critical. Farming is one of those ways to do that.”

This belief led Garcia to rally for Finca Tres Robles to receive a 40-year lease from Harris County so the farm can continue servicing food-insecure families also grappling with health care access. It makes their lives just a little less stressful, but it also marks a turning point in agricultural land allotment in Harris County. Despite all the challenges involving profits (or lack thereof), county leaders agreed that what Garcia-Prats and his team are accomplishing transcends mere economics and formulas in a ledger.

Finca Tres Robles was “already committed to distributing their produce to Precinct 2 and inner-city elementary schools, inner-city senior groups. It just was ridiculous that they should do this incredible work, make this incredible investment, make this land farmable, then just to be told, ‘Thank you, but bye, Felicia,’” Garcia says. “We are an unzoned community, so it’s immensely difficult, but it’s also an opportunity. I think we ought to have legislation that is squarely tied to affordable housing credits. So let’s say that, when developers are seeking these tax credits to build affordable housing, they should also create some capacity to have an urban farm attached to that housing unit.”

His vision of a more farming-friendly city is already moving the needle at the lawmaker level, and Ngouala and Lockhart Folkerts are working at the grassroots level to encourage more landowners to donate or affordably lease their lots to expand Plant It Forward’s operations. It’s been difficult, but not insurmountable, though Lockhart Folkerts worries that the nonprofit’s commitment to the specific, localized benefits of urban farming may be compromised if the farmers ultimately get pushed out to rural areas.

“We would love to be urban. But overall, our experience has been that it’s so expensive to operate in an urban area. It’s so hard to get the land,” she says. “With the size we are and the funding that’s available to us and the need that is being expressed from the farmers we work with, we need to get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of land. We would be very interested in talking with the county or other institutional landowners.”