Standing between two buildings on 127th Street, a group of campers on the cusp of adolescence mulled over a change in schedule. Normally, they would spend the morning planting and gardening as part of Harlem Grown, a youth development nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking to teach and empower children in Harlem.
But on this Friday, they would become amateur cartographers, mapping their local food landscape.
The 15 campers walked through their neighborhood, paper and pencils in hand. How many delis? (By some counts, 17, by others, 14.) Supermarkets? (Three.) Fast-food restaurants? (Twenty-two, they estimated, but lost count.)
As he looked for places offering affordable vegetables, Myles Bradumn, a 13-year-old camper, grew frustrated. “What about the delis?” he asked.
“Can you get vegetables at the deli?” said his counselor, Jarielle Isaac, 22.
“Sort of,” Myles replied.
“Can you get a lot of produce at the deli? Is there fresh food there?” she asked, pressing him.
“No,” Myles snapped. “But where are we supposed to get our food from, then?”
For years, summer programs like the Fresh Air Fund have transported low-income New York City children into the suburbs and countryside for outdoor activities. More recently, urban-farming initiatives have offered similar experiences within city limits.
But programs like Harlem Grown and Culinary Arts and Agriculture Training, which began in July at four New York City Housing Authority buildings around the city, are taking the local experience one step further, helping children explore bigger questions in their neighborhoods: what the food choices are, and why healthy options are often hard to find or afford.
“Food justice is an issue that primarily has affected communities of color,” said Rafael Espinal Jr., a City Council member. He recently introduced legislation to create a city Office of Urban Agriculture, resembling Boston’s Office of Food Access, to support existing urban farms, promote local produce and help expand farming and nutrition programs. “Once you open up a child’s mind up to that, it’s easier to see other issues and how they’re more prevalent in communities of color than in white communities, or more affluent communities.”
In the South Bronx, where the Culinary Arts program has a location in the city’s Patterson Houses, only 4 percent of residents meet the federal recommendation of five or more daily servings of fruit or vegetables, compared with 11 percent citywide, according to a 2017 report by the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College.
Each of the 200 campers citywide is paid a weekly stipend of $100 through the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program. They cook, tend gardens and grow plants hydroponically in their homes.
“This is community guerrilla farming,” said Yadira Garcia, a founder of Culinary Arts. She also started Happy Healthy Latina, which uses cooking and growing food to help underserved communities eat healthier. “We’re using hydroponics to do an S.O.S. from our windows.”
As the children sliced fruits for salsa, Ms. Garcia encouraged them with cries of “O-krrra!” a nod to Cardi B’s signature trill, “Okurrr.” She was met with eye-rolls, but many real giggles, too. She hopes her campers can parlay their developing skills into green jobs to support their own communities.
“Gentrification is happening. We’re in a war for our land,” Ms. Garcia said as she led the campers past an upscale wine store and rising residential development on their way to La Finca del Sur, a community garden.
The grocery store across the street from the Patterson Houses, Western Beef, has a produce section, and there are other supermarkets in the neighborhood. Still, several campers said their parents and grandparents regularly shop for produce in Manhattan, where they work, or take buses farther north into the Bronx, near Morris Park. It’s fresher elsewhere, they said, even if it takes more effort to get.
“I’d love to eat healthy, but it’s hard,” said Denise Rodriguez, 15. “It’s so expensive, and it’s not any good at the local supermarket. We have to travel to get something good.”
Culinary Arts also focuses on the children’s growth. At the Patterson Houses, the day starts with yoga on the basketball court, where the campers stretch (and sometimes peek at their phones, stashed in the open mouths of their sneakers). Nearby, clusters of memorial candles commemorate two young men who recently died in gun violence.
As they pressed seedlings into the thick, dark earth in beds a resident built on the complex, the head farmer, Adriano Espaillat Jr. (a founder of Culinary Arts and the son of a local congressman, Representative Adriano Espaillat), urged the campers to encourage their plants as they watered them for the first time.
Around the beds, the dirt was filthy, if dirt can be filthy, with cracked glass, blackened plastic and debris. A rat nosed around the edge of bushes. “I hope it doesn’t get into the peppers,” said Vissica Quiñones, 15, wrinkling her nose.
But Mr. Espaillat pressed on. The plants can hear you, he told the campers. You have to help them survive in this difficult place. “It’s not really about planting,” he later explained, washing soil from his hands. “Some of these kids have a difficult time saying anything positive, especially about themselves.”
Ms. Quiñones hung back from the group, pretending to tie her shoelace. After her fellow campers trickled inside, she finally bent down.
“You are going to be a star one day,” she whispered, her lips near the stem. “Keep growing. You going to make it through. Don’t worry about it.”
Across the Harlem River, the Harlem Grown campers finished their survey of the neighborhood’s eating options. The counselors had hoped the exercise would help drive home the reality of an unequal food landscape dominated, as it has been for decades, by bodegas and fast-food outlets.
“We don’t want them to feel like everything is their fault,” said a counselor, Xana Pierone, 21. “They are living in a circumstance that they cannot control.”
In addition to the summer program, which is free, Harlem Grown offers year-round Saturday programs at their farm sites, provides farm tours to schools and gives students at five schools in-school mentorship throughout the academic year.
Harlem is considered neither a food desert (where it is difficult to buy affordable fresh food) nor a food swamp (where unhealthy foods dominate). There are supermarkets in the area: Key Foods, Pioneer and Whole Foods.
Regardless, community members cannot always benefit from those offerings, or afford the food. Despite a city tax-incentive program designed to bring healthy food into underserved neighborhoods, some of the proposed projects haven’t materialized.
“We don’t use the term food desert: We call it a food apartheid, because it’s man-made,” said Tony Hillery, Harlem Grown’s founder and executive director.
At the end of each day of camp, there’s always a large box of farm-grown foods available for parents and guardians when they pick up their children. One mother said they were the only fresh vegetables she could get.
As the campers sat in the shade after their mapping project, they discussed what they had observed. “I’m realizing there aren’t a lot of places to get healthy foods,” said Mekhi Wilkerson, 13. “It’s the Whole Foods on 125th, or it’s Harlem Grown.”
He paused, his fellow campers nodding, before continuing quietly. “I’ve only been in that Whole Foods twice. No one can afford it there.”