At Just Roots Chicago, a dedicated staff and team of 1,500 volunteers have transformed three and a half acres into a community farm on the site of a demolished Catholic church. “All the food that we grow is grown with and for our immediate community,” says Sean Ruane, the director of operations and development at Just Roots Chicago.
Five years ago, the community of St. James Church offered the site of their demolished church to Just Roots Chicago, which now operates two community farms on Chicago’s South Side. Just Roots Chicago had already been contributing produce to St. James’ Food Pantry, so it was a partnership that came about naturally.
“On our farms, zero food is wasted,” Ruane says. “Over 99 percent of it ends up in somebody’s hands. Everything that we harvest is distributed in 24 hours, so it’s as fresh and nutrient-dense as food can be.” He adds, “It’s completely antithetical to our current system, where food is traveling thousands of miles.”
The grocery business generated five million tons of surplus food in 2022, according to the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. Roughly a third of that surplus was wasted, either dumped into landfills or burned—meaning at least 3.2 billion pounds of food went to waste. “In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply,” according to the Food and Drug Administration’s website.
By contrast, Ruane says a lot of intention goes into Just Roots’ crop planning, and they put any unused food back into the earth. “The 1 percent of our food that is not used is composted to make new soil for the crops on the farm,” Ruane says.
Catholic social teaching affirms each person’s right to food, but it doesn’t stop there. Pope John XXIII writes in Pacem in Terris (On Peace): “[People have] the right to live. [They have] the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services.”
The pope’s claim is much deeper than the right to a food product. Pacem in Terris (On Peace) affirms each person’s right to the “means necessary” to produce their own food; in other words, each human being has the right to the unpolluted soil, clean water, and land needed to grow a living, to feed themselves and their families. Food is not just a product on the shelf; it’s part of a whole ecology. The quality of our food is a symptom of the health of the soil where it’s grown and the morality and sustainability of the farming systems used to extract it.
The 1,500 volunteers at Just Roots Chicago aren’t just planting crops—they’re reconnecting with their family roots and fostering a deeper connection to the Earth.
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In Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), Pope Francis addresses human beings’ need for a healthy, fruitful ecology rather than the current technocratic paradigm that reduces our food, soil, labor, and waste into manipulable products from which to extract profit. In his 2015 encyclical, Pope Francis criticizes factory farms, industrial agriculture, and large, genetically modified crops that bring lucrative profits to some people but have disrupted ecosystems and negatively impacted small farmers and regional economies.
Factory farming produces millions of tons of manure that pollute water supplies. Industrial-scale meat production also contributes to increased antibiotics in the water supply, as livestock are given high doses to stave off contagious diseases and speed growth. Finally, each year in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, dozens of millions of tons of pesticides and fertilizers run off large fields into the water supply. This sort of industrial-scale farming impacts the health of water and soil, as well as human beings, and it imperils future generations’ ability to farm the Earth.
In his new book, We Are Only Saved Together (Ave Maria Press), Colin Miller writes about his Catholic Worker community’s efforts to “shorten the supply chain” between themselves and their food. Miller calls their vegetable garden and their small chicken flock “our little-way attempts to reduce the distance between ourselves and the earth.”
Miller contrasts these efforts to foster an ecological connection to the Earth, creation, and God the creator with the experience of growing up assuming that food comes from supermarkets. “All my experience was of a different reality,” he writes, “the one most of us live with every day: eggs come from the store; their packages, shells, and any scraps go in the trash and get carted off somewhere else.”
In contrast to the current food-supply chain, where food is wasted on the farm, on its way to the supermarket, and on store shelves, Catholic social teaching demands harvesting the Earth’s fruit in a way that protects the well-being of both people and the planet. “We believe that the economy, including the agricultural economy, must serve people, not the other way around,” the U.S. bishops write in “For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me Food,” the 2003 bishops’ document on agriculture.
The 1,500 volunteers who come to Just Roots Chicago’s community farms aren’t just digging down to plant actual roots, Ruane says; they’re also reaching back to their own family roots. Ruane says many of their farm volunteers have grandparents or parents who worked in agriculture. Ruane himself had grandparents who farmed in Ireland, and many other American families were also built on farming traditions. Until the Industrial Revolution in the 1890s, half the population in the United States lived on farms of some kind. By 1920, just over 20 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms, according to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; today, it is about 2 percent.
Now, however, the urban farm is planting the future’s seeds, and inspiring movements of community-driven agriculture. With close to 60 percent of the entire globe living in urban areas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says that urban farming is an important step to reducing inequality, creating sustainable and accessible agriculture, decreasing pollution, and ensuring a quality food supply.
Urban farmers are also discovering something about what it means to be human. Ruane says many volunteers find that caring for the Earth—which Pope Francis declared a work of mercy in 2016—and growing their own food give them a new sense of connectedness and responsibility.
As Miller puts it, “For the first time in my life, I was participating in creation the way it was meant to be.”
This article also appears in the January 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 1, pages 40-41). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Shutterstock/Agnieszka Gaul
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