The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities

Allen’s work is with plants, yet they have a symbolic value to his story as well as a literal one. The growth of his plants in unconventional conditions, for example, parallels the growth of Allen’s own personal relationship with farming and with his family’s agricultural history. Similarly, the trees that Allen plants with his employees and volunteers have practical value, but they also represent the time and patience agriculture asks of its workers. Trees take a long time to grow and to bear fruit, and Allen himself learns a lot from watching nature take its course, at its own pace. Even Hope Finkelstein, Allen’s original partner at Growing Power, sees symbolic and literal value in plants, in sunflowers in particular; she saw the sunflower as both an inspiring source of beauty, but also as a pragmatic source of food. 

Allen petitions the Milwaukee council to preserve the greenhouses, arguing that they hold more value than an additional church would. In a sense, Allen is proposing that the community needs practicality over faith to sustain themselves. He is also placing value on old, traditional models of community, i.e., farm life. Allen then takes those three decrepit greenhouses—which remain on the last vestiges of agricultural land in the area—and turns them into a successful operation as well as a stable haven for Parker and her children.