Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (12 page)

“I didn't expect that I'd be in a job where fifty percent of my time is working with adults with learning disabilities,” said Child. A lot of those clients with learning disabilities come in as troubled youth, kicked out of school and with serious social integration problems.

“You get a report on these lads from school and it's best not to read it,” Child confided, though I was sure his imposing, well-muscled volunteer firefighter frame would give even the most rebellious client cause to think twice about acting up. But according to Child, he's never had a problem with one of the kids. “You get them out of that environment [where they were getting into trouble]. You get them away from their peers, and they have no one to play up to. They become totally different.”

After chatting with Child, I wandered the farm's pathways with moms pushing strollers and children racing between the various pens of sheep, chickens, ducks, pigs, and other animals enjoying the cool, misty day. When the mist turned to rain, I popped into St. Werburgh's Farm Café at the edge of the farmyard. Part circular tree house, the café attracted a bohemian crowd. In the middle of the restaurant, there was a large table of what looked like at least three sets of Gor-Tex
^®
-clad parents with their toddlers. The adults drank coffee and laughed as the children grazed plates of farm-sourced eggs, sausages, and seasonal vegetables. But for all its quirkiness, St. Werburgh's City Farm Café had a serious national reputation, as did its workhorse thirty-something chef, Leona Williamson, for the café's simple, straightforward farm-style menu and for Williamson's commitment to sustainability and community-minded social values. Instead of listing the miles of its food on its menu (which it doesn't even bother to do), this cafe could rightly list food yards. The pigs that were reared on the farm could also end up on the café's menu.

When the downpour returned to a drizzle, I set out for the asphalt walking and bicycle path to the Ashley Vale Allotment Association gardens. I was curious to see an example of Britain's famous allotment gardens.

While allotment gardening may seem like a leisure activity to many these days, its history in the United Kingdom (and almost universally) began as a social concession to the landless poor. With the political and social upheavals of the British Civil War through the seventeenth century and continuing with the enclosure of common land in the eighteenth century—which dispossessed the farming poor, leading to increased urbanization in the nineteenth century—the allowance for allotments as a civil right got some political lip service with the Allotment Act of 1887. The Victorian idea that gardening would be a way to keep the poor away from drink and other activities resulting from idle hands was really just a way to try to keep poor people from causing trouble, not as a result of social justice values redressing inequality. As such, the legislation had little traction.

The allotment concept finally got the legislation it needed starting with the Small Holdings and Allotment Act of 1907 and 1908. This legislation, and further amendments, gave the movement stricter guidelines and legal force. If six or more people demanded land for growing food, the town council had to provide it. From the end of the 1800s to the First World War, allotment plots in the United Kingdom soared from a quarter of a million to one and a half million.

The Dig for Victory campaign sponsored by Britain's Ministry of Agriculture during World War II seemed to put a positive spin on the hardships brought on by the war and the legacy of food rationing, which lasted in Britain into 1954. The Ministry of Agriculture estimated that in 1941, nearly 1.3 million tons of food was produced on allotments.

This is roughly the same ratio of production to space under spade that was confirmed by a 2008-2009 survey. The standard 300-square-yard (250-square-meter) plot produces an average of three-quarters of a ton of food. At 330,000 plots, this means that the United Kingdom currently produces 247,500 tons of food. Yet with over one hundred thousand gardeners waiting for allotments, it could be 322,500 tons. Given that a standard plot can provide a family of four with “a reasonable portion” of its
annual fruit and vegetable needs, 430,000 allotment plots could provide 107,500 families of four with their fresh produce per year.
¹¹

This Dig for Victory campaign traveled oversees to North America, where “Victory Gardens” were set up all over the United States and Canada during the Second World War. While in Britain, the aim was to keep civilians from starving during the deprivations of war; the rhetoric in the United States enlisted gardeners into the fight more directly. I still have my grandmother's book
Victory Backyard Gardens: Simple Rules for Growing Your Own Vegetables with Simple Rules and Charts
, which was published in 1942. The book begins with an address by the secretary of agriculture, Claude R. Wickard. “One indispensable line of war production is food,” Wickard asserted. “Let's make it the three V's—Vegetables for Vitality for Victory,” he concluded.
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Allotments, however, declined in Britain (as did the vacant-lot gardening and other wartime urban-agriculture measures), as they did throughout Europe and North America. By 1970, allotments had dipped to around half a million plots in the United Kingdom, giving way to the pressure to use the land for other urban development priorities. The allotments that remained were increasingly poorly kept. And by 1999, there were only an estimated 250,000 allotments in Britain.
¹³

But allotment demand has roared back into prominence in Britain during the past decade. Currently, waiting lists for allotment plots can have more than a thousand applicants in some city council areas. The National Society of Allotment & Leisure Gardeners (NSALG), the main national representative body for the allotment movement in the United Kingdom, reported that wait-lists grew by another 20 percent in 2010.
¹⁴
The most recent figures from the society estimate that a minimum of 330,000 allotment plots are currently in use in the United Kingdom. There has been a feverish increase in demand, with over a thousand people currently on waiting lists. The society noted that one strategy was to cut the size of allotments in half—as is common in London—for new allotment gardeners as they wait for full-sized plots.

The same press release detailed the benefits of allotment gardening. The first benefit listed was healthy exercise. The second was good company. “Quality, fresh, and affordable fruit and veg” is the third bullet on the list. While exercise and good company is undoubtedly a concern for people who face food insecurity, it might not be their top priority. A 2006 article by the BBC titled “Can You Dig It?” that came out a week in advance of National Allotment Week (August) had already identified this trend. “Younger professionals” are “swelling the ranks of the allotment diggers.” The article also mentions that allotments are considered “green gyms.”
¹⁵
(One can only expect that the allotment workout DVD will be next, if it doesn't already exist.)

Even at the allotment garden's entrance, wet earth, compost, and the pungency of celery and root vegetables hung in the air. Many of the community garden spaces I have visited in Canada and the United States suffered from over-manicured neatness—more eye-candy than geared toward food production. The gardens in England's Ashley Vale Allotments, in contrast, were refreshingly wild, messy, unruly, and, as a consequence, quite productive. Being the end of September, allotment owners were clearly struggling to keep up with the fall productivity of most of the plots. A few gardeners had even turned over their plots to new plugs of winter kale and cauliflower.

The bulk of the plots were long, rectangular beds running lengthwise on a steep vertical slope that ran toward a row of houses. Some had little wooden sheds; others had small private greenhouse buildings. Most had a round, black plastic compost collector. Perhaps because of the rain that day, there were no gardeners for me to chat with about their plots. I was curious to know why the vertical strips ran lengthwise on the slope, as opposed to horizontally—rice paddy-like. I wanted to know what crops they grew and how often they visited their gardens. Was the fencing intended to keep out hungry humans or other grazing wildlife? Instead, I pulled off a few ripe blackberries that found themselves on the outside of the metal fencing and deeply inhaled the smell of wet earth and plants.

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My first appointment in London was to meet Mark Ridsdill Smith, a North London food gardener whose nonprofit enterprise Vertical Veg “inspires and supports food growing in small urban spaces.” We had traded e-mails when I stumbled across his blog on the web, and when I announced that I was heading to London, Ridsdill Smith graciously invited me over to tour his balcony gardens.

It wasn't difficult to spot Ridsdill Smith's house from the street. It was the one with giant gourds and tomatoes cascading from second-story window boxes on an otherwise confusingly repetitive array of late Victorian, veggie-less row houses.

Ridsdill Smith, his wife, and their toddler live on the top two floors of the house, which means they don't have access to the backyard below.
But Ridsdill Smith had always wanted to grow food, so he had signed up for allotment space with his local council in 2000. After seven years of waiting, he checked back with them. “I was told that it would be another fifteen years, so I'd be about sixty-five years old by the time I got one.”
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Concerned about climate change, Ridsdill Smith had been working to make an impact with a number of “low-carbon groups,” but he found it was tricky to get people enthusiastic about all the things they couldn't do. He turned to growing food, figuring it would be a low-impact action that might be a nice change because it was about something you
could
do. He had always kept a few planters of arugula, salad greens, and herbs, so he wondered just how much he could grow using the space he had available to him: a nine-foot-by-six-foot northwest-facing balcony, six windowsills (four facing south, two facing north), and a small patch of concrete outside the front door. As it turned out, the answer was
a lot.

Ridsdill Smith began documenting the production he was getting on his Vertical Veg website and set up a social enterprise nonprofit business of the same name. He needed a benchmark challenge and wondered if he could make up for his lack of allotment space with just his available balcony and windowsills. Could he grow at least £500 ($820) of produce that he might otherwise have to buy at a store in a year? He documented each handful of parsley and each harvest of tomatoes, peas, and beans, month by month, itemizing what he'd otherwise have to pay at a greengrocer. By the time I got to London in late September to meet with him, he'd surpassed his initial goal and was shooting for a new target. He revised his goal to aim for the equivalent of £782 from May 2010 to May 2011—the average annual crop value that comes off a London-sized allotment. (The National Society of Leisure & Allotment Gardeners estimates that a 300-square-yard (250-square-meter) allotment produces £1,564 worth of food a year. Most London allotments are half this size.) In the end, during his 2010-2011 May-to-May experiment, Ridsdill Smith's balcony gardens would produce eighty-three kilograms of food, or the equivalent of £899.99, almost double his initial goal.
¹⁷

The bulk of Ridsdill Smith's food growing was taking place on his small wooden balcony above the neighbor's backyard below. This space—so small that Ridsdill Smith and Clare Gilbert (a student apprenticing with him during a year off from her academic studies) had to take turns on the balcony—was home to an amazing selection of food: lemongrass stalks, Bright Lights Swiss chard, various types of tomatoes, a bay leaf tree, rosemary, salad crops, kales, blueberries, lovage (a stalky and leafy herb with a flavor similar to strong celery), and even a mallow, the highly versatile family of plants that includes marshmallow, okra, and cocoa. The tower of scarlet runner beans yielded about 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) per week at peak production. A wooden window box had a new crop of sunflowers and beans that would be harvested as sprouts. Pots, two and three deep and arranged in a ring around the outside perimeter of the balcony, had an unruly display of edible plants. And a small plywood box housed Smith's wormery that kept the plants in a steady supply of nutrient-rich compost. Above the patio, a cantilevered wood-plank shelf was loaded with several buckets of lettuces.