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  • From: <pbunch@cox.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Feeding the Cities Series Intro
  • Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:20:08 -0700

Here in Medellin we still see horse carts on occasion. They used to be very
common say 10 years ago but they still serve a purpose.


---- Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:
>
> Feeding the Cities Series Intro
> http://www.grist.org/article/series/food-feeding-the-city/
>
> As Tom Philpott explains in his introductory essay to this series, cities
> for centuries have played an integral part in producing food for their
> residents. Only recently did cars and trains replace horses—and
> garden-friendly horse poop—a switch that made possible the long-distance
> supply chain of big-farms-to-big-supermarkets that’s the foundation of the
> modern American urban food system.
>
> Thanks to a confluence of pressures—rising fuel prices, a nostalgic desire
> to reconnect with our food sources, a new awareness of the environmental
> and moral costs of industrial agriculture—that model is losing ground. Not
> since the Victory Garden movement of World War II has America seen such an
> explosion of urban food-growing. Cities are once again green with lettuce
> and alive with the cackling of chickens.
>
> Over the next few weeks and beyond, the Feeding the City series will
> explore the many alternative food systems taking root in major cities
> around the country, with profiles of New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit,
> Oakland, Philadelphia, and Seattle. You’ll meet agtivists such as Annie
> Novak, who’s farming a rooftop in Brooklyn (above), and an entrepreneur
> who’s got a wildly ambitious plan for abandoned big-box retail stores in
> blighted urban neighborhoods. We’ll show you painless ways to compost, even
> if you live in a studio apartment, and some of the ingenious places that
> urbanites have found to grow food.
>
> Feeding our cities requires more than urban farming, however. Stephanie
> Paige Ogburn will look at the thorny issue of “food justice,” or making
> sure low-income neighborhoods have access to healthy fresh food. Emily
> Gertz checks out the nouvelle food trucks that are serving up Slow
> Food-esque fast food to middle-class, but budget-conscious hipsters.
>
> And that’s not all. Public Produce author Darrin Nordahl takes you on a
> tour of towns that are growing food, not flowers, around public buildings;
> Kerry Trueman spotlights cities that are leading the way in
> agriculture-friendly policies; and Daniel Nairn explores the limits of
> “agricultural urbanism,” a city-planning model that evangelists believe is
> key to the livable cities of the future.
>
> Even with the best agricultural policies in place, no U.S. city is capable
> of supplying more than a fraction of the food it needs. “Not even the most
> committed Brooklyn market gardener dreams of supplying the metropolis with
> flour from wheat grown on French-intensive plots,” Philpott writes in the
> introduction. “Growing grain in the city makes no sense, and no one wants
> to see cows grazing on Central Park’s Great Lawn. Any realistic vision of
> ‘green cities’ sees them as consumption hubs within larger regional
> foodsheds.”
>
> As the many pieces in this Feeding the Cities series will illustrate, that
> still leaves a lot of room in which to grow—and plenty of projects to be
> inspired by.
>
>
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