Civil Eats

A year ago, my business partner, Caitlyn Galloway, and I started Little City Gardens. We grow salad greens, braising greens, and culinary herbs in the heart of San Francisco, which we sell to a restaurant, caterers, and individual subscribers. Little City Gardens is a lot of things: a market-garden, a small business struggling to succeed, and an experiment in the viability of urban micro-farming. We started the business with a desire to apply ourselves to the redesign of our local foodshed. We wanted to grow produce in the city and sell it. And, crucially, we wanted to be paid for our work. Read More

While delegates debate what to do about climate change in Copenhagen, citizens will gather in New York City tomorrow at New York University for a climate summit all their own: one that puts much-needed focus on how the food we eat contributes to climate change. A collaboration between Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office and Just Food, an organization that focuses on increasing access to fresh food for all New Yorkers, the Food & Climate Summit will feature some of the best minds on food issues, all discussing our carbon “foodprint,” like Marion Nestle, Wangari Maathai, Vandana Shiva, Colin Beaven (AKA “No Impact Man“), and Joan Gussow. Read More

Urban Agriculture has become one of the hottest movements in the sustainable design world. During a recent Re:Vision Salon conversation, Josiah Raisin Cain—Chief Design Officer with Design Ecology and Urban Re:Vision—presented some interesting models proving that urban agriculture design “is close to exploding” given recent media, products, planning, and focus.

Urban edible gardens solve many design problems simultaneously. They help reduce gas, cost, water (depending on which system is used), while increasing food access and security and community connection. During the discussion, Josiah noted that challenges for designers typically include space and scale, but that there are alternative ways of imagining and planning our cities. Josiah showed projects with successful green roofs with edible gardens like this one at Trent University: Read More

I’m always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

In reality, nearly every square inch of Central Park was painstakingly landscaped back in the mid-nineteenth century to the specifications of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. A massive public works project, it required some 20,000 workers to subvert existing swamps and blow up bluffs to create a soothing pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition.

Oh, and there was the little matter of evicting the Irish pig farmers and German gardeners who’d built shantytowns on the land. And destroying Seneca Village, the “first significant community of African American property owners on Manhattan”. The five acre settlement, which included three churches and a school, was seized through eminent domain and demolished.

All this, so that cooped-up city dwellers could get their fix of “nature”. Our civilized way of life is so removed from the natural world that Central Park’s manicured, manipulated acres are as close to a bit of wilderness as we can hope to get within the borough of Manhattan.

But you can catch a glimpse of what Manhattan was really like before we invaded it and tamed it by watching the fascinating video that architect/educator Fritz Haeg’s created in collaboration with The Mannahatta Project. The video documents Haeg’s Lenape Edible Estate installation, which was designed to “provide a view back to the lives of the native Lenape people, how they lived off the land 400 years ago” on the island that was then called Mannahatta. Read More

Urban farming is not new — its been a way to feed cities for thousands of years. But in the US, it was purposely planned out of our cities, even as they grew bigger and, as a result, hungrier. Now many of our cities contain massive sprawl, which have created new opportunities in the form of abandoned lots, a consequence of the economic downturn. But we also have a mobilized movement of individuals interested in feeding people, especially those without access to healthy fruits and vegetables (many of whom reside in cities). But connecting these dots is sometimes more complicated than it seems.

As urban farming takes hold across the nation, reviving old school ways of supporting communities with homegrown food, it will inevitably bump into resistance in the form of outdated laws and legislative confusion around this up and coming issue, in addition to complaints by neighbors who don’t see the value in having a farm nearby when there are still packed shelves at the supermarket. These neighbors worry about their views, are disturbed by farm animal noises and deposits, and fear property value declines, which have more to do with economics than kale.

These anticipated problems now have a face — Bad Seed Farm is at the center of a neighborhood zoning debate in Kansas City, Missouri. Read More

We are in the midst of a revolution in urban agriculture. In a growing number of cities, suburbs, and small towns, community groups and entrepreneurs have discovered innovative ways to harvest and grow food, using networks of relatively small plots of public and private land and shared resources, and in the process, forging novel relationships among producers and consumers.

While these innovations are based on historical precedents, from the radical Diggers movement of 17th century Britain, to sharecropping arrangements, the victory garden movements during the World Wars, and recent community supported agriculture systems, they are unique in that they apply social networking tools, mapping technologies, unusual land tenure arrangements, or novel business models to forage and farm cities and suburbs. Read More

When I think of Petaluma, California I think of a tiny little town 30 minutes or so north of San Francisco home to antique and outlet stores, many a poet and artist, dairy cows and rolling fields nestled next to quaintly rusted industrial-scapes. I have never really given much thought to the families and seniors in line at the free food pantries. The fact is though that Petaluma has changed a lot in the last five to ten years. In 2007 there was a 30% increase in the number of seniors visiting food pantries and a similar 30% increase in the number of children enrolled in the free or reduced price meal program at school. That’s one in three kids and a reminder that all is not as it may seem.

A job-hunting informational interview led me to Petaluma Bounty and Grayson James, the Executive Director of the non-profit dedicated to transforming the way the hungry get fed in Petaluma. Read More

The idea of community looms large in the current environmental debate. It offers a locus of action that complements both the national and international protocols and the individual behavioral changes that have, until recently, dominated the environmental agenda. Read More