"Tend your garden," said Voltaire--even if you live downtown.
by Paul Rauber
Now that the 20th century is on its way out, maybe us cityfolk can get
back to normal. For urban dwellers prior to this screwy century, "normal"
meant that most of our food was raised either in town or a donkey's journey
away.
Plans for medieval European cities show fields both within and without
the fortified walls (no reason to give up cabbage just because the Huns
are besieging you). In what is now Mexico City, the proto-hydroponic chinampas
garden system fed the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. And one-sixth of
19th-century Paris was devoted to marais, intensive urban gardens
fueled by manure from the city's thousands of working horses, which produced
greens, vegetables, and fruit the year around.
But with the advent of internal combustion, refrigerated trucks, and
modern sanitation systems, the circle was broken. Urban farms were built
over or fell into desuetude, and urban dwellers became increasingly alienated
from the land, to the point where most have no idea how their food is produced
or where it comes from beyond the freezer case.
In the past 20 years, the pendulum has started to swing back. Community
gardens are springing up in abandoned lots, "gleaning" programs
harvest the fruit from urban trees for community food pantries, and labor-intensive
urban organic farms are providing healthful produce along with badly needed
jobs.
In South Central Los Angeles, the "hip-hop entrepreneurs"
of Food From the 'Hood turned a weed-infested quarter-acre lot at Crenshaw
High School into a thriving organic garden, the profits from which go to
a college fund for the young gardeners. San Francisco's Fresh Start Farms
employs homeless families raising vegetables for some of the city's finer
restaurants, while at the San Francisco County Jail's Garden Project, prisoners
grow food for local soup kitchens, graduating when they complete their sentences
to an intensive market garden that serves restaurants and farmers' markets.
The Washington, D.C.based From the Ground Up farms a piece of land
a half hour from the city center, selling part of its harvest to middle-income
people through a "community supported agriculture" (CSA) program
and using the proceeds to subsidize food distribution to lower-income neighbors.
One of the reasons for this efflorescence is the harsh nature of the
modern food-delivery system itself. In many inner-city areas, neighborhood
supermarkets are pulling up stakes, leaving entire communities dependent
on high-priced convenience stores. In this situation, urban agriculture
fills the niche abandoned by the corporate food giants. Groups concerned
with the very basic problem of food access founded the Community Food Security
Coalition, which performed the minor miracle of carving out a $16- million
portion of last year's Farm Bill for urban agriculture projects. "The
Democrats could see that it benefited their constituency," says Coalition
director Andy Fisher, "and the Republicans liked the emphasis on self-reliance.
The amount is really a pittance, but it's a start."
Urban agriculture faces many impediments. Planning departments tend to
be suspicious, neighbors don't like the smell of manure, and vacant lots
have to be thoroughly tested for toxic substances. City farmers outside
the United States have a much easier time of it, and the field is flourishing.
Hong Kong, for example, the most densely populated city in the world, produces
two-thirds of its own poultry and nearly half its vegetables.
In Brazil,
slum dwellers raise iguana and guinea pigs to supplement protein-poor diets.
In Moscow, 65 percent of all families engage in some kind of food production,
while a women's co-op in a poor neighborhood in Bogotá uses modern
hydroponic techniques to raise vegetables to sell to supermarkets, providing
their families with as much as three times their husbands' salaries.
Urban farmers in the United States do enjoy some advantages over their
country cousins. "Cities are waste-producing machines," says Jac
Smit, head of the Urban Agriculture Network. "Urban farmers have much
more ready access to organic waste. They typically grow multi-crops rather
than mono-crops, so the need for pesticides just doesn't occur. And while
the rural farmer often has no idea of the market [for fruits and vegetables],
the urban producer talks to shoppers and restaurateurs on a weekly basis.
Food From the 'Hood works because the people who grow the food are also
there selling it."
Urban farmers are well situated to profit from shifts in consumer tastes.
The increasing demand for fresh, organic produce is easy to meet from gardens
around the corner, but antithetical to the industrial food system. Major
supermarkets have designed themselves around produce that can be grown in
huge quantity, shipped long distances, held on the shelf for ages, and consequently
sold for a song, and are poorly equipped to do anything else. Springing
up to meet consumer demand, then, is a literally grassroots network that
brings with it a revolution in food retailing: instead of mega-markets,
farmers' markets; instead of microwavable frozen packages, food that tastes
as good as it did in our grandparents' day.
"It's a lot of micro-responses
to problems in the food system," says Claire Cummings, an activist
attorney and food policy consultant. "It's about taking back the ability
to produce food for ourselves. At the grocery store, you not only don't
connect to the food system, but your money goes out of the region."
People are looking for a sense of community, she says, and they find it
at the farmers' market or in their local community garden.
For an overview with lots of case studies, particularly
in the Third World, see Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable
Cities, published by the United Nations Development Program, 1996. Jac
Smit, one of the report's authors, heads the Urban Agriculture Network,
1711 Lamont St., N.W., Washington, DC 20020; (202) 483-8130; e-mail 72144.3446@compuserve.com.
The Community Food Security Coalition publishes a newsletter and provides
information about how to start a community garden; you can contact it at
P.O. Box 209, Venice, CA 90294; (310) 822-5410.
Food First, a project of
the Institute for Food and Development Policy, is also active in promoting
urban farming; it is at 398 60th St., Oakland, CA 94618; (510) 654-4400;
foodfirst@igc.apc.org. For a comprehensive Web site on the subject,
check out http://www.cityfarmer.org.(Don't miss the "Tele-Garden"
for those with "no garden space whatsoever.")
