Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (15 page)

The portability of the skips is important, said Dutka, since Global Generation has until 2020 to use the skips and move them from construction site to construction site as the rebuilding of King's Cross Central takes place. The idea is to plant the fruit trees and vegetables on the rooftops of the new buildings in the area as the redevelopment progresses.

Paul Richens, a rooftop gardens entrepreneur and site manager for a number of the urban-agriculture sites, including the King's Cross Skip Garden, chimed in that he was drawn to the project because, as he put it, “this is an exercise in gardening in difficult places.”
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“This is quintessentially urban ‘ag.’ You don't get any more urban than this. It's about using a space which is unusable,” Richens said, as we walked the uneven packed ground that was a combination of construction dust and rubble.

Richens was most proud of “the green engine,” the skip that held three separate wormeries, something he called a “worm café.” A lush strip of Russian comfrey, the unimpressive-looking plant that is a very rich source of nitrogen and that makes excellent organic fertilizer when pulped or soaked in water to make “compost tea,” ran lengthwise on the lip of the green engine. This wouldn't be the first time I saw a comfrey juicer. The four feet of PVC drainpipe were held vertically onto the side of the skip. The idea was to pack freshly cut leaves into the pipe and crush them with a weight on the end of a chain, the dark-green sluice emptying into a modified plastic gallon milk jug. “And the most disgusting-smelling liquid in the universe comes out the bottom,” enthused Richens. Comfrey, as any gardener will tell you, smells like hell but is the best organic fertilizer going.

Richens has his sights set on a secondhand 1,000-litre (264-gallon) in-flight fluid container, the kind used on aircraft. He said he needed
three hundred liters (eighty gallons) a week, on average, for watering. And when a heat wave hits London, as it did in the summer of2010 with its record high temperatures that went up to 116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.4 Celsius), Richens went through twice that much. London tap water was neither environmentally savvy nor desirable, because it didn't have the right pH for the plants. And he wasn't keen on the chlorine in the tap water either. “If it kills bacteria on our teeth, what else is it killing in the soil?”
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T
ASTIER,
H
EALTHIER,
G
REENER:
T
HE
L
ONDON
O
LYMPIC
G
AMES OF
2012

Perhaps London's most ambitious local food initiative to date will be the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), which will take place in the summer of 2012.
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LOCOG is the first Olympic Games organizer to put forward a food vision as part of its organizational plan and bid. The LOCOG official document, “For Starters,” refers to its vision as “aspirational standards”; it will set goals for sourcing and supply chain for its commercial partners, caterers, and suppliers. Because of the intensity involved in feeding the athletes, the visitors, and the support staff, it's still a move forward to use a major international event to fast-track more local, more sustainable food systems in London and throughout the United Kingdom. (In 2000, Londoners consumed 6.9 million tons of food. Eighty-one percent of that was imported from outside the country.)
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What this means is that the athletes’ villages, the main press center, the International Broadcast Center, and the overall food that the thirty-one competition venues at the 955 competitive events—estimated at some fourteen million meals—will fall in line with a food policy. It will put British-produced food at the center of attention of the visitors and athletes. Imported foods such as bananas, tea, coffee, sugar must be Fairtrade
(certified by Fairtrade International) products, meaning they must meet the committee's standards for ensuring that the producers receive a living wage for their products. Chocolate must be either Fairtrade or ethically sourced—that is, products grown or produced in ways and conditions that are nonexploitative to the workers, animals, or environment where they are made. Traditional British cheeses—for instance, cheddar—must be made in Britain. There will be an estimated 25,000 loaves of bread, 232 tons of potatoes, 75,000 liters (19,800 gallons) of milk, 19 tons of eggs, and 330 tons of fruit and vegetables consumed in the Olympic Village during the games. To achieve these numbers, and to source the products within the United Kingdom, urban food production will have to play a role.

But the Olympics will come and go like a circus through town. Whether the edible window dressing remains afterward is anyone's guess. But one thing tends to hold true: when you habituate people to growing food in a city, it becomes the norm. For all of London mayor Boris Johnson's eccentricities, his government's focus on sustainable food security in London is hard to knock.

A
s I flew into Los Angeles, California, on a clear June day, I tried to map out the flats, farm belts, and orchard lands that drew the great caravans of migrants west during the Dust Bowl years, as well as the giant commercial enterprises that now lure people from Mexico and Central America to work the strawberry and tomato fields, to pick oranges, and to harvest avocados. But the approach over the greater Los Angeles area became a geography lesson of another sort. The continuous urban landscape where 12.8 million people
¹
(and their cars) were living was without natural reference points. As the airplane circled and descended, the city became an enormous monochromatic computer circuit board with an infinite horizon. Its features were distinguished only by varying shades of gray: lighter gray boxes and rectangles that made up warehouses, shopping malls, and parking lots; the medium gray of the great freeways that cut above and through the city; and the charcoal gray of the smog that sat over what presumably was residential Los Angeles that day. I sat in awe of the lack of green space, despite how much I'd read about the city's complete concretization and continuous urban sprawl.

Just north of Los Angeles, across a small mountain range, is Bakersfield, the southern tip of California's great Central Valley. It runs north to south, stretching 450 miles (720 kilometers), and is forty to sixty miles (sixty to one hundred kilometers) wide. This is where the lettuce, tomatoes, and strawberries that fill grocery stores in the United States and Canada—and maybe elsewhere—are grown. Home to one of the great tracks of farmland on the North American continent, the Central Valley is the produce basket of North America, providing 8 percent of the nation's agricultural output on less than 1 percent of the farmland. The mountains north of Los Angeles and those that divide the Pacific coastal cities of Monterey and San Francisco offer a very distinct barrier between rural farmland and the gleaming modernist cities and boundless suburbs that still shape Southern California and, most notably, Los Angeles.

This friction between food and freeways has taken its toll. Los Angeles's metropolitan area, the globe's fourteenth-largest megacity, is home to the very rich and the very poor, a place of great excess and of endemic food insecurity. White neighborhoods in Los Angeles have three times as many supermarkets as do black neighborhoods and twice as many as do Latino ones.
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South Los Angeles is often held up as a textbook example of a food desert.

Despite the fact that south and central California are extremely productive agriculturally, one million Angelinos go hungry or are food insecure every day, making hunger every bit as much of a chronic condition as the disproportionately high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart problems, and other health conditions that arise when urbanization meets poverty. Los Angeles, according to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly known as the food stamps program) is the “epicenter of hunger” in the United States.

My main purpose in traveling to Los Angeles was to meet up with some of the farmers who got the world's attention as they fought against the destruction of their fourteen-acre urban farm in South Los Angeles
in 2004. It was the largest community gardening project of its time, and its destruction became the subject of a heart-wrenching Academy Award-nominated documentary called
The Garden
(2008). Perhaps this urban farm was ahead of its time, but several years earlier, another early urban-agriculture battle took place in the Goleta Valley, near Santa Barbara. Fairview Gardens Farm, which started out as a rural farm but found itself surrounded on all sides by residential sprawl throughout the years, retained its right to exist and is now the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens.

What I found in the Los Angeles area—an early battleground where important struggles in urban agriculture have been fought and won, and fought and lost—is that it is still a frontier in many ways. It's a cautionary tale of how greed, politics, racial disharmony, and extreme urbanization can take their toll on a city's soul. But the city is making great strides to meet these challenges. There are a handful of people working to put food-growing spaces and alternative food-distribution models at the center of its makeover. Food gardens are rising from Los Angeles's notorious food desserts. The city's Unified School District now has five hundred school gardens at varying levels of production. There are seventy community gardens in Los Angeles County, giving food-growing access to 3,900 families. And in 2010, the city put together a high-powered Food Policy Task Force that conducted an inventory and assessment of the city's foodshed and produced a 108-page document in support of a municipal and regional food policy.

A L
ITTLE
H
ISTORY

Los Angeles County was, until the 1950s, the largest agricultural county in the United States. It produced citrus, walnuts, strawberries, tomatoes, dairy, and meat in significant quantities, along with a wide array of other agricultural products.
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As its cities grew in the postwar boom, urbanization
stampeded through the state. Farming was expected to make way for development. Urban growth—residential communities, schools, retail centers, roadways, commercial zones, industrial areas—seemed to have a presumptive de facto right of way. Food production, farmers, and farmland simply were expected to move out of the way of “progress.”

Two notable exceptions to this rule became causes célèbres in the urban-agriculture sphere: Michael Ableman's successful fight to save Fairview Gardens Farms in the Goleta Valley near Santa Barbara throughout the 1990s, and a group of Latino campesinos and campesinas now known as the South Central Farmers, who lost their struggle to continue growing avocado and banana trees, beans, chayote squash, corn, yams, and sugarcane right in the middle of an industrial park and gang-ridden area of South Los Angeles in 2006.

Fairview Gardens Farm

Michael Ableman was an accidental urban farmer. As an aspiring photographer and an enthusiastic back-to-the-lander, he started working at an agrarian commune managing a hundred acres of pear and apple trees in Ojai, California, at the age of eighteen. From there, he continued north along California's Pacific coast to manage an avocado and citrus sapling nursery near Santa Barbara. Still in his early twenties, Ableman arrived at Fairview Gardens, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles and ten miles from Santa Barbara, in 1981, to work and lend his organic expertise, primarily grafting orange trees. The farm manager who hired Ableman soon announced that he was taking a leave of absence and asked Ableman to “farm-sit.” The manager never returned, and Ableman's two-decade journey on Fairview Gardens farm began.

Fairview Gardens was originally homesteaded in 1895, with topsoil thirty feet deep. By the 1950s, it was part of the patchwork that made up the agricultural quilt of orchards and farmland in the Goleta Valley.

As Ableman writes of his arrival at Fairview Farms in
On Good
Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm
, the Goleta Valley was already in a state of agricultural to post-agricultural transition. The Chapman family that owned Fairview Gardens no longer wanted to farm the land and were quite happy to let Ableman run wild with his ideas of what the twelve-and-a-half-acre farm could be. His tinkering and ambition led him to diversify the farm from a few orchards to a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including peaches, avocados, citrus, artichokes, asparagus, beans, broccoli, lettuce, melons, tomatoes, carrots, and the like. As most commercial farms in Southern California were growing single-crop fields for supermarkets far away, Ableman writes that he was turning Fairview Gardens farm into a “kind of supermarket in itself, diverse and ever changing like an agricultural botanic garden.”
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As Ableman's agricultural botanic garden developed, detached homes with swimming pools, sidewalks with streetlamps, lawns, cul-de-sacs, and other signposts of suburbia crept ever closer. The maw of generic residential and commercial development outflanked the farm on all sides by the early 1990s, and the newly arrived citified neighbors weren't happy with the tractors, the on-farm store, the roosters, and the piles of compost. Ableman had to continually defend the farm's right to operate, as the landscape around it shifted from rural to urban. Though the farm grew local, convenient, organic, fresh food, it was at odds with the new residents’ ideas of what an urban space should look, smell, and sound like. There were cease-and-desist orders filed over the farm's composting, and the roosters’ daily dawn ruckus prompted public nuisance complaints, which in turn sparked a media storm as supporters and naysayers clashed. Ableman was spending a lot of time and energy just trying to keep his farm operating as it had been for decades in the face of the juggernaut of suburban sprawl.

Fairview Gardens produced one hundred different types of fruits and vegetables, employed thirty people, and fed some five hundred families through on-farm sales and farmers’ markets. The farm was grossing close to one million dollars in sales at its peak.
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It was a viable economic entity,
standing on its own two feet without any municipal or community concessions, though it was being treated as less than one in so many ways.

The farm's land had already been rezoned as residential, with the potential for fifty-two condominium homes. Developers were salivating, while the family that owned the farm had mixed feelings about the land's legacy for the community and also the potential payday for its inheritors. It was a fight that Ableman surely would have lost if not for the fact that Cornelia Chapman, the family's matriarch, obviously harbored an emotional connection to the land as a farm. Ableman ultimately convinced the family that the land should be left as farmland in a trust to give future generations the ability to see where and how food is produced. He also knew that it was important for the family to get a reasonable value for their land. In the end, a compromise was miraculously reached in the gulf between the then current value of the tract as agricultural land and the unthinkable price it would bring as residential properties. Cornelia Chapman eventually pushed a note under Ableman's door with her final figure. The terms were “Seven Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars Firm and No Bickering!” spelled out in handwriting.
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Ableman managed to raise the asking price and promptly set up a nonprofit corporation, with a board of directors and bylaws, that would steer the future of the land. The Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens became one of the first agricultural protected zones in the United States in 1997. A precedent-setting case had been made for urban agriculture. But in the end, it was all a very gentlemanly agreement over land use, the selling price, and the future of a suburban part of Santa Barbara. Now the farm functions as a working enterprise with a produce stand and a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, an educational center, and a national model of urban agriculture and urban farmland preservation.

Every minute in the United States, over an acre of agricultural land is lost to commercial and residential development.
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We have built our cities next to good farmland for the obvious reasons, but those flat, well-drained
open spaces make for easy sprawl. Land is always more valuable as a future shopping mall, because food can be obtained so cheaply from elsewhere. Clearly the odds are never in favor of the small farm, let alone an urban one.

The story of Michael Ableman and Fairview Gardens is a rare example of success in the face of slim odds. But Ableman had the support of a community—wealthy donors, foundation grants, and regular farm customers—and was able to raise the money he needed. He was also lucky that the Chapman family wanted to cash out and get out of the landlord farming business—but didn't want to gouge. I'm sure it didn't feel like it to Ableman at the time, but it was a fairly straightforward transaction among relative social and economic equals.

A group of disenfranchised Angelinos from South Central Los Angeles did not have such advantages as they coaxed guava trees, sugarcane, tomatillos, and cilantro to rise from the Los Angeles concrete. In the end, the South Central Farm's fourteen-acre patch of green wasn't allowed to survive, as it was too much outside the paradigm. The derelict fenced-in space in South Los Angeles serves unintentionally as a cautionary tale and a reminder that racial inequality and the principles of private land ownership versus the common good are still hugely important shapers of the American city.

S
OUTH
C
ENTRAL
F
ARM'S
U
NLIKELY
B
IRTH

At 3:15 p.m. on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of using excessive force in the roadside beating of Los Angeles resident Rodney King. The beating, which occurred in 1991, was videotaped by a bystander and was a shockingly brutal account of what many Angelinos of color felt was a common occurrence: unchecked racially motivated violence by a corrupt, mostly white Los Angeles Police Department. The footage of King, an African American Angelino,
being beaten with batons and kicked while on the ground was broadcast on the television news and written about in newspapers around the globe. When the predominantly white jury acquitted the officers, it was the breaking point in poor and gang-ridden black and Latino neighborhoods, especially the one known as South Central, one of the most economically disadvantaged areas of Los Angeles.