For these Gen Z’ers, growing food is about feeding their families and recognizing their relationship to their environment.
Lockdowns early in the pandemic were a popular time to pick up old hobbies and try new ones. Although 35- to 44-year-olds garden the most in the United States, a 2022 report shows a 44% surge in Gen Z participation. But for many, it’s more than a hobby: Agricultural work is a means of survival, as many depend on growing their own food to feed their family and communities. For others, they recognize their relationship with the environment is mutual, and their culture instills respect for the land they occupy.
“I come from a long line of agriculturalists and farmers,” says Jaiden Willeto, a 24-year-old community organizer and farmer living in Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation. “In the Navajo language, we call [cornfields] Dá’ák’eh – and ‘cornfield’ doesn’t fully encapsulate the word. It can’t really be translated because it means getting together with your family and harvesting, planting, and doing everything to live the agriculturist lifestyle.” Willeto began gardening with their mom when they were 13. Two years ago, they started their own garden; they now spend over 10 hours a week independently tending to more than 40 crops, in addition to their work sheep-herding, composting, and caring for their greenhouse.
The Navajo Nation is larger than West Virginia, but there are only 13 grocery stores for the entire reservation. Willeto uses their garden to feed their community, as climate change impacts their land. Severe drought, wind storms, wildfires, and flooding have ravaged an area that Willeto says once thrived. “Over my grandma’s lifetime, she would tell me about the abundance of springs and artesian springs,” Willeto recalls. “Our people have thrived in this land since millennia, and the reason that they have thrived in the land is because they are so in tune with the ecology and the land here that they see themselves as an extension of it and not separate. Because of this, they were very, very careful with their thoughts, their behaviors, and their actions because they knew that they were part of a collective ecosystem.”
The Navajo people are dependent on the land in part because it is a major food source. Because of settler colonialism and capitalism, however, their land is at risk.
“Food apartheid is the blatant and intentional destruction of our food systems as it was ancestrally and traditionally,” Willeto explains. “It has replaced our food systems with commodity foods first.”
Recent Consumer Price Index data shows that food-at-home prices increased 12.2% over the last 12 months. With record-level spikes in gas prices in the first six months of the year and scarcity in affordable housing, many families are just barely getting by each month, and others aren’t getting by at all. Homeless shelter officials in at least 15 states have reported major surges in those looking for assistance this year.
Like Willeto, Donovan Smith is working diligently to fight food insecurity by growing his own food and supporting the homeless population in his community. Smith knows the plight of homelessness firsthand. “Ten years ago, my mother and I were homeless ourselves,” Smith says. “And since that experience, it really instilled in me that I should do whatever I can to help my community of people who are in the same position as me.”
At just 9 years old, he was making his own soaps and, by age 11, started giving away a percentage of his sales to organizations that helped his family when he was homeless. He then began donating his soap directly to the homeless, giving away more than 22,000 bars over time. While spending time abroad as part of his homeschooling experience, he picked up gardening and got experience at a peanut farm in Vietnam. Now he has moved on to tackling food insecurity back home in Spokane by growing and giving away his harvest.
“[I] first started off with soil or other methods of gardening, and I realized that hydroponic growing just stuck for me. I’m in an apartment, so space is very limited, and with hydroponics, you can just grow inside your living room,” Smith says. “All you need is really water, the right container, nutrients, and you can grow about 200 heads of lettuce right inside in a single month.”
Smith condenses his 200 heads of lettuce each month down to 100 salad cups, which he tops with fruits and nuts and then distributes to his community. Hydroponic gardening is also more environmentally friendly, as it can use 10 times less water than traditional practices. However, due to the rising costs of electricity, Smith began taking a break from growing and donating in June. He uses five to seven hydroponic units which require 24/7 pumps and several grow lamps, which require a lot of energy. In the meantime, he has been volunteering with local food trucks to provide meals for his community while he waits for prices to come back down.
Although food insecurity isn’t unique to this generation, young people have inherited environmental issues such as water scarcity and carbon emissions in an unprecedented way, which impacts food production and national hunger rates. In Smith’s home state, over 600,000 people are facing hunger, with one in eight children being food insecure. With price gouging, Smith fears that it will only be a matter of time before food swamps and deserts are exacerbated in his community.
Melissa Legaria, who began doing farmwork with her parents at age 13, remembers realizing that she was being taken advantage of the first summer she started working. “I went to the grocery store and I tried to buy some blueberries,” Legaria said. “I had just spent the whole summer picking blueberries with my parents. The price was so expensive, I couldn’t afford it. I had other things I needed to buy, and it was really sad because the only reason I couldn’t afford was because I was getting paid so little while picking blueberries. I was very aware that my work was being exploited.”
Legaria and her family are from the indigenous town of Guadalupe Nundaca in Mexico. As Mixtecs, her parents’ native language is Mixteco, and her native language is Spanish. When she was young, they moved to Oregon, where they began doing fieldwork. “My summers from 13 until high school, I was picking all types of fruits and vegetables, I was going to my parents, and it was really hard work,” Legaria remembers. “You’re out in the sun a lot, you’re carrying a lot of big, heavy buckets all the time.”
Legaria and her parents aren’t an anomaly. As of 2019, 57% of farm laborers are of Mexican origin. Farmworkers in the United States are often overworked in extreme conditions with little pay, especially migrant workers. The agriculture and food industry is a trillion-dollar sector, yet there are few protections in place for workers to receive fair wages and to be protected from physical and sexual abuse.
Now, at 24, Legaria has been growing foods she grew up eating with her parents in Mexico, including different types of squash, herbs, and corn, since local grocery chains in her area don’t offer many of her cultural staples.
“I graduated in 2020, and one of the things that I wanted to go back to my roots was gardening and planting because that was something that my family had done for a long time,” Legaria says. “With the pandemic, I saw access to food just became so different because prices were changing, or I just couldn’t go to the grocery store so often.”
Legaria didn’t realize until later that the work she did as a teenager gave her the skills she has now to grow food for herself and her family. Above all, she thinks back to that time of her life and encourages others to consider the plight of farmworkers. “Talk to people that grow and pick your food and you’ll realize pretty quickly the circumstances that we live in because of exploitation,” Legaria tells Teen Vogue. “Always look at the address on the produce to see where in the country it came from, and just be aware of how far your food is traveling.”
Growing food for these Gen Z’ers is more than a hobby: For them and many others, it’s a form of resistance against climate change, food scarcity, and price gouging. Above all else, the labor of these three gardeners serves as a reminder that large corporations that are primarily responsible for greenhouse gas emissions should be working in tandem with well-intentioned individual efforts to combat environmental harm. As climate change, the pandemic, and war in Ukraine continue to disrupt the food supply chain, individuals interested in picking up a shovel and learning to grow their own food in the meantime can refer to TikTok teachers like @GardenMarcus and @HighDesertGardener.
