Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (3 page)

In 2000, farmers and transport truck drivers in the United Kingdom staged a protest over government fuel duties that they felt were crippling them, along with the rising cost of gasoline and diesel. Their strategic protests and blockades managed to severely disrupt the nation's fuel supplies, shutting down motorized transportation. There were also so-called
rolling blockades on major highways to disrupt transportation in and out of cities. The major grocery chains, Sainsbury's, Tesco, and Safeway, noticed panic buying, and without reliable deliveries to restock their shelves, they started rationing their food supplies by the third day.

The British government took notice of how quickly a city like London could run out of food. It created an agency called the Countryside Agency to study the United Kingdom's food security. In 2007, Lord Cameron of Dillington, the head of the Countryside Agency, concluded in rather dramatic fashion that Britain was indeed extremely vulnerable to a food shock caused by any disruption of the normal flow of supply lines. Major cities in the United Kingdom, the report concluded, were at any given time “nine meals from anarchy.”
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That the big supermarkets knew to start rationing what supplies they had left on the third day was not by coincidence. Though they likely don't refer to it as “nine meals from anarchy,” they do operate what is known as the three-day rule.

The supermarket retail business is highly competitive. Supermarkets depend on volume to turn a profit, because they average less than 1 percent net profit after tax in a year, according to the Food Marketing Institute's published 2010 figures.
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More to the point, they depend on tightly controlling their costs so as not to lose any of that profit. Holding a lot of inventory, in a grocery retailer's mind, is costly. Milk, bread, fresh fruit, and vegetables—pretty much any perishable inventory, so much of which is thrown out as it wilts, rots, passes its sell-by date, or goes moldy—is the worst kind of inventory for a grocery store. It's the loss leader that gets you in the store, but it's also why these products are tucked in the back of the store, forcing you to walk past the other nonperishable, more expensive, processed items.

To carry as little inventory as possible, grocery chains have created very sophisticated just-in-time “value chain logistics” systems. They manage inventory so well that they only need a three-day supply of food in their distribution system at any given time.

It's worth pointing out that these tightly controlled supply lines that replenish our grocery stores are fine—until they're not. When so much of our food comes from so far away, what happens when there is a disruption in fuel supplies, a natural disaster blocking access to a city, or a terrorist attack shutting down borders and internal transport? Three days of food is not enough inventory.

When the planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001, transportation within the United States was severely restricted, but it eventually had to be reestablished because the city would soon run out of food after about three days. The same three-day rule played out in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina left the city cut off from resupply. And this can be said for any city in the United States or Canada at any given time. Ask anyone with firsthand knowledge of the modern grocery “supply chain” system, or any emergency preparedness policy maker. They probably can't tell you on the record, but they'll be unable to deny that there are only a few days’ worth of food in the city.

The supermarket is really just the outlet mall for the industrial food system. And if, as so many organizations and economists warn, we're coming to the end of the industrial food system, or if we're at least facing a major crisis in it, we'd better start figuring out how to feed ourselves when those shelves go empty for the very last time.

This is why, as I stood in the produce section one day despairing for the unglamorous, unloved, yet local and seasonal root vegetables and heads of cabbage, the illusion of abundance that is the supermarket model unraveled for me. I realized that it was all smoke and mirrors. We were, as Michael Pollan so astutely writes, “eating at the end of the industrial food chain” to our bodies’ and our environments’ detriment.
¹⁷
But what if we were also
coming to the end
of eating at the end of that industrial food chain?

A
t the beginning of the 2008 documentary
Food, Inc.
, Michael Pollan explains the trade-off we've made for convenient, cheaper food at the till and for triple-washed, pre-cut, bagged lettuce. “The way we eat has changed more in the past fifty years than in the previous ten-thousand, but that's the image that is used to sell the food…. You go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers. The picket fence and the silo and the 1930s farmhouse and the green grass. The reality is…it's not a farm. It's a factory. That meat is being processed by huge multi-national corporations that have very little to do with ranches and farmers.”
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These are not just the pronouncements of food activists, journalists, and filmmakers. Ask your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, or elderly neighbors. They'll tell you about the kinds of food that appeared on their table when they were kids and what grocery stores were like in their youth. They'll tell you about how food grew in gardens next to the house and how the bounty that didn't end up on the table that day was canned and stored in the basement for winter. Then they'll tell you that
food looked nothing like the toaster pastries and SpaghettiOs
^®
that we stock our cupboards with nowadays.

I certainly didn't need to scratch too deeply to find real-life examples of this change. My grandparents on both sides, for instance, grew up on farms and thrived on a regional, seasonal food system. What they couldn't make, grow, or raise themselves was purchased from the general store in a nearby city. The constant trips to the supermarket only became routine for my grandmothers later, as married women living in cities, with working-class husbands and hungry mouths to feed at home. It must have been exciting times as they parked their newly acquired cars and stepped into the state-of-the-art supermarkets in the early 1950s. Little did they know that they were stepping from one era into another.

For example, my grandmother on my father's side was born in 1911 in a little farmhouse in Saskatchewan. She married my grandfather at the age of twenty-two, and by the time their second child came along, they had left the farming life to seek their future in the city. Another child came along just before World War II, and then the last of four was born the year before the war ended. Those were very lean years. Seeing her four precious children deprived day after day, year after year broke her heart, she'd tell me decades later with tears welling up in her eyes. (Whether it was due to lack of money, food shortages, or the eventual food rationing, my father still bristles at the sight of a bowl of porridge, a legacy of eating it three times a day as a young child. And my grandmother spent the rest of her life making sure no one left her table hungry ever again.)

Food shortages and high prices continued after the war. In Canada, sugar rationing lasted until 1947. The very day, however, that it was derationed, my grandmother went out and bought a bag of sugar. There wasn't any supper that night. There was cake. One cake for each child. (It's worth noting that North Americans got off rather easy. Rationing didn't end in Britain until 1954.)

In those days, no one thought twice about growing food in a small
garden plot at home. Sometimes, entire backyards were used for food production. It's just something people did in times of crisis.

Even before World War I, vacant-lot gardening was an organized movement in most cities in North America and Europe as a type of pre-food bank for families and individuals who couldn't afford to buy food. During the war, the idea of urban food gardening went from a relief situation to a war effort with the Victory Garden movement. Because so many farmers went off to war, food production dropped dramatically. An army of civilian gardeners was created both as a morale booster on the home front and, perhaps more importantly, to mitigate food shortages and steep rises in food prices. The year World War I ended, one particularly enthusiastic study of Victory Gardens,
The War Garden Victorious
by Charles Lathrop Pack, put “the number of such gardens at 5,285,000” in the United States.
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After World War I, interest in urban food growing dipped temporarily, only to roar back again throughout the worst of the Depression with “relief gardens.” The following decade brought World War II, and the Victory Garden frenzy began again. The United States Department of Agriculture released a twenty-minute public service film called
Victory Gardens
, which “conscripted” families to do their part for the war effort. It explained how to turn one-quarter of an acre next to the house into an early garden, a late garden, and “where the
real
garden began, the Victory Garden,” for canning and preserving to tide the family over for the winter and maybe as an insurance policy for food shortages. There was even a special certificate that a family could post beside its Victory Garden. “Our family will grow…A VICTORY GARDEN…in 1942. Realizing the importance of reserve food supplies, we will produce and conserve food for home use,” it read.
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It was partly a plaque of recognition and part patriotic pledge. There was even a line for a Victory Gardener's signature at the bottom.

Growing your own Victory Garden was heavily promoted as being both stylish and patriotic. Posters and gardening guides extolling the
virtues of being self-sufficient food-wise were widely distributed. In
Victory Backyard Gardens: Simple Rules for Growing Your Own Vegetables
, published in 1942, the introduction begins, “In this world-wide war in which every American plays a part, every productive vegetable gardener helps our national well-being and is an aid to victory.”
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First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt even joined the ranks of World War II Victory Gardeners by planting a food garden at the White House, although she was strongly warned against it by the secretary of agriculture, Claude Wickard, who suggested it would hurt national food processors’ commercial interests.

The World War II mass mobilization of citizen farmers in the United States was an extremely successful campaign. At its peak, the United States was producing 40 percent of its own vegetables in twenty million home-scale Victory Gardens on both private and public land.
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Similar widespread citizen farmer movements were taking place in other countries during wartime, on both sides of the fight.

Until her children were grown, and even beyond, my grandmother relied on her resourceful farm-bred ways even in the city. She grew a seasonal “kitchen-garden” in the backyard with the basics: potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage, herbs, beans, peas, and so on. She pickled cucumbers, canned homemade sauerkraut, and put up preserves to last through the long winter. She canned peaches, pears, apples, and cherries; the selection of preserved summer fruits tucked away under the stairs became the pride of her winter pantry. In the late fall, the root vegetables in the garden were dug up and stored in sand in the basement's cold room. Just before winter settled in, my grandfather and his buddies went on their annual fall hunting expedition for duck, goose, and the occasional pheasant. That would last throughout the winter, and by spring, the freezer would fill with pickerel, whitefish, northern pike, and lake trout from nearby lakes. My grandparents were by no means self-sufficient, food-wise, but their grocery expenses were extremely modest when supplies and money allowed: coffee, tea, tinned ham, cocoa, flour, bananas,
raisins, tinned goods, and a bright box of Velveeta
^®
, North America's beloved processed cheese product, as a treat. Their food chain was mostly short, with a few imported and processed exceptions.

My grandparents’ fortunes steadily improved during the postwar economic boom. General stores and “groceterias” gave way to department store food floors. National chain supermarkets took over from independent grocers, offering an ever-expanding selection of tinned foods and exotic fruits like fresh pineapples, avocados, artichokes, and iceberg lettuce. Nevertheless, meals were made from scratch and eaten in the home. Restaurants were for very special occasions.

Like most women who had spent more time than they could tally standing at the stove and kitchen sink, my grandmother welcomed the ever-expanding selection of prepared foods in the 1950s and 1960s. TV dinners, eaten on newly purchased TV trays in front of the television, were beyond exciting, modern, and glamorous in their own way. Less time spent peeling, chopping, and standing at a hot stove was fine by her, and more and more processed food crept in. Her home cooking saw some exciting advances like ambrosia salad, which consisted of tinned fruit cocktail, tinned mandarin orange segments, and miniature marshmallows bound together by Dream Whip
^®
edible oil topping. Tinned pineapple was also dumped on everything—especially products like Spam
^®
and its similar canned pork cousins Klik, Kam, and Prem—to make a dish “Hawaiian.” Convenience was king. Live television commercials showing a groaning spread of fluorescent Jell-O
^®
moulds and Miracle Whip
^®
-based foods. Home economists and cookbook authors echoed the intoxicating liberation of Minute Rice
^®
and instant puddings that came with the modern lifestyle.

I can just see my grandmother quietly cheering the change in attitudes toward her domestic duties as wife and mother. “There is no virtue in doing things the hard way,” wrote Canadian newspaper food section columnist Muriel Wilson in her
Victoria Times-Colonist Cookbook.
“It's fun getting acquainted with the newest mixes, the fabulous instants, the
ready-to-go canned and frozen foods. Our jet-aged cooking would have astounded Grandma who, when she wanted gelatin, had to boil a pot of calves’ feet for hours. Now we simply reach for a package. A package plus imagination adds up to food anyone can be proud of.”
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Food had gone from being scarce, expensive, and labor-intensive to becoming a matter of a ten-minute trip by car to a supermarket—cheap and alarmingly conveniently processed and “prepared.” For a woman who grew up during the Depression and raised children through World War II, a little convenience made all the sense in the world. Toward the end of her life, however, my grandmother suffered two of the diseases that are linked to our modern diet: type 2 diabetes and cancer.

My grandmother's life was just a microcosm of the changes evident in how we grew, gathered, cooked, and ate our food in just her life span. From when she married in her early twenties to when she died in her eighties, her world transitioned from a regional, seasonal food system that produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every one calorie of fossil fuel it used to a system that took at least ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of highly processed, calorie-rich but nutrient-poor modern food.
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We had made an evolutionary leap in our ability to mass-produce food. But at what cost?

A S
HORT
H
ISTORY OF
I
NDUSTRIAL
F
OOD
P
RODUCTION

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the world's population was at 1.6 billion.
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The general consensus was that the earth had reached its carrying capacity. Voicing a sentiment that was pervasive among industrialized nations, British chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes declared in 1898 that “England and all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources
dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious phenomena.”
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The fear was that there simply wasn't enough food to sustain the .5 percent growth that was adding nine million people per year to the global population. Something had to come along to change the variables, because as they stood, humans had come up against what in today's terms would have been called peak food.

It was already known that nitrogen is a key element in soil that drastically improves plant vigor, growth rate, and crop yield. Farmers would spread compost on their fields because it was rich in nitrogen from the decaying plant matter. They would also plant cycles of legumes like beans, peas, lentils, vetch, and alfalfa, for example, which would also enrich the soil with nitrogen, thanks to a symbiotic soil bacteria that lives on the roots of legumes and makes the nitrogen in dirt available to plants. Lightning striking the ground released the bonds of atmospheric nitrogen, so the rainfall after a lightning strike was a haphazard source of nitrogen, as well. But making compost and growing nitrogen-fixing plants were slow processes, and lightning was far too random.

Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, another very rich and naturally occurring source of nitrogen, could be added to the soil. But saltpeter was rare, mostly limited to deposits in Chile, which had a near monopoly and could set the price. Moreover, agriculture had to compete for these mineral deposits. The same nitrogen compounds that made terrific fertilizer also made terrific bombs.