A Leading NYC Mayoral Candidate Thinks Roof Farms Can Save America’s Cities
“We can repurpose these rooftops to ensure that we can grow our food. We’re going to take trucks off the road.”
By Amanda Kludt
Eater
Jan 14, 2021
Excerpt:
Why not say, “Let’s turn to food.” And by growing the food using rooftops, using classrooms, using empty factory spaces, the person who invents and expands this system now will have enough money to leverage long contracts. So if I go to the companies and state that, “Hey, I’m going to give you a five year guarantee contract that you’re going to grow the vegetables and some of the fruits that you’re about to provide to our school system,” you now can leverage that to go into the science and to expand. What do we do in the process? You’re going to teach my young children a nutritionally-based education so they can learn this multibillion dollar industry of urban farming.
They’re going to be skillful in it. And these are the jobs of the future, because 40 percent of the jobs we’re training our children for now won’t be available because of computer learning and artificial intelligence. But we’re always going to eat.
Then we take the trucks off the road that are feeding our Department of Education. Then we have the children built into this civic educational plan of identifying food desert, food apartheid, and do nutritionally-based education in their communities so that you can go into the bodegas and local stores and storefronts and start making available fresh fruits and vegetables. Then we go to the Department of Correction and start feeding them healthy meals instead of the meals we’re feeding them. Then we supply them to the hospitals. So this will continue to expand based on the buying power and the leverage we have as a city.
