Lack of access to commercial food sources is a pervasive problem for people who live in extremely rural and urban areas. Urban food deserts are not uncommon, and often the closure of a single grocery store in a neighborhood can create significant barriers to food access.

Ethan Tyo, a Syracuse University student, is working to find ways to use traditional indigenous methods of growing food in an urban environment; solutions he hopes could be used to combat food deserts.

When Tyo first set foot on his rooftop high above downtown Syracuse, he said he was able to see beyond the sun-faded asphalt and the hum of HVAC equipment.

“For me, it’s working to feed people,” he said. “There’s a lot of rooftops that we see that are empty, and if you look around on a map, you can see that there’s so much space in the urban environment that doesn’t get used.”

Over the past few years as a graduate student, he decided to create a rooftop garden to experiment with ways to utilize these empty rooftops to grow food in an area that doesn’t have reliable access to fresh foods, nor adequate land on which to grow it.

“Most grocery stores in this area are a 10- to 20-minute drive outside of downtown,” he said. “For most people downtown, they have access to a car, but if you don’t, it creates economic barriers.”

Tyo grew up on Akwesasne Mohawk lands near the Canadian border with New York state, where he said the nearest grocery store was 25 minutes away. That meant access to commercial food sources was sometimes a challenge, just like it often is in dense urban areas.

“If we can feed our community in this building, what would this look like on other rooftops?” he said.

What he grows is typically rooted in indigenous traditions. While he shares some of what he grows with other residents, one of the priorities of the project is returning the crops and seeds to ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee. He said he keeps some seeds for the following year, while passing along others.

“Three sisters: corn, beans and squash,” he said, while showing remnants of last year's plants. “It allowed us to eat during hard winters and times when we didn’t have a lot of food.”

Downstairs, Tyo is just starting the seeds for this year’s garden.

In addition to giving back, he tells us another important part of his mission is to spread knowledge and traditions of the Haudenosaunee as it relates to food production to a broader audience, both through his work at Syracuse University and beyond. That is, in part, to recalibrate how we look at feeding our communities — de-commodifying the process of growing food, thereby making it about feeding families and not growing corporations.

“We’re not growing the stuff for money, we’re growing it to feed people,” he said. “That pays dividends in the end.”

He says whether it's miles of countryside separating folks from the nearest grocery store, like it was for his family, or miles of steel and concrete like here in the city, he’s looking to find ways to encourage people to rely less on supply chains and more on neighbors and whatever space there is to work with.

“Our generation grew up with supermarkets, so I never grew up with a garden like my grandparents, where they really had to eat that food,” he said. “Now, I’m trying to reclaim all of those food ways, but also find a way to make it more modern and accessible, and to make it meaningful again.”