The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Exploring Urban Farming and Food Justice with Erika Allen

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Exploring Urban Farming and Food Justice with Erica Allen urbangrowerscollective.org About the Guest(s): Erika Allen is the founder and CEO of Strategic Development and Programs for Urban Growers Collective, an organization focused on creating sustainable and equitable community food systems. She is also the President of Green ERA Educational NFP and co-owner of Green Era Sustainability Partners. Erika Allen has been appointed by the Illinois Governor to the Illinois Leadership Council for Agricultural Education and by the Biden Administration to join the Farm Service Agency Committee for Illinois. She also serves as the co-chair of the Food Equity Council for the city of Chicago. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss is joined by Erika Allen, an influential leader in sustainable agriculture and food justice. Erika discusses the importance of growing your own food, especially in urban settings, highlighting the numerous health and community benefits. From food as medicine to creating local economies and addressing food deserts, Erika's insights are both profound and accessible. Erika shares the transformative work being conducted at the Urban Growers Collective and the Green Era Campus in Chicago. These projects focus on creating circular food economies that reduce food waste, generate renewable energy, and provide educational opportunities. She emphasizes the role of such initiatives in empowering communities, mitigating climate change, and offering sustainable economic opportunities. This episode is a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in sustainable agriculture, food justice, and community development. Key Takeaways: Community food systems can drastically improve food security, economic opportunities, and public health, especially in underserved areas. The Green Era Campus utilizes anaerobic digestion technology to convert food waste into renewable energy and nutrient-rich compost. Urban Growers Collective focuses on food justice through educational programs, community gardens, and support for local food economies. Growing your own food not only provides nutritional benefits but also fosters a deeper connection to the environment and community. Sustainable agriculture projects can serve as powerful tools for trauma-informed care and community healing. Notable Quotes: "We all should know how to grow food and to be able to continue our relationship with the earth and with one another through our food system." "There's a correlation between environmental health and our human health." "Knowing that one's life energy can be spent on, you know, creating peace and prosperity within our own communities." "The food that we eat, if it's not nutritionally dense, we're depriving our systems of the building blocks to repair ourselves." "We get addicted to processed foods, and to mitigate that, if you start eating fresh, local foods, it drastically improves your health."

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We'll get this rolling before we completely explode. We have an amazing young lady on the show with us today. We're going to be talking to Erica Allen. She is the founder and CEO, Strategic Development and Programs for Urban Growers Collective. She's also the president of Green ERA Educational NFP and co-owner of Green Era Sustainability Partners. She's also been appointed by the Illinois Governor to the Illinois Leadership Council for Agricultural Education for a three-year term.

And she was also recently appointed by the Biden administration to join the Farm Service Agency Committee for Illinois. She's also a co-chair of the Food Equity Council for the city of Chicago. Darn it. Welcome to the show, Erica. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks, Chris.

There you go. Well, you know, there's always shitty parts of a city. Chicago, New York, L.A., you know, pick your place. So I guess that's what, I don't know what the hell. We'll just compost that. We'll compost that. I take that as a compliment for my fine city. Yeah, yeah.

You got to use that. Welcome to the show. Give us dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. You can find us at UrbanG collective.org and we can also find us at green era chicago.com just for general information and run all the like the linkedins the instagrams the facebooks etc yeah i think when i i think when i let slip shitty i was thinking of the Chicago Bears performance the last few years, maybe. Oh, oh. We love our Bears. They're thicker, thicker, thin.

The Bears. Yes. The blue and the orange, always. Hey, I'm in the same boat as a Raiders fan, so I can't throw shade. So give us a 30,000 overview, what you do. I think the big picture is food justice and developing community food systems that people can control and operate and, you know, that provide, you know, sustainable. And, you know, these are all these buzzwords, but just kind of in simple terms that you know where your food's coming from, multiple generations can access food, and to do so in a way to also transform how we look at care and the environment. And, you know, for us, it's really doing this within communities that have had the most historic impact of not having

access to, you know, multiple sources of nutritionally dense food and economic opportunities. So we try to do, you know, just meet the need, but also create new economies and opportunities for folks to transform their own communities. So we've been doing this for 20 years. And I'm a she, her, hers, we. I use we a lot because I work collectively. I'm one person who has had a vision and has been, you know, privileged to be able to work in a city that has the complexities and the opportunities

for transformation for my career. And through that work, we've really been able to create a culture and multiple food systems where people are growing a lot of food in the city now. And so we can grow food in the city. That means our friends in the suburbs and in the rural parts of our communities can do this without as many social pressures. And that's really important that we all think about how we can impact our carbon footprint and impact supply chains through our own efforts. And to me, that's really, you know, regardless of politics, et cetera, or even access to resources, it's something as a human being that we all should

know how to grow food and to be able to continue our relationship with the earth and with one another through our food system. There you go. Why is it important to grow our food, especially in the cityscapes where it's just concrete jungle, as opposed to just hitting the menu at McDonald's? I think you answered your own question, right? So one of the things that happens when you start thinking about growing food, even if it's a couple of pots on your windowsill, or if you have a little, you know, side yard, or if you're fortunate to have a larger, larger backyard or some acreage is you have to deal with your contamination. Is there fertility? What's happening in the soil happening in the environment? You know, we, my dad coined this term, you know, it all starts, it's all,

it's all about the soil. It's from the ground up. It's all about the soil. And it really is. You are what you eat. So if you know that your soil is full of fertility, that you're able to cultivate and control what's in your soil, then you know what you're putting in your body. And there's a correlation between environmental health and our human health. Food that we eat, if it's not nutritionally dense dense we're depriving our systems of the phytonutrients and the just the basic building blocks to repair ourselves and to just function fully a lot of our food is over processed so just having the opportunity to like have fertile soil grow some carrots grow some greens grow some tomatoes and have that control also means when there is a supply chain breakdown, like we saw in the

pandemic, that you know you can supplement storage crops, right? Like, you know, your rice and beans, things that are shelf stable, if you're able to grow your own food and have sort of that victory garden mentality that you always can jazz up some of those things and make sure that you have the nutrients. And also trade and share with folks in your community that may not have, you know, access to some of those things economically. There you go. I mean, the next time we have a massive crisis like the pandemic again,

I'm just going to figure out a way to barbecue and eat the zombies. But, yeah, they probably aren't eating the kind of foods that would make them delicious. So let's not. They're not vegan. So cut is what they've been eating. Or omnivore, just a healthy omnivore. Well, in today's world, they're after brains. And on social media, they're not going to find much.

You know, one of the things that I did. That's good commentary. I've seen Facebook. And one of the things I did was I ate horribly for most of my life. In fact, you can tell by looking at me. And somewhere around, I think it was 2016, I got tired of being 100 pounds overweight. And I got tired of feeling like shit all the time. And I read, it was a book by Penn Jillette called Presto.

And it talked about how he lost 100 pounds by switching his food sourcing. And, you know, I was doing the same thing he was. I was eating out of the frozen food section, going to the McDonald's and, you know, all the fast food joints and drinking, I would think about 10 to 15 Mountain Dews a day. I'm not even kidding on that. And then I would mix it with vodka at the end of the night. It's Mountain Dew and vodka. It's nasty, but it works. And so I was just living this completely awful lifestyle. And it became what I call veganese. Don't write me, people.

Because I know there's 5,000 variations of vegans. And I can never get any one of them right. So I don't care. So never mind. Anyway, so I started doing veganese so i basically started eating broccolis and and cauliflower i started learning about live foods how to eat you know how to you know you you stay in the grocery in the produce section of the store you don't go down the evil aisles like the chip aisles the pop aisles the candy aisles um and. And if it's in your house, it's in your mouth.

That's one of the rules I learned from Penn Jillette. So you don't bring it home. You don't play that Faustian bargain with yourself that you're going to only eat one Oreo a day out of the Oreo. Yeah, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen. That thing will be gone an hour at home. I started living that way, and I lost 100 pounds pounds in about I think it was 8 months. Congratulations.

That's awesome. No, I'm just kidding. But I'm feeling I eat healthy now. I intermittent fast now. The way I feel now of eating live whole foods is just 10,000% difference in the

quality of my life and how my body works. Yep. And one of the things too, that we're, that we know around just sort of the mitigation of just the, the quality of food and staying away from processed food, whether it's for, you know, weight reduction or chronic diet related illness. And I think in our case, a lot of the communities that we work with is also dealing with trauma. And so having an inflammatory response to the traumas of gun violence, systemic poverty, and just the stress of surviving

or dealing with issues that we don't have control of, and how food becomes one of the things that we do have agency over, we have to eat three times a day. And for communities and individuals that don't have control over a lot of the external things that, you know, the food system become a powerful force for healing, but also can become detrimental in shortening our lives if we're not really looking at the kind of the holistic perspective on all of the challenges that we face on an individual or societal level. So the work that I do really kind of is complex. It's more than just growing food and gardens, but really thinking about place-based kind of de-escalation spaces where young people can get a break from

the things that they're contending with on a day-to-day, where they can see new realities for themselves and others, gain social skills, cognitive behavioral interventions can actually take root in those spaces, because I can try on a different way of living, as opposed to being outside of that fence, and having, you know, things that are pretty horrific that now I think everywhere, I mean, we kind of get, you know, get a bad rap in cities like Chicago, but whether it's, you know, different kinds of opioid addictions and all the related trafficking that happens with that or in the city with gun violence and, you know, just unexpected, you know, murders that happen on a day-to-day basis that affect

the people in our organization and the communities that we work with, these are things that surprisingly, having a garden, having a farm, growing food can really mitigate some of those stressors. And then we're creating a local supply, food security at the same time. There you go. There's kind of an empowerment to it when you learn to grow your own food. I like to grow my own food. Unfortunately, I've been staying more in Utah. So you lose a lot of, you know, you have to start over every winter after every winter. Yeah. Same in Chicago. We're seasonal, but we do extend this season with low-tech hoop houses. So we're able to grow a lot of kale and collards and Swiss chard and some root crops without heat in hoop houses, even in our Chicago climate.

That's what I think. So you have no excuse. Yeah, you can go year round. I need a greenhouse. I'm like, I'm seriously, every year I'm like, I need to buy one. Now tell us about this project you're working on called the Green Era Campus that you have there in Chicago. Thank you.

Yes. So the Green Era Campus is centered around this idea of a closed loop system or closed loop economy. And it's really a mirror of what happens in nature. So what we're doing at the campus, the heart of the campus is something called an anaerobic digester. And it sounds kind of, think about aerobics, right? Like you do your aerobics, you're increasing your oxygen intake, and that's helping you burn energy, right? That's something that we're all familiar with. Anaerobic means without oxygen.

So it's basically an apparatus that looks kind of like a grain silo that has like a big ice cream like paddle in it. And this is five stories tall and it slowly mixes food waste that's been pulverized in a but it's kind of like a loose oatmeal slurry sounds kind of gross but it just breaks down slowly just our digestive system and microorganisms are eating that food waste and as they're eating all that food waste, they're releasing methane. They're carbon-based life forms, just like us. So we're carbon-based life forms. When we eat and we release gas, we're releasing methane. And we're not walking around capturing it. But I guess somebody could. But that doesn't seem like an efficient way to create a renewable source of natural gas. But it really makes sense when,

you know, in cities like Chicago, where we produce a lot of organic waste, food scraps, food manufacturing waste, and right now, what doesn't go to the emergency food system, you know, and food pantries that still fit for human consumption, or to farms, it goes to landfills. And we do not want that. We want that food waste, those byproducts to come to our digester so that we can break down that food waste responsibly, capture the methane before it hits our atmosphere, because methane is one of the biggest causes or mitigating factors for climate change that we can actually control. And then we also are producing a new energy source. And at the end of the day, all that material comes back out to our farms to grow more food.

So we're circulating that food waste that, you know, those scraps from your dinner, your chicken bones, your broccoli bits, your all that, you know, healthy, delicious food that you're eating now, Chris, whatever you're not consuming, we want to come to the digester so that we can recirculate it. So you have a perpetual supply of that food, and we're also contributing to decarbonization. So that is like the heart of it, and it really represents a new way for communities. And this is in a community. It's not off in the outskirts of town.

It is part of the fabric as both a place-based, this is we're doing this here. We don't want to increase our miles of moving this material around. We want it to recirculate and be an asset and also begin to shift the way that we think about our participation within our own food economy. So the project is a economic development kind of instigator as well, because now there's more green business that's attracted to the work that we're doing. And the site as a

campus will also support, you know, I talked a little bit earlier about the hoop work that we're doing. And the site as a campus will also support, you know, I talked a little bit earlier about the hoop houses that we grow in a vertical farm, so we can grow your tomatoes and strawberries year round using higher tech, growing technology, because we have a fuel source. We'll also be hosting students from, you know, starting in elementary school up to postdoc to do research and to learn about food systems. And, you know, whether it's the trades, you know, learning so folks can come in and purchase and also have sliding scale opportunities for folks who have limited incomes to get this healthy food because we want to make sure everybody in our community has access and has a pathway and clarity to you know eat these foods that's good for all of us for our society that we're healthy you know, eat these foods. That's good for all of us, for our society that we're healthy,

you know, and I believe that food, good food is a human right. You know, clean air is a human right. Clean water is a human right. Shelter is a human right. And these are kind of, these have become negotiable, and they shouldn't be. So if we have, if we operate out of a sense of abundance, that we're still creating a market economy we're still going to generate money everybody wants money and we need it but we can do so without extracting and harming our environment or one another and to me that is really what good business is the bottom line is it's important i'm i'm a very i'm not really competitive but like i like a good problem to. And it is complicated to do this work when you up the ante with technology too,

because technology is expensive. And how do you do that? How do you enter into something that's a little bit more kind of startup intensive? This is a $35 million project just to build this, this first phase of the facility so that we can actually have this apparatus that to scale can generate enough revenue and enough gas and enough compost to really activate a new economic reality. So that's what we're doing. And it's really based around what a decentralized food and energy system can look like that engages our communities, that is profitable, that supports, that doesn't dictate one way of doing things, that supports and encourages more food waste diversion from our landfills and, you know,

create space within those landfills for things that really do need to be landfilled because some things you can't recirculate as we move into a much more responsible way of living in our cities. Wow. It's all encompassing. And, you know, you mentioned poor people, people that are on limited incomes, you know, they're usually the ones who eat the worst, poorly. They'll, you know, they go to McDonald's and they eat the highly processed foods that,

you know, we've pretty much found these things are cancerous, these highly processed foods. Yeah. Yeah. They're not good. So you're creating this on a nine-acre vacant brownfield south side of Chicago. Former. Former brownfield.

It is no longer a brownfield. Oh. So we've mitigated that already. So that's already creating more public health by it is no longer a brownfield we've cleaned it up what's a brownfield by us for those who don't know including a brownfield is a any piece of land that has contamination that the epa has there's certain levels of metals carcinogens just like usually industrial waste that was not cleaned up. So we were able to acquire without, you know, we hadn't this whole project, it's just kind of an economic marvel in itself,

because we were able to work with just some really, you know, generous and risk tolerant community development entities to finance and fund the project. But one of the things that we were able to do was to leverage fields remediation funds to increase the value of the land to then use it as collateral to access capital. Because I found it just kind of it sounds kind of ignorant, but I'll just say it because I've worked in the not for profit space my whole career. You can't actually like get loans without collateral or money already. So it's kind of like an impossible thing without somebody co-signing or having something of value to access capital. So if you don't have land of value, it's really difficult to scale or to build wealth. And I think this is something that, you know, doing not-for-profit work, which is essentially resolving long-standing social, environmental,

economic issues with very limited resources. Whereas there's industries that don't do that, they're motivated to generate profit. And then not for profit realm, we do the cleanup work, right? So, but really, it's antithetical to what good business is, because we can create these opportunities, these models where we can do all of those things at the same time. And I think that this next generation coming up is very interested in that. It's not as interested in, I call it the gold-plated toilet kind of situation, or, you know, I don't know, private jets, or some of these kinds of abstracts that really aren't based on any kind of real happiness, but knowing that one's life energy can be spent on, you know, creating peace and prosperity within

our own communities, understanding why and how to actually scale something was really important for us. So our project is not, it is all encompassing, but it's's really it could be many different industries just operating within this socially responsible way it's also profitable but not knowing like i really never thought about it you know because i like you know wasn't trying to be in debt trying to like you know divert people from incarceration young people um that you that that's a that's a, that that's a requirement. So that's a long-winded way for me to answer your question. Brownfields are just leftover contaminated spaces that industry left behind in communities. So we had to clean it up.

So we were able to get money from federal, some grants from federal EPA. And then here in the Chicago area, we're in region five, so the Great Lakes and Illinois EPA. And that allowed us to then move forward on the rest of the project. So yeah. Maybe that's a way to use to re-green EPA Superfund sites or something like that. Exactly. We're not a Superfund site. This is a grade below that. But yes, that would be, that is one of the, you know, I think the strengths of our work is that it is mitigating, especially in communities that are, they tend to be low income, or as you said, poor communities tend to be in communities of color, tend to be placed by some of these, you know, cancerous areas where you see just higher, you know, rates of cancer,

of asthma, of autism, all kinds of, you know, health, health detriments. So how do we eliminate that? How do we create opportunities for folks who, you know, nothing like some fast food and i don't you know it's it's a quick fix you get addicted it's sugar our bodies can't handle the the corn syrup and the other things that are in those foods and you know and and we're we get addicted to them and to mitigate that if you start eating the foods that you know you talked about you know just to transform your own health. What does that look like at a community scale so the next generation isn't growing up with those inflammatory responses, is able to live a healthy long life and be productive. You can't function well if you don't have the nutrients for your brain to develop correctly. And just to be able to mitigate,

you know, just pathogens and things that we all, you know, our immune systems encounter. And we don't, there's been such a disconnect in lieu of convenience. And it's not convenient to be sick. It's not convenient to have your kidneys blown out before you're, you know, an elder, or really no one should have their kidneys blown out. But you, you know, an elder, or really no one should have their kidneys blown out. But you know, things happen. But when you know, you're in late adolescence, we have young people who are having all kinds of organ failure because of the things that they're eating or not eating. So all of our work kind of revolves around that. And of course, it affects behavior, right? It affects how we make decisions. And to be able to be part of a organization and to lead some of this work

is a real privilege to be able to be counter to some of these detriments. You sound like you're doing an amazing job and all-encompassing too from every angle you know when i ate poorly i was living on roll aids and i would have i would have a bottle by the bed probably go through i don't know five or six at night my stomach would send food back up sometimes in the middle of the night i think for a while i was suspicious that i'd burn out that valve that goes in your stomach too much acid reflux from eating just the worst stuff. And it was always fast food. And lots of Advil.

I think I was living on Advil. Not Advil, Tylenol, which is not that great for you either. But I was living on all that sort of stuff. And when I cleaned up my diet, it all went away. I quit the pop. I quit everything. I started eating salads and making myself broccoli. And, and then I, I got, I learned what you guys are probably doing.

I, I got empowered by learning how to make broccoli taste great. Cauliflower tastes great. You know, and it's kind of all about taste too. That's how they get us these fast food joints. They, they bioengineer this, this Frankenood to hit our dopamine centers and make us addicted. And if you design vegetables right and season them well, they can taste as good as any burger. And you'll feel good afterwards. You don't want to eat a half a pound of Roll-Eats. So you guys are helping process up to 55 million pounds of Chicago's total food waste.

I'm thinking of pizza right now for some reason when I said Chicago. And 300 plus new jobs for the community. You guys make such great pizza. 42,500 tons of carbon dioxide offset by green area technology each year. That's really important because I just read a study today, I think it came out this morning, that the most methane gas is put out by people who eat at Taco Bell. Oh!

No, I'm just, I don't, no, that's true, folks. That's just. Let's talk about your other project, or I'm not sure if it's similar, the Urban Growers Collective as well. Yes. All those stats that you shared are we're just opening, so we're not, that's what we'll hit when we're in full operation. Urban Growers Collective is one of the partners at the campus.

So we farm at eight different sites throughout Chicago. We started off as office, as Growing Power Chicago's office back in 2002, and slowly made, you know, increased our footprint and worked with the city and the state to, you know, actually have policies and zoning that allowed for food growing because for a while it was not part of the city's code so it was actually not legal it was it was not legal to take our let's say your coffee grounds and your your your your broccoli fixings after you've you know your scraps down the block to the community garden because there was not it was not allowable it was all trash needed to be there was no separation of organics from trash. And of course, you can't

just go and start a landfill somewhere. So we had to work with policymakers to change that. So Urban Growers Collective continues that kind of practical problem solving, working with folks who have been challenged socially, who've been formerly incarcerated, and also folks who are passionate about growing food, who come from academic backgrounds. We have a multicultural approach to growing food and problem solving within the context of creativity and healing. Our urban farms all employ youth. Many of youth, their first job, including my son, actually, his first job was last summer with Urban Growers Collective. And our goal is to really improve and introduce food and growing literacy so that we don't have a generation of young people who think that a carrot comes from a styrofoam you know plate from the grocery store it has no idea that that little

seed when you put it in the ground grows into a carrot i mean i can't tell you throughout my career how many aha moments with kids who would pull out a carrot from the ground and be astonished who had no idea and it sounds so like, but just that connects us to nature, especially in cities. And, you know, and so if I understand where my food comes from, I understand how hard it is to grow it. And how important it is to creating, you know, just the health, then I'm going to appreciate that I don't expect everybody to become a farmer or a grower, but I do think there's an opportunity for everybody to support and want to know who's growing their food and where it's coming from. And our work really centers around that. And the healing aspect, the food is medicine aspect, we have grower apprentice programs.

We have youth core programs. The food is medicine is probably one of our most popular programs because everybody wants to know how to not only work with plants and the foods that we eat, which of course are delicious, especially when they're fresh and local, but also the medicinal properties. And there's so much plant medicine. Most of the pharmaceuticals that we use come from plants. They've just been synthesized and put in pill form that we use come from plants. They've just been synthesized and put in pill form, but they come from plants. And there's so many things that, you know, teas and just simple things that are adaptogenic, meaning that the herb, the plant,

one of my favorites is yarrow or Tulsi, a holy basil. These are adaptogenic herbs. They just, you make a tea and your body just uses what it needs to use. And it helps to mitigate all kinds of inflammation and has, you know, helps to with some of that acid reflux you're talking about, or, you know, just helps to smooth out the edges within the system. The plants, you know, have evolved along with us. So they have all the remedies that we need. Mint, we all know that mint tea soothes the tummy, right? It helps to open up the breathing ways. So these are just things that like people are very interested in knowing about as, you know, in terms of just personal, just having autonomy and control over our own, you know, body systems, but also to have relationships with plants, which sounds kind of corny, but it's really powerful

when you can, you tend a plant and you understand its uses and how that can translate to having more care and respect for the people in your community and one another. There you go. It's been really a powerful transition, both in terms of the food is medicine understanding and both prevention and preservation of health, good health and prevention of disease, dis-ease, right? Not being in an easeful way. We don't want to be in pain or be worried about our bodies, right? We want to be focused on our purposes in our lives and to contribute to society in positive ways. And we can't do that if we don't feel good, if we're crabby all the time, if we don't get enough, maybe we're full and empty

at the same time because the food that we're eating is not nutritionally dense and it's not giving our body the nutrients it needs. And that of course affects so much. And yeah, so that's what we do. There you go. So how can people get involved? How can they support you? How can they help you? How can they reach out and be part of the program? Well, of course, we do. We're not for profits. Financial donations are always very helpful, but also just come to one of our farm stands. Financial donations are always very helpful, but also just, you know, come in, come to one of our farm stands. If you're in our area, you know, subscribe to our collective supported agriculture, which is a weekly subscription that you get a share of all the things that we're growing and gets delivered to your home. Come out and volunteer. We do,

come and volunteer. We actually, I was just at the farm earlier this afternoon and we've had all this heat and rain. So we got a lot of weeds to pull and it's very satisfying to pull some of these weeds. And so volunteering and then just participating. We have a grower apprentice program where people can sign up for that and learn over a three-year period how to grow cooperatively. We've kind of lost the art of cooperation and shared work and responsibility, but just to learn how to grow, to be able to, whether it's for business or just for homesteading or just for curiosity. And I think just learning more, you know, participating in your local food system, you know, as a collective of a board of directors of other lateral organizations that all collaborate. all the abundance and opportunities within our communities to care for one another and to

nourish one another. And then from that, being able to have more stabilization and build a truly equitable society where folks aren't so angry about everything. Pete There you go. Maybe we can maybe build some of these sort of systems in prisons and help people feel more empowered, maybe. prisons and help people feel more empowered maybe? Oh, I would like to build those systems outside of prisons. And so when people are done hopefully avoiding having to go to prison and then coming out of prison, having safety nets in place so that folks aren't falling into the same traps. I think that's really important.

Prison is not an economic development tool. Prison is something that does not necessarily work, from my opinion. And I mean, there's folks that need serious rehabilitation and will harm themselves or others. I'm not speaking in those terms, but speaking around the detriments of systemic and structural racism and poverty,

we have to do things differently. And I've seen transformation happen with the work of having meaningful work and having some of these basic human needs being met early. We make very different choices. And farms and gardens as intervention, you know, trauma-informed care and understanding and cognitive behavioral therapeutic interventions to really address the root causes of why people make poor choices so that we can eliminate the continuation of some of these detriments. There you go. And, you know, I mean, we've had lots of scientists on the show that talk about how the gut is your second brain and how when you have inflammation in the gut from processed foods and poor eating, it goes directly to the brain and swells the brain and inflames the brain. And then you probably don't make the best decisions. I might have been guilty of that after a couple of shots of vodka. I'm just still on the vodka and the Mountain Dew and the amount and that you're this coherent. So you're a testament to the healing power of vegetables. Yeah, I certainly am.

I gave up drinking completely in 2020. I didn't have to. It's not like I had a problem with it. But I just, you know, starting that journey of listening to my body and eating right, I started really hearing what was going on with my body. And it just became apparent that, you know, two or three hours of fun on Friday nights or Saturday nights equaled three days of dehydration, water bloating. I would just

feel ground down for three days. I would feel it. And I didn't feel it before because I don't know, I guess it just kept drinking every other night. But, and plus, you know, getting old, you kind of start to feel stuff. But I would just feel it, and I just started listening to my body. You know, one of the things I'll endorse too is you mentioned, you know, the importance of local farms. When I went green, you know, I was just going through the produce at the local big box grocery store. Here in Utah, I'm lucky enough that we have some local farms. And they do hydroponic, I think it is. So they run year round, even though it freezes here half the year or most of the year.

I think it's frozen all the time, pretty much. Maybe it's people's brains here. I don't know. The Utah jokes. But I go now to a local farm and I got to tell you the lettuce everything they make there is like so different than the lettuce and vegetables that I buy at the store that are shipped in from you know I don't know other countries and stuff like that you know and they're somehow they're preserved or they take tomatoes I guess they blow methane on them to get them to ripen faster. So they're kind of forcing the production of them.

But I got to tell you, the food that I get from my local farm, and I'm really lucky, there's one like four blocks from me. And the taste of the lettuce, the taste of the spinach, all the stuff they make is 10 times better than what you get at the store. And the other thing too is it looks healthy. You'll buy like a what you get at the store. And the other thing, too, is it looks healthy. You'll buy, like, a thing of lettuce at the store, and it has that pale look, pale green sort of look. The lettuce that I get is, like, rich.

Your brain sees it and goes, I want to eat that, you know, even this lettuce. And it just makes all the difference. I get the home make all their dressings. They have all this other food. And it's so much different to eat there. So I'm a big proponent on if you can support your local farms, please do. You'll thank me for it. Now, I noticed there's a donate button on the urbangrowerscollective.org.

That's the place people can go and help out? Yes, sir. Okay. And then on the Green Campus area, there's a donate button as well, it looks like. Yes, that is. We'll be launching, oh, you can donate now, but we'll be launching our campaign in the coming months to finish building the campus. So some of the things that, you know, the vertical farm that's growing the hydroponic and aquaponic greens and tomatoes and strawberries will be one of our workforce intervention programs, some of the decarceration.

And, you know, when people come out of prison, having opportunities to, you know, for restorative justice, to be able to really learn and grow, and then to be part of a worker-owned cooperative business, so that we're able to really turn the tides on some of these cycles, right? So to do that, and to have our education center, so we can work with communities, you know, maybe even some communities from Utah, who are interested in having some of these circular economy projects and having anaerobic digestion so that we're really, you know, creating sources of conflict-free energy, that we are recirculating our resources and having a direct impact on climate change by mitigating our methane. That methane piece is key. I kind of, I always forgot, I forget about the use of methane for ripening bananas and tomatoes, too, you know, and that really speaks to how that that gas accelerates and heats things up and really kind of creates something that, want to see the campus flourish and be this national and really international model of what communities can do to transform blighted areas into abundance.

We would love everyone's support. There you go. And the farm food lasts longer. I'll buy a head of lettuce or some tomatoes. They're dead in a week, maybe not even a week, maybe two or three days're they're wilting i buy i buy lettuce from my local farm it lasts like two weeks it's like it's still alive it's literally still alive and so a lot of the food that we get in the grocery stores i mean it's gone through wholesalers it's been shipped sometimes across the the you know from another part of the world it might two, three weeks old before you get it.

And then depending on the market, some things can be put in cold storage and it might be two months old, you know, certain crops. And so when the market, the price goes up, those products sometimes come out. So you don't really know what you're, the age of what you're eating is and it may still taste okay usually it doesn't really taste that good either we just kind of get used to it and it's nutritionally deplete so people try are trying to eat healthy they get a you know a bag of lettuce and they're they're just eating you know water they're eating water with some fiber. And the fertility, like what grew it, is it really growing in organic matter? Is it a chemical fertilizer?

So it's really, I mean, it's sad to say, but people are, I call it dirty water food. It's just, yeah. I'm not going to be able to get that out of my head now. I know. Sorry. That's why you want to keep eating what you're eating. It'll motivate me to keep eating. eating well just keep getting that that green like when we grow romaine lettuce it is dark green it is dark green it's vibrant maybe the the core of it is that that kind of lighter green but it is

the chlorophyll is just popping in those in those greens and flavor is rich. It just tastes totally different. And because it's just been cut, and if it's properly harvest handled and kept in a crisper, that lettuce might get a little wilt after a week, but it's alive. It's literally alive. And it really, eating food that still has energy in it

is what we need to address all of the, to repair our chromosomes from damage so that we mitigate the onset of cancer and other disease. So, these are easy things that people can make shifts in and participate because these are all things we can grow ourselves too, even if it's seasonal. Yeah. It's all about diet. Yeah. I mean, I look at the food from my local farm, and my genetic brain, my biological brain, whatever that is, the hindbrain, it sees the food, and it just sees how rich it looks in that chloroform color like you talked about. And it goes, this is good. I like this.

Now, when I go to the big box store with the lettuce, I look at it, I'm like, that looks dead. There you go. Well, thank you very much, Erica, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for the great conversation. And I just appreciate you sharing your own journey with your listeners and with me today too. I think that's so powerful and courageous to make those changes in our lives and how important it is to have access to these things so that we can make the best of our lives. There you go. Give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you guys on the interwebs as we go out. Urban Growers, plural, collective.org and greenerachicago.com. There you go. The place for the pizza pizza too because you guys make vegan we can't there is vegan pizza there's like pizza without gluten-free pizza we have the deep dish we have my favorite is the lumonatis there's also vegan pizza and one of my

favorite spots majani's they started making making a vegan soul food place that is fantastic. So vegan pizza, it's a thing now. It's delicious. But we have, yes. You don't want me to start talking about pizza. I got stuck at it. I was having pizza last time. And you guys have so many great restaurants there in Chicago.

We do. It's just amazing. But thank you very much for many great restaurants there in Chicago. We do. Yeah. It's just amazing. But thank you very much for coming to the show, Erica. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortunes Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortunes Chris Voss. Chris Voss won the TikTok and all those crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe and eat well.

And we'll see you next time. Peace.