Genetic Engineering > Alternatives > Katherine Webb

My name is Katherine Webb and I'm the head gardener here at Santa Fe Bar and Grill.

The garden is for the restaurant. It is an organic garden providing all of the salad mix, fresh herbs, some greens, edible flowers and some berries for the restaurant. There are no pesticides or herbicides used. I try to do much heirloom varieties just to have demonstration of biodiversity. Many heirlooms are better tasting and more interesting. Although we do grow some hybrids we do not grow any genetically engineered crops.

I do what I do because I really like food and I like to be outside. I was studying political economy and world agricultural systems and the way corporations control our food system and it got to be very depressing.

And basically I got into hands-on creation of alternatives.

Part of that is urban farming is very important to me.

Living here in the bay area and growing up predominantly in the urban areas, I think it's really important to green our cities and take, for example, Cuba as a role model of how they are able to produce a lot of their food for the urban communities within their cities.

And then this is sort of a unique model of having a garden in a restaurant.

It's incredibly intensive because it's production oriented to produce enough for the restaurant. So I think, hopefully there is a growing number of really production oriented gardens.

Some foodbanks are beginning to provide fresh produce for the food bank, and that's a wonderful model.

Especially in the Bay Area, there are a lot of wonderful opportunities to get involved with urban agriculture and organic growing.

We have many many organic communty gardens in San Francisco, and in the East Bay. You probably have one in your neighborhood.

Also there is a big movement to create gardens in schools, so you can volunteer and work with kids, and school gardens and I think that's just a wonderful trend. I did some volunteering at Edible School Yard in Berkeley, a wonderful project where they actually also have a kitchen so you have the opportunity of working with kids on growing food and then working with them to prepare the food.

I think there are a lot of young people that haven't had the opportunity of a family cooking together and sitting down and eating together because things are so crazy these days.

Our relationship to growing and preparing food and sharing it with people is something that's very fundamental and very pleasurable. It gives a lot of pleasure for people to sit down and eat food in this rat race that we are living in right now.

 

(the Santa Fe Bar & Grill is located at 1310 University Avenue, Berkeley, California)