The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities

Will Allen, author of the 2012 book The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities, co-written with Charles Wilson, is an important figure in the American urban farming movement. Born into a farming family, Allen spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood hoping to avoid the agricultural life; however, after a career in professional basketball and later in corporate sales and marketing, Allen finds himself farming full-time, with idealism in his heart and a need to feel soil on his hands as often as possible. Thanks to Allen, the negative connotations of growing one’s own food have been transformed into meaningful commentary about environmentalism and social justice, commentary which inspires the delivery of actual fresh food items to urban Americans.

Born and raised in Maryland in 1949, Allen attended segregated schools until high school and then became the first black basketball player at the University of Miami, Florida. He married at the age of 20, while still a college student, and he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his young family after playing professional basketball in Belgium. In Milwaukee, while working a full-time corporate sales job and farming in his free time, Allen purchased the city’s last remaining farm, which took the form of three decrepit greenhouses. He turned them into Will’s Roadside Farm Market, where he sold vegetables from his own gardens starting in the spring of 1993. Over the course of nine years, this small market transformed into a massive urban farming operation, complete with low-cost vermiculture systems, an indoor fish farm, youth outreach programs, and food and farming education opportunities. Today, Allen’s non-profit, Growing Power, which employed nearly 150 employees at its peak, is synonymous with sustainable urban agriculture. Allen’s unique knowledge basis and ingenuity continue to enable him to combine his expertise with economical and sustainable technologies to deliver healthy food to underserved populations in urban areas.

In The Good Food Revolution, Allen defies the traditional structure of a memoir and describes the history of some of his own sharecropping ancestors alongside his own personal history as a farmer. As well, he interweaves moments from American history with comments on race relations in America, all the while articulating his goals for social justice and civil rights for all communities through healthy food production. The result is a book full of practical farming tips, life lessons learned from nature, and thoughtful reflections on what it means to be black in America.

Fifteen years after the opening of Will’s Roadside Farm Market, Allen is a leading authority on urban farming. In 2008, Allen won a Macarthur “Genius Grant” which came with a half-million-dollar prize. Two years later, he was lauded by health hero and former First Lady Michelle Obama, who invited him to partake in her Let’s Move campaign in 2010. He was also celebrated by food expert Michael Pollan, who listed Allen as one of the “World’s Most Influential Foodies” in Forbes magazine. Allen received an honorary doctorate of agriculture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2012, the same year as the publication of his autobiographical text.