--- title: TIME 100 Talks Health: The Healing Power of Food | TIME description: During this event with urban gardener Ron Finley and musician and food entrepreneur Questlove, learn how gardening and food can strengthen communities. Brought to you by CVS Health. canonical: https://time.com/video/ymjKxIWx/ og:title: TIME 100 Talks Health: The Healing Power of Food og:description: During this event with urban gardener Ron Finley and musician and food entrepreneur Questlove, learn how gardening and food can strengthen communities. Brought to you by CVS Health. og:url: https://time.com/video/ymjKxIWx/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ymjKxIWx/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME 100 Talks Health: The Healing Power of Food twitter:description: During this event with urban gardener Ron Finley and musician and food entrepreneur Questlove, learn how gardening and food can strengthen communities. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: TIME 100 Talks Health: The Healing Power of Food [Watch (HLS stream): TIME 100 Talks Health: The Healing Power of Food](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ymjKxIWx.m3u8) (27:40)  _Published 2021-05-04. During this event with urban gardener Ron Finley and musician and food entrepreneur Questlove, learn how gardening and food can strengthen communities. Brought to you by CVS Health._ --- Jul 28, 2023 4:04 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [TIME for Health Talks Livestream: The Healing Power of Food](/video/sJfIal8l/):54 ### TIME for Health Talks Livestream: The Healing Power of Food [Are 'Multigrain' Foods More Healthful?](/video/ITg864AL/) ### Are 'Multigrain' Foods More Healthful? [Urban Deserts: Fresh-Food-Free Zones](/video/U9SB5Xkl/) ### Urban Deserts: Fresh-Food-Free Zones --- ## Transcript Hi, everyone. Welcome to time for Health Talks brought to you by CVS Health. It's my pleasure to welcome Ron Finley, an urban gardener in Los Angeles in Questlove, a musician, author and food entrepreneur. It's so great to have both of you here. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be. So, Ron, for people who don't know your story, years ago, you planted a vegetable garden on a vacant strip of land owned by the city. At the time, that was illegal, but you got the laws changed. Now you teach people all over the world how to garden, how to grow their own food. So how did you start gardening? Well, it was, you know, doing what? 0708 and doing the what they keep calling the recession is actually a depression. And I was like, do I use my AK or do I use my schedule to several would be a little safer to use. I dug up my parkway in front of my house and I beautified it and I wound up getting an arrest warrant, you know, for planting tomatoes and jasmine. That's that's that's basically how I started this particular part of it. And long story short, I got the law changed in L.A., where you can grow food on the on the parkways on the streets now throughout the city of L.A., nobody knows about it, But, you know, you can do it. And that's how I got started. I mean, there was just no healthy food in my neighborhood whatsoever. And, you know, we always had to leave the neighborhood to get healthy food. So that's why that's where I started. You know, basically it was food apartheid. You know, I tell people we live in food prisons that food deserts. How did you learn to garden? Was it something you grew up doing? Well, yeah. I mean, it was simple. Is the things we learned in elementary school where you would have in the 1800s when I went to school, it was, is it you have the wet paper towel and you put it in the petri dish and you put a seed in it and you wash it. Grow is like, wow, You know, that's that was my foundation. And then my first hustle has a very, very young kid, was mowing people's lives and cleaning people's gardens. So it's in there. I mean, we're black. It's already in our DNA, you know, of of being stewards of the land. So it's just we need to bring it back out. So that's how that's basically how I got started. And but the thing about it being young and being in school like that and getting that lesson, they didn't give you the whole lesson. They didn't give you the economy lesson. This attached to that. They didn't tell you that, okay, you see this little beam that destroyed itself and gave you a new a new to sprout. They didn't tell you. Put that in the soil so you can get 100 other ones. And they had one of those in the soil. So you can get a thousand. That's the economics part. So all our lives we get getting these half assed lessons. That's the one. That's the piece we need. You know, you wanted to talk about rate of return planted, damn fruit tree, you know, and it's going to give you fruit like clockwork for the next 300 years. Questlove So people know you for your band, The Roots, and as the musical director for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. But you're also really involved in the food world. You've written cookbooks. You host food salons with famous chefs. So where did this interest in food come from for you? The interest in food for me came from maybe a creative standpoint where being on The Tonight Show puts you in close proximity to a lot of what I call artists, different chefs. And for me, like, I became obsessed with just the creative process of how people express themselves through food. I mean, even now in the in the in this pandemic, I'll say that the number one way of people have used their time to sort of maintain some sort of level of sanity is cooking and being creative in the kitchen. So for me, I guess my interest in food, besides my lifelong devotion to it as a consumer and eating it, is watching people figure out ways to prepare it and who gets access to it. Also, that's important to me as well. So you you brought up the pandemic. We're talking about food and gardening today. For that reason, gardening often has a resurgence during times of war or natural disasters. And we're really seeing that right now. Like Questlove said. So, Ron, how can people who know nothing about gardening get started? I mean, don't be afraid. You know, it's funny because they can watch my masterclass course, you know, go to Masterclass dot com and watch my masterclass, you know, And it's great. I can attest to that. Right. Don't don't be scared of soil. You know, like what I do, I weaponize soil, you know, that's what I soil is my protest, you know, to all of these injustices that that that we're dealing with have been dealing with since the inception of this country. It's its soil is water, and it's the seed. I mean, it's in some air. I mean, how difficult could it possibly be? But, you know in the making of a those was would it. I knew it. But, you know, it's like one of those things that's in front of you that you don't see that there are people that literally in their whole lives that may be 50 years old, who've never touched soil in their life. They have because it hasn't been in their proximity. They've lived in, you know, apartments or, you know, projects or, you know, these kind of environments, these city, these urban environments, they have no soil. You know, we are soil. We we need to touch it. I think I have a thing if we can holds some soil, if it's a wooden crate, if it's a shoe box, put some soil in it, put a seed in and start your garden. It's not, it's not that difficult. What I'm finding out now is bringing back humanity and people's bringing families together, just like with this pandemic. I mean, literally, I didn't leave my property for probably two months, two weeks easy, because I didn't have to. I mean, I can grow in my front yard and eat and go on my back and go in my pool, which I'm in now. And I could eat. I can go up on my roof of my container and eat. Actually, I got healthier. I'd probably lost £12. I didn't get the cold. The 15, you know. So something that you both are interested in is using food to empower and strengthen communities. I want to hear from both of you. How how do you think food does this? You know, I always said that food is next to music. Food is probably a social adhesive. You know, before COVID, I was known to do these, like social experiments called the food salons, mainly because, you know, once I became a professional musician, like right out of high school, you know, I basically spent the next 20 years of my life in a hotel at the mercy of either like room service or backstage food or roadside food or, you know, I guess as I came up where you status grew up with, I grew up in Philadelphia, I grew up in Philly. And so, you know, the one thing I always missed was sort of like the family meal, which is weird because the family that I quarantine with, you know, I'm quarantining on a on a ranch, on an apple orchard. I'm now in a place where, like for the last six months, you know, there's family dinners, it's at 6 p.m. and we talk and we work out our problems. And it's it's a feeling that I never thought that I'd ever miss ever in like even quote when this is over, I don't know if this will ever be over, but I definitely know that the importance of the adhesive that is the family dinner, I mean, the bottom line, once you start growing food and you do it collectively, once you start growing food, period, you can't eat all growth. It's physically. And it would be that would be a new job to try to eat all the food that you from and you can't, so you have to share it. And that's what gardeners share. I mean, gardeners, dinner, humanitarians, you know, I leave food on people's people's doorsteps in my neighborhood, you know, and in sometimes I leave the food in a pot so they could use the pot, the plant, their own. Some of them get the message seven don't I mean but what I found that if you grow together, you grow together. And that's what communities do. You know, we need to grow together. And I was trying to establish something here in Los Angeles, whereas, you know, we took blocks and planted just the parkways, the strip in front of the strip, in front of people's houses. That way, collectively, you got the onions and the carrots and Mabel has the collard greens and the tomatoes and and just imagine if you organize this, that, you know, Mabel's kids and, you know, jams and, you know, the mechanic. And now you started sharing and now you're sharing stories and you're sharing food and you're sharing meals. That's community and that's how you build it. I mean, that's that's I mean, to me, there's so much of our culture that's in food and it's so much of our culture that's been lost by the lack of food, by the lack of community and values. What we have to share is values. And I mean, and it's like now what's going through it is Black Lives Matter. It's like, yeah, Black lives matter, but shit, I have to tell somebody that my life matter. And then we, we we need to start. Does our lives matter to us? You know, are we because the people in our neighborhood, we have terrorists in our neighborhood that will kill you over a pair of shoes who kill you over a jacket? Those that needs to be addressed. And we need to address it in our in our neighborhoods. So you both grew up in inner city communities that were predominantly black. What's the biggest food challenge today facing communities? If you remember, there was a period where Magic Johnson was sort of embarking in his businesses and you saw like Magic Johnson movie theater. Johnson Starbucks, Magic Johnson. Friday's game is and, you know, I was like, I was I was him. You know, one point I saw is when I first saw the Fridays and I seen him at an event and I was like, really? You got to have a Magic Johnson Fridays and he was like, You don't understand. A Walmart ventures this means the most to me. And I was like, Well, what's what do you mean? And he told me that wherever he place that Magic Johnson's Fridays, he said that he did it because growing up you couldn't get a garden salad anywhere in any proximity where his home was growing up within ten miles. And then I thought about it. And, you know, I'm from Philadelphia. And of course, you know, there is no shortage on a lot of the foods that are known for Philadelphia, which, you know, quite fatty, you know, there's cheesesteaks everywhere. There's, you know, all types of of fattening foods. And, you know, I grew up in the age of hip hop where I think in the nineties it was a challenge to, you know, for lack of a better term, you know, to not get shot up in the club. And then there's a point when you turn 30 and you think like, okay, that part of my life is over. I'm good. And then I realized the new getting shot in the club is avoiding strokes. And so I really I just I'm living in real time right now. My wakeup call or avoiding that wakeup call like, like Warren said earlier, not gaming has killed COVID 15. pre-COVID, I was £420. And the one thing that I was determined not to do was to panic, eat or panic snack or use food in an abusive way that could be detrimental to my health. And so, I mean, taking off £100 in the last year or so is is kind of paramount to how I see food now, just like how important farming is and how important vegetables are. Like our relationship with vegetables. There's a peer of mine in the industry who he passed away, but he had lost three of his limbs. He lost two legs and an arm and and when he went to the hospital, the doctor asked them, like, just out of curiosity, which is your diet like? And he revealed to him that for 20 years straight, higher intake was the gas station across the street, like the AMPM mini market, the 7-Eleven, frozen food burrito cheeseburger, like he even had a green salad in 20 years. And that stories running often too rampant in our community. So I see this more as a a not only a state of emergency, almost feel like it's the invisible warfare on a community that doesn't even know that, you know, thank God I have the job I do, because even to eat the right foods is so expensive if you don't have access to your own garden and that sort of thing. So yeah, there's a way. Bigger State of emergency story here. But where I grew up, yeah, there are no types of health options whatsoever. Food is the weapon that has been formed against us. This is another way to kill us. And that's real. And, you know, people ask, you know, what? What is the true cost of food? You know, all that sexy food we see, you know, with the it's all wet on the shelves in the vegetable section with light shining on it, it looks out listening. I mean, how did it get there? Do you know what people's lives are like? Do you know the toll on their lives from them being over with their backs bent? I don't know, untold hours picking our food, You know, what is the true cost of food? Do we think about those people when we when we bite into that apple, when we buy that celery? You know, do we think about what their food, what the food is truly costing us and what is costing them? And I don't think most people think about that. Questlove I wanted to ask you about so so you invested early in some food startups, like Just Impossible Foods, which really caught on. What did you see in them. At at the food salon back when Impossible was just a baby? We heard about this company that makes hamburgers that aren't hamburgers, that taste as good as hamburgers. And, you know, we thought just to be cute, let's, you know, let's do a blind taste test in one bite Shake Shack and one bite this impossible company and see what happens. And when I tasted it, the proximity to where they were compared to, you know, the other foods that I consumed, that whole foods, you know, like the both of burgers and all that stuff. The times like this did not taste like. Yeah, taste like cardboard. I was like, whoa. And that was the earliest version of it. And it piqued my curiosity. And I realized especially, you know, I've I've spoken with Papa before. I know that he has a hard core mission with his, you know, turning the earth completely green by 2030 and not our need for killing cows anymore. I mean, you know, let me let me just let you know that I'm a still a lover of steak. And I think it's necessary. However, I will say that I think I'm pretty much at this age in my life, ready to literally make the changes for whoever the Amir is that's growing up in West Philadelphia that didn't have the right food options that that I'm just learning right now. In my second chance in life at New York 50, I tell people with this gardening design the life you want to live, not this one that's been designed for you because most people do not know the life they're living. They didn't design. It's been designed for them. And these are the lessons that we've got to tell these kids. These are the lessons that you are the most valuable, the most precious, the most expensive thing on this planet with nothing. Money does not make you rich. Gold does not make you rich. None of that. Nothing that you can buy gives you value. But nobody gives us those lessons, you know? But then they flash all the stuff in front of us. All of this. And I tell people, if you eat food and agriculture business, you wear clothes, you're in the agriculture business, you drive a car, next go to business. But with your dollars. I wanted to ask you both about that very thing. So you both do nonprofit work with children around food. What's the most important lesson that kids should learn early on about food? You know, three years ago, someone had put me on to the school in New York called Food and Finance. And this is like back in 2003, like I'd never heard of like indoor farming and then and growing fish on your rooftop and all those. I thought it was the most bizarre thing I ever heard in my life. And suddenly this school had manifested in Manhattan in which it would be the equivalent of if they took the fame school and instead of performing arts, it was home economics or the culinary arts. And for me, I thought that was the most genius thing I've ever saw. Because one, like again, I still see the parallel line between music, creativity and culinary creativity and the fact that these kids who, you know, there's there's a whole nother conversation about who gets access to kind of the world of the culinary world of back when, you know, being a James Beard chef was important. Being a michelin star restaurant was important. pre-COVID. You know, at the time, there was a certain unattainable carried on a stick that really wasn't really wasn't made available to women, to people of color. And I really, really, really wanted to figure out how I could use myself to be a change in that. So, you know, I kind of unofficially adopted the school because a lot of them had dreams of opening up their own bakeries and had new ways of cooking and informing. And it teaches survival skills which really wouldn't talk to me. So when I saw this, I felt what best way to use my platform and do these kids, he said. I was going to say food is a life skill. It ain't frivolous. It ain't like, Oh yeah, this is something. Knowing how to grow food is is like it's a life skill. It's like it should be in our it's in our DNA and we should we should nurture that DNA. That's something that nobody ever can take from you, period. Run in your master class. You talk about how people don't need acres and acres of lands to grow their own food. What's the easiest thing to grow when you don't have a lot of space? That is lettuce, leafy greens, I mean collard greens and people don't. I did a video. I said, okay, this is this is real intense. I want you guys to play real close attention. I must show you how to plant collard greens. But you've got to pay attention. And I was sitting there and I broke a piece of the collard greens off and I stuck it in the ground and I'm like, Wipe the sweat from my brow. Like, wasn't that intense? You know, that's how easy it is to grow food, you know. Ron, will you lead us in a little tour of your garden? Let me see what other moves. So this is what you see when you enter the gate. She says there are no broken dreams, only unfinished realities. So there's grapes and there's oranges. And then this is on the parkway where we have pomegranate sugar cane. These are banana trees. That's an almond tree. This is the heartless stuff, guys. So this is this here is a branch that I took off of a plum tree and I stuck it in the ground. And now I have a plum tree. And that's literally all I did is Rosemary Bush is probably 12 years old. Giant sunflowers. You can see you guys see the sunflower? Not yet. No. Is that. Well, that's the stock right here. The flower hasn't grown yet. Oh, yeah. Okay, then we see it. Yeah. Let's talk. Yeah. Figs. I mean. So this is all right in front of your house. Do people congregate here and. And talk to you and pick your fruit? Yeah. These are sweet potatoes we got. We got some ginger finally growing out here. The sweet potatoes took over the world. These are apple juice. You got to see those because I'm not looking. Yeah, Yeah. Well, everything grows in California. Yep. So bananas, corn. We have watermelon down here, and we have pumpkins. That's taken over the sidewalk now and then more sweet potatoes that are probably. I don't know. That's one of the sunflowers here are probably that's probably 13 feet up. Wow. Not more bananas. And you can see the banana flower. Yes or no? Yes. Okay. So yeah. It's a jungle. It's a pain is what it is. This is the apricot tree. And these are some of the most delicious figs you guys never had. Oh, my God, they're so delicious. People know they're here now, so they take them. So I don't really get enjoying them like I used to. But I'll go back inside if you want. Yeah. Can you show us your pool again? Yeah. So these are. These are all. These are pomegranates. Well, those are beautiful. But let's see, an orange right here. And there's a pear tree on the other end. I'm jealous. That's. This is a nectarine tree growing in 18 inches of soil on top of concrete when it's that big. Wow. Dragon fruit. I wonder. We should go up on the roof. Let's see. That's my workshop. We're moving and cleaning here, guys, This is sugarcane of sugarcane is probably one of the healthiest things on the planet that nobody knows about. And you see these peppers here and you see these. And you guys see those? Oh, yeah, the pumpkins. And you have two different kinds of kale, strawberries, apricot, avocado. That has been fruit. Yes, more bananas. So there you have it. Well, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being with us. I appreciate it. Thank you. Wrong. And thank you for making me cool, man. I appreciate it ever, man. Stop it Back on this side, man. How let your boy. Unreal. I can't wait to get out there, brother. Thank you. Thank you. I say, I'll see how they say. Thanks to all of you for watching. Time for health talks brought to you by CVS Health. 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