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Douglas Gayeton

“After Katrina there was no fresh produce within a hundred miles of New Orleans, but this community of Vietnamese people in east New Orleans collectively mapped out their backyards and the total cumulative acreage of all their backyards put together equaled the size of a medium farm. So they worked out who was going to grow what. Not only do they grow for the community, but they also grow food specific to where they had lived in Vietnam. Food sovereignty is an idea of not abandoning their culture and of maintaining a sense of community that’s connected to food as they know it — it’s their term.

It’s really wild. What you don’t see is that she’s in a suburban area with all these houses around her — I like it because you think it’s a picture of a woman in Vietnam and then you start to read it and you’re like, ‘What, huh?’”

Credit: Information artwork by Douglas Gayeton. From the Lexicon of Sustainability project.