Europe: The green shoots of urban agriculture
Food forests seem especially popular in the Netherlands, while Poland retains a culture of urban allotments for growing vegetables.
By Anthony King, Horizon
The EU Research & Innovation Magazine
Oct 13, 2023
Excerpt:
City farming and food sharing are blossoming in Europe with the help of local traditions and EU research.
Picture the following scene in the Netherlands: kids roll dice and move grandmother around a board to collect the ingredients she needs for a meal.
This is a boardgame proving popular with young children in a neighborhood in the city of Utrecht. But there’s more to this entertainment than meets the eye.
“At the end of the game, the kids get a little recipe card and a little map so that they can go find the food themselves in their own food forest,” said Jessica Duncan, a sociologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands whose team designed the game.
Their food forest is part of Rijnvliet, a neighborhood where residents can gather passion flowers, pears, herbs, apples and other ingredients. A group of artists has set up camp to bring the community together around foodie fun. They’ve cooked pizzas on a Friday evening with ingredients from the forest.
This Dutch food forest is just the tip of a burgeoning popularity of urban farms and communal food activities spreading through Europe as people embrace local, more sustainable produce.
“We’re seeing a wave of food sharing emerging for a whole host of reasons,” said Duncan, who has visited the food forest as part of a research project called CULTIVATE in which she participates.
Running for four years until the end of 2026, the project received EU funding to promote sustainable food sharing in Europe.
As Europe seeks to improve both human diets and agriculture’s environmental footprint, cities, suburbs and towns can be a trigger for change because they’re home to the majority of people living in the EU.