Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…

Turn onto any main street in Allston-Brighton, and you’ll find evidence of new construction present in the neighborhood. Look, and you’ll see the people who labor hard to bring up new property, cranes, and flyers for city-led abutters’ meetings.

One upcoming development looks different from the rest, and may not rely on global construction supply chains as much: a food forest.

A food forest is marked by its various layers that can provide sustenance, community, shade, and cleaner air, from its tree canopy at the top to its vines in the ground. But the dimensionality is not the only difference. In addition, it is notably different from a community garden or a farm, where people have individual plots.

“This is a more, frankly, egalitarian space and a way that everybody can participate in land stewardship without owning a particular plot,” said Jehan, a neighbor.

Neighbors were quick to add that no two food forests are designed in the same way. When Andy Breeding toured three different food forests with the Boston Food Forest Coalition, he noted how each of the three absorbed the “feel” of the neighborhood they were in.

“They really reflected sort of the circumstances of the neighborhood, the preferences, the history, and so that seemed kind of nice to me, because these aren’t cookie-cutter things,” added Breeding. “They’re really different and connected to what’s going on in that place.”

Today, Allston-Brighton is actively building its own unique connection to a food forest.

***

Jehan, Breeding, and Sam Yoon are neighbors in Allston-Brighton and members of Allston Brighton Health Collaborative’s Food Access Committee, which is stewarded by Jessi Rubin.

In March 2024, the ABHC committee met weekly four times to establish the priorities of food access in the neighborhood. Rubin invited Liz Luc Clowes, a director of engagement at Boston Food Forest Coalition, to one of the meetings.

“From there, we were just like, ‘Oh, a food forest! Right!’” said Yoon. “We’re thinking about how to get more green spaces into Allston-Brighton because it’s a concrete jungle here.”

Since then, the committee has continued to meet and lead workshops to invite the neighborhood into the work of making a food forest. The most recent workshop was on October 29 at Josephine Fiorentino Community Center. In a filled room, BFFC executive director Orion Kriegman spoke to neighbors about ways to connect to a food forest and fielded questions from the community about it.

“The joy of urban agriculture is not that we’re all going to feed ourselves by growing food in the city because you’re never going to get 100% of your calories that way. But you’re starting a conversation, you’re starting a process of educating each other and our neighbors, and you can also supplement to that,” said Kriegman. “Nature grows in community, and it grows in diverse community, and it grows in dense communities, which in some ways mirrors the world that we’re living in when we live in the city, right?”

Along with consultants, members of BFFC and ABHC are working to identify potential parcels in Allston-Brighton upon which to build a food forest, which presents a “unique puzzle,” because whereas other neighborhoods may have had large vacant lots, “especially in Allston-Brighton, land is just hard to come by,” Nikhil Dasgupta, a neighbor and manager of engagement at ABHC, stated.

In the process, BFFC and ABHC have brought along other local organizations and have built up the knowledge of the myriad of ways a food forest can be made. They brought on the Charles River Watershed Association, which provided technical tools to create a list of lots that could make a food forest also a facilitator of stormwater management. In addition, they spoke with affordable housing developer Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation, who shared knowledge about developers and existing land plots in the neighborhood.

BFFC has also been a part of partnerships between food forests and developers. During the workshop, Kriegman mentioned that in Jamaica Plain, a senior affordable housing development called the Forbes Building will also be the site of a food forest, along with a community kitchen and a community harvesting processing room.

Kriegman added, however, “My experience too with developers is sometimes they just fill a lot of steam, and then nothing goes anywhere. So, you got to find the right firm to work with.”

Many food forests sit on community land trust sites, pieces of land that are permanently taken off the market and preserved for public benefit. This remains a priority for ABHC.

“The end goal still is to acquire a community land trust site,” said Rubin.

***

The development of a food forest in Allston-Brighton is part of BFFC’s larger initiative to break ground on 30 food forests in Boston by 2030. Today, there are 14 food forests in the city, with the latest food forest groundbreaking being this past Saturday in Dorchester.

Allston-Brighton was “on notice” for BFFC because there are no food forests in the neighborhood. Kriegman mentioned that the consistent work of residents like Jehan, Breeding, and Yoon also strengthened the process. “It’s just so beautiful that folks in Austin might have been meeting monthly for years now around this vision. It’s like, this shows that it needs to happen, and so when I talk to power brokers and decision makers, I can point to the fact that the community is clamoring for it.”

***

Kriegman was part of a grassroots effort to bring about the first food forest in Boston: the Egleston Community Orchard in Jamaica Plain.

“A bunch of neighbors were like, ‘Oh man, there’s lots full of trash. What are we going to do about it?” retold Yoon. “They kept writing to the city, writing to the city, and finally, if the city is not going to do anything, we’re just going to do it.”

Yoon once worked at a place near the Egleston Community Orchard, and would go there for lunch.

“I was just thrilled to have a place nearby that felt a little more wild and also just a little pocket of quiet, natural contemplation, while also clearly being a place that people met and gathered.”

The potential of a food forest seems, for Yoon, to be a space that outrightly opposes a phenomena of neighborly values and mutual care breaking down that they observe today.

“A food forest is about communal stewardship together, to take care of each other, both in feeding ourselves and in getting outside and getting to know each other, and also in kind of building a place together where we can continue to gather without having to buy something, without having to be surveilled, without having to be policed, without having to worry about am I allowed here or not?”

In addition, for neighbors, it seems to be a space that outrightly opposes the idea of drawn boundaries between humanity and nature, in a nation where the average person’s encounters with food are situated within the structures of the industrial food systems, on-demand delivery, and restaurants.

“Humanity is not separate from nature. There’s no separation. That’s that’s actually a Western construct of — not every culture had that sense of humans being separate from nature,“ said Kriegman. “I think we have to remember that we are part of it, and that we depend on it. It also depends on us.”

Finally, for neighbors, the potential of a food forest is a possibility of a different world.

“I think a food forest is a possibility for a different way of living — I don’t want to call it a disruption in the system — I think that can be scary to people. But I think it’s a beautiful dream that we can bring into reality,” said Yoon. “I feel very the Arundhati Roy quote of ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’”

“I think a quiet day to me would be in a food forest under the service berries, hearing people doing their stewarding work, and that’s when I hear her breathing.”