Video bonus and transcript

“Everything starts from the seed. Everything! I live in South Central. This is South Central. Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. So, the city planners, they get together and they decide they’re gonna change the name South Central to make it look softer. So, they change it to South Los Angeles. This is South Los Angeles. Liquor stores, fast food and vacant lots. Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert. Wait, hold up, I live in a food prison. South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. Funny thing is, drive-thrus, they're killing more people than the drive-bys. South Central and other cities in the United States are under siege and they need triage, just like you would do in a war, just like you would do in an earthquake or something else. We're under siege by the fast food industry. I see wheelchairs bought and sold like, like used cars on the street. I see dialysis centers, they're popping up like Starbucks, and I figured this had to stop because I know that, like Beverly Hills, which may be like ten miles away from me, is, you know, that our rate of diabetes, our rate of obesity is five times higher than theirs in my neighborhood. So, what I did, I figured the problem was the solution. Food is the problem and food is the solution. Plus, I got, I got real tired of driving like 45 minutes to get an apple that wasn't sprayed or impregnated with pesticides. So, I'm like okay, so I started my food for us, on this strip of land in front of my house. They call it a parkway. Mine is like 10 feet wide by 150 feet. So, it's owned by the city but you're supposed to maintain it, so I'm like cool. Since I got to maintain it, I'm gonna put over whatever the hell I want to put on this piece of land, you know. So I put fruit trees and vegetables and everything on this piece of land. Coz in my, where I’m at, the, we're plagued with heart disease, asthma, high blood pressure and a lack of opportunity just off the chart. How would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walked out your door you see the effects of the present f ood system has on your neighborhood. So, me and some of my friends, we volunteered as a group where we put in vegetable gardens around South Central, so mine was one of the first. So, what we did, like I said, we put in apple trees, veg, all kinds of vegetables, chard, kale, you name it. It was on my parkway for people to enjoy, for people from my neighborhood to come and partake in this free food, because in that neighborhood, you cannot get any healthy food. But the city came down on me and basically told me I was in violation and they were going to give me a citation. Well, they did give me a citation, which would turn into a warrant, and I'm like, really, you're going to give me a warrant for planting fresh food and feeding the neighborhood? So, I'm like, cool! Bring it! Coz it wasn't coming out. So, so, it was, man it was, it got crazy so, you know, long story short, we put up a petition on change.org, 900 signatures, we had to take it down because we had a success. Steve Lopez from the LA TIMES, he did a story on it, and now, it was almost like a rap, because once he talked to my councilmen, they, they all of a sudden loved what I was doing and they, you know, they embraced it and thanked me, even though they didn't want to give me no money to do it. So, we had a victory on our hands and it was cool. So, once this happened, other people started parkway, started, you know, coming, just showing up around the neighborhood and I was like, why wouldn't they embrace this? LA leads the nation in vacant lots. We have 26 square miles of vacant lots. That's 20 New York Central Parks’ worth of space. You can plant in that space, you can plant 724,838,400 tomato plants. Why in the hell wouldn't they do? Why wouldn't they okay this? When one, when one dollar worth of bean seeds would give you like $75 worth of produce, why wouldn't you grow your own food? Growing your own food, it's like printing your own money. I tell people, it's like my gospel. We have to start growing our own food. So, I have a legacy in South Central. I raise my sons there. I went to school there. Actually, I was one of the kids in the special trailer, you know, but now I'm on a TED stage... So, this, I have a legacy that I wanted this to change, and I didn't want my sons to grow up with this. So, what I did... I'm an artist. I grow my art. Just like a graffiti artist, they beautify walls. Me, I beautify parkways lawns. I used the gardens as a canvas in the plants and fruit that I used for that garden, used for that canvas. That's my embellishment, plus you can eat my art. You would be surprised how, if you let the garden be your canvas with a sunflower, how it can transform people. It was this kid, he was coming from school one day. He had his headphones on, you know. He was listening to his music, pants sagging, and he sees this big-ass sunflower, it’s like 11 or 12 feet, and he looks at me, like: “Yo son! Yo son! Is that real? Is that real, son?” There were laughs because...I had to laugh because that sunflower, it all made up, it made him touch nature, you know. When he was into this other, into himself and his music, and that's why I put this garden there. I want people to get back in touch with nature. I wanted him to know that just like you, this sunflower started from a seed, and look what, and now, look what it's doing, it's watching over this garden. There was this, there was this, this mother and her daughter, this mother and daughter, they were out in my garden, like 10:30 at night, so I heard stuff out there, so I went outside and you know, when they saw me, they were like embarrassed. I'm like, you know, it made me feel ashamed, made me feel ashamed that, that any, that somebody this close to me was, they were doing this because they thought, you know, they were ashamed, and I'm like, you don't have to do this like this, you know. I put this food on the street for a reason, and people ask me: “Fin, aren't you, aren't you afraid people are gonna steal all your food?” And I'm like, “Hell no, I'm not afraid they're gonna steal it. It's on the street! That’s why it’s there.” I want them to take this food, but also, I want them to take back their health with it. To me, gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, and it’s…in the inner city, a place you get strawberries.

There's this time where I was working with these guys in this homeless shelter, and I said, I figured we’d put a garden in their for them, so they, you know, so they could partake in eating some healthy food, and it was, it was beautiful. They engaged and it took them out of their space for a minute and they were sharing stories with me about how they used to garden with their mother and their grandmother and their father, and they, and they just knew these things that they hadn't been able to do in so many years, and it's like, that really touched me. So, I, we also do these things we call dig-ins, and what I've learned is we've gotten so far away from who we are, we've gotten so far away from the soil that I have 30-year-olds that I work with, they don't know how to use a shovel. So, a lot of what I'm doing now is training people how to use tools, and also training people how to eat coz if kids grow kale, kids eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes, but when none of this is available to them, when you don't show them the difference between this and some red hot flaming Cheetos, they're gonna eat whatever the hell is in front of you. And that's what we have to change. My group is going on to, we've put in probably like 24-plus gardens and it's a volunteer group that's now, since TED, we probably have over 400, 500 volunteers, people that want to put in gardens all over the city. So, we get, we're getting calls every day from people that want gardens. It's getting king of hard to keep up with the work. What I'm trying to do is just show these young kids a different opportunity that's out there for them, rather than the one that's been manufactured for them by some other people. I see these kids walking around and they have no sense of hope left, and I want to change that. I wanna, I wanna show these kids that there are other options that they can do in life, and gardening is basically just a metaphor for life, because to me, everything happens in the garden, and that you, when you show kids how to grow their own food, they're a part of this food, and that's why they embrace it, and you can't grow hot Cheetos, you know. You don't get a lesson from that. So, we're trying to change that, where we're showing these kids how to become leaders in their community, how they, how they, how they, how much fun and how practical it is and how healthy it is to grow your own food.

Putting them to work is the first priority because a lot of them, I say, for, to hell with hope! They don't need hope. They need opportunities, because we're not sitting around singing ‘We Shall Overcome’, because with opportunities, we will overcome, and that's what they're not allowing these children to do, they're not allowing these children to know that they have another option, and if this happens, who knows, we might, we might produce the next Shirley Chisholm, we might produce the next George Washington Carver, but if we never change the composition of the soil, we will never see this happening. So, what I, one of my ideas, what I want to do, what I'm working on is the Ron Finley Project, which will, what we, I want it to be global, where we want to take land off people who want to change their food system and take it back from the GMOs and take it back from the pesticides and plant healthy food for us all over the world, whereas we're also training people into how to prepare this food from the street to organic cafes, that we want to have made out of containers. So, I'm not, this and you know, people are nonprofits, nonprofits. I'm not talking about no free shit here, because you got to realize free is not sustainable. Funny thing about sustainability, you got to sustain it... What I'm talking about is putting these kids to work and showing them that there is another way, another option, and that gardening is basically a tool where you can, you might not want to do that, you might not want to be involved in food, but what gardening is going to do, it’s going to prepare you for anything else you want to do. I'm trying to train leaders that train leaders to go on and train other leaders, so they can take over their communities, so, they can change their life, that they do know that they have a purpose. That's what we're trying to do. Where we're trying to put, we're trying to put people first, not profits, not war, not Monsanto, not GMOs. We're trying to put people's lives first and let them know that they have an option.

So, basically, like this, open in farmers’ markets. This is, this is what we want to do. We want these kids to know the difference in food just because a lot of people, a lot of adults, they don't know what food is even when it's in the store unless it has a label on it. We want to change that. So, basically, what I want you guys to do when you leave here, I want you to just plant some shit. I don't care, I don't care if it's in a cup, I don't care if it's in a whole field, I don't care if you bomb a lot with seed bombs, just plant some shit and let's change this. Everybody in here is an artist, and as artists, what we're here to do is beautify some shit, so that's what we need to do. That's what we need to get back to. So, all these people that want to come and meet and sit down in cushy chairs and have these meetings where they talk about doing some shit, where they TALK about doing some shit. You want to meet me? Come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. Peace.



a seed: une graine
a vacant lot: un terrain inoccupé
drive-thru: service au volant (d’un fast food)
drive-by: coups de feu tirés d’une voiture
to pop up: pousser (comme un champignon)
to be plagued with: être rongé par, être affligé de
off the chart: aberrant, inconcevable
chard: blette, cardon
to partake: (ici) partager
in violation (of the law): contraire à la loi, en infraction
a citation: un procès-verbal (PV)
a warrant: un mandat
a councilman: un conseiller municipal
a legacy: (ici) une légitimité
to raise one’s son: élever son fils
parkways lawns: les pelouses au bord des routes
a canvas: une toile
a sunflower: un tournesol
headphones: des écouteurs
pants sagging: au pantalon affaissé, qui pend
ashamed: honteux
health: la santé
a defiant act: un acte de défi, provocant
a homeless shelter: un foyer pour SDF
a dig-in: action de déterrer, de creuser
a shovel: une pelle
Cheetos®: snack américain à base de farine de maïs soufflée au fromage de couleur orange
soil: le sol, la terre
GMOs: des OGM
a purpose: un but (dans la vie)
a label: une étiquette


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