Overview
Public agencies at one time were at best indifferent about, or at worst dismissive of, food production in the city. Today, public officials recognize that food insecurity is affecting everyone, not just the inner-city poor, and that policies seeking to restructure the production and distribution of food to the tens of millions of people living in cities have immediate benefits to community-wide health and prosperity.
This book profiles urban food growing efforts, illustrating that there is both a need and a desire to supplement our existing food production methods outside the city with opportunities inside the city. Each of these efforts works in concert to make fresh produce more available to the public. But each does more too: reinforcing a sense of place and building community; nourishing the needy and providing economic assistance to entrepreneurs; promoting food literacy and good health; and allowing for “serendipitous sustenance.” There is much to be gained, Nordahl writes, in adding a bit of agrarianism into our urbanism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610911436 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 02/13/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 180 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Public Produce
The New Urban Agriculture
By Darrin Nordahl
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Darrin NordahlAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-143-6
CHAPTER 1
Food Security
To put it simply, Americans have been eating oil and natural gas for the past century, at an ever-accelerating pace. Without the massive "inputs" of cheap gasoline and diesel fuel for machines, irrigation, and trucking, or petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides, or fertilizers made out of natural gas, Americans will be compelled to radically reorganize the way food is produced, or starve.
James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency
A rugula became an unlikely—and politically controversial—metonym for fresh produce and the escalating cost of food in America during the 2008 presidential campaign. While stumping in the Hawkeye State in the summer of 2007, Senator Barack Obama—then a front-runner for the Democratic nomination—lamented the rising cost of arugula sold at Whole Foods, portending that fresh produce and healthy food was fast becoming out of financial reach of middle and rural America. The irony of his statements is that they were made in Iowa, a state that does not have a single Whole Foods store, and that Iowans, like most Americans, cannot afford much of Whole Foods' inventory anyway—arugula or otherwise. Iowa is also a state that produces an abundance of corn and soybeans, but not arugula. And Iowans, like many Americans, refer to arugula by its more common, English-derived name: rocket. Though pundits on both sides agree that Obama's "arugula moment" was a political gaffe, his underlying message was on point. Our nation's food—from beef, milk, and eggs, to corn, rice, and soy, and even to fresh produce like arugula—is, pardon the pun, rocketing in price. And, as the price of oil has risen with the price of food and our economy has crumbled around us, Americans, for the first time in many generations, are beginning to understand what developing countries have always known: food security is economic security is national security.
In an open letter to the 2008 president-elect, journalist and best-selling author Michael Pollan outlined just how our current system of food production is compromising national security. Pollan argues that our complete reliance on fossil fuels for food production spells imminent catastrophe as the era of cheap and abundant—and nonrenewable—energy comes to a close. His arguments deftly illustrate the escalating futility of conventional agriculture. Pollan notes that in 1940, 1 calorie of fossil fuel energy produced 2.3 calories of food energy. But with today's industrial system of agriculture, the ratio has flipped to an inefficient, unsustainable equation, as it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce just 1 calorie of modern supermarket food. Pollan maintains that the solution "could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine." He advocates for smaller agricultural efforts in more places across the country, "not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security." Pollan further contends that "nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food."
Pollan is not alone in his pessimistic views of our current state of food production. James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, is also a believer of the decimation that will ultimately result if we do not wean ourselves off of our high-petroleum diet. Many of Kunstler's arguments parallel Pollan's. Kunstler paints a chilling tale of doom for urban America that is quite frightening—frightening because his predictions do not seem particularly far-fetched. He predicts that smaller communities surrounded by agriculture have the highest hopes of surviving the Long Emergency. He is not so confident about the big cities, however, because they are growing in an unsustainable manner and they haven't had the urge to create or preserve an agricultural belt surrounding them. Kunstler concludes with a realization that our cities cannot continue to grow in the ways that they currently are, and predicts we will have to return to some form of agrarian life. No longer will large-scale industrial agriculture take place in entire states of Iowa, but that every city is going to have to be engaged in some form of food production.
Before we discount Kunstler's and Pollan's arguments as apocalyptic hyperbole, it is important to recall the many government-guided, community-implemented food production programs in this country that arose from national crises. The most significant—and prolific—of these were the Victory Gardens of World War II: Twenty million small gardens supplied 40 percent of the fresh vegetables consumed in America. But there were similar food-producing efforts during the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Long Depression of the 1890s. During each of these distressed times, amid threats to national security, the federal government rallied the American people around food production, and created programs to educate citizens and assist them in exploiting food-growing opportunities throughout their urban communities.
The agriculture and gardening efforts during those periods of crisis were initiated to help secure our food supply, and the government looked to urban means of food production to supplement the rural farms that were unable to keep up with domestic demand. During World War I, the community agricultural efforts not only stabilized our nation's food supply, but bolstered that of the Allies as well. But more than a food source, the community agriculture efforts, especially the Victory Gardens of World War II, were meant to counteract a host of societal ills associated with crisis by providing "nutritional, psychological, and social returns for the individual and family." These agricultural activities provided work relief for the unemployed; allowed the otherwise helpless women, children, and elderly to participate in the war efforts, giving them a sense of patriotic self-sacrifice; and even provided a form of recreation, allowing people to escape, if only momentarily, the troubles of the times.
Today, the need for similar public agriculture efforts could not be greater. In addition to the concerns that our earlier community food-producing efforts addressed, our current food system has far-reaching environmental and societal health ramifications as well. Principally, what is at stake is threefold: the rising cost of produce, and the resultant effect on our pocketbook; the degradation of our environment; and the growing girth of our citizens and the number of diseases associated with the obesity epidemic. The gardening and agriculture endeavors during our previous economic depressions and world wars helped supplement the nation's food supply and sustain the American population through periods of food shortages. The great irony today, however, is that the call for more abundant, locally led, and community organized forms of agriculture—even amid our current fiscal and war crises—is not so much an appeal to supplement our current system of food production, as it is to save us from it.
At the crux of both Pollan's and Kunstler's arguments is our nation's reliance on oil for the production of food. From before the advent of agriculture until the Industrial Revolution, societies never had to rely on fossil fuels to feed themselves. Today, the conventional system of agriculture in the United States relies on fossil fuels for almost every phase of food production: in the manufacturing of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; for powering the complex machinery necessary for tilling, planting, harvesting, washing, sorting, and processing ; and in transporting the final food product thousands of miles to our supermarkets. As the bounty of cheap oil dwindles, so too, does our bounty of food. The health of the people, and of our environment, will rely on restructuring how food is grown and delivered to the hundreds of millions of people concentrated in our urban environments. Smaller, localized agricultural efforts that do not rely on big, complex machinery, industrial agrichemicals, and vast systems of transport are needed in and around our cities. Fortunately, we already have an abundance of underutilized land within our cities—under public control—that can, at the very least, begin to return the agrarianism that Pollan and Kunstler contend is necessary for survival. Agrarianism and urbanism needn't be mutually exclusive.
Our carefree use of fossil fuels and their greenhouse gas emissions have also precipitated global warming and a dramatic change in climate, resulting in weather anomalies that are exploiting the vulnerabilities of our centralized agricultural system. Annual rainfall totals are diminishing in some areas of the country, and water is becoming increasingly scarce, particularly in the already moisture-deprived Southwest. As cities continue to sprawl into the desert, farmers are competing with urbanites for precious few resources. The Colorado River, the principal river of the region, is used so heavily to irrigate crops in California's Imperial Valley that it no longer consistently reaches the sea. Yet, water continues to be wasted on lavish fountain displays and verdant lawns throughout Southwest communities. As water scarcity increases with the rise of wasteful consumption and global climate change, it will be essential that purely ornamental landscapes be put to more productive use. Population centers like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Albuquerque are going to have to figure out how to feed their citizens, and their only option may be to establish within their municipalities a local network of small farms or urban gardens utilizing dry-farming methods.
Water troubles are also plaguing the normally humid Southeast. That region's drought woes do not bode well for sprawling metropolises like Atlanta. Its dire water shortage became a topic of national dismay in 2007. Two years later, Atlanta is still grappling with a meager water supply. In 2008, the entire state of California also experienced parched conditions, threatening the state's abundant farms. The driest spring season in eighty-eight years left Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger little choice but to seek federal aid for California farmers. During that same year, Iowa reeled from an overabundance of water. Much of the state experienced substantial flooding due to torrential rains, destroying more than 20 percent of the grain crop. It is becoming abundantly clear that additional (call them "backup") systems of food production should be in place as we move into an uncertain climatic future. Coupled with the rise in oil and transportation costs, it is imperative that these systems be smaller, more abundant, and very close to home, within easy public access.
Our centralized system of agriculture is not only eroding our environment and economy, but our gustatory experience as well, erasing opportunities to enjoy fresh, fully ripened produce. Nonagenarian Juanita Kakalec reflects fondly on the times she used to pick fruit near her home in Washington, D.C. "It was just like milking a cow," she reminisced, recalling the simple pleasures of harvesting blueberries fresh from the bush, just a few miles north of the city, in Maryland. "You'd set your bucket down on the ground and just work your fingers over the branches, letting blueberries fall into the pail." Juanita also remembers picking strawberries, as well as visiting the peach and apple orchards in the area.
After her recent move to North Carolina, Juanita was looking forward to some local peaches. Though not as famous as their Georgian siblings further south, peaches grown in the Carolinas are wonderfully fragrant, juicy, and tasty. "Unfortunately, you can't find Carolina peaches here in the supermarkets of Carolina," lamented Juanita. "And when you do, they are not very good, because they pick them too early. It seems all the produce these days either comes from California or Peru." Chile is more like it, but her point is valid.
Whether it is apples, avocados, or asparagus, the globalization of agriculture has given us year-round convenience. But when tied to the rising costs for oil, this convenience comes at a price. It raises the cost of produce and yields a diminished gustatory experience. It is a simple fact: Pickers have to harvest fruit before it is ripe so it can be shipped around the world without spoiling. Once the produce has been delivered, it is often gassed with ethylene to induce ripening. Global agriculture also favors cultivated varieties that pack tighter and bruise less, often sacrificing flavor and suppleness. The flavor, texture, aroma, and feel of a peach that is harvested early, transported thousands of miles, artificially ripened, then set on a supermarket shelf is quite different from one naturally ripened on the tree and plucked straight from the branch.
Juanita's desire for a fresh, local peach reminded me of an essay written by the provocative New Urbanist architect Daniel Solomon. Aptly titled Peaches, the essay relays the profound experiences fresh produce provide to the urban dweller. Solomon notes that "Food and urbanism are both fundamental to human experience." His argument is that the lack of everyday contact with fresh food in the modern city erodes our sense of place, disconnects us from the natural environment, and threatens an experience that was once commonplace. Solomon writes:
Foodies worry that masses of people will go through life and never taste a peach that tastes like a peach. The people will survive somehow—it's peachiness that is threatened with extinction. In the contemporary world, retaining the full-blown potential of the flavor of a peach as a part of most people's life experience is no small matter. It involves land use policy, banking, union agreements, transportation, and distribution networks as much as it involves peach breeding, which itself is a more complex subject than ever before. In an agrarian society, where the peach trees are outside one's door, the perfect peach is commonplace. Delivering perfect peaches to the modern metropolis is another question.
The land use-policies, transportation, and distribution networks that threaten our quest for perfect produce also threaten our pocketbook. Community food expert, Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, notes that the northeast region of the United States is especially susceptible. New England, at the extremity of both the national transportation system and the food chain, sees substantial increases in food costs compared to California, for example, where much of the country's fresh produce originates. As Winne contends, "The high energy costs associated with shipping food from those regions [near the beginning of the food chain] to New England increase food costs there by 6 to 10 percent."
The distribution and transportation networks are not much shorter for communities in America's Heartland. According to Food, Fuel, and Freeways, a report by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, the average produce item trucked to a terminal market in Chicago travels more than fifteen hundred miles. Grapes, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, green peas, and spinach all travel over two thousand miles to reach the Windy City. Most disheartening was the statistic for sweet corn. For Chicagoans, residents of the second-largest corn producing state in the nation, sweet corn travels, on average, 813 miles to reach them.
As states have become more specialized in agricultural production, citizen access to locally available food has drastically diminished, erasing a bit of cultural heritage in the process. Take Iowa apples, for instance—a fruit with a long history in the Hawkeye State. The first recorded apple orchard in Iowa was planted in 1799, on the banks of the Mississippi River in Lee County. By 1870, apple orchards flourished, and almost 100 percent of the apples consumed in the state were grown in Iowa. By 1925, apple production declined substantially, and Iowa produced just half of the apples consumed there. At the close of the twentieth century, apple production had all but disappeared: Only 15 percent of the apples consumed by Iowans were grown in their home state. Now, it is not just apples; almost all of Iowa's fresh produce supply is produced in other states and trucked in. It is estimated that less than 10 percent of the produce consumed in Iowa is grown in Iowa. In 2007, fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables represented just 0.13 percent of the state's cash receipts for all of Iowa's agricultural commodities (including livestock). Today, mink pelts produce three times the cash receipts as the state's apple crop.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Public Produce by Darrin Nordahl. Copyright © 2009 Darrin Nordahl. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction: Serendipity
Chapter 1. Food Security
Chapter 2. Public Space, Public Officials, Public Policy
Chapter 3. To Glean and Forage in the City
Chapter 4. Maintenance and Aesthetics
Chapter 5. Food Literacy
Conclusion: Community Health and Prosperity
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes