The Urban Food Revolution: Changing The Way We Feed Cities

The sustainability movement encompasses a great number of issues; Renewable Energy, Marine Preservation, and Agriculture, among others. It’s always been difficult to convey the urgency of these issues to the general public who don’t yet experience the adverse effects. However, we’ve found that the easiest way to make the sustainability movement resound in people’s minds is through food. Passed around the dinner table, enjoyed over meaningful conversations, and for many of us (whether we like to admit it or not), the first and last thing we think of everyday. Food is a religion, and has been bringing cultures and peoples together for as long as we can remember. Food is also a massively significant part of the sustainability movement. Fact: 50% of our ecological footprint comes from meat. Even more eye-opening: a meat-eating cyclist has a larger ecological footprint than a vegetarian Hummer owner.

With food as my religion, I dragged myself from the leathery recesses of the couch to Peter Ladner’s “The Urban Food Revolution: Changing The Way We Feed Cities” book launch on Commercial Drive. He presented some of the book’s most significant ideas, and afterwards, held a short Q&A. Inspired is a meager word to express what I felt last night. Here are some of the ideas he presented, some of which already exist, others of which are in the works.

How can we farm in an urban environment? Because of the lack of farmable areas in their immediate environments, urban farmers are finding ways to maximize space through innovative new farming methods. One such way is Aquaponics, a system devised to maximize space and resources. The Aquaponics system is composed of a small fishpond, on top of which hangs a rack of vegetable plants. The water from the fishpond is funneled upwards to water the plants, which contain natural fertilizers from the fish. Plants absorb the water, and the surplus cascades back down to the fish. The cycle goes on, and water is added to the system as needed. Off-shelf Aquaponics systems are being made available to the public.

Another innovative way involves the workplace. Some have collaborated with their employers to house rooftop gardens on their buildings. Grocery stores have also jumped in, planting vegetable gardens on their rooftops, which directly and efficiently answer questions of supply and distribution.  Mobile and pocket farmers markets are popping up even in the busiest sections of the downtown core. There are many people championing the urban farming cause, but we need many more.

How do we involve people in the urban farming movement? There are many opportunities being made available to people of all ages. The annual Pemberton Slow Food bike tour is one, and it promises to “Blow the fast food competition away”. This agritourism event has grown considerably, with around 4,000 cyclists touring the farms and experiencing the food Pemberton Valley has to offer. Some schools have integrated food literacy into their programs, hosting garden plots on-campus to encourage community building and learning in children.

The Stop Community Food Centre in Toronto is a great organization that houses a food bank, produce market, and artist centre, among others. Its programs include sustainable food systems education, agriculture, and community cooking.

What can the urban food revolution do for us? Peter mentioned a study that used good food as a crime prevention tool. Sound unrealistic? Not so. The study was conducted in the downtown Eastside, where they started distributing good, fresh produce through the food banks. Consequently, they noticed that crime and 911 calls dissipated substantially; after some time, emergency calls whittled down to almost none. It’s not such a surprise; healthier people have healthier dispositions. There is less room for aggravation, fighting, and crime. At the same time, governments can spend less on emergency or crime facilities and channel the money into green job creation.

Better food almost immediately equates to better health. A long-term goal in the urban food revolution is to lower government healthcare expenditures. The urban food revolution and all its supporting facilities could also increase the aesthetic and subsequent property value of homes and neighborhoods. It’s a win-win situation. However, we never said it was going to be easy.

What the urban food revolution needs to succeed: Local doesn’t automatically mean sustainable. It may actually be more sustainable to import rice from China because they have a larger agricultural capacity (better conditions, more facilities) in place. As a result, we need to figure out which food our area is at a capacity to produce while contributing least to our carbon footprint. We also need to consider factors other than carbon or GHG’s—factors like water and land pollution carry a lot of weight.

We need local processing facilities, as well as optimized distribution systems in order to be truly sustainable. We’re hoping that these systems will be just as innovative and resourceful as those of supply. The most important thing we need to achieve all this however, is a change in perception and a call to action.

Click here for more information on Peter Ladner’s book “The Urban Food Revolution: Changing The Way We Feed Cities”. If you’d like to take a stand, volunteer for RangiChangi Roots by clicking on the “Get Involved” tab on our homepage .

Youth weigh cultural cuisine in light of demand for local, sustainable food

RangiChangi Roots hosted a workshop in December 2011 at the first HSBC-Evergreen Youth Action Series to discuss sourcing local, organic food for ethnic dishes and supporting a sustainable diet.

by Tracy Bains

Arzeena Hamir of Richmond Food Security Society. Photo credit: Sean Stiller

“If we removed the potato, tomato and chili from South Asian cuisine, would you recognize your favourite dishes?” asks Arzeena Hamir of the Richmond Food Security Society.

Her question elicits shy smiles and soft laughter from youth aged 15-20 gathered early Sunday, December 4, at the W2 Media Café. They’re here at a workshop organized by RangiChangi Roots to explore whether it’s viable to source local, organic food for ethnic dishes and support a sustainable diet.

“Youth aren’t as tied to doing things the way they’ve always been done—they’re resourceful and imaginative. Straddling the cultural divide, young people can help facilitate change at home with their parents,” Hamir explains.

An agronomist and garden writer, Hamir uses her personal history to make the case for fusion cooking that blends local, heart-healthy ingredients like kale with traditional dishes like curry. She recounts how her family migrated from Kutch in northwestern India to East Africa in 1908, and then to Canada in 1973.

“Of all the things that change when you move,” Hamir tells the participants, “the last you’re willing to give up as an immigrant is your diet.”

Yet, over time, her family’s diet altered to reflect both South Asian and East African influences.

To put this in broader context, Hamir reveals that three key ingredients we associate closely with South Asian cooking—the potato, tomato and chili—originated in the Americas. Through trade, these foods came to Asia where they were adapted to the local diet.

“Can the same be done in Vancouver’s multi ethnic community?” she asks us to consider. “Can we adapt our favourite dishes in order to be healthier and more sustainable?”

The question is taken up next by Tricia Sedgwick, founder of World in a Garden, a multicultural urban agriculture project demonstrating the nutritional, cultural, social and environmental benefits of a just and local food system.

Tricia Sedgwick of World in a Garden. Photo credit: Sean Stiller

“I didn’t want to just sit in an office and tell people what to eat,” Sedgwick explains.

A registered holistic nutritionist, she started the garden to help participants experience the seed to table process and promote cross-cultural acceptance.

“We can grow traditional foods locally but also adapt when we are unable to do so,” Sedgwick tells the crowd. “At World in a Garden, we grow as many of The Seven Species of Israel as we can but many of the traditional staples of the region can’t be grown here—like dates, pomegranates and olives.”

Consequently, Sedgwick urges her young audience to take another look at the traditional Western diet—not McDonald’s and Pizza Hut—but back to First Nations communities who have long acted as stewards of the land.

“Why not cultivate corn, beans and squash known as The Three Sisters by the First Nations?” she asks. Like real siblings who support one another, these three crops are planted together because each assists the other to develop.

“Start by asking questions,” ends Sedgwick. “You don’t have to start a garden or make a big change—it’s about the small steps.” 

Additional workshops in the City of Vancouver will cover anti-racism, anti-discrimination and intercultural leadership training through citizenU, a three-year initiative designed to train 2,000 young leaders and reach youth from marginalized cultural communities. Following the program, up to 24 youth-driven community building projects will address the prevention of bullying, violence, crime and addictions.

Adding colour to the sustainable movement, RangiChangi Roots is an education, advocacy and networking hub of cultural and ethnically diverse groups working on green initiatives.

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In addition to having Arzeena and Tricia to help illustrate the questions around the coexistence of traditional, cultural cuisine with that of sustainable food systems, we were only too pleased to invite graphic facilitator Taraneh King of Whole Picture Thinking who produced this gem of a visual recording for us:

Life and Death

The best lechon in the Philippines can be found in Baybay, a small town in Southern Leyte, east of Cebu. I spent my youth taking yearly trips to Baybay, to visit my grandparents and spend time with my extended family. Fifty cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents spend an entire day by the beach, listening to music, playing mahjong or cards, hunting for hermit crabs, and eating.

We are very, very good at eating. My aunt, Tita Sylvia makes sure that we have enough food to spend the entire day at the beach, preparing the feast days before. I wake up to the cries of the pig in my grandparents’ backyard being slaughtered for our family’s epic lunch. Mang Kardo, my grandmother’s trusted roaster goes to the beach house straight after breakfast to roast the pig on a spit for four hours and turn it into glorious lechon.

I gave up pork for three years while living in Manila, only to fall madly in love with lechon all over again as my cousin swooped her fork from the lechon’s ribs to my plate. I shrugged, ate it with vinegar and garlic, and it was divine.

I realize that this entry might be a bit too graphic for the Western palate. Being passionate about environmental sustainability, I’ve been struggling with the environmental cost of my consumption of meat and how essential meat consumption is to my home culture. Does eating meat make me less passionate about sustainability? Is it strange that I am comfortable looking at the pig I’m having for lunch before it gets slaughtered?

Moving to Vancouver made me realize how disconnected I have become from my food system. Back home, I knew how the trees where my fruits come from looked like, I knew the names of at least twenty kinds of fish, and went to the public market to haggle and buy my meat and seafood early in the morning. Western supermarkets just make it so easy and convenient to get neatly packed meat and produce, and hectic everyday living makes these romantic notions of knowing where your food comes from become such a hassle. Herein lies the problem – we are so disconnected from the earth and the damage that we place on it, that our actions are no longer guided by the non-monetary consequences of our consumption.

A friend of mine once told me about the time he slaughtered a goat for dinner. I’ve never killed a mammal for food before, so I wondered how this affected his consumption of meat. “I still eat meat. In order to have life, there must be death,” he said. I thought about that, and realized that this philosophy applies to all living beings. Even plants have to stop growing to nourish us.

As frequent my local farmer’s market and every week, I am reminded of the tension that exists between health and affordability. I don’t question that the higher price point reflects higher quality, better feed and labour-intensive organic farming. However, our society and economy have much to do before it can become a just and equal food system, accessible to everyone, regardless of their economic situation.

While there are no simple solutions the problems surrounding food security and climate change, reflecting on the process of growing, distributing, slaughtering, preparing and eating food, might make all of us better consumers who waste less, and eat better food.

Eat good food, try new food, share food with other people, grow your own food, kill your food and think about how comfortable you are with that, practice Meatless Mondays, prepare your food and be thankful to everyone who was involved in the process of getting that food on your plate.

Mao vs. Wild

It’s always tough picking out which movies to watch when the Vancouver International Film Festival rolls along. There are always so many movies to watch, and so little time and money to go out and see them.  Being my geeky self, I watched Waking the Green Tiger last weekend. China, Mao, new green movement: those key words were enough to make me commit an hour and a half to watching a documentary – films I’m never usually the biggest fan of.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward involved killing off sparrows, reclaiming land, wiping out forests and flattening out mountains in the name of progress. It was a success to conquer nature and extract its bounty. Archival footage of workers happily scaring off sparrows and passing on sacks of soil were shown, reflecting a sense of solidarity in the hope of pushing the nation into development. VIFF audiences are always more engaged and responsive compared to regular moviegoers, and everyone chuckled and smirked in retrospect. Then I noticed deep, troubled breaths as footage of recycling scavengers picked through the garbage beside a mountain that was once their farmland, before the government built dams over it.

The film focused mostly on social justice and land tenure issues for the farmers along the rivers, who were in danger of losing their land to the construction of hydroelectric dams. The footage was very emotionally charged with farmers fighting for their land, triggering a wave of interest for the cause of the local environmental movements. I had hoped that the film would spend a little more time digging into the contentious issues it touched on, namely:

1. How was the Great Leap Forward any different from what had happened in the Industrial Revolution?
2. One of the officials interviewed said, “Did Mao have bad intentions? No.” I most definitely agree. The struggle between development and environmental degradation is so much more tense when you’re living in dire circumstances.
3. Mistakes were made by Mao and felt by the people who were tasked to finish the job. What could be the mistakes that we are making now, as we try to rectify the wrongs we committed in the past?

I’ve been toying around with the idea of emotional attachment and ownership to the motherland and its people, and how, as immigrants in a foreign land, we lack a certain degree of solidarity with the new land we inhabit and its people. How can we live in Vancouver, a city unlike most of the ones we come from, bursting with tree-lined streets, random patches of forests throughout the city and among the freshest water and air available in the world, and still be cognizant of the environmental degradation that seems so far removed from the reality of our daily lives?

Waking the Green Tiger is showing at Empire Granville on Friday, October 7^th at 9:30pm, and on Tuesday, October 11^th at 12:20pm. For more information, visit: VIFF: Waking the Green Tiger

For further reading on General Mao’s development agenda and its effects on the environment, check out Mao’s War Against Nature by Judith Shapiro.

For images of recycling depots and rural development in China, watch Manufactured Landscapes by Edward Burtynsky, or view the photo series on Recycling and the Three Gorges Dam on his website.

by Nicole Ignacio