Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (11 page)

Toronto, Canada

As it turns out, the crisp white jackets, white chef's hats, and knee-length aprons are ideal beekeeping attire. “You don't want to wear dark colors,” my friend David Garcelon, executive chef at the Fairmont Royal York hotel in downtown Toronto, warned me as we climbed the last few flights of stairs to the rooftop herb garden and apiary.
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Dark-colored clothing, especially brown and black, puts the hive on high alert. It's too “bear-like,” he dead-panned. Bears, as even the most citified person knows, are the bees’ public enemy number one. “Oh, and bees tend to be cranky in the morning,” Garcelon continued. “And don't stand right in front of the hives’ entrance,” he quickly informed me, as if he were debriefing me to meet a head of state (apparently everyone has this tendency to stand and observe right in front of the small opening at the front of the hive; bees like a clear runway to their home).

The day I had scheduled for my tour of Garcelon's rooftop apiary was already not ideal. It was drizzling, and there was a little bit of wind. “Bees hate wind, too,” he informed me. All I needed to do was to douse myself in perfume (perfume doesn't make bees angry, but it would certainly attract unwanted attention from them), and I'd have an urban bee adventure to remember.

In 2008, Garcelon decided that beehives would be a great addition to his rooftop herb garden. With the help of the Toronto Beekeepers Cooperative, three hives were installed.

“The first question was if bees could survive fourteen stories up in a major urban center,” Garcelon told me, as I foraged a few late-season
alpine strawberries from nearby raised garden beds also on the fourteenth-story roof. The rooftop herb garden, with its seventeen beds of lavender, thyme, rosemary, chives, strawberries, cape gooseberries, tomatoes, basil, mints, and other culinary plants would provide some sustenance for the bees. But fourteen stories up, with the wind and the height, and without any other obvious food sources, no one knew if the bees would make it.

As it turned out, the bees did just fine. Garcelon was able to harvest 380 pounds (172 kilograms) of honey—that's over 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of honey per hive—that first year. As we looked out over the parapet toward Lake Ontario, Garcelon suggested that maybe the bees forage on a small chain of little islands, just opposite downtown in Lake Ontario known as the “Toronto Islands,” or, perhaps they went as far as the Don Valley, a slash of greenery over three miles away.

In 2009, Garcelon and his beekeeping team doubled the number of hives to six, but it was a cold, wet summer. The harvest was a mere 425 pounds (193 kilograms). He'd just harvested and bottled honey two weeks before my visit. As he handed me the jar, he warned that it wasn't a good idea to open it on the roof near the hives. Honey is food for bees, so they're pretty interested in it, and an open jar of honey is just a bad idea. Of course, all these rules are common sense when you think about them. But they were rules picked up along the way, sometimes the hard way. An early-morning television media event to announce the hotel's rooftop hives concluded with a reporter wanting to taste some honey on the roof but ended with him running off-screen on live morning television.

Safely indoors, I cracked open the jar of urban Toronto honey. The late-season honey was a beautiful translucent amber color, tasting a bit like buttery caramel or toffee. Not surprisingly, the menthols and spiciness of lavender and mint were apparent in the Fairmont Royal York hotel honey. It was also rather thick and sticky.

One of the joys of honey, I discovered as I traveled around and sought out “city honey” from places like Paris, Versailles, London, and
Vancouver, was the different seasonal tastes and
terroir
expressed in the jars. By
terroir
, I mean that the unique characteristics of honey (or wine for that matter) are influenced by the interplay of the weather that year, the specifics of the geography of the place, the season it was made and harvested, and the inherent geological attributes that play out in the year's production. The small pot of Versailles honey, for instance, was thinner and clearer, almost oily, but in a delicious “clarified butter” kind of way. It, too, had mint and lavender top notes but without the caramel undertones of the honey I got in Toronto. Vancouver honey was intensely floral and sweet, characteristics that most likely came from the apple blossoms in the nearby rooftop herb garden and orchard. They were a snapshot of the variety and flavors that the bees had sampled, like a season suspended in liquid sunshine.

Another joy of tasting urban honey was the layering of flavors due to the variety of flowers that were encapsulated in each jar. Late-season honeys tended toward these darker, rounder flavors, while early-season honey had higher-pitched sweetness and subtler floral notes. But it's not just the variations caused by the different seasonal blooms; city honeys are known to contain hundreds of types of pollens, whereas rural honeys, especially those near monocrop fields, can contain less than a dozen.

I was becoming an urban honey snob.

R
ussians are the European leaders in household food growing. The country's Union of Gardeners reports that seventy million Russians own food-growing spaces. Sixty-five percent of Moscow households grow some of their own food.
¹
St. Petersburg urbanites aren't far behind, with 50 percent of households in a city of almost four and a half million growing food.
²
The historical reasons range from frequent interruptions in the food system to the fact that a centralized economy and an overwhelmingly industrialized, chemical-heavy agricultural scenario—even in postcommunist Russia—means that if you want organic, fresh produce, then you likely have to grow it yourself. But very little of that produce is urban agriculture. Instead, household food gardening happens almost exclusively in plots and at country homes, or dachas, outside the city. It's not uncommon for a family, no matter what its economic class, to have a dacha, since Russia has a mushrooming surplus of rural land as the population shrinks and concentrates in cities. These country-garden plots can range from a winterized country house to a glorified garden shed with a bed.

There are recent reports, however, of community gardens starting in
cities like Moscow, modeled on Western European and North American ones, where a Muscovite can rent a plot for one thousand rubles (about thirty-three dollars) a month.
³

Berlin is another city steeped in a long history of personal-use food gardening, but here, it is right in the city. Berlin has 540 “colonies,” which are large urban spaces divided into eighty thousand privately owned allotment gardens, and a century-and-a-half tradition of urban food growing. Even Albert Einstein had an allotment in Berlin, but he was notified that he was going to forfeit it unless he started to properly maintain his unruly plot.
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(Take note, messy gardeners, this could be a sign of genius.) Berliners can even have their mail redirected to their allotments in the summer.

However, I was drawn to Bristol and London because, food-wise, the United Kingdom and North America were in the same proverbial sinking boat of almost complete reliance on an industrial food system with a supermarket-retail model. Britons eat the most “industrialized” diet of any European nation—one in three meals is a type of fast or “ready-made” food.
⁵
One-quarter of the population is obese
⁶
; childhood obesity is skyrocketing; and Britons waste a tremendous amount of food through the industrially supplied supermarket system: 6.7 million metric tons a year, or one-third of the food purchased in each house-hold.
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Britons import most of their food from outside the country, despite having a solid agricultural sector, and they are as utterly dependent as we North Americans are on the hope that the shelves of the supermarkets will continue to be full. In other words, city dwellers in the United Kingdom are in the same precarious position of experiencing alarmingly high levels of food insecurity. In fact, it was Lord Cameron of Dillington, the then head of the UK Countryside Agency, who declared that the United Kingdom was “nine meals from anarchy” after an in-depth 2007 report on the nation's food system was conducted.
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Maybe it was the wake-up call that British cities needed, since food security and urban agriculture finally seem to be getting some traction in
places like London and Bristol, and interesting things are percolating as a result.

London not only has a history of fervent urban food gardeners growing on some thirty thousand allotment plots, but right now, huge swaths of the city are under construction or scheduled for redevelopment. London's mayor, the kooky, two-wheeling, scarecrow-haired Boris Johnson, has an aggressive and overt green agenda. (His daughter's middle names are “Lettice” and “Peaches.”) I had read about green-thumbed entrepreneurs, like London's newest (and only) commercial vineyard owner and vintner, whose newly planted vines are growing in an industrial area of the city. The city-supported Capital Growth Network had announced a goal of helping London establish 2,012 new food-growing spaces by 2012. And the 2012 London Olympic Games committee had announced that it had a food policy for the games—the first of its kind—that would leave a legacy of a strengthened local food system in its wake.

The United Kingdom was always a bit ahead of the curve anyway. And London was the city that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, so maybe it was poised to lead a type of deindustrialized urban food revolution.

S
T. WERBURGH'S
C
ITY
F
ARM
, B
RISTOL

Unlike in North America, where developments and roadways are given pastoral names for marketing purposes, Watercress Road in Bristol is actually named for the natural watercress beds that could be found there until a century ago. (The cress beds gave way not to the farm but to housing in 1910.) The houses were destroyed in an explosion nearby as a storm drain was being built. The derelict houses were finally torn down in the 1970s, and in 1980 area residents rehabilitated the site as a city farm with the support of Bristol City Council. It was Bristol's second city farm.

City farms seem like vestiges of village life in the United Kingdom but are, in fact, later arrivals on the urban-agriculture scene. They came out of the 1970s in London and spread to Bristol. Windmill Hill Farm was Bristol's first city farm in 1976, then came St. Werburgh's in 1980. City farms are exactly as they sound, small farm holdings in urban areas that contribute to the social fabric of the immediate community. They provide a rural space, food, food education, and a community green space for urbanites.

Prince Charles has been the patron of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, the United Kingdom's main city farm umbrella organization, since 2001. There are nine city farms within the inner metropolitan limits and sixteen within the Greater London area. The oldest is the Kentish Town City Farm, founded in 1972, right in the heart of Camden, in King's Cross, inner-city London. According to the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, which supports 120 or so community-managed affiliate city farms, there are a thousand community gardens and orchards, a growing number of affiliate allotment
gardens, and two-hundred-plus city farms and community gardens in development—city farms in the United Kingdom are a £40 million ($63 million) industry. Very few charge admission. Instead, they depend on private and public funding as well as income from therapeutic social horticulture and agriculture programs that benefit socially disadvantaged youth at risk of slipping into crime and poverty and physically and mentally challenged clients.

St. Werburgh's City Farm, perhaps because its creation predates the founding of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, operates independently as a separate registered charity. It is both a working farm—raising pigs, goats, sheep, ducks, chickens, and rabbits for meat—and a greenhouse and training center for youth and mentally challenged persons. The public is welcome, free of charge, to wander through and observe the animals and take in the different rhythms of a small mixed farm, which includes a community garden and greenhouses in a highly urbanized area, like in the heart of Bristol. The main purpose of the farm is for people to have a place where they can experience a bit of rural living regardless of their income or physical capabilities. As such, it's open almost year-round, free of charge.

“We run it as close to a working farm as we can,” said farm manager Tim Child, on a drizzly, concrete-gray morning when I showed up for a tour of this urban farmyard.
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Already soft-spoken and measured with his words, he proceeded with caution, “Everything we produce here, we use for meat.” And then he looked for my reaction. Clearly, he had had his run-ins with vegetarian journalists.

A sow just had a litter a week before, so we scrambled over a wood fence and into a concrete shed. The largest sow I had ever seen in my life was lying on her side, sleeping with a large hairy ear shielding her eye from the light. Thirteen piglets were piled into a corner under the orange glow of a heat lamp.

Still measuring my ability to stomach such issues, Child mentioned that he intended to keep six piglets to fatten but the rest would be sold
off right away. Some might even end up on the menu at the nearby farm café, he offered. I didn't fake bravado, but I didn't pretend I didn't eat bacon, pork chops, or ham either. Once he realized that I wasn't going to break down at the thought of the piglets becoming sausage meat, he continued. When the piglets were weaned, the sow would go, too. “As soon as I decide I'm not going to breed them again, they get replaced,” he said.

When Child came to the farm, there were too many old animals, he said, and the place just wasn't functioning very well. Nor was it very interesting. Having worked on a commercial hog farm with 3,500 pigs, he had to figure out how to keep a good variety of animals and have good turnover on such a small site. And the solution was that the animals raised on the farm could not become pets.

Finding slaughtering facilities willing to take on one or a few animals at a time, Child said, was problematic for small mixed farms in the United Kingdom. Luckily, he had a deal with a slaughtering plant that was only fifteen miles (twenty-four kilometers) away. Selling meat was never a problem. He kept a list of area residents who would buy as much as he could sell, and there was also the farm's independently run onsite café. Demand, it seemed, always outstripped the farm's ability to supply the local neighborhood.

I asked if customers pay more for his locally produced meat, and Child replied that they pay a “fair price.” “They've seen where the meat comes from; it's fresh, and they also want to support the farm.”
¹⁰

Meat sales, however, were not the main income source for St. Werburgh's. Charitable donations from private and public sources were the mainstay of the farm. It also helped that the farm paid only a “peppercorn rent,” a very low fee, in other words, to the Bristol city council, owners of the land. Plant sales from the onsite greenhouse also brought in a few pounds here and there, and there was income generated from the training programs that the city farm provides to “clients.” (St. Werburgh's provides horticultural training to adults with learning disabilities and also offers youth programs to troubled school-aged youth.)