Armed with soil and seeds, Catholics in blighted cities are taking social justice into their own hands.

In Camden, New Jersey a jumble of railroad tracks, freeways, and abandoned factories lace through the Waterfront South area on the Delaware River just across from Philadelphia. During heavy rains, a nearby wastewater treatment plant frequently leaks raw sewage onto the streets.

An urban exodus from Camden has left 4,000 empty lots in a 10-square-mile area; half of the houses have been abandoned. This makes the city a prime place for people to dump stuff they don’t know what to do with. One day an old speedboat ended up on Broadway, one of the city’s main streets. Two weeks before, a huge abandoned factory caught fire and burned to the ground.

Camden, once a thriving manufacturing center, is today better known for its crime, corruption, poverty, and urban dysfunction. It also must contend with the consequences of the industrial era: high concentrations of polluting facilities, diesel emissions, and contaminated Superfund sites (highly polluted locations the E.P.A. designates for cleanup).

Parishioners at Sacred Heart Church have been trying for years to turn things around in their neighborhood, and most recently they have focused on food.

“Food is the most basic justice issue,” says Andrea Ferich, director of sustainability at the parish’s Center for Environmental Transformation. “If you don’t have it, what justice is that?”

Ferich and her neighbors are hoping that the plants sprouting in their city garden will bring new life to Camden. Before the land was turned into a vegetable garden, it was a trash heap amid boarded-up rowhouses. Now it features lush green growth on raised beds, a greenhouse, and a farmers market.

To turn the tide of urban decay in cities like Camden, residents across the country have invested in backyard, community, and school gardens in order to provide themselves with good, healthy food. Catholics are among those creating, promoting, and volunteering in this effort as they attempt to meet Jesus’ call in Matthew’s gospel to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger. What they are finding is that feeding people enhances dignity among the poor, promotes justice, builds community, and offers healing.

How does your garden grow?

Detroit is one of the most economically devastated cities in the country. Although the downtown area boasts beautiful skyscrapers and new economic development, other sections of the Motor City feature hollowed-out factory buildings, boarded-up storefronts, and neighborhoods where only a few houses still stand among acres upon acres of vacant land. The city has lost more than half of its 1950 population of 2 million, as mostly white people headed for the suburbs and left 25 percent of Detroit’s 139 square miles vacant.

Five supermarket chains served the city, but by the 1990s they were all gone, too, leaving a “food desert,” a phenomenon that affects low-income neighborhoods in many American cities. Retail executives began pulling supermarkets out of mixed-income neighborhoods after the civil disturbances of the late 1960s.

Prejudice against the poor, people of color, or ethnic minorities also plays a role. A 2010 report by PolicyLink (New York) and The Food Trust (Philadelphia) reviewed more than 132 studies, discovering that low-income zip codes have 25 percent fewer chain supermarkets and 1.3 times as many convenience stores compared with middle-income zip codes. Zip codes with primarily African American residents have about half the number of chain supermarkets than do areas with primarily white populations; predominantly Latino areas have only a third as many.

Without grocery stores, people buy their food in convenience stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants, says Capuchin Franciscan Brother Jerry Smith, executive director of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen in Detroit.

“They eat a lot of fast foods, and kids think Coke and chips is a meal,” he says.

The combination of processed and fast foods and the lack of fresh produce is having a negative impact on people’s health. According to FeedingAmerica.org, 49 million Americans are hungry, including 17 million children. Meanwhile, one out of three American children is overweight, and childhood diabetes has reached epidemic proportions.

Capuchin Franciscan Brother Rick Samyn decided to grow a vegetable garden for the Capuchin Soup Kitchen in 1997. He started out with two lots, and today Earthworks Farm covers several vacant lots in a residential neighborhood on the east side of Detroit with vegetables, fruit trees, herbs, and beehives.

Earthworks supplies food for the soup kitchen, which provides 2,000 meals a day, and also sells produce through the Grown In Detroit Co-op as well as to several health clinics and the Gleaners Food Bank. A 1,300-square-foot greenhouse on the soup kitchen parking lot produces more than 100,000 vegetable seedlings that are distributed free to community gardeners.

Magic beans not required

The desire to feed the poor also led Mike Zimmerman, a second-year law student at Fordham University in New York City, to plant a garden 14 stories up at St. Paul the Apostle Parish.

Zimmerman had been volunteering at the church’s Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen when he got the idea of supplying the poor with healthy, organic food by growing it himself. He contacted Paulist Father Gil Martinez, the pastor, who suggested the church’s rooftop as the site for the garden. Zimmerman recruited several fellow law students to help with the garden and solicited donations for soil and seeds.

Zimmerman, who plans to specialize in agricultural law, wanted others to understand the connection between food and justice. At the soup kitchen Zimmerman saw this contradiction in the processed food the poor were typically served, supplied by a global agricultural system that is intent on producing quantity and profits, and that relies on expensive pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers.

“Our garden is not going to feed all these people,” says Zimmerman, “but through local action, we’re showing what we can do to change this food system. This is just the first step toward fixing an unjust system and learning the skills required to grow fresh, organic food on a larger, more practical scale.”

The garden delights neighbors in the 42-story condo building that overlooks it, Martinez says, but it also delights the people who eat the food.

“They know that the food is grown just for them,” says Martinez, “and they say our soup kitchen is the best in Manhattan because of that.”

Zimmerman’s project wasn’t just altruistic. The native Vermonter missed the lush greenery of home and believed that a garden could help re-energize himself—and maybe others—in the Big Apple. Martinez, a son of migrant farmworkers, agrees.

“There’s a sense of touching creation and participating in it through the garden,” he says.

Although Zimmerman is Jewish, he and Martinez are united in the common spiritual tradition of stewardship of the earth, as described in Genesis.

Having dominion over creation “is about taking care of the world that God has so graciously given us,” says Zimmerman. “And what’s so poignant here is that there is not a lot of open space [in New York City] for us to see God’s creation.”