HOW TO EAT A CITY

“Was I born to get up in the morning to sit in traffic, to work at a deadening office job all the day only to sit in traffic again at night and come home to an empty house that I inhabit so I can sleep enough so I can get up in the morning to sit in traffic…?”

--anonymous

Lets rethink this.

Let’s put the workplace just outside the door, in a checkerboard of vacant city blocks that scream to be cleaned of debris and trash. You walk to work, or bicycle, or maybe take the subway for a few minutes. All over the city, every city, there are thousands of acres of vacant, unused and abused properties that need greening, need planting, need workers working on them, producing something of real value.

It’s called food.

There is a revolution underway in this country, if you haven’t noticed. It’s called urban farming. Many of the 8,000 farmer’s markets that have sprung up in the United States in the last dozen years have been inside city limits.

People are farming vegetables on rooftops in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, an acre here and an acre there. The Brooklyn Grange was the first, six stories above the street, followed by East Street Rooftop Farm, also perched on high. Now rooftop gardens are sprouting all over the city that never sleeps.

Clever folks in the Midwest are forming beehive cooperatives across urban backlots to harvest honey from bees foraging on weeds and wildflowers growing in lost corners of big town.

A lady in Sacramento, California, runs an undercover business inside a 8,000 square foot warehouse. What’s she doing in there, huh? She’s growing and harvesting delectable high-end fungi, thousands of pounds a year, under the name Dragon Gourmet Mushrooms.

School kids in the South Bronx are building vertical walls of edible greens all over the borough and even high in the Hancock Tower in Boston. Their produce is sold to schools and local customers in their slice of the Big Apple. They are in business. They earn real dollars.

On the very edge of the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, a young lady milks her goats morning and evening at Mountain Flower Goat Dairy. She can’t produce enough to meet demand.

In Reno, Nevada, two women wanted to farm a hardscrabble lot in the city, but city statutes would not permit such a use. So they worked to change the laws. They did. They are farmers to this day in the heart of the beast.

Two young entrepreneurs in Santa Barbara, California founded Green City Farms to develop small unit vertical towers suitable for growing vegetables and row fruits as high as an elephant’s eye. Something similar is going on up in Temecula, only Ken Keitz, Jr. is growing strawberries in big towers, so many that his urban acre yielded over $300,000 in gross revenue recently.

A foursome in Baltimore, Maryland, set up a B corporation, and they are assembling an entire network of urban garden farms with the objective of making the entire city over into a huge green space that feeds the city folk well day in and day out.

And how about that headline about the very recent 60-acre inner-city farm initiative in Detroit, wherein the city planners have decided its far better for residents to farm vacant land and produce valuable crops than it is to clean up dirty needles, empty liquor bottles, and squatter’s camps.

And so it grows. Greenhouses are erupting atop urban buildings in our ever greening USA. There are automated vertical growing towers being installed in skyscrapers. Fish farms are finding their way into warehouse basements. Vegetable sprout businesses are being born in backrooms and down alleyways. Chicago hustlers are planting their first pick-your-own fruit orchard now. Backyard chickens are suddenly everywhere and it’s only a matter of time before people flock to back lot egg businesses.

Okay, here’s the punch line. That age old enterprise called farming is suddenly a big new opportunity in the inner city. Creative people are and will be making money right outside their doors, working in the sun, greening up the urban steel and concrete. They are changing how people eat and what their cities look, feel, smell, and taste like.

This business opportunity is in its infancy. Its growing, and it’s going to grow big and strong in a thousand urban boroughs and neighborhoods. People want fresh food. They want organic food. They want to know where their food is coming from. And in the poorest neighborhoods, citizens just want access to fresh food because there isn’t a supermarket operating anywhere for miles around. And they want jobs. They can and do seed their own employment opportunities.

Now, imagine yourself an urban farmer. Your customers are right at your doorstep. They come to you, every few days, every week. They want the organic produce you have grown, not the stuff shipped in from 3,000 miles or even half a planet away. They want to support you because they want a farm in their backyard instead of that empty lot where the drug deals go down.

To hell with sitting in traffic morning and night.. Damn that dead end job in a deadening office under glaring florescent lights. You need to get out into the fresh air and sunshine, brothers and sisters, and get your hands dirty in that good city composted soil lovingly nurtured and spread around.

Oh, yes, you do.