Those who live in the desert borderlands of southern New Mexico face plenty of serious struggles. Water is limited, living wages are scarce, and many live in unincorporated communities called colonias, which often lack basic infrastructure like roads and gas lines. Things are so tough there, in fact, that one might understandably presume that the only food issue on residents’ minds is whether or not they’ll have enough. Not so, argues Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard, director of the Farm Fresh program for La Semilla Food Center in Las Cruces, the largest city south of Albuquerque. In 2010, Wiggins and two colleagues founded Semilla (“Seed” in Spanish), with plans to start a youth food policy council, a youth farm, and multiple produce stands. After their inaugural year, which included the council’s launch and the gift of 15 acres to start the farm, Wiggins’ work won her an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) fellowship — and a visit from cookbook author, New York Times columnist, and food maven Mark Bittman. I spoke with Wiggins by phone to hear about her surprising path to food work, her plan to grow 500 foods in a desert, and what it’s like to promote local food in the country’s fifth-poorest state.

Q. You didn’t start out as a food person. How did you end up doing work that lured Mark Bittman to the desert?

A. [Before La Semilla] I was a grad student in political science, and I have a history of being involved in human rights movements on the border. I was working at Colonias Development Center, and I came in after a USDA Community food projects grant was [going] to start community gardens, and I realized I had a passion for working with youth and growing food. [Before that], if you’d asked me about food, I probably would have said, What’s the big deal, you go to the grocery store and you buy it. Once I saw that [only some] eaters have access to food and income to buy healthy food, how that’s a human rights issue, it was a natural fit for me. It was, How did I miss this?

The youth of La Semilla Food Center.

Q. Colonias are known for lacking things like roads and water lines. What does that mean for food?

A. There are very small grocery stores and little corner stores, but they don’t always have the healthiest or the freshest food available and that’s really part of our work — to pilot market stands in the community to increase access to that fresh food. There’s no organic food, there’s very little choice. Most of these colonias are in very rural areas, and you have to have a car or know someone who can give you a ride. We did a [community food] survey with our youth in 2009, and everyone said they go to Las Cruces or El Paso [to buy groceries]; it’s 20-30 miles, and there’s no public transportation. People prefer to have healthier choices and more options, so they’ll drive elsewhere.

Q. A small town in Maine just passed a food sovereignty law, and there are a number of U.S. organizations beginning to talk about that idea, which is the belief that having access to healthy food and retaining control of its production is an essential human right. How does food sovereignty factor in to your work?

A. I have a lot of experience with communities in Chiapas, Mexico, where I worked with a weaving cooperative. The reason they have to sell their products is they are no longer able to farm their land for subsistence. We should be able to grow enough food for our own subsistence if we choose to, and use our land the way we want without having powerful corporations make choices for us. I think food sovereignty is also tied to being able to save seeds that are GMO- and chemical-free, and having more choices that aren’t determined by corporations.

I think our work is entirely in line with [food sovereignty]. We will be growing desert foods and things you can’t find in the grocery store [at the youth farm], like amaranth. Right now, much of what’s grown in New Mexico is shipped out, and we can really grow our local economy if we sell our food here instead of selling to an outside company.

Cooking with prickly pears at La Semilla.

Q. Desert farming? Could you really feed a modern community on that?

A. In southern New Mexico, we have a year-round growing season. It’s pecan, cotton, alfalfa for most of it, [and] you can grow so much here with modest season extension techniques; there are 550 varieties of fruits and vegetables that can grow here. The problem in the desert is water [and] our farm is also meant to show that we can use dry land farming techniques.

Q. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country. How can farmers markets make sense for a population where the median household income is 16 percent below the national average?

A. I think farmers market prices here are quite affordable and many of the vendors take WIC [Women, Infants and Children support service] checks. Some of the colonia communities have really high redemption rates for WIC checks there, and it’s a great way to access fresh food. They are also usually getting food grown without pesticides and people want those choices. One thing in our area that we are lacking is the use of EBT (food stamp cards). There’s only one market in our region that accepts EBT and part of my work is trying to increase access to EBT at markets.

A group of young participants at La Semilla Food Center.

Q. What’s been the biggest barrier to seeing your students change their eating behaviors?

A. I think any personal behavior change is hard … [and] it needs to be a family effort, not just an individual one. [In our cooking classes] we found that that was more effective in making change within a household because parents are largely responsible for the purchasing decisions. So we’re focusing our efforts on more activities with family, and I think our classes will feature recipes anyone can do with minimal cooking experience. For the most part people were looking for ways to incorporate healthy cooking and that’s why they joined the program. We had no one here who said, “I’m never going to stop eating McDonald’s.” But we did have one who said, “I’m not eating at McDonald’s any more.”

Kandace Vallejo.

Q. What made you decide to bring food justice education to a group of construction workers?

A. Our membership asked us to. We bought a building in 2009 with a couple acres of land, and when our membership voted on what they wanted to see happen here, having a garden was one of the top priorities. In terms of doing youth programming around food issues, it just became apparent that it was something kids could really grasp because food is something that everybody interacts with. You can use it to talk about issues of access and economic inequality with a high schooler, and for a five-year-old we can talk about why it’s not fair that they don’t have a grocery stores in their neighborhood. That’s one way to talk about food. Another way is to get kids to appreciate their own cultural practice and use that appreciation to see and appreciate other cultural practices. It’s a good way to teach kids about difference.

Q. What are the biggest challenges around food faced by your group’s members?

A. The folks we’re working with definitely have issues with food access. Construction workers in Austin tend to work 10- to 14-hour days, and usually get paid a daily rate of anywhere from $60 to $90. Other folks are paid a weekly rate of $150 or $200, on the high end. So we know it’s drastically below minimum wage. And most of the folks we serve live in east Austin: a predominantly low-income, historically African-American and Latino or immigrant [neighborhood]. One of my first nights in the youth program, we were busting out some snacks for the kids — crackers and peanut butter — and I was asking if they had eaten dinner yet, and one of the kids said, “We don’t eat dinner.” And I was thinking, “Is that [because of] a religious practice”? And he said, “My dad has been out of work so we just don’t eat dinner, we don’t have money for that.”

East of I-35 [which bisects the city] there are just three grocery stores, and none of them are very well served; they’ve got produce that’s fallen off the back of the truck, and pretty small fresh food sections. Most of east Austin is considered a food desert by the USDA, and the closest food access points tend to be gas stations or Dairy Queens.

So, there’s access in terms of what they’re able to afford, but also access based on where they live.

It’s also a problem of time. If you’re working two jobs, it becomes even harder to find the time to go to another neighborhood to get healthy fresh food for your children and cook it. And the kids don’t have a lot of places where they’re learning about good food habits, or places where they can see those things being consumed by other people; the messages they are getting about food [are] coming from animals on television singing about neon-colored food products.

Q. You recently took your students on a field trip to Hyde Park, an upper-middle-class neighborhood known for its restaurants — and for having a Central Market, a high-end chain grocer. Why did you take the kids there, and what did they say after the trip?

A. We took students to two different neighborhoods. One group of kids went to Hyde Park, an upper-middle-class community, and the other went to the neighborhood around our community center, Pecan Springs. We chose them to illustrate the links between property size and appearance and what kinds of cars people drive, houses, things like that, and what kind of food options are available — so that we could highlight the connections between economic inequity and food.

One of the things the kids said was that the stores in [Hyde Park] had a lot more variety than the ones in their part of town, and both [groups] asked the same question at the end, which was Why? And they’ve begun to kind of explore this question … and they’ve also started to recognize that knowing this is the first step to making alternative options possible.

Q. There’s a lot of talk these days about how to make good, fresh food something everyone wants to eat. Some people argue that it’s a problem of changing food culture and preference; other people take a more structural approach. Where does your work fall on that continuum?

A. Talking about changing people’s cultural habits or preferences is a real slippery slope. We tend to imagine that we have a ton of answers; so many of us [in the food movement] have had access to great education and a lot of knowledge. Those things combined with the structural privileges that we’ve had access to put us in an interesting position when trying to recommend solutions for other people’s problems.

[Our members] are not saying they prefer to be obese and have diabetes and have heart disease in their family. What folks are saying here is they don’t have money. There’s no grocery stores. They would love to garden but they don’t have the land because they live in a trailer or a shared apartment … their kids are eating whatever is being given to them in free or reduced lunch in the school system. When we asked what they wanted, they wanted a community garden and cooking classes.

Q. What kind of food do members eat at WDP?

A. Last weekend, we had our Christmas party, and we had vegan posole alongside a traditional pork-based posole, and tamales and chips and salsa. We also had greens and quinoa. And when we have [that kind of food], people eat it. They are very interested in the different vegetables, and that curiosity leads them to want to try them — but they don’t know where to buy them or how to cook them. I just harvested a bunch of collards and chard and beets and some peas and the last few little tomatoes from our garden and gave them to a couple of members, and they said, “We’d eat them, but we don’t know how to cook them.” So I gave them a recipe for caldo gallego, a Cuban soup that features collard greens. One member said he’d bring the leftovers. I need to ask him about it.

Johanna Gilligan packs fava beans with a student from the Grow Dat program in New Orleans.Photo: David Schalliol

Gilligan, co-director of New Orleans’ Grow Dat Youth Farm, traipses up the mound, which terminates at a deck of sorts and more containers, crowded with architectural students from Tulane University and local urban farm experts. Beyond the deck sits a bayou, lined with trees weeping Spanish moss into the water; the I-610 freeway buzzes along in the background. “I can’t believe how much is done! My office is going to be in a treehouse!”

She has reason to be excited. At four acres, the buildings’ site is just a sliver of City Park, 1,300 acres of green space on New Orleans’ north side. But come February, the buildings will be done, the beds will be ready for planting, and the second class of Grow Dat farmers will commence their work. The goal: one acre planted, 10,000 pounds of food grown, 20 jobs for student workers.

Pitched as the natural progression of programs like Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard (New Orleans is home to the first Edible Schoolyard affiliate outside of the Bay Area, and its founding director, Donna Cavato, sits on Grow Dat’s board), Grow Dat will welcome its second round of student workers in February. The project was founded in 2010 with the Tulane City Center, a community design and architecture initiative, and the Urban Innovator Challenge Fellowship, also at Tulane. The backing let Gilligan, a founding staffer for the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and a driving force behind Rethink‘s New Orleans School Food Report Card, bring in a small staff to work out kinks for the program’s first year. In its inaugural year, Grow Dat employed 13 student workers who grew a total of 2,200 pounds of food, donating nearly two-thirds of it to food banks, and selling the rest at a farmers market.

The effort, says Denise Richter, who coordinates gardens at five elementary and middle schools for Edible Schoolyard New Orleans (ESY-NOLA), solves a riddle that’s confounded ESY-NOLA since it was founded: how to keep students engaged with food after eighth grade.

“There was always this moment where it was like, ‘Great, we’ve been able to establish a culture and an understanding of how important it is to know where your food comes from and cook it,’” says Richter, who says ESY-NOLA works with more than 500 students each year. “And there’s always this regret, because what do they do [after ESY]? Go to a place where their cafeteria food looks like it did five years ago, eating slop. Grow Dat is such an asset, because our students can apply their skills and go even further.”

A young Grow Dat participant.Photo: Andy CookWith an older — if much smaller — pool of students, Grow Dat is aiming to expand teenagers’ food knowledge while teaching even broader lessons about work and collaboration. “A key concept of Grow Dat is that you cannot do social change only in one neighborhood,” says Gilligan. She sees the program’s site at City Park as neutral ground for students, who this year will come from a mix of public and private schools, to learn “to communicate across race and class lines.”

That’s a heady goal, but if Aston Shields, 17, is any indication, Grow Dat may have some luck in meeting it. One of last year’s students — he’s angling to return as a crew leader this year — Shields didn’t start out interested in food. “I was just reading posters on the wall, and stumbled onto [the job listing],” says Shields in an urban drawl, adding that he mostly applied because it was a paid job. For a modest stipend, he learned how to plan and maintain food gardens, wash and prepare vegetables for market and track their sales, and even attended a handful of lectures on food systems at Tulane. “I came here and I was like, ‘Wow, I never even really thought about how people produced our food,’” says Shields. “It was just a whole new world.”

But in addition to being paid for his work, Shields was able to take home fruits and vegetables from plots he was helping tend at the Hollygrove Market and Farm — a special boon to a family living in the Hollygrove neighborhood where, says Shields, the closest thing to a supermarket is a Walgreen’s. “Once Grow Dat gave me fruits and vegetables, [my family] embraced it,” says Shields — even if the end results weren’t exactly what most slow food acolytes might have had in mind. “We had some shiitake mushrooms,” says Shields. “And my momma made sloppy joes with it.”