The Sunday Collards at Joyce — a Southern-inspired restaurant in downtown Los Angeles — is a flavorful and familiar ode to the post-church service meal often made in Southern households. The mildly sweet greens are simmered in either a smoked oxtail or vegan “holy trinity” broth made with onions, celery and carrots. It’s one of the restaurant’s signature dishes.
But long before the greens are scooped into a bowl and carefully plated on the marble counter at Joyce, they begin as seeds, with origins thousands of miles southeast in Alabama. The seeds are then planted in California, where Eddie Anderson, a clergyman, political organizer and the founder of Freedom Farms Collective, helps oversee their growth.
“We started with the seeds,” said Anderson, who is known by his congregation as Pastor Eddie. When he started the collective around eight months ago, he wanted to increase access to fresh, healthful food in communities across South and West L.A., and diversify the type of produce residents see everyday. Through state grants, he invested $1 million into local urban farms and gardens, supplying them with seeds, equipment and even extra people to help grow the crops.
Anderson is the chief executive of Partnership for Growth L.A., or PGA, a community development organization established in 2020 in collaboration between the McCarty Memorial Christian Church and the Jewish Center for Justice, which invests money and resources to help increase food access and job security. Freedom Farms Collective is one of its latest initiatives, and includes a program called Project Jubilee, an urban farming and career development program for young adults ages 18 to 25. The participants help harvest the seeds into plant plugs, which are then given to farmers partnered with the organization.
One of those farmers is Kevin Ridley, a South L.A. native who has been farming for the last 45 years. He serves as the urban farm consultant for PGA and helps care for the Greater Watts Community Garden, where he guides the selection of produce grown each season. The majority of the crops are sourced from the Southeastern United States.
“Most of these [crops] are culturally relevant and things that people in the different communities that we service would like,” said Ridley, who is also known as Farmer Kev. Around 15%of the population in Watts is African American, and many have roots in the South because of the legacy of American slavery. Ridley, who has family from Arkansas and Louisiana, first learned how to garden from his Southern grandmother, and continues to pass on his knowledge to Project Jubilee participants.
Ridley specifically wanted to grow Alabama Blue Collards — the same greens that are picked up by the collective, taken to a distribution center and then delivered to local restaurants and markets.
“They’re one of my favorites because their [flavor] profiles are a little different than a lot of the collards you’ll find in the grocery store,” said Ridley. “These, I think, have a sweeter taste, and they lack the bitterness that sometimes you’ll find in collard greens.”
When the collards are fully grown but still rooted in the ground, with the sunlight shining above, the crop’s veins appear plum-colored, with large indigo-green leaves. In winter, he said, the blue hue becomes even richer.
Anderson, who was born in Georgia, moved to L.A. to attend seminary school at Claremont School of Theology, where he met mentors such as the late Rev. James Lawson, a civil rights activist who was a close colleague of Martin Luther King Jr.
Anderson said that Lawson introduced him to activism in L.A., and that many of the goals and methods for change that inspire him trace back to the civil rights movement.
“Fannie Lou Hamer showed us that food is more than just life; food is a pathway to freedom,” Anderson said, referring to the civil rights leader who pioneered the food justice movement and founded the original Freedom Farm Cooperative in Mississippi in 1969. The cooperative sought to make land accessible to Black farmers in the Mississippi Delta, not just for health, but for economic empowerment. Anderson has continued the legacy in Black and brown communities around L.A. County.
Anderson’s collective has provided grants to Title 1 schools, religious centers like L.A.’s first African Methodist Episcopalian church, and housing corporations to invest in their own urban farms. The Greater Watts Community Garden is also supported by one of these grants.
Anderson said the collective implements what it calls a “closed-loop” model within its programs, meaning it’s involved in every stage of the food production process to ensure quality, create economic opportunities and help recirculate the dollar within the community.
One turning point for Anderson was meeting a person in his community who was astounded after trying produce that was grown on one of their local farms.
“They ate a strawberry and said, ‘I never knew strawberries had a taste,’” he recalled.
Eating produce that has gone through fewer steps of production preserves the flavor, health benefits and freshness, Anderson said, which is something low-income and Black communities have historically lacked access to.
After picking the produce from the different farms, Anderson and other workers from the collective store the produce at AMP kitchen, a shared warehouse space in Lincoln Heights, before distribution. According to Freedom Farms community distribution manager Charles Saseun, all of the distribution is done with “Farm Fresh” practices, a motto the collective uses to replace the “organic” label that is typically seen in grocery stores.
“The farms that we’re working with, they’re using these sort of [organic] practices without having to get the certification, because it’s really expensive,” Saseun said. “We trust their food science and also their food safety because food safety for us is paramount.”
Each farm must implement a specific food safety plan that the collective approves in order to participate in the partnership, said Saseun, who was previously a specialist at the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
The produce from the warehouse is then delivered directly to restaurants and markets across Los Angeles County.
At Joyce, culinary director John Cleveland said he’s increasingly received compliments on the restaurant’s collard greens since partnering with Freedom Farms.
“It’s a staple in Southern food [and] it’s one of the litmus test dishes that most of our guests will base their experience on,” said Prince Riley, co-owner of Joyce. “It’s great to know the person that’s sourcing this [is someone] we can talk to, or we can go there very quickly. You can’t really put a price on that.”
Andrew McDowell, owner of With Love Market and Cafe, a coffee shop and grocery store in Pico-Union, said his partnership with Freedom Farms has allowed him to sell locally grown produce that customers might not have tried before, like purple cauliflower, for affordable prices.
“If you take care of everyone throughout the process, at the end, what you get is not just food on tables, but a community,” Anderson said. “And that’s why I want L.A. to be.”
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