When fresh peaches were delivered to Haynes Middle School last year, the students had one question: "How do you eat this?"

The kids had seen peaches many times, said Principal Robert Blankenship, but only the canned kind served in sugary syrup on the lunch line. They'd never tasted a fresh peach, or had the natural juices drip down their chins after taking a bite.

But through a federal grant, Haynes students were able to try the fuzzy fruit and a variety of other fresh produce, which was delivered to classrooms every day about an hour before lunch. Next year eight new Metro schools were selected to receive that grant, along with about 64 other schools statewide.

He turned to scan the field, dotted with large farm-unfriendly rocks.

The rocks gave me pause: didn't millions of Americans leave farms for good reason? The work is hard, nature can be cruel and the pay is low; most small farmers work off-farm to make ends meet. The appeal of such labor to people already working low-wage, long-hour jobs - the urban dwellers Allen most wants to reach - is not immediately apparent. And there is something almost fanciful in exhorting a person to grow food when he lives in an apartment or doesn't have a landlord's permission to garden on the roof or in an empty lot.

"Not everyone can grow food," Allen acknowledged. But he offers other ways of engaging with the soil: "You bring 30 people out here, bring the kids and give them good food," he said, "and picking up those rocks is a community event."

Of course, if rock picking or worm tending - either here or in a community garden - doesn't attract his Milwaukee neighbors, it's easy enough for them to order a market basket or shop at his retail store, which happens to sell fried pork skin as well as collard greens. "Culturally appropriate foods," Allen calls them. And the doughnuts in his truck? "I’m no purist about food, and I don't ask anyone else to be," he said, laughing. "I work 17 hours a day; sometimes I need some sugar!"

This nondogmatic approach may be one of Allen's most appealing qualities. His essential view is that people do the best they can: if they don't have any better food choices than KFC, well, O.K. But let's work on changing that. If they don't know what to do with okra, Growing Power stands ready to help. And if their great-grandparents were sharecroppers and they have some bad feelings about the farming life, then Allen has something to offer there too: his personal example and workshops geared toward empowering minorities. "African-Americans need more help, and they're often harder to work with because they've been abused and so forth," Allen said. "But I can break through a lot of that very quickly because a lot of people of color are so proud, so happy to see me leading this kind of movement."

If there's no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, says Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms, "we've got big problems, because the critics will be proven right - that this is a consumption club for people who've traveled to Europe and tasted fine food."