A three-month effort by The Groupe de travail en agriculture urbaine, (http://www.agriculturemontreal.info/) a coalition of 50 organizations and members of environmental and gardening groups, recently met with success, when they managed to collect more than 25,000 signatures on a petition to force the city to hold public hearings on urban farming.
This is an idea whose time has undisputedly come. While some people may believe that efforts to introduce urban farming initiatives are only favored by permaculture activists and tree huggers, and perhaps those intent on sharing their limited living space with chickens and rabbits, a recent poll conducted revealed that 51% of respondents in Montreal were already growing food in their yards, gardens and balconies. The next step is to encourage the city to help introduce and foster larger- scale, long-term, sustainable urban farming projects.
Low income urban dwellers spend between 40% and 60% of their income on food each year, yet many of them suffer from high rates of obesity and diabetes, due to limited sources of fresh produce. Why? Because choosing to eat in a healthy way is hard on the wallet! Junk food is exponentially cheaper.
Studies of already-established urban agriculture programs have proven that they both increase the amount and the quality of fresh food available to people living in cities. After all, urban agriculture is really nothing new and was heavily used during World War I and II and the Great Depression, when fresh food was scarce.
Not only would participating in urban gardening save us money, it would also contribute to better health and nutrition, as we consumed fresh food, free of pesticides and preservatives. Not to mention, the sheer joy of eating something you’ve grown yourself! I have friends who take pictures of their puny grape tomatoes, grown in a planter on their balcony, with all the pride and adulation usually reserved for your first born. They know who they are…
My most prized possession is my balcony herb garden. Just the smell of fresh basil, marjoram, and thyme wafting in the air while I sit outside makes me happy. I can only imagine the satisfaction of someone growing actual vegetables and fruits!
The immediacy and availability of foods from all over the world goes hand-in-hand with our “want it all, want it now” consumer attitudes, but it comes at a terrible cost; environmentally, politically, and socially. -
The goal, at the end of the day, is to affect a paradigm shift, creating a different perspective on food and how it arrives on our tables. Not everything needs to be purchased and there’s something immensely gratifying and financially sound about growing it ourselves.
The 100-Mile Diet
A fascinating book on a related subject that many readers may find of interest is “The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating”. The book, written by Canadian writers Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, recounts their experiences, including motivations and challenges, on restricting their diet, for one year, to include only foods grown within 100 miles of their residence.
Think it’s easy? It’s not. They soon find out that most meals consumed by North Americans travel “a planet-busting average of 1,500 miles from farm to plate!”
The immediacy and availability of foods from all over the world goes hand-in-hand with our “want it all, want it now” consumer attitudes, but it comes at a terrible cost; environmentally, politically, and socially.
Smith and MacKinnon's local eating experiment (http://100mile.foodtv.ca/) reveals all sorts of truths that are disturbing, debatable, fiercely readable and enormously important for the welfare of our environment.
"A single supermarket today may carry 45,000 different items; 17,000 new food products are introduced each year in the United States. Yet here we were in the modern horn of plenty, and almost nothing came from the people or the landscape that surrounds us. How had our food system come to this?"
It’s a question worth asking ourselves…
