Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution

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Authors: Jennifer Cockrall-King

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Published 2012 by Prometheus Books

Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution.
Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Cockrall-King. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Trademarks: In an effort to acknowledge trademarked names of products mentioned in this work, we have placed
®
or ™ after the product name in the first instance of its use in each chapter. Subsequent mentions of the name within a given chapter appear without the symbol.

Cover image © Compassionate Eye/Steven Errico

Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cockrall-King, Jennifer, 1971–

Food and the city : urban agriculture and the new food revolution / by Jennifer Cockrall-King.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61614-458-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61614-459-3 (ebook)

1. Urban agriculture. 2. Food supply—Social aspects. I. Title.

S494.5.U72C63 2011

363.8—dc23

2011041554

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

T
he idea to write a book about urban agriculture—the practice of producing and distributing food right in cities—felt like it came looking for me as much as I went looking for it.

As a food writer with a serious passion for gardening, I had long been in the habit of stopping to talk with anyone watering a few pots of rosemary and basil, for instance, on the patio. (Several minutes later, we'd still be trading stories about what interesting edibles could be grown with the right amount of obsessive coddling.) But about five years ago, I started noticing more tomatoes and cucumber vines twisting around condo balcony railings where previously there had only been the usual flowerpot standards of geraniums and lobelia. Then a few maverick homeowners began ripping up their front lawns and replacing them with tidy rows of pole beans, peas, and carrots. Other urbanites were not so subtly defying city bylaws and keeping chickens and beehives in backyards. Finally, it was impossible to ignore how community gardens continued to mushroom in size and quantity, not just in my hometown, but in other cities I visited.

Before long, I was obsessed with finding food growing in cities in unexpected places and ways. Moreover, I wanted to delve into the question of why there seemed to be a growing number of urbanites suddenly investing time and energy in growing, producing, sourcing, and supplying food much closer to home. I needed to know what was fueling
this enthusiasm for growing vegetables, fruit, and even keeping a few laying hens or beehives in the city.

Were these simply the same diehard farmers’ market-goers who were now spending a few bucks on seeds and a couple of hours a week in the garden? There was no denying that the farmers’ market renaissance in the past decade had given many people a reminder (or in some cases, an education) of what fresh, seasonal food looked and tasted like. Was this all for the sheer pleasure of a couple of homegrown harvests without worrying what pesticides had been sprayed on the delicate baby eggplant, strawberries, and such?

Or was this merely a fleeting trend masquerading as a generational rediscovery of the domestic arts, like knitting and quilting?

I had a hunch that many people, like myself, were turning to growing their own food because their excitement had waned for ever-cheaper food, produced farther and farther away. Food scares had been shaking the tree of industrially produced cheap food in our free-market economy for over a decade, and it was becoming impossible to turn a blind eye to the risks we were opening ourselves up to in order to shave a few cents off our grocery bills. Food companies had become so big and their distribution lines so global, a contaminant scare could affect millions of consumers on an international scale. In 2003, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad-cow disease, was confirmed in a cow on a Canadian farm, shutting down cross-border trade in cattle and destabilizing beef prices on both sides for years. Also in 2003, a line of organic pear juice for children, produced in China, had to be recalled from shelves in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong because of dangerously high levels of arsenic in the juice. A deadly strain of
E. coli
OH57:H7, a dangerous bacterium in fresh spinach packs from California, affected twenty-six states, sickened hundreds, and left five people dead in 2006. Those were just the beginnings of a decade of mounting food scares. It was becoming impossible to ignore the risks of out-sourced large-scale food production in the name of convenience and price.

Like many in the so-called food movement, I had pored over books such as Eric Schlosser's
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
, Marion Nestle's
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health
, and Michael Pollan's
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
(By taking on the ethical, nutritional, and safety questions of industrially produced food, Schlosser, Nestle, and Pollan finally got a critical mass of people asking questions about where our food was coming from and how it was being produced.) In my local Slow Food chapter, I counted myself among the new wave of conscious eaters who were watching their food miles—the distance a food travels between the farm to our forks and the amount of fossil fuels used in the journey. With the average grocery store item traveling more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from the field to our plates, it seemed that we had completely lost control of the complex algorithm that was our food chain.
1
Concerns over the ethics of our cheap food and the politics of unequal access to fresh, healthy food were finally becoming mainstream topics of conversation.

I was also coming to the realization that counting my foods’ food miles was a luxury that others, even in my own city, didn't have. Many large urban centers were coming to be known as food deserts because of the total absence of proper grocery stores, which therefore resulted in less access to affordable, nutritious, fresh food in their immediate vicinity. Usually what remained were convenience stores and fast-food outlets.

Was it any wonder that some of us were trying to find alternatives to the chemical fertilizer-laden, pesticide-dependent, fossil fuel-guzzling industrial food? It got me thinking about alternatives to what I had previously taken as a given, that food is grown and produced elsewhere, and if we are lucky, we buy it exclusively from a supermarket. I began to wonder how much food and what kinds could actually be produced in cities.

My interest in urban agriculture led me to Cuba in 2007. I took part in an island-wide “food tour” organized by Wendy Holm, a Canadian agricultural expert. Our group visited a number of Cuba's ubiquitous
organopónicos
—commercial urban organic farms across the island. These astonishingly productive food gardens, often growing in little more than a foot of soil in raised beds over concrete, opened my eyes to just how much food could be produced in a city when people really put their minds to it. I saw urban garden after urban garden bursting with gorgeous salad crops, vegetables, herbs, and even “green” medicines like the noni fruit, a pinecone-shaped knobbly tropical fruit high in vitamin C and sold in North American health food stores as the next “super-fruit.” Moreover, Cuba's urban food gardens were not just in the capital of Havana but in every medium and small town our group visited from one end of the island to the other. Cuba, as it happened, had suddenly been forced to reinvent its national food supply. (As I explain in
chapter 14
, Cuba went through a sudden fuel crisis in the early 1990s when its dominant trading partner, the Soviet Union, dissolved. Cut off from any outside trading partners, the fuel crisis quickly became a food crisis, and Cuba had to reboot its food system very quickly, without any chemical inputs or fossil fuels—or starve.) As a result of this crisis, urban agriculture wasn't a fringe activity in Cuba but rather the keystone of their new, postindustrial food system. It became the island's low-tech but effective and sustainable model of how to grow and distribute fresh, nutritious food right in cities.

Around the same time, I was becoming increasingly uneasy about the vulnerability of the monolithic industrial food landscape we all relied on back at home. Grocery stores, from which we in the industrialized world get nearly all our food, operate on highly efficient, just-in-time, long-distance supply chains. The reality, though, was that these systems had become so efficient that cities had little more than a three-day supply of food on hand at any given time. If those supply chains were to grind to a halt due to a fuel crisis, border closures, war, or environmental catastrophes, the grocery store shelves would be empty within days.

Urban agriculture, food grown and sold right down the street, was
suddenly starting to make a lot more sense, not just in Cuba but in cities closer to home.

Though my eyes were open to radical new possibilities for alternatives to the weekly trip down the grocery store aisles, I was not naive enough to imagine that cities in North America would consider giving up valuable urban land for such a marginally profitable enterprise as growing food. As a gardener, I also knew that nonindustrial agriculture requires a human physical effort that most of us are no longer fit for. We were so far from even acknowledging the intrinsic problems in our food system at home that a food revolution, in my mind, was a very long way off.

That said, I was encouraged by the gathering momentum to challenge the status quo of what kind of food we had access to and where it was grown, even in my hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, a northern Canadian city under snow for six months a year. Looking back, it was on a bitterly cold evening in November 2008 that I started to consider that real change was on the horizon for how food and cities could move forward together.

That evening, I made my way to a public hearing at city hall, expecting to be part of a small group of concerned citizens voicing concerns about the city's thirty-year development plan. The document addressed housing and transportation plans to cope with the projected population and economic growth targets up through 2040, not exactly the stuff that tends to get people to leave their couches and televisions on a November weeknight for the municipal city council chambers’ public gallery. Yet it touched a nerve, as the plan failed to protect the last of the city's development-threatened urban farmland, prime agricultural land where a few remaining market gardeners still produced an astonishing array of fresh produce for local markets despite a short growing season of just over one hundred frost-free days. Nor was there mention of a municipal food policy—that is, a deliberate public policy plan for a safer, healthier, more egalitarian approach to the production, distribution, and consumption of food in the region—despite a grassroots civic
lobby that looked like it was finally getting some traction on the idea. Instead, the thirty-year municipal development plan was likened to a blueprint for a massive home renovation that curiously did away with the kitchen.

I arrived at city hall that
evening to be shuttled into the third overflow room that had to be quickly opened. More than 550 people had shown up, not just a few food activists and weather-beaten farmers waxing nostalgic for a lost way of life. Edmonton city councilors had never seen anything like it. I venture to guess that neither had the organizers, the Greater Edmonton Alliance, a citizen action group that was only a few years old at the time.

The crowd featured a range of ages, ethnic groups, incomes, and other social groups that rarely met under one roof. In compliance with the rules of a public hearing, representatives from several of the citizen groups were allowed to address the city councilors, and the entire evening was piped into all the overflow rooms through closed-circuit audio. Restaurateurs spoke about the importance of preserving local foods to ensure an authentic local food culture. Parents voiced their safety concerns with the global food chain that begins thousands of miles away. Church leaders spoke about moral duties of land stewardship, and community leaders spoke about the need to shorten the food chain, to buffer against food shortages and price increases, as well as to involve community members in creating their own resilient food safety net. In short, food—for the first time in a few generations—was back on the political menu. The fact that hundreds of people came out in support of shortening the food chain, taking the city's food security into their own hands, and showing their support for growing food in the city was beyond significant and impossible for the city councilors to ignore.

If this was happening in my city, I wagered that seeds of change were germinating in others as well. Indeed, a few months prior, a group of Slow Food activists had caused a sensation when they planted what they called a “Victory Garden” in front of San Francisco's city hall that yielded more than a hundred pounds (forty-five kilograms) of fresh produce for the city's food bank. By the spring of 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama would dig up of a portion of the South Lawn at the White House and plant 1,100 square feet (102 square meters) of organic vegetables. And the Seattle city council would declare 2010 its official year of urban agriculture.

Seemingly everywhere, cities were forming food-policy councils; community gardens were multiplying; and municipal governments were voting on whether to allow households to keep a few urban chickens or a beehive, or to permit commercial farming to coexist with other commercial pursuits in their cities.

Across the pond, I learned that London had thirty thousand allotment gardens, as long-lease community gardens are called in the United Kingdom. There was a municipally supported push to create another 2,012 food gardens in the city by the opening of the 2012 London Olympic Games. City farms—small mixed farms in the middle of major cities, many of which include cows, chickens, ducks, and goats as food livestock—were a booming businesses all over the United Kingdom, and community orchards were now catching on as fast as are community gardening clubs. And Paris, which is the birthplace of modern intensive urban agriculture, was experiencing its own revival of urban gardening. Parisians were also keeping urban bees in record numbers.

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