Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Public Produce: Cultivating Our Parks, Plazas and Streets for Healthier Cities is an unusually important book, if only because the topic is so unusual — how people in cities and towns can grow food on public lands.
In 2011 Berman decided to take the plunge into expanding her vision of planting a new local food economy in Appalachia by turning her farm into a major educational endeavor. She launched the Allegheny Mountain Institute (AMI) in an effort to attract young people from throughout the country for six-month fellowships on her 550-acre mountaintop farm.
When the current epoch declines, as it surely will, and we are left to pick up the pieces, what will our local table look like? All the various peoples will certainly add a mixture to that table. But the table will be influenced by what is producible in the local food shed.
The Weirauchs got their first two dairy sheep as a wedding gift fourteen years ago. The operation began as a hobby, but grew in scope (as hobbies involving living things that multiply tend to do), and after eight years of figuring things out, the Weirauchs have been in business for seven years as a licensed sheep dairy.
This is where for me the ELC ticks a lot of boxes. By raising money from investors, it’s able to lease or sell leasehold smallholdings at more affordable prices, thus obviating the aforementioned need for the would-be farmer otherwise to choose the circumstances of their birth, enter a loveless marriage of convenience, or toil miserably to turn an income when they should be turning a furrow.
Shaun Hill is the founder and CEO of Hill Farmstead in Vermont, who are, for me, one of the most imaginative breweries in the world. Based on the farm that has been home to his family for over 230 years, Hill Farmstead’s mission statement is “to hand craft succinct, elegant beers of distinction and to revive and diversify the farmscape of the Hill Farmstead in Greensboro”.
Each day, Catherine Caldwell hauls three gallons of bottled water to her bathroom and two to her kitchen. She and her family use the water for flushing the toilet, washing hands, and— after heating it on the stove—cleaning dishes and cooking. For bathing, they head to her mother-in-law’s house a few blocks away.
Istanbul, like many other cities, is under heavy pressure from urban development projects. In the face of this threat, the DÜRTÜK collective supports small scale farmers in and around Istanbul by organising reliable demand for the produce from urban gardens, and by building a supportive community around them.
Most useful to good food campaigners, McDonald’s book positions food security within the context of “human security” — a new way of framing the issues that boosts the chances of food getting the green light as a priority.
The financial struggle of the poorest Americans is a national concern as wages for those at the bottom fail to keep pace with the rising costs of living: food, housing, medicine, doctor’s visits, and even household water service.
The ELC is the only organisation in England to offer affordable residential smallholdings for ecological land users. Their approach aims to overcome two key barriers to accessing land: high land prices and the planning system.
We all have to consume; it’s a necessary reality of existence. However, in the ‘consumer society’ the most radical thing you can do is not to consume ‘as directed’ – by finding alternative options that meets your needs while enacting a set of principles in opposition to that overbearing and exploitative economic paradigm.
