Neelam Sharma: Food Not Lawns in Los Angeles

Neelam Sharma is the Programs Director for CSU, Community Services Unlimited, an organization empowering South Central Los Angeles residents to eat and grow healthy food. The "Food Not Lawns" attitude towards neighborhoods, I must admit, is infectious. After hanging out with urban and suburban farmers in the last year, we see people watering grass and we gasp. What a waste! CSU encourages and empowers folks to start thinking this way by teaching backyard gardening and reclaiming un-used urban space for food production. Check out their other projects in our previous video 'Community Services Unlimited: Rocking LA with Food and Beauty'.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• community
• services
• unlimited
• south
• central
• los
• angeles
• la
• urban
• gardening
• farming
• food
• justice
• ryanishungry

[inremembranceofruth]

Thank you for all of your inspiring ideas and work. Further, how you have informed yourself...so that you can inform others as well. Uploaded 3 years ago and, even as many more people have implemented such endeavors, there is still mostly indifference amongst our general population. Thus, I appreciate your efforts even more.

[ZennLa13]

@octohorse You can control what is i your soil by planting in raised garden beds :)

[keilana6]

I am totally for this, however I have no money to buy land and no knowledge about how to implement it in a city.

[vidaripollen]

sensible.monospecies lawns are idiotic waste.in bombay great work is being done by kavitha mukhi to promote organic farmers market.

[chevkoch]

Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic attitude.

[octohorse]

I heard gray water must be cleaned or your food could uptake toxins. And how are you testing the lawns? Many have been exposed to weedkillers, and what about poison runoff from neighbor's lawns? Please answer cheers

[saltycreefer]

& we are made from the same earth as the dinosaurs. Only difference is we should be smart enough to avoid extinction.

[EbolaV1rus]

This is a great video. My husband and I are going to turn the entire back lawn into raised beds next spring. The garden I had produced really well, but it was just too small. We are going to use a drip irrigation method.

[EbolaV1rus]

Agreed. Also composting toilets would sure go a long way towards preserving what water we have left, considering that water is not a renewable resource. We are drinking the same water the dinosaurs drank.

[oatmealstoutpint]

This seems fringe today, but is going to be mainstream when oil is permanently above $150 / barrel.

Nothing tastes as good as fresh produce from your own garden.

Next we need a way to caputre "gray water" from our homes to water these gardens.