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Street Farmer
Elizabeth Royte, New York Times
… Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.
And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.
With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.
Onward through the hoop houses: rows of beets and chard. Out back: chickens, ducks, heritage turkeys, goats, beehives. While Allen narrated, I nibbled the scenery — spinach, arugula, cilantro.
If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”
Propelled by alarming rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity, by food-safety scares and rising awareness of industrial agriculture’s environmental footprint, the food movement seems finally to have met its moment.
(1 July 2009)
Pointed out by Tom Philpott at Grist (Must-read: urban farmer Will Allen in the NYT Magazine), Carl Etnier and others.
The WaPo serves up a food-politics column
Tom Philpott, Grist
… The Washington Post has debuted a new biweekly food-politics column by the political blogger Ezra Klein. (Ezra is the second young political blogger to grab a big forum in the prestige print world—see Russ Douthat at The New York Times.)
Congratulations to Ezra, one of the most widely respected political bloggers out there. More food-politics columnists, please! It’s fantastic to see an august newspaper, still widely read by policymakers in the capitol, take the topic this seriously. It would be nice to see the column take its place on the Op-ed page with the quote-unquote serious opinion (it currently resides in the food section); but we’ll take what we get.
My advice to Ezra is this: Don’t submit to the creeping Broderism that haunts your new editorial home—a Beltway-centered worldview that hones in on narrow details within tightly defined debates, incapable of asking broader or even interesting questions. I would argue that it is Broderism—named after the hallowed and unreadable Post columnist—and not the Internet that has pushed the newspapers to the brink of irrelevancy. Food is such a beguiling, attractive, and vexing topic precisely because it is so broad and far-reaching. It refuses to stay between the lines. In your inaugural column, you write:
[I]t’s not that something is wrong with our food. It’s that particular things are wrong with our food. And knowing what those things are is the first step toward fixing them.
As you investigate the “particular things [that] are wrong with our food,” I think you’ll find yourself wandering into broader fields, including political economy (to speak nothing of science!). Our food system doesn’t exist, and wasn’t created in, a vacuum. And it won’t be “fixed” in a vacuum either. To put it crudely, if we’re going to be a nation populated largely by Wal-Mart workers earning near-poverty-level wages, then our food conglomerates had better know how to profitably crank out extremely cheap food—and they’d better employ a team of food scientists who know how to make it taste good.
That situation can’t be “fixed” by merely tweaking the Farm Bill or any other D.C. policy mechanism (as much as those mechanisms need tweaking). New food systems (note the plural) will require new economic models. It might be more fruitful to stop looking for for big fixes and start looking for alternatives—which are being constructed on the ground all over the nation and world.
At any rate, welcome to the table, Ezra. Bon appetit! And here’s to yet more new food-system voices in the media—especially ones from people-of-color communities who remain largely marginalized in these vital debates. Like farm fields and much else, public debate thrives on diversity.
(1 July 2009)
Sustainable Food Blogs
Paula Crossfield, Bitten (blog), New York Times
(Paula Crossfield is the editor and lead writer for civileats.com, an active and intelligent food blog. I met with her recently and asked her if she wouldn’t mind surveying the world of sustainable food blogs for Bitten. –MB)
Fresh news on sustainable food is popping up everywhere online these days, but consistency is a virtue. As the editor of a food policy blog, I rely on these sites to inform and feed my own work. But anyone, from an ag policy wonk to a newbie just learning about the perils facing the food system, can find something here. A look at 10 of my favorite regular reads:
The Ethicurean has been a leader, churning out hard-hitting stories on food policy, food safety and the models for improving the food system. Featuring the writing of editor Bonnie Powell, Elanor Starmer and others, the newly redesigned site has also come to be known as the place to catch up on the weekly food policy news via their well-sourced digest. Check out Powell’s recent look at the allotment system in Britain.
(4 July 2009)
Fears for the world’s poor countries as the rich grab land to grow food
John Vidal, Guardian
The acquisition of farmland from the world’s poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe’s farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.
New reports from the UN and analysts in India, Washington and London estimate that at least 30m hectares is being acquired to grow food for countries such as China and the Gulf states who cannot produce enough for their populations. According to the UN, the trend is accelerating and could severely impair the ability of poor countries to feed themselves.
Today it emerged that world leaders are to discuss what is being described as “land grabbing” or “neo-colonialism” at the G8 meeting next week.
… De Schutter said that after the food crisis of 2008, many countries found food imports hit their balance of payments, “so now they want to insure themselves”.
“This is speculation, betting on future prices. What we see now is that countries have lost trust in the international market. We know volatility will increase in the next few years. Land prices will continue to rise. Many deals are even now being negotiated. Not all are complete yet.”
He said that about one-fifth of the land deals were expected to grow biofuel crops.
(3 July 2009)
Interest in bees and chickens soars ahead of final Royal Show
Jo Ind, Birmingham Post
… the smallholdings section of the show, which runs from Tuesday until Friday next week, has never been so popular as the trend towards having a little farm in the back garden grows.
In the past year, the smallholder retailer Countrywide has seen a 40 per cent increase in net sales across all poultry products in the past year.
Simon McEwan, editor of Country Smallholding magazine, said: “Many suppliers report that business has been very brisk over the past year. From humble beginnings in the 1970s, the grow-your-own revolution is gathering pace.
“Concerns about food security, climate change, food miles and the energy crisis are also considerations. No doubt the credit crunch is having an effect too.”
RASE’s Sarah Beveridge said: “Keeping chickens is just the start. We will be offering advice and practical demonstrations on beekeeping, milking goats, and even spinning the wool from your own alpacas – not to mention how to prepare a pig for slaughter or the artificial insemination of goats.”
(3 July 2009)
Agriculture and Food in Crisis
Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, Monthly Review
An Overview
“Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?,” asks the title of an article by Lester Brown in Scientific American (May 2009). Just a few years ago, such a question would have seemed almost laughable. Few will be surprised by it today.
In 2008 people woke up to a tsunami of hunger sweeping the world. Although the prospect of rising hunger has loomed on the horizon for years, the present crisis seemed to come out of the blue without warning. Food riots spread through many countries in the global South as people tried to obtain a portion of what appeared to be a rapidly shrinking supply of food, and many governments were destabilized.
The causes for the extraordinary spike in food prices in 2008, doubling over 2007 prices, brought together long-term trends, at work for decades, with a number of more recent realities.1 The most important long-term trends leading to current situation include:
- increased diversion of corn grain and soybeans to produce meat as the world’s per capita meat consumption doubled in about forty years. As much as 95 percent of calories are lost in the conversion of grain and soybeans to meat.
- decreased food production associated with poor countries adopting the neoliberal paradigm of letting the “free market” govern food production and distribution;
- widespread “depeasantization,” partially caused by neoliberal “reforms” and International Monetary Fund (IMF) mandated “structural adjustments,” as conditions forced peasant farmers off the land and into urban slums, where one-sixth of humanity now lives; and
- increasing concentration of corporate ownership and control over all aspects of food production, from seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers, to the grain elevators, processing facilities, and grocery stores.2
… This issue of Monthly Review has two parts: the first deals with the history, politics, and economics of the food and agriculture crisis — how it developed and its characteristics in selected countries. Articles in this issue by Philip McMichael, Walden Bello and Mara Baviera, Utsa Patnaik, Sophia Murphy, and Deborah Fahy Bryceson offer a mix of historical and contemporary outlooks on the underlying roots of the crisis, as seen from a variety of international perspectives.
The second part of this issue discusses the possibilities for improving systems of food and farming as well as attempts to develop more secure food supplies for all people. David Pimentel addresses questions concerning energy and agriculture while Miguel Altieri discusses better ways to grow crops, organize production, and feed people. Christina Schiavoni and William Camacaro describe how Venezuela is working to reach food sovereignty, and articles by Peter Rosset and Eric Holt-Giménez explore the struggle for food through social movements and the push for meaningful land reform.
(July-August 2009 issue)
This issue of the highly regarded independent socialist journal, Monthly Review, is devoted to food and agriculture. The above article is available online, and the other articles will probably be posted gradually over the next few weeks. -BA
