The power of urban farming
Can cities grow a lot more of their own food? Should they? The creators of the Gastropod podcast investigate.
By Cynthia Graber And Nicola Twilley
Boston Globe
July 16, 2020
Excerpt:
This sudden, shared urge to grow food in the middle of America’s cities intrigued us — enough to make an episode on urban agriculture, featured above. As the creators of a food podcast, we’re well aware of the harms caused by the intensive, industrial system of agriculture that feeds America, from the food miles racked up by the average spinach leaf to the underpaid farm workers who harvest it. Could the solution to these problems lie in diversifying where food is grown? Advocates claim that urban agriculture, which has been expanding in many ways in recent years, yields healthier diets, environmental benefits, and a host of more intangible outcomes, from beautification to food sovereignty. We couldn’t help but wonder: Might this spontaneous efflorescence of COVID Victory Gardens be part of a genuine shift, as America’s city-dwellers begin to feed themselves?
And, more importantly, is urban agriculture really the panacea our food system needs?
History provides some clues. The World War II Victory Gardens to which today’s COVID gardens have been compared were far from the first American urban garden movement. In the 1890s, faced with hunger and rioting following a stock market panic, Detroit’s mayor Hazen S. Pingree offered vacant lots to the city’s poor to grow food — a popular scheme that became known as the Potato Patch Plan. A few decades later, the Liberty Gardens effort of World War I urged newly urbanized Americans to grow vegetables to support the war.
