- Maized and confused. The Economist looks at ethanol. Jeremy says: great headline.
- Would Cassava be any better? The post doesn’t even consider the question.
- Is it nuts to grow almonds in California and ship them to Vietnam for processing and packaging?
- This project aims to better understand the levels of agrobiodiversity found in homegardens. Yes, but in the UK?
- [A] gold mine of useful resources for city farmers.
- … a visionary pomologist, a fruit scientist, a species of practical rapturist … Wow!
Airport ag
Luigi shared links to two recent pieces about food, conservation and airports. The first is an audio slideshow of urban gardeners who make use of land owned by the airport in St Louis, Missouri. I found it a bit fluffy — and we don’t hear directly from any of the gardeners — but there’s a place for fluff. The big question: do the gardens attract birds that might pose a threat to jets?
Birdstrike is not a problem for the other, an article about how the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly has made a comeback at Los Angeles airport thanks to a conservation project that hinged on providing the butterfly with its sole food plant, seacliff buckwheat (Eriogonum parviflorum). A buckwheat, eh? So, is it edible? I can’t find any evidence that it is. Or that it isn’t.
Detroit, Cuba, and you
Have you got your own urban farming story? Upload it to iReport.
Forget Cuba, we’ve got Detroit
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.
Cuba’s urban ag miracle has feet of clay
Proponents of urban and peri-urban agriculture, ourselves included, have a poster-child: Cuba. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a big market for sugar exports, the Cubans became more self reliant and replaced the food they could no longer afford to import with bounteous harvests from small urban plots.
Alas, all is not quite so rosy in the organopónico. A new book, noted at HungryCity, points out that these plots supply just 5% of Cuba’s food. Furthermore, 75% of Cuban farmers use agrochemicals, and 83% would apply more if they could. Despite masses of evidence that organic land in Cuba really was more productive than conventional farms, the country is reverting to a conventional model.
I came to that post via this one at Spillway, where Will Wiles dissects the issue:
[T]he proponents of urban farming often muddle up doing it because we must (that is, we face shortages if we do not) and doing it because we should (self-reliance being a virtue, food security being desirable and so on) — necessity and desirability. And it’s the questions of necessity that tend to be the most powerful arguments: no one wants to face shortages. But if people see urban farming as only a necessity, it will only ever be seen as an emergency response to a crisis, to be rolled back when (if) more secure times return. This appears to be the condition Cuba is in. But that simply sets society back on the road to consumer-dependence of food produced invisibly elsewhere.
Moving to a more diverse and stable system of food production — including some urban farming — has to accent that is is a desirable option in good times and bad.
That makes a lot of sense to me; urban ag and greater diversity can deliver both resilience and better nutrition, health, incomes etc etc. I wish I had the skills and time to do a decent analysis of an idea that has long intrigued me. At the moment global food supply is dominated by cheap refined carbohydrates and appalling meat. People are not fools; they buy the cheapest calories they can. And that does not include good nutrition. So, why not integrate intensive (but preferably less harmful) production of storable, shippable commodities with local production of the extras that are so vital for a diverse diet that is tasty and nutritious?
There’s more at Spillway about Art and Food, but time is short today and I can’t summon the energy to unpack it or to respond. You might fare better.