Whether this is the middle of the end, or the end of the beginning, or just the way this COVID-19 era is, I’ve stuck to my pandemic habit of baking sourdough bread — a sure ritual in unsure times.
I’ve practiced something long enough, 22 months, to get really good at it. I’ve taken chances and risked falling flat, literally. But sourdough is forgiving. No matter how imperfect a loaf looks, it always tastes good. It’s a small triumph. It’s easy to love.
I needed a place for that joy to spill over. When neighbors and friends offered to pay for the bread I was leaving on their doorsteps, I wondered who they could pay instead.
I decided to ask my bread “subscribers” to donate $25 or more to Gardopia Gardens, a nonprofit on the East Side that uses garden-based learning to promote healthy living. My goal was 40 loaves. Forty sounded biblical in a time of fires, floods and a pandemic, not to mention that quaranta (Italian for 40) is the root of “quarantine” and the number of days that Venice required ships to sit at anchor to slow the spread of the plague in the 14th century.
The COVID-19 “plague” has shown us the exorbitant cost of being an unhealthy city and nation. Too many might have survived the pandemic if not for the vulnerability to the virus caused by underlying, diet-related conditions, something that disproportionately affects San Antonians.
Food deserts, supersized portions, a built environment that makes us sedentary, and billions of marketing dollars spent to promote processed foods that taste so good and yet are so bad for us are only a few obstacles to eating well. We face a generational crisis with 20 percent of U.S. children and more than 30 percent in San Antonio now clinically obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The big structural changes we need to make to our food system feel overwhelming. Feeling like I can’t make a big difference has often kept me from trying to make a small difference. Yet I know small is good. Small gestures bubble up and create change.
When all was shaped and baked, with flour donated by Barton Springs Mill and the generosity of friends and neighbors, 40 loaves became $4,000. The money became soil, shovels, gloves, fertilizer, plants. It was health, community, hope for the future.
Six years ago, Gardopia Gardens had no funding, just an abandoned one-third acre on North New Braunfels Avenue, but it did have charismatic leadership. For Stephen Lucke and Dominic Dominguez, who together hold degrees in chemistry, nutrition, environmental science and sustainable development, idealism has met expertise. Small has grown bigger.
Gardopia Gardens has leaped the bounds of the one-third acre and the 3 tons of produce that volunteers have harvested for the community. It is now an educational enterprise with a $350,000 budget. Gardopia Gardens has created hundreds of gardens at homes, schools and restaurants through its Build-A-Garden program.
In its outdoor classroom and at city schools, Gardopia has educated nearly 10,000 adults and children, including weekly classes in the gardens at Democracy Prep, Young Men’s Leadership Academy and Young Women’s Leadership Academy Primary. The latter is funded by the city’s Office of Innovation and the San Antonio Area Foundation.
This year, Gardopia is reaching out to San Antonio’s colleges, universities and medical schools to recruit and train more urban farmers to teach in the city’s schools. The demand is there, according to Lucke, who fields frequent calls from educators asking for garden consultations, a service Gardopia provides to schools for free.
It’s easy to be part of a collective shoulder shrug when so many problems seem intractable. But the upside of a disaster like the pandemic can be creativity and change. The pandemic gave gardening a boost.
Gardening can create an upward spiral that leads to more home-cooked meals, less junk food and more families re-anchored at the dinner table. More meals together mean better family communication, healthier and happier people, less adolescent drug use and higher grades for children, according to decades of research and a recent meta-analysis in the Journal of Nutrition and Education and Behavior.
Soon I’ll start another 40 loaves. I’m happy to latch my bread-baking habit to Lucke’s dream: Someday urban agriculture will be so integral to San Antonio’s culture that there won’t be a need for Gardopia Gardens.
May we rise above our pandemic weariness, think less about where it all ends, and instead ask ourselves, “How can I begin?”
Cary Marriott is a writer and editor in San Antonio.
