Ron Finley: A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”

Here's some life-changing quotes from this amazing talk:

- 26.5 million Americans live in a food desert.

- People are dying from curable diseases.

- Wheel chairs are being bought and sold like used cars. Dialysis centres are popping up like Starbucks.

- Food is the problem and food is the solution.

- Los Angeles leads the United States in vacant lots. The city owns 26 square miles of vacant lots. That's 20 Central Parks! That's 724,838,400 tomato plants.

- You'd be surprised what the soil can do if you let it be your canvas. You just can't imagine at how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people.

- If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body they'll blindly eat whatever you put in front of them.

- Free is not Sustainable. The funny thing about sustainable is: you have to sustain it.

Sourced from growtest.org