The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

By Sandor Ellix Katz

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Food Production Urban Style

The 2000 United Nations Food and Agriculture report entitled Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture (UPA) on the policy agenda states: "Numerous examples in recent years have shown the potential for UPA to ameliorate emergency food shortage situations: cities in Indonesia, Kosovo, Russia and other war torn and economic-crisis zones have turned to UPA." In short, we are all inherently capable of growing our own food, no matter where we live or what life brings.

• President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has set a target of supplying 20 percent of their vegetable production to come from urban gardens
• The Food Project in Boston, MA produces 130,000 pounds of vegetables per year
• In Toledo, thriving vegetable gardens can be seen at public housing projects
• The Catherine Ferguson Academy, a public alternative high school for pregnant teens and young mothers in Detroit is a veritable small farm, complete with gardens, milking goats, horses, bees, and many other things typically only found in rural areas, yet it encompasses a city block
• A 1996 survey by the American Community Gardening Association reports this of 6,021 gardens:
• Nearly 1,000 are public housing gardens
• 500 are school gardens
• 87 were part of mental health or rehabilitation programs, and
• 85 were associated with senior centers.

This way of thinking is not always without barriers. In the 1990s, in response to being asked why the city was auctioning off hundreds of city owned lots with gardens on them, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani responded "This is a free market economy; welcome to the era after communism." During this period, the More Gardens! Coalition was founded, who put out a pamphlet stating "What Giuliani and his real estate supporters haven't bargained for is the strong fight we'll put up to save our green havens." They weren't alone, and in the end Bette Midler, with her privately funded land trust, supplemented another offer by the Trust for Public Land and saved all 112 gardens.

Other areas aren't so lucky. South Central Community Farm in Los Angeles is a 14 acre plot of land that was sustaining to 350 families deemed below the USDA poverty standards. These families each had smaller plots on the land that were not tiny, weekender type projects, but self sustaining ecosystems full of Meso-American plants as well as native species; all were used by their prospective tenders to feed their families. The land was dedicated to the community as a sign of goodwill after the Rodney King rebellion of 1992, but after over a decade, in 2003, the city sold it back to the original owners through backroom political deals with no consideration for those that depended on it. Small bulldozers had begun plowing through the land in 2006, yet as of the writing of this book, the farmers still fight for their rights.

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