On her first day of fieldwork in Baltimore, Intan Kumbayoni expected to begin interviewing gardeners for a research project on how city residents grow and find their food. Instead she spent the day pulling trash and wild garlic out of a vacant lot and learning what poison ivy looks like.
Kumbayoni, now a second-year doctoral student in Michigan State University’s Department of Anthropology, had gone with fellow graduate student Reilly Becchina and their supervisor to meet Ms. Paige (a pseudonym, like all gardeners’ names in this story), a gardener growing food on a city-owned lot. When they reached the address, the lot was empty. The city had reclaimed the land, and Ms. Paige had moved a few blocks away, where she and her neighbors were clearing a new lot. The researchers joined in.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect that we would end up helping to clear a new lot, but we learned a lot that day,” Kumbayoni says. As they worked, Ms. Paige talked about losing her old garden. “Looking back, Ms. Paige’s story was the first sign of a pattern we would see again and again.”
That pattern is the subject of “Urban Gardening: Precarity and Instability in Baltimore, Maryland,” which Kumbayoni and Becchina published Dec. 12, 2025, in Gleanings, an online forum of the American Anthropological Association’s Culture & Agriculture section.
Permission to grow, not to stay
The work began as Kumbayoni’s master’s project at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was part of a larger USDA-funded study, the Alternative Urban Food Provisioning Network, run across the University of Maryland, the University of Rhode Island and George Washington University. Kumbayoni joined as a medical anthropologist with training in nutrition assessment. Becchina, now a doctoral student at the University of Vermont, came from environmental anthropology.
From May through fall 2024, the two interviewed about 30 gardeners. Each visit also meant mapping the garden, recording every plant growing in it and taking soil samples, so a single interview could take half a day. It took longer when a gardener asked for help with the work.
The growing spaces varied. Some were urban farms, including one in Northeast Baltimore that grows food reflecting the cultural preferences of its predominantly Black neighborhood. Others were a church garden started with Burmese refugee members who missed the foods of home, or a single gardener’s work on a vacant lot.
Many individual growers worked through Baltimore’s Adopt-a-Lot program, which lets residents tend vacant city-owned lots. Participants get a license to use the land, not ownership, and the city can reclaim a lot at any time. Kumbayoni and Becchina’s article argues that this insecurity is not spread evenly across the city; it ties that pattern to Baltimore’s history of segregation and redlining, which left many majority-Black neighborhoods with fewer supermarkets and higher rates of food insecurity and diet-related illness.
“Food access is one of the most everyday ways that structural inequality shows up in people’s bodies, especially when we are talking about chronic conditions like diabetes,” Kumbayoni says.
Sean, another gardener, showed the researchers the irrigation system he had built and the mulch he planned to spread across his beds. A few months later he contacted them again. “The city mowed my lot,” he told them. After that, he no longer wanted to garden.
“He didn’t just lose his garden, but he lost his motivation to garden at all,” Kumbayoni says.
Making gardens more secure
For many of the gardeners they met, Kumbayoni says, gardening supported their mental and physical health, their food access and their ties to culture and community. Yet “when land can be taken away at any time, people are asked to invest their time, money, and care into something they could lose overnight.”
She would like policymakers to consider longer-term agreements, advance notice before a lot is reclaimed, and ways for gardeners to keep land they have cared for. “They also can try to see gardens as part of the city’s food and health infrastructure, not just as a way to keep vacant lots clean,” she says.
Some routes already exist. A lot can be designated community-managed open space, which takes it off the city’s list of properties for sale, but only if the city decides the garden shows enough community involvement. Groups such as Baltimore Green Space help residents acquire and preserve lots. “These show that more secure options are possible, but they are not easy for everyone to access, especially for individual gardeners,” Kumbayoni says.
Where the work led
At MSU, Kumbayoni is in the biological anthropology track with a focus on human biology and works in the Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research with Dr. Masako Fujita. Her dissertation research examines skeletal maintenance and the role of uric acid, combining biomarkers from blood samples with ethnography. The question comes from Indonesia, where she has seen musculoskeletal problems, including gout and hyperuricemia, increasingly affecting younger people as well as older adults. Before graduate school, she worked as a field researcher with Germany’s international development agency, GIZ, on maternal and child health in coffee and cacao supply chains.
Gardens and blood samples look like a change of subject. Kumbayoni sees the same question running through both projects.
“Whether I was studying infant growth, nutrition, or skeletal maintenance, I think my broader interest has always been in understanding how people’s living conditions and social experiences affect their bodies and health,” she says. “My experience in Baltimore also helped me appreciate how important it is to understand people’s everyday lives and circumstances when studying health.”
Read the full article in Gleanings.