Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (10 page)

The oldest vines in Paris are now in the Vigne du Clos Montmartre, planted in 1932. It's also the largest urban vineyard in the city at 16,750 square feet (1,556 square meters). On a good year, the twenty-seven different wine varietals, 75 percent of which are Gamay, yield 2,200 pounds (1 metric ton) of wine grapes. Le Vieux Montmartre, a historic (and viticultural) society, tends the vineyard, along with the city's parks department. The grapes are harvested and made into wine. The harvest is marked each year with a public festival in early October.
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This wouldn't be the end of my fascination with urban vineyards. Paris is not the only city in Europe with notable amounts of urban land under vine. Vienna is the king of urban viticulture with 1,700 acres planted, producing excellent wines within the city limits. Viennese wine is best known for its floral whites like Grüner Veltliner, Riesling, and a grape called Gelber Muskateller from the aromatic muscat family. London, however, not Vienna, was my next stop. I was thrilled to learn that a few optimists in London, as it turned out, were starting to grow grapes, and that London wine, quality notwithstanding, was making a splash.

P
ARIS
N
ATURE
C
APITALE

A friend's jogging route takes him past the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris each morning. On a May weekend run, he was unexpectedly lost despite this daily routine. He came out onto the Champs-Élysées, Paris's famous boulevard, and found himself in a forest. Besides the forest, there were also squares of waist-high green wheat and stands of sunflowers, sugarcane, and bamboo swaying in the morning breeze. Other little plots were dotted with cabbage, lavender, and tobacco. Sheep, cattle, and Limousin pigs were in pens, taking it all in. For as far as he could see, the Champs-Élysées—both the busiest thoroughfare in Paris and home to its most expensive commercial real estate (and therefore the most expensive boutiques and shops)—had become a strip of vegetation, livestock pens, and curious human onlookers.

My friend had stumbled upon Paris Nature Capitale, an event staged by French “street artist” Gad Weil to celebrate International Day of Biodiversity during the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010. Through massive organizational feats, the Champs-Élysées was closed to traffic late Saturday evening, and throughout the night, as teams of volunteers coordinated deliveries of 150,000 plants, 8,000 plots of earth, and 650 fully grown trees. By morning, three-quarters of a mile (1.21 kilometers) of the Champs-Élysées had become a pastoral promenade like its Elysian Fields’ namesake.

The event was staged to remind Parisians that their food doesn't come from grocery store shelves but from farms. The 55,000-member French Young Farmers union played a major role, but it also required help from truckers, forestry specialists, greenhouse growers, event planners, and volunteers. Monday night, all was whisked away, returning the Champs-Élysées to its usual busy thoroughfare.

The 2010 event attracted 1.9 million people who came to marvel at the difference between triticale and hard spring wheat, to see pineapples growing at the end of a plant, and to see mustard in full yellow bloom. The plants and produce were for sale, and Parisian butchers organized a mass barbecue onsite. The event made the rounds in the news abroad and prompted a flurry of phone calls and e-mails from friends who knew I'd be interested. The event was such a success that weekend, Nature Capitale is planning future expositions of massive “overnight” gardens for streets in New York, London, Milan, Shanghai, and Moscow.

U
RBAN
B
EEKEEPING

About a century ago, urban beekeeping wasn't newsworthy. It was common practice to keep bees in cities, as it was on small mixed farms, for personal stores, or to sell commercially. Perhaps because sugar became cheaper and cheaper from the late 1940s on, honey became less prevalent in our diets. City bylaws were passed outlawing beekeeping, labeling the honeybee as a pest rather than the keystone pollinator that it is in the natural environment. Eventually, it was just something that fell out of fashion. Certainly my friend, a young professional beekeeper, had been used to being the only woman in a male retiree's club until a few years ago.

Whatever the reason, urban beekeeping has been taking off in cities like Toronto, New York, Vancouver, and just about everywhere I visited. (I've heard that Tokyo's Ginza district is a hotbed of urban beekeeping.) It's been an especially important element in the urban-agriculture revolution, given the devastating effects of the mass honeybee decline known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), a name given to the mysterious die-off of anywhere from one-third to 90 percent of beekeepers’ hives in 2007. Colony collapse disorder isn't what happens when a beekeeper finds unusual amounts of dead bees in the hive; it's when the beekeeper finds near-empty hives despite the presence of a queen and has no clue as to why the bees left the hive and their queen. Colony collapse disorder continues to claim at least one-third of the honeybee population in places like North America, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, to date.
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According to the USDA, there were five million “managed hives” (probably commercial hives for honey production and pollination) in the 1940s, but that number has currently fallen to half despite the increased demand for the pollination services of honeybees.
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While the honeybee population was already in decline, the recent die-offs raised questions about the vulnerability of the food chain if bees were to continue to mysteriously disappear.

The USDA acknowledges the importance of honeybees in our food chain. “One mouthful in three in the diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination,” it states unequivocally on its Frequently Asked Questions page for CCD.
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Studies are being carried out all over the world to try to determine the causes. But the signs are now pointing to a “perfect storm” of stresses that the bee colonies are under: epidemic infection rates by the varroa mite parasite, poor nutrition as these commercial pollinators forage on low crops with low nutritional values for bees, heavy use of pesticides on commercial crops that bees work as hired pollinators, “monocrop diets” of commercial pollinator bees who forage on just a few crops rather than on the more nutritionally varied “polycrop diet,” limited access to water or contaminated water sources, and migratory stress as they are trucked up and down the continent as fewer bees are asked to do more and more work.

Plainly put, the countryside is toxic. Rural bees continue to decline while their city cousins thrive and produce almost three times as much honey. Earlier blooms (due to the fact that cities are generally a few degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside because of the amount of concrete), much greater biodiversity per square mile, fewer genetically modified plants, and fewer pesticides are just some of the reasons why bees are happier and healthier in cities.

Bees in Paris

A century ago, Paris used to have over a thousand hives in the city.
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But there were very few, if any, left after World War II, except for the hives maintained at the Luxembourg Garden Beekeeping School in Paris, established in 1856.

Colony collapse disorder has been especially troubling to anyone in the agricultural chain, but especially in France, which is the European Union's biggest agricultural producer. Since 1995, over one hundred thousand hives have been lost. Pollinator bee populations continue to
succumb to CCD by about 30 percent a year, yet the root causes still remain uncertain.

In 2005, France's National Apiculture Association launched an urban bee program to support and encourage urban beekeeping. It was created not only to raise awareness and interest in beekeeping among the public, but it also may help to bolster flagging rural honeybee populations, with city bees being used to rebuild the stocks of rural bees.

While the scientists work out the details of what is killing rural bees, a quick look at the healthy and productive hives in a city like Paris might yield answers more quickly. In the 1980s, Jean Paucton, a prop worker at the Palais Garnier, home of the Opéra National de Paris, put a hive on the rooftop there. It was meant to be only a temporary situation until he could relocate the hive to his country house, but he was shocked to find that in no time the hive was full of honey and the bees seemed happy. They were obviously having no trouble finding pollen and nectar (bee food) along central Paris's chestnut tree-lined Champs Élysées or in the gardens of the Palais Royal or even in window boxes kept by apartment dwellers. More hives went up, and Paucton became a cause célèbre, even getting his photo in the pop celebrity and society magazine
Paris Match.
Now France's most famous urban beekeeper maintains five hives on the roof of the Palais Garnier. His “honey harvested from the rooftop of the Paris Opera,” as it states on the labels, is also some of the world's most expensive. A small four-ounce (125-gram) jar sells for €15 ($22). At €120 ($175) per kilogram, it's about ten times as expensive as any other premium honey. Nevertheless the 2,500 to 3,000 jars made each year always sell out. He also has since installed bee hives on the ultramodern Paris Opéra de la Bastille and at his country house after all, though he reports that his rural hives produce less honey, and the country bees keep dying off.

Paucton's success both with beekeeping and commercially with his urban honey has encouraged a new wave of urban beekeepers to install hives on rooftops and balconies throughout the city.

In 2006, Corinne Moncelli got the idea of keeping bees on a balcony at her three-star Eiffel Park Hotel, and she now reaps over three hundred pounds of honey a year (a treat for guests) from three hives. They are tended by Parisian beekeepers Michèle Bonnefond and Armand Malvezin. Bonnefond and Malvezin also keep ten personal hives on their penthouse apartment balcony in Paris.

The Grand Palais, one of Paris's most popular attractions, got its first rooftop hive in 2009. There are now up to five hives, which have proved to be not only a great addition to the Grand Palais's gift shop but a public relations windfall as well. There are now hives on a skyscraper in the La Défense business district; the town hall in the Fourth Arrondissement has rooftop hives; and Charles de Gaulle Airport has four hives as part of its “show of duty to the environment.”
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Paris, with all its parks and mild climate is a very bee-friendly city. Most importantly (for bees), it has been a pesticide-free zone since 2000. (The irony that cities like Paris can be refuges for bees tells us about the state that we've created in our rural agricultural lands.) Urban beekeepers must register with the veterinarian authority of Paris, and their hives must be at least eighty-two feet (twenty-five meters) from the nearest school or hospital. Swarms do happen, but Parisians seem rather content to share their city with docile honeybees.

London, United Kingdom

Perhaps London, with its five thousand hives and a thirty-to-one bee-to-human resident ratio takes the prize for the most productive city for urban honey.
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For many years, Steve Benbow has tended hives on the rooftop of Fortnum & Mason, one of London's oldest, exclusive food shops right in the heart of the city. Benbow's bees forage on the forty-two acres of private gardens of nearby Buckingham Palace, so it's no surprise the honey sells out quickly, even at £12.95 per 8-ounce (227-gram) jar.

Aside from his exclusive hives up at Fortnum & Mason, Benbow keeps hives all over London and reports that the variety of locations affords him honeys whose tastes range from light honeydew with sharp citrusy top notes to dark toffees from other parts of the city.

In December 2010, the first-ever London Bee Summit brought together scientists to talk about the challenges facing the honeybee in Britain and urban beekeepers whose numbers have been doubling in a very short time (and are likely to keep on growing, as the Capital Growth organization launched a Capital Bee campaign in late 2010 for the city to encourage and support community beekeeping). There was even a
London honey-tasting competition at the London Bee Summit. Seventeen different London honeys were entered. The colors of the honeys ranged from a dark molasses to red amber to those as light as champagne. The winning honey was produced at a nonprofit eco-garden and training center for disadvantaged youths called Roots and Shoots.