Food sovereignty is a community’s right to shape its own food system. It’s not just about getting enough to eat—it’s about who owns the land, the seeds, the labor, and the distribution. In East Los Angeles, where I serve as pastor of Iglesia del Santo Nombre, this idea crashes into daily life. We live among food deserts, gentrification, and the quiet erasure of our culinary memory. A community garden isn’t a pastime. It’s a declaration. A small, stubborn act of resurrection in a neighborhood that’s been told, for generations, to wait for outsiders to save it.
The Garden as a Parable of Power
We’re in Ordinary Time now—that long, green stretch of the church year built for growth and daily discipleship. It’s the right season to talk about gardens, because a garden doesn’t give you the drama of Pentecost or the starkness of Lent. It gives you the slow, unglamorous work of tending. And in that tending, you learn who really holds power.
When a supermarket chain pulls out of a neighborhood, it doesn’t call a parish meeting. It doesn’t ask the elders. It locks the doors, and a community that was already struggling becomes a full-blown food desert. A bell pepper triples in price at the corner store. Fresh cilantro turns into a luxury. That’s structural violence, plain and simple, and it grows out of a lack of sovereignty. The neighborhood has no say because it doesn’t own the means of production. A community garden, scratched out of a vacant lot or tucked into a church courtyard, pushes back against that powerlessness. It says: we won’t be completely dependent on supply chains that don’t care if we live or die.
Beyond the Raised Bed: Defining Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty—a term lifted up by the global peasant movement La Vía Campesina—rests on a few pillars. It puts local food production first, respects the rights of producers and consumers, and rejects the dumping of cheap, subsidized crops that undercut local farmers. In our context, it means seeing the nopal, the epazote, and the maíz criollo as more than ingredients. They’re cultural artifacts. They carry the memory of a people who worked this land long before the 710 freeway sliced the barrio in two.
When we plant a garden at the parish, we’re not just growing vegetables. We’re building a small, local food system. We’re teaching young people that food comes from dirt, not a plastic wrapper. We’re making a space where the knowledge of the elders—how to read the sky for rain, how to compost without chemicals—gets treated like the treasure it is. That’s the heart of cultural memory preservation. The garden is a living archive.
The Prophetic Voice of the Land
There’s a sticky sentimentality that can creep into church talk about gardens. We say “God’s beautiful creation” and stop right there. But the prophet Isaiah told a story about a vineyard that produced wild grapes, and the owner’s response wasn’t gentle appreciation—it was judgment. The land itself becomes a witness against injustice. When a neighborhood gets paved over and stripped of its trees, that’s not just ugly. It’s a sin against the common good. It creates heat islands that sicken the elderly. It denies kids the simple dignity of playing on grass.
Our garden work has to be prophetic. It has to name the forces that degraded the land. When we compost, we’re not just making fertilizer; we’re practicing a theology of redemption, turning what the world calls waste back into life. When we save seeds, we’re defying the corporate monopolies that patent life itself. This isn’t exaggeration. It’s the daily reality of a community that’s seen its soil poisoned by lead from old paint and its air choked by diesel from the rail yards. To plant in that soil, after testing and remediation, is an act of defiant hope.
From Charity to Solidarity: The Parish Model
For too long, church food ministries have been stuck in a charity model. We hand out bags of groceries. We serve hot meals. Those are necessary works of mercy, and I’ll never speak against feeding a hungry person right now. But if we only do charity, we risk creating a permanent underclass that’s always waiting for a bag of food they didn’t choose. Food sovereignty moves us from charity to solidarity. It asks: who grew this food? Who decided what would be in the bag? Who profits from this transaction?
At Santo Nombre, our garden is tied to our food pantry, but it’s not the pantry’s source. The garden is a teaching tool. The pantry is a stopgap. The long-term goal is to support families in starting their own backyard gardens, to create a network of growers who trade surplus, and to advocate for policies that protect urban agriculture from predatory development. This is the slow work of building a parallel economy of grace, one that runs on the logic of the Eucharist: take, bless, break, and share.
Cultural Memory in Every Furrow
You can’t talk about food sovereignty in East LA without talking about memory. Our gardens are full of plants that tell a story. The quelites, those wild greens many people dismiss as weeds, were a staple of our ancestors. The chayote vine climbing a fence is a living connection to Mesoamerican agriculture. When we lose the knowledge of how to grow and cook these foods, we lose a part of ourselves. The fast-food chains and the dollar stores aren’t just selling cheap calories; they’re selling a kind of forgetting.
That’s why our garden work is intergenerational by design. We pair a young person who’s never touched soil with an elder who remembers the milpa system—the ancient practice of growing corn, beans, and squash together. The corn gives the beans a stalk to climb. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil. The squash shades the ground and keeps pests away. It’s a perfect, self-sustaining community. The garden becomes a classroom where the curriculum is survival, and the textbook is the memory of our grandmothers’ hands.
The Politics of a Seed
Let me be blunt: the industrial food system isn’t designed for our flourishing. It’s designed for profit. The same corporations that sell us pesticide-laden produce also sell us the medicines for the diabetes and heart disease that follow. A community garden is a small but real act of secession from that system. When we save a seed from a native tomato plant, we’re not just preserving biodiversity; we’re committing an act of political resistance. We’re saying that the gift of creation won’t be privatized.
This is why we partner with local seed libraries and organizations like the Seed Savers Exchange. We teach our youth that a seed isn’t just a future plant; it’s a story, a lineage, a prayer. At a time when a handful of corporations control the vast majority of the world’s commercial seed supply, saving and sharing open-pollinated seeds is a direct challenge to that monopoly. It’s a way of insisting that the means of life belong to the commons, not the boardroom.
Practical Steps for a Parish or Neighborhood
I get asked a lot how to start. People feel crushed by the size of the problem. My answer is always the same: start with the soil and the soul. You don’t need a master plan. You need a patch of ground, a few willing hands, and a commitment to show up. Here’s a simple framework we’ve used at Santo Nombre, shaped by the liturgical seasons.
Advent: A Season of Preparation and Listening
Before you break ground, you have to break open your ears. Walk the neighborhood. Ask the elders what they remember growing. Ask the young people what they wish they could eat. Test the soil for lead and other contaminants—this is a non-negotiable act of love in a community like ours. During Advent, we hold listening sessions and soil testing workshops. We wait. We prepare. We don’t rush to plant.
Lent: A Season of Clearing and Composting
Lent is a time of stripping away what’s dead so new life can emerge. In the garden, that means clearing the land of debris, building raised beds if the ground soil is unsafe, and starting a community compost system. Composting is a deeply theological act: we take what’s broken down, what’s discarded, and we turn it into rich, dark soil that will feed new growth. It’s a tangible sign of resurrection.
Eastertide: A Season of New Life and Planting
After the long wait of Lent, we plant. We choose crops that are culturally meaningful: maíz, frijol, calabaza, chile, tomate, cilantro, epazote. We bless the seeds and the soil. We invite the whole parish to the planting, especially the children, because they need to know that their hands can create life. This isn’t a metaphor. This is a resurrection reality breaking into a neighborhood that’s been told it’s dead.
Ordinary Time: The Long Work of Tending
This is where most of the work happens, and where most community gardens fall apart. The first burst of enthusiasm fades. The weeds come. The watering schedule turns into a chore. That’s why we tie the garden to the liturgical calendar and the daily life of the parish. We have a rotating schedule of padrinos and madrinas—godparents of the garden—who are responsible for watering and weeding each week. We hold garden workdays after Sunday Mass. The garden becomes part of the rhythm of our common life, not an extra project. This is the unglamorous, daily discipleship of dirt.
FAQ: Common Questions from the Parish and Neighborhood
Isn’t this just a nice hobby? Why call it “food sovereignty”?
Because words matter. Calling it a hobby makes it sound optional, a pastime for people with free time. Calling it food sovereignty names the power dynamics at play. It admits that our neighborhood has been systematically denied access to fresh, affordable, culturally appropriate food. It connects our small garden to a global movement of peasants, indigenous communities, and urban farmers who are demanding the right to define their own food systems. It’s a political and spiritual claim, not just a pastime.
What if the soil is contaminated? Isn’t it dangerous to grow food in East LA?
This is a serious and legitimate worry. Many lots in our neighborhood carry the legacy of industrial pollution and lead paint. We never plant directly in the ground without first testing the soil through a service like the University of Massachusetts Soil Testing Lab. If the soil is contaminated, we build raised beds with a barrier at the bottom and bring in clean soil and compost. That’s an added expense and more labor, but it’s a necessary act of care for our community. We also teach about phytoremediation—using plants like sunflowers to draw toxins out of the soil over time—as a long-term healing practice for the land.
How does a garden preserve cultural memory?
Cultural memory is preserved through practice, not just through stories. When an abuela teaches a child how to plant maíz criollo using the tres hermanas method, she’s passing on an agricultural technology that’s thousands of years old. When we cook quelites in the parish kitchen, we’re reviving a food tradition that colonization tried to erase. The garden becomes a living library where the “books” are seeds, recipes, and the embodied knowledge of our elders. It’s a place where our history isn’t just remembered but actively lived and adapted for the future.
How can I start something like this if I don’t have land?
Begin with what you have. A few five-gallon buckets on a sunny balcony can grow an abundance of chiles and herbs. Talk to your neighbors about starting a community garden on a vacant lot; the Los Angeles Community Garden Council can help navigate the process of securing land and water access. If you’re part of a parish, ask your pastor about using a corner of the parking lot or an unused patch of grass. The key is to start small, build relationships, and let the garden grow as the community grows. The land will come if the people are ready.
The Harvest We Cannot Yet See
I write this not to romanticize our work. Gardens fail. Pests come. Water bills rise. Neighbors sometimes steal the tomatoes. But even in the failure, there’s a lesson: we are not in control. The garden teaches us a dependency that the consumer economy tries to hide. We depend on sun and rain, on the microbiology of the soil, on the pollinators, on each other. This isn’t weakness; it’s the truth of our creatureliness. And in that truth, there’s a strange freedom. We aren’t called to be successful. We are called to be faithful.
So we’ll keep planting. We’ll keep saving seeds. We’ll keep telling the stories of this land and its people. And we’ll do it not because we’re sure of the harvest, but because we’re sure of the One who gives the growth. The garden is our prayer, dug into the earth with our hands.