| Food and the City reviews urban agriculture in Paris, London, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, and Cuba, with tidbits tossed in about other cities like New York City, Vienna, and elsewhere. The challenge in writing a book like this is in telling one story with continuity instead of giving the reader a number of disjointed vignettes. Cockrall-King does this well. In several chapters, each based around a specific city, she takes a topic important in that city and then tells more about that topic around the world. For example, one chapter tells about urban beekeeping in major cities around the world, whereas another chapter tells the story of SPIN farming, a surprisingly successful business model in which an urban farmer grows food for profit on several relatively small, urban lots. This helps give the reader the necessary context to understand the importance of a particular urban vineyard in one city or public edible landscapes in another.
Another aspect I liked were the historical notes Cockrall-King provides, particularly the development of French intensive gardening in 19th century Paris, which used the city's plentiful horse manure for fertility and thick, stone walls surrounding gardens to retain heat and allow for extended growing seasons for high value crops in the city. Leave it to the French to figure out how to produce ultra-fresh, delicious food in a small space during a time of urbanization and before the existence of today's modern technology.
The book seems front-loaded with radical, grassroots urban farmers and communities, such as the South Central Farmers in Los Angeles, whose urban farm was demolished by the city for no good reason, a story documented in the film The Garden. And while the community of South Central LA may have similarities with the low income part of Milwaukee served by Growing Power, the radical rhetoric of South Central's Tezozomec is world's away from Growing Power's Will Allen, who Cockrall-King quotes urging an audience he is presenting to to consider working together with Wal-Mart (perhaps foreshadowing for the $1 million Wal-Mart just gave to Growing Power).
The latter half of the book, which I found distinctly less inspiring, tends toward the big, capitalistic urban agriculture projects, such as the Detroit millionaire John Hantz's project to create a large urban farm in Detroit (for profit, owned by him) and a vertical farming operation in Chicago. These are both interesting ideas, and Cockrall-King presents them positively and without much critique (although she does note the concerns Detroit residents have about the Hantz project). Detroit certainly is home to more radical and grassroots urban agtivism (and as a fellow author, I understand how time and money constraints make including absolutely everything in your book impossible) but the chapter almost entirely focused on Hantz. The Greening of Detroit, I think, merits a mention - or more than a mention - but is almost entirely left out.
The Chicago chapter is a little more interesting, as it focuses on a vertical farming operation. I've always dismissed the idea of vertical farming as stupid because it's seems impossible to do it all on natural sunlight (as it absolutely is impossible to do in this case) and because it would require a lot of resources - perhaps most importantly soil - to do something (grow food) that can be simply done with very few resources while enriching the natural ecosystem outdoors.
The Chicago vertical farming operation described in Food and the City is about as efficient, green, and intelligent as a vertical operation can get. It is using an existing building that is being refitted using as many recycled materials as possible, nearly 100% artificial light via efficient LEDs, and several different clever methods of creating and retaining heat during Chicago's cold winters. Even still, this operation and many others described in the book involve an awful lot of plastic, including PVC plastic, which is toxic. Why people would want to grow food in a material that I won't even use as a shower curtain is beyond me. Using PVC plastic as a frame for your hoophouse is one thing, but using it for water for your plants is another.
After being so uplifted by the first half of the book and then feeling so skeptical of the second, I was interested to see what conclusions Cockrall-King would draw. To be fair, it's difficult to judge the Hantz and vertical farm operations because neither are in production yet (or weren't at the time of the book's writing). Overall, I love the topic of urban agriculture, because as Cockrall-King quotes Darrin Nordahl (an advocate of public edible landscape) as saying, "City Hall will always act faster than Capitol Hill." (Amen to that! On that note, I want to give a copy of this book to everyone in my city's municipal government! Can we have some public edible landscaping please?)
While she never comes out in favor of grassroots strategies over large scale capitalist ones, Cockrall-King ends the book resoundingly in favor of urban agriculture in general, saying:
Cities - or rather, those of us who live in cities - can no longer just be consumers of food and producers of waste. We're realizing that it's time to close the loop. We need to grow some food, relocalize our diets, and compost our food waste. And by doing these things, we liberate ourselves from that Titanic, the sinking global industrial food system. |
