Innovative market and school gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area will be toured Thursday, June 4, by a group of social scientists looking to gardens for solutions to economic and community development problems. Participating will be members of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society. Both groups have gathered for their annual meetings. The tour will visit The Garden Project, the brainchild of Catherine Sneed, who has taught prisoners French intensive gardening for many years. Vegetables from the project are sold to restaurants such as Chez Panisse in Berkeley. "Our second tour stop is The San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners' Alemany Youth Farm and its Urban Herbals unit, one of the premier community food security projects in the nation," says Gail Feenstra of the UC Davis-based Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, which is sponsoring the tour. Urban Herbals is the name of the vinegars, jams and salsa produced by the young people. At The Edible School Yard project at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, visitors will see how the garden is integrated into the school curriculum and lunch program. The tour will end at the Berkeley Youth Alternatives' Community Garden Patch project, which includes a job-training program for at-risk young people.