Good Food is Everybody's Business
Practical and at times comical (just like a goat!), connected both to nature and the city, and slightly rebellious — City Goats: The Goat Justice League’s Guide to Urban Goat Keeping is a book for gardeners, people committed to eating locally, and anyone who has ever pondered joining the backyard goat revolution.
HISTORY SHOWS URBAN FARMS CAN FEED CITIES WHILE PROVIDING ECOLOGICAL SERVICES – Perhaps the revival of urban farming will lead not just to a diet for a small planet but a diet for smaller people?
It’s the middle of March and time to get your seeds in – and for those of us lucky enough to live in milder climates, time to get those cool season plant starts! Buying starts and seeds from local growers and at local sales ensures that you get plants that are climate-appropriate. Get planting!
Urban Roots is a documentary about farming within the city limits of Detroit, and as such, it’s a handy way to get an education on the subject in something like 90 minutes. Dedicated Detroiters are working tirelessly to fulfill their vision for locally-grown, sustainably farmed food in a city where people – as in much of the county – have found themselves cut off from real food and limited to the lifeless offerings of fast food chains and grocery stores stocked with processed food.
Ever more Americans are becoming urban dwellers and access to good quality, reasonably priced food grown sustainably is more and more challenging. Food is grown using chemical-laden agricultural methods and travels longer distances to kitchen or table. We need to find ways to bring sustainable food production closer closer to home.
Christina Hahs is a sprite with a direct stare. Even at the age of 27 she is not one of the youngest farmers in the City of Seattle. In the egalitarian context of urban agriculture it would be wrong to describe her with any other superlative or enumerator but she is, on her own, guiding a group known as the Harvest Collective. It has not been an easy year, however.
Are we having a spate of “mid-life food crises” or are folks in their late 30s and early 40s simply realizing that the words “supermarket” and “good food” don’t seem to belong in the same sentence anymore? Annette Cottrell – self-avowed “extreme gardener” – and Joshua McNichols turned their love of whole, minimally processed, naturally grown food into both a passion and a book.
People like Will Allen and Erika Allen, his daughter, have been able to convince Chicago’s politicians that for-profit businesses like urban farms can be an economic engine, not just for the farmers and their employees, but for the city in the form of tax revenues. A well-functioning urban land use policy will allow small farms and food related businesses to put people to work, to generate income, and to pay taxes.
