A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.
Cost per calorie should figure in that definition too; either way, here’s a dream of an idea for greening Detroit, symbol of all that is urban decay in the US. It could happen, I suppose. But what are they going to grow during those Michigan winters?
Mark Dowie, the article’s author, “lives on an island floating in the Pacific” it says here, but I’m sure he has researched the topic as thoroughly as he does all his articles and will be moving to Motor City any day now.
Google You Tube and you will find plenty of evidence of a strong urban garden movement going on in Detroit already.
Will Allen, founder, Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an equally cold and windy city has figured out a few things and is one of many working on bringing food back into people’s neighborhoods in Detroit. The two-acre GP headquarters site produces more than $500,000 worth of produce, fish and meat annually, not including all the social benefits. He’s helped communities take over abandoned lots and transformed abandoned vertical spaces into towers of abundance in inner cities. Allen was a McArthur Award Fellow in 2008. http://www.growingpower.org/Index.htm
You can also catch GP and Allen at work at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EpTWQWx1MQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k39D2myzRFQ&feature=related
The photo behind the first link made me think of this art project in London:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/climate-change-art-food
The print edition had a nice picture not displayed on the web, but this one is actually from the “original” project, a wheat field next to Wall Street in 1982.
http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/exhibitions/denes.html
The “harvest was worth £158, produced on land valued at $4.5bn.”
Beat that.
@Penny: Thanks for reminding us of Will Allen, who we have featured before now. My question remains; what about the staples?
@Jacob: that’s the one mentioned in the second part of the post about Cuba, the one I didn’t have time yesterday to mention.
Staples can be grown inner city same as any other annual or perennial crop. Perhaps we need to shift our current way of envisioning how they are grown, ie. from big sweeping fields to sections of parks, vertical floors in abandoned towers or roof tops, or from big to small and mixed up with all the other things we grow? We eat a whole lot more processed staples (flours) than we need to. Maybe with all the awesome work everyone is doing to bring back those thousands of yummy old food cultivars and animal breeds, we wouldn’t need to produce as much refined starch. Wonder how much critical mass we’d need to achieve that?
Thanks, Jeremy.
The London wheat field project wasn’t very impressive.
A visitor wrote “the only people I see going in are trendy local arty types in the know.”
The wheat field should have been inside the Square Mile, of course.
“But what are they going to grow during those Michigan winters?”
I’ve always wondered that when people advocate an exclusively local diet. I eat locally when it’s available, and even grow a little food on the balcony, but gosh darn it, I’m going to buy fresh spinach from Cali in January.
Bad choice, spinach. It is pretty hardy and could easily be grown — or at least harvested — through the winter from a protected environment.
I’ve never grown spinach, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it would take a lot of heat (and light) to grow anything in -40 F weather (in Iowa). It might work in some places with milder winters, but I recall a study a while back that showed growing tomatoes in greenhouses in the winter in the UK was far less efficient than shipping them from farther south – likely the spinach scenario would fare the same in an energy analysis. It would probably be more expensive for the consumer as well, since the growers would have to build the greenhouses.
Heat can easily be designed into an urban or rural growing system; check a permaculture guide for that, or just borrow from the originators of the practice who housed farm animals next to a wall of the house to keep the insides of the house warm in freezing cold winters. That opening picture of the farm in snow and the greens in the greenhouse on the Growing Power video clip should give you a good idea that it can be done!