Royte notes the inherent challenges for advocates of urban agriculture:
…there is something almost fanciful in exhorting a person to grow food when he lives in an apartment or doesn’t have a landlord’s permission to garden on the roof or in an empty lot.
But the edible landscaping trend is taking root wherever there’s soil, and even where there isn’t, with the help of exhibits like the New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Garden, which just opened last weekend and runs through September 13th.
The Edible Garden exhibitions include a Good Food Garden, a Seed Savers Heirloom Vegetable Garden, and a Beginner’s Vegetable Garden, along with a half dozen other edible landscape-related exhibits. Rosalind Creasy, whose essential but long-out-of-print book Edible Landscaping has a new edition coming out in 2010, thankfully, designed the Heirloom Vegetable Garden. Other homegrown heroes like Kitchen Gardeners International founder Roger Doiron and Slow Food USA‘s new president Josh Viertel will be among the featured speakers at events taking place over the course of the summer.
If I may borrow from Stephen Colbert, I’d like to give a tip of the hat to cookware company Anolon, a major sponsor of the NYBG Edible Garden exhibition whose own Creating a Delicious Future campaign seeks to remedy kitchen illiteracy by fostering “a return to eating delicious foods prepared simply at home using fresh, seasonal, local ingredients.”
The exhibition’s other major sponsor, Scott’s Miracle Gro, gets a wag of the finger: hey, guys, great way to greenwash the profits from all those pesticides the EPA has ordered you to take off the shelves.
Another wonderful edible gardening program to which I’ll gladly give a shout-out is the Giving Through Growing campaign sponsored by Robert Mondavi’s Woodbridge Winery in partnership with The American Community Gardening Association. Woodbridge is donating $40,000 this year to the ACGA to help provide “educational tools, leadership training, and community building strategies to participants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.” As the Giving Through Growing website notes, the ACGA estimates that over 2,000 new community gardens will be established this year, on top of the 20,000 existing community gardens.
The Giving Through Growing program encourages you to send virtual “eSeeds” to your friends, and for every eSeed that’s planted, Woodbridge will donate a dollar to the ACGS. It’s a pretty painless way to show support for the folks who are greening our urban spaces.
Those of us who garden understand that food waste can either become “black gold,” i.e. soil-enriching compost, or be shipped off to the landfill where it rots and generates methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Animal manures, too, can be a blessing to a farmer who raises his livestock on pasture, where the manure returns fertility to the soil as it has for centuries.
But when you crowd farm animals into what Jon Stewart aptly dubbed “an Abu Ghraib of animals” on Thursday’s Daily Show in his interview with Food, Inc.‘s Robert Kenner, the massive quantities of manure that result become an environmental disaster.
Diabetes and diet related diseases are statistically related closely to genetics, environment, and poverty. Placing them simply within kitchen ignorance from is offensive not only because it downplays the serious health effects of such diseases and the real suffering of people who experience them, but also assumes that they are caused by ignorance, by people not knowing what is good for them, not truly understanding "good" and "slow" food.
While I would never presume that ignorance is completely unrelated to such illnesses (they are complex and stem from a wide variety of causes), foods that contain high amounts of poor carbohydrates are significantly cheaper and more available to people on low or fixed incomes. They are often easier to prepare and consume. It strikes me as naive and divisive to assume that as Americans, especially those who are sick with diet related diseases, don't care or are deeply ignorant of food. Within the "food movement" we must avoid the limiting of the movement ideologically and practically to any set of ideals, lest we leave behind or ignore those who consume or appreciate food differently than ourselves.
There can be no one solution, and no one end goal of making the food system in this country more just and sustainable. As Wendell Berry says, "In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one."
I just wanted to thank you for the thoughtful words about all of us and the food that we consume. At the same time I would like to take issue with Bethany's comment.
I live right here at ground zero of our industrial agriculture system: the great San Joaquin Valley. Rich folks, middle class folks, and poor folks are all suffering a bit from kitchen illiteracy these days, but the poor seem to be more afflicted than most. With school lunch programs dependant on industrial agricultural castoffs from the government, donated food from similar sources, and effective advertizing by the same industry that benifits from the government programs; these folks don't have much of a chance. We need a sea change of new thinking that comes from neither the right or the left, but is just sensible in it's focus.