Devita Davison’s good food crusade reaches Tasmania

ELAINE REEVES ponders what Tasmania might learn from the 1600 gardens and urban farms in the city of Detroit and its 22 farmers’ markets.

DEVITA Davison’s father is a preacher, and perhaps that explains her ability to hold an audience for an hour while she talks without notes and leave them steeled up to go forth and do good.

Certainly she held a room full of farmers, scientists, chefs, food lovers and activists riveted to what she had to say in Hobart recently.

Devita is the executive director of FoodLab Detroit and was in Australia for the launch of FoodLab Sydney, with a side trip to Hobart at the invitation of Leah Galvin of Eat Well Tasmania.

FoodLab is a community-driven food movement that has nearly 200 members who are “post-gate” food businesses — cafes, retailers, processors and value-adders.

FoodLab connects them with growers. Another organisation, Keep Growing Detroit, acts for the urban farmers and gardeners who grow the food.

Devita’s parents came from Alabama, part of a black migration from the south between 1940 and 1970 that went north looking for opportunity.

Young Devita took herself off to New York City where she spent 18 years mostly working in big businesses until 2012, when Hurricane Sandy wrecked her apartment and lifestyle.

She went home to Detroit crying “why me”. Her mother said to her: “Girl, the good lord did not send the water to drown you, he sent the water of mooove you.”

And so she was back in Detroit, at just about the same time the city filed for bankruptcy and an infant FoodLab came into being.

Many, including all the big food shops, left the city. And where there had been 2 million people, now there were just 600,000, 85 per cent of them African-American — and lots of vacant land for urban farming.

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Today, there are some 1600 gardens and urban farms in the city and during the seven months around summer, 22 farmers markets.

While she appreciates that “y’all in Australia” are keen to export, the then state governor Rick Synder wanted to ensure that at least 25 per cent of the food produced in Michigan was consumed in Michigan.

To aid that strategy the state introduced a scheme, now adopted by others, called Double Up Food Bucks, whereby every dollar of a food voucher, if spent on produce grown in Michigan, became worth $2, and the problem of poorer people not being able to afford to shop at farmers markets disappeared.

Forget the trickle-down effect. Devita believes: “If we create policies that takes care of most vulnerable, everybody else will do just fine.”

“But the revolution has to be funded.” Philanthropy has played a big part — the Kellogg Foundation gave a capacity-building grant and a creative thinking consultant was hired.

The state government helped with funding and by setting up “a conversation around good food and what it means to the state”.

The City of Sydney is a partner in the FoodLab there, but the City of Detroit was struggling to keep the lights on and police and fire departments running. It’s help was to turn blind eye.

Now FoodLab would like it to give a long lease on one of those empty buildings (Keep Growing Detroit has a former bank building).

Devita Davison during her recent talk in Hobart. Picture: ELAINE REEVES

Detroit’s circumstances are unique, and our welfare is not in the form of food vouchers, but there are many lessons we could take home from Detroit.

At the beginning of each year FoodLab distributes a calendar of the “times, spaces and places” of events it will run.

There are workshops on scaling a food hobby up to a business, courses for business scaling up and looking for capital, one-on-one mentoring, and every month a FoodLab member will do a round-table class to share their skills with other members.

Members are paid for their contributions. “I do not believe in asking people who have worked, people who have experience to do stuff for free,” she said. “I get emails and phone calls all the time saying it would be great exposure for Food Lab to do such and such for free. Does exposure pay the light bill?”

Every month the growers issue a list of their aggregated produce and its wholesale price. Keep Growing Detroit delivers twice a week or businesses can pick up at a farmers market during the season.

Businesses can get a discount by picking their own, which has them making connections through working alongside the farmers.

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