Victory Gardens Transforms Your Lawn into Leafy Greens published in The Native Tongue, Spring/Summer 2018 issue
Copy: Heidi Turner
Photos: Alana Patterson
Layout: Carling Hind
Victory Gardens transforms your lawn into leafy greens.
The three pals flexing their green thumbs at urban growing company, Victory Gardens, aren’t the typical crew you’d expect to see slinging manure around the city. The co-op organization turfing lawn for lettuce by transforming any vacant space into your own personal vegetable patch has hosted meals with aspirational dining pioneers, Kinfolk; while founding member, Lisa Giroday herself has curated an art gallery, worked in fashion, and braved the daily commute on her Harley. They are your modern-day gardeners, showing us that any neglected balcony or rooftop can become a sustainable, food-growing mecca.
Just as Victory Gardens is bringing a “mind-body connection” to the food on your plate, we are doing the same with the shoes you pull on your feet. The Beast Free philosophy began as a way to verbalize our choice for excluding animal materials from our design and production process, without screaming the ‘V’ word. “No sasquatches or unicorns harmed” became our formal policy that we scrawled across a pink tag of a yeti character’s head. But over the years, we realized that the Beast Free guarantee was about more than just keeping fur, feathers, and scales out of our product line. It transformed from a quirky slogan to driving all that we create physically and visually. We have come to proudly embrace that we are — I’ll say it — a vegan footwear brand.
By no means are we inferring that you have to scoff at the sight of meat or dairy in order to wear a pair of Apollo Mocs or Jeffersons. Just as Victory Gardens is not recommending that you become a full-time forager and never purchase produce from a market ever again. The plant-based community that we’ve come to know exists on a spectrum, one which allows you to make steps towards a friendlier lifestyle at whatever pace you choose.
For us, this means helping fried chicken fanatic, Jesse Furman, make a locally sourced salad (see Issue 4.5); or surprising the veg-centric restaurant staff of Cafe Gratitude in LA, Butcher’s Daughter in New York, and Virtuous Pie in Vancouver with shoes. You may even recall the banana- inspired collaboration with The Juice Truck a few seasons back that we served up alongside internal-aiding concoctions. The simple fact is that being Beast Free no longer has just one meaning. In Victory Gardens’ case, it’s about getting your hands dirty and supporting the soil beneath your soles.
* Project done for Native Shoes *
Thanks to Victory Gardens
