My 30 hour introduction to Growing Power was motivational to say the least. How often does coursework make you want to join a revolution? I suppose they were preaching a bit to the choir in my case. The second day I was in I took home a bucket of worms for my own little worm farm. Granted that’s something I had wanted to do for a while but from the beginning I was very eager to delve in and learn what the Good Food Revolution was all about; to get my hands dirty.
The juxtaposition I had mentioned in the last reflection about the burger joint across the street from Growing Power where you are served through bullet proof glass continues to ring loud with its irony. Another mild irony is that I was studying Urban Development in another class which explored with some depth the conditions that lead to housing projects the likes of where Growing Power is located. Cast in this light, The Growing Power story becomes (I’m gonna go for broke here) a fantastic, epic representation of good and evil. Forces that have molded our cities into regions ranging from almost demilitarized zones up to the affluent areas where birds sing and land on your shoulder. Growing Power as an entity, something to identify with represents a resistance to conditions in society that yield poverty and disintegration of our cities and society.
My worms are doing good. Are they going to multiply into an army and march out to dismantle the fast food enterprise and fix the follies of city planning mistakes? Depends on how you think about it. What they’ve accomplished so far has been to dispose of all the kitchen waste from our apartment and turn it into black, nutrient rich soil. More important than that is the adjustment they’ve made to our routine in the kitchen. First we tried using the five gallon bucket the worms came in to collect our kitchen scrapes in before carrying them down stairs to the little 1.5 x 1.5 x 2.5 ft bin they live in. But the open bucket attracted flies so covered it. That turned decomposition from aerobic to anaerobic and stunk like a baby’s diaper. So now we use a small one quart yogurt container instead of the five gallon bucket. It doesn’t breed fruit flies and needs to be emptied before it has time to stink.
What has all that gotten us? Awareness of not just of the types of waste we throw out but of little it takes modify our routines in ways whose byproducts are not waste full and don’t contribute to the deterioration of our cities.

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