Columbus Monthly / November 2010 / Growing hope

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Growing hope

An urban garden, a food pantry and a restaurant owner offer more than sustenance to the hungry.

It started simply enough. Vincent Withers stuck a couple of leafy green plants on the roof of his Clintonville restaurant, Cafe Bella, trying to use his sunlit space to get better tasting food on the plates of his patrons. “My application of problem-solving skills becomes: How do I get fresher food at a lower cost with less waste to customers?” says the former engineer as he absently strokes his scruffy black beard, remembering those days more than three years ago.

Slowly—day by day, week by week—the leafy green lettuce began to sprout, as did cucumbers and melons and squashes and herbs. And they eventually made their way into various dishes on the menu.

There still are plants tucked up on the patio rooftop, but his growing operations have become much more elaborate. Behind his restaurant, Withers shows off what he calls his “big rig”—a vertical garden scaffolding made of discarded shipping containers and PVC pipe. The contraption can hold seven or eight tiny terraces full of greens, basil, peppers and eggplants. He pipes the water right off his roof to feed this beast, as well as several smaller flats of vegetables growing on pallets.

Then there’s his newest invention, gurgling on the patio: a trio of aquacultures. Basically, they are jury-rigged fish tanks constructed of materials salvaged from the scrap heap—bits of Styrofoam cups converted into little rafts, for example, which support plants with roots dangling delicately into the nutrient-rich water. And small fish dart around while fattening up on the Cafe Bella table scraps dropped into the tank.

Yet, this unconventional garden isn’t producing much food anymore for his customers. Withers’s vision is much larger. When his tiny plants have grown up a bit, he and some helpers pick out the two dozen or so hardiest ones. And then he does a curious thing: He drives a little more than five miles south to one of the worst neighborhoods in Columbus and gives them away at a food bank.

Withers wants to do nothing less than change the way people who go to the food bank on Oak and 18th streets think about their lives—and their relationship to food.

He calls his urban growing space the Giving Garden.

It seems Withers has been driving south his whole life with food on his mind. A Grandview kid, he often spent his summer days on a several hundred acre farm owned by his grandparents outside of Jackson in southern Ohio. There were plenty of chores to do—planting corn, bailing hay, rounding up cattle—for a city kid with energy to burn. You didn’t have to ask him twice to do them, either.

“I found it very rewarding to understand what was happening with seeds and dirt over time,” he says. “I would be away from the farm and wondering what was happening, you know, kind of projecting how I thought things had grown. And always being surprised by what had actually happened.”

With an agile mind that liked sorting out how and why things worked, Withers gradually pulled away from his family’s pastoral past and became ensconced in Ohio State’s engineering program. “Although the interest was still there with food, the focus had shifted away from crops to electromagnetic stuff and robotics,” he says. “The creative problem solving was focused on nuts and bolts and lines instead of dirt and weather.”

After graduation, Withers took a position at a small company with a steady pipeline of Department of Defense contracts. He spent eight years there working on robotics projects, electromagnetic chambers and systems that simulated high-altitudes (to better calibrate global positioning systems mounted into the nose cones of modern weaponry).

“I was making bombs for the Man,” he says, breaking into a broad, toothy grin.

Looking for a way out of a life he couldn’t face in the mirror anymore, Withers went back to his roots and bought Cafe Bella in 2006. The city was about to find out what happens when you cross the mind of a mechanical engineer with the soul of a farmer.

Sabra Howell was coming back from yoga class when she stopped at Cafe Bella for a bite. She got to talking to the tall, curly-haired owner in the bucket hat about her job running a food pantry as a VISTA volunteer.

Howell began coming in regularly, and the two chatted about the canned and boxed food that makes up the bulk of any food pantry. And they discussed how Withers might supplement the processed food with something green, leafy and alive.

The two meshed quickly, seeing in one another a kindred spirit wanting to do something beyond just feeding the down and out who show up at Howell’s pantry each week.

“It’s not just about food,” she says. “It’s about teaching and empowering people to be self-sufficient and get beyond needing handouts. I think we are opening up people to the idea that they are not helpless in their situation.”

At the pantry, people get more than plants; they also receive lessons in how to grow food at home using stuff other people have thrown away and seeds from the plants they are given. It’s a notion Withers calls “upcycling.”

“People are seeing that it doesn’t take special tools to do this,” Howell says. “If they have a water bottle or a salad oil container in their trash, they can grow a plant in it.”

It’s all part of a vision that Withers and Howell share: To make the restaurateur’s growing operation an example for hungry people across the city to replicate. “I don’t want to see any more can drives or food pantries,” he says. “I want to see agricultural outlets where people pick up packages to be useful food suppliers.”

The Germans have a word—zeitgeist—that needs to appear somewhere in this story (so it might as well be here). It loosely translates to “spirit of the times,” and it seems fair to note that the easy partnership with Howell and all the assistance the project is getting reflects, in part, the growing awareness and interest in the origins of food. (The project benefits from Otterbein University student volunteers, paid interns from the Urban League and people who show up at Cafe Bella regularly to help.)

“There is a problem with the supply of food to hungry people—and I think it’s predominantly because of the disconnect we modern people have with food and where it comes from,” Withers says. “To oversimplify it, a lot of people think tomatoes come from Aisle 4 always wrapped in plastic.”

It’s a bright Wednesday morning and the Choice Pantry of the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church on Oak and 18th isn’t set to throw open its doors for another 45 minutes.

But that hasn’t stopped a crowd from gathering—they’re the lucky ones because they called and called and called beginning at 9 am the previous Tuesday until they could ring through on the pantry’s only phone line. There are spots for just 80 families a week, and you can only walk into the pantry once a month.

It looks as if most of the folks here are very old, very young or very sick. A few come with walkers, a few more shuffle along with canes. Everyone waits patiently as several dollies full of plants are wheeled by and then through the pantry doors. The crowd murmurs approvingly.

One of those in line is Alice Willis, who’s resting on a cane. A stroke a few years back has slowed her, causing her to seek help at the pantry. She lights up when she talks about the pepper plant she got last month from the Giving Garden program.

“I love it because when I pull back my patio drape, I can see all my little peppers growing—it’s like a little piece of life,” Willis says. “It makes you think of life.”

Howell, wearing a VISTA T-shirt, emerges through the pantry door. She barks out orders to her charges like a hard-nosed Marine instructor addressing fresh recruits. “Let me know that you are here when I call your name,” she says emphatically. “Please line up in the order I call you.”

Willis begins to pick her way through the waiting crowd, walking slowly toward the door. “I hope I can get another plant this week,” she says, nodding her head slowly as her hoop earrings bob ever so slightly in the morning light. “I don’t know if I’ll get one because I’m pretty far back on the list, but I hope so.”

Aaron Marshall is a freelance writer.