Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (22 page)

The problem, as Christensen saw it, was that this system, though proven, was all “in Wally's head at the time.” Farming traditionally has been a trial-and-error or, slightly better, a long, hands-on apprenticeship scenario with an experienced farmer. If Satzewich had to consult personally with every urban farm that wanted to use his sub-acre model, or if they had to trail around with him for hands-on learning, the uptake would be slow. But Christensen and Satzewich realized that this model was already somewhat systematized; it just needed to be stated into words. “It was very franchise-ready.”

Christensen and Satzewich struck a business partnership agreement. He would be the farming expert who would continue to innovate and tweak. She would be the writer who could put the system into incremental instruction guides, accessible for novice urban farmers.

“We characterize it as a self-serve, self-directed, online learning series for self-starters,” Christensen said. The basics of SPIN farming are detailed in seven modules, each guide available for purchase online for $11.99. The bundle of seven is $83.93 and can be purchased as a print textbook. When I remarked that it was a small sliver of the cost of an agricultural degree, even in Canada, Christensen quickly pointed out, “And those are largely outdated techniques and methods” being taught to young farmers.

Clearly, Christensen and Satzewich's hard work has paid off. There are now over six hundred practicing SPIN farmers who share successes and failures, and who support one another on an e-mail discussion service. Interest in the SPIN model continues to grow, but Christensen was quick to remark that the interest was strong early on, even in 2003. Most entrepreneurs coming to SPIN have no farming background or any practical experience. They are drawn by the economic potential. And Christensen is quick to point out that this interest predates the economic crisis of 2008. People were, and are, attracted to SPIN farming because of the opportunity, not because of desperation. “Farming is no longer viewed as a downwardly mobile profession.”

One of the uphill battles of urban farming is that, in many cities, it is at the mercy of outdated municipal policies. In Philadelphia, it's still illegal to sell from the same land that you grow on. And there's really no smooth process that helps entrepreneurs to get access to land in the city, but Christensen gets calls “daily” from other municipalities that are looking for a boilerplate policy and paperwork to cope with the volume of requests coming in from would-be urban farmers.

Only the markets will decide whether urban agriculture will be a lasting business concept in places like North America. “If these ways really are better, they'll dominate. We don't have to fight anything, we just have to do it,” Christensen replied when I asked her if SPIN farming would be around in a decade or two in North America. The “new frontier” aspect is in the form of interest from people in developing nations who can benefit from a relatively easily adoptable business model for very little cost—even in those countries whose governments are desperately trying to move their populations away from farming to get more in line with industry in the developed world. If people in the developed countries like Canada and the United States are choosing to be involved in urban agriculture, Christensen reasons, then it might become an acceptable option for entrepreneurs in developing countries. Christensen was particularly excited about the possibility of helping women in Sierra Leone establish SPIN-farming businesses. As a brand, SPIN farming provides an instant professional identity. “If we can export Pepsi
^®
, we can export SPIN farming and have it accepted and have it become a ‘force multiplier.’”

At the height of his SPIN-farming productivity, Satzewich had twenty-five urban plots, ranging from 500 square feet (46 square meters) to 3,000 square feet (275 square meters).
¹⁵
He's since cut back. SPIN farming and revenue from his SPIN-farming workshops and
guide-books that he and his now-business partner, Roxanne Christensen, have put together have put him in a position that many farmers can't even contemplate. He's thinking about his retirement plans now. Satzewich and Vandersteen have bought some land in a small town that Satzewich says is like a “Clint Eastwood movie set.” But he's already growing some market crops out there, so retirement might just mean something different to a farmer than it does to the rest of us.

T
oronto, Canada's most populous city, has two nicknames that speak to its food roots: “Hogtown” refers to Toronto's early prominence as a pork-packing hub in Canada (much like Chicago was in its early days), and “Cabbagetown” is another working-class moniker given to the eastside neighborhood where Irish immigrants grew cabbages in their front yards in the mid-nineteenth century.

Toronto is still bursting with food gardens, but these days those front yards, community gardens, and allotment gardens are just as likely to contain okra, Thai basil, and tomatillos as they are to sprout heads of cabbage. Toronto is Canada's most culturally diverse city, and the city's backyards and gardens are a United Nations of ingredients. Forty percent of Torontonians grow some sort of food at home, and countless others grow food in the 226 known community gardens spread out across the city.
¹
(Toronto has a number of unofficial, self-organizing “squatter” community gardens, run by groups that have simply commandeered vacant and unoccupied areas for unofficial community gardens on land that is not part of this total.) The city also operates twelve allotment gardens totaling 1,674 individual plots, but there's a waiting
list of five hundred people hoping to get an allotment plot.
²
If the capacity were there, Toronto would be virtually dripping in food gardens, some of them established by choice as leisure pursuits and others established by necessity.

F
OOD
S
HARE
T
ORONTO

I was in Toronto, arguably Canada's food capital, on a postcard-perfect clear October day. The air was crisp and thin, but the sun was hot. I had made my way to the Ontario provincial legislature grounds known as Queen's Park for a harvest celebration called Eat-In Ontario. As I approached, it looked as if a mammoth food-focused circus had just rolled into town.

I watched in amazement as a group of fourth-grade boys huddled in a tent cheerfully sampling beets—albeit in dried, chip form. According to the chef who had prepared and was serving the beet chips, there had been beet-chocolate cupcakes swirled with ruby-red beet-infused cream cheese icing earlier. But the previous gang of ravenous elementary school kids had wiped out the supply before moving on to the “garlic tent,” where another Toronto chef was piping garlic foam onto crackers for the kids. Under dozens of tents, groups of children of various ages were paying close attention as they learned about local vegetables and produce, and actually enjoying samples of foods like squash and carrots.

After the roving herds of children had grazed for about an hour, organizers gathered them up for the pinnacle event of the day. The kids sat on the grass and squirmed in sheer anticipation as people in bumblebee outfits and dressed up as sunflowers led the countdown. Then, at 1:45 pm exactly on the command of the bee and sunflower people, several hundred kids brought giant red apples to their lips and took the biggest bite they could manage. It was all part of the Big Crunch 2010—a synchronized bite shared by 64,000 kids from 125-odd schools across
Canada that day. The Big Crunch 2011 doubled its participation with 112,352 crunchers who simultaneously shared a bite from coast to coast.

FoodShare, the originator of the Big Crunch and the organizer of today's harvest event, was founded in 1985 and is now Canada's largest community food-security organization. From the beginning, it has been a proactive food-security organization that uses community-development strategies as alternatives to the usual stopgap emergency food-relief services provided by food banks. FoodShare began a subsidized CSA program called the Good Food Box in 1994. Community gardens, urban-agriculture demonstrations in low-income neighborhoods, and food instruction via community kitchens were part of its earliest programs, filling the “food-literacy” gap by passing on knowledge that used to be taught in the home and on the farm.

FoodShare has grown into a web of educational and community outreach programs and an advocacy and activism hub for food justice in Toronto. With its 682-square-foot (63-square-meter) demonstration urban garden and compost facility, it has helped to facilitate 720 student nutrition programs as part of its role as a key partner in the Toronto Partners for Student Nutrition, and it provides dozens of different school food-literacy programs as part of its Field to Table Schools program. It offers mother-and-toddler nutrition classes. FoodShare also operates seventeen “Good Food Markets”—farmers’ markets in the low-income neighborhoods that are not only poor candidates for farmers’ markets; they are urban food deserts.

“Toronto is the most developed and complex—in a food sense—city in the world,” Debbie Field, executive director of FoodShare, declared to me as we chatted among the hubbub of the Eat-In Ontario festival.
³
This makes FoodShare's seemingly simple mission—to work with “communities to ensure that everyone has sustainably produced, good, healthy food”—all the more tricky.

Toronto is Canada's most culturally diverse city, and it's one of the world's most multicultural cities per capita.
⁴
It's a huge immigration
hub, absorbing 55,000 new arrivals each year.
⁵
Fifty-one percent of Toronto residents were born elsewhere. (The Peoria, Illinois-born, New York-raised Field herself is part of this demographic.) Just considering the multicultural makeup of the city, not to mention its population of over 2.4 million residents, has a huge impact on how you think about food security, explained Field. So, while FoodShare works to build a resilient food system, Field knows that “in a city of immigrants, it's
as
important to have mangoes [available] as apples.” And because of the immigrant population—a sector of the population that often values fresh produce much more than Canadian-born eaters—you have a high cultural demand for fresh and varied produce.

Toronto, like any big city, has food deserts. Field cited a recent study by Darcy Higgins, a Toronto-based food activist and writer, who researched the proximity of grocery stores to residential areas in Toronto and found that only 51 percent of residents in the city live within 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) of a grocery store.
⁶
“So 49 percent of people are five, ten, fifteen kilometers away from anything,” Fields reemphasized.

The lack of planning on the part of the city to include food retail in zoning and planning discussions is currently one of Field's hot-button issues. Field explained that “FoodShare wants to change the city's planning act so that developers can't build housing unless they can show that someone can access fresh food from within one kilometer of where they live. You can force them to do it in a mini-moment if there is political will!”

At first this seemed a bit extreme to me, until I recalled that I grew up in a community that had that family-owned-and-operated grocery store with the produce and fresh meat section, and it was only four blocks from the house.

“In some neighborhoods, people can't even afford the twelve-dollar [Good Food Box] cost,” said Field, of the FoodShare's home delivery of weekly fresh, local produce. So recently, FoodShare has begun to establish Good Food Markets in low-income neighborhoods. Good Food Markets are simply a table of fresh products operated by two women in
the lobby of their low-income neighborhood housing complex or in a nearby parking lot. The sales don't amount to much—about $300 worth of food on “market days,” but the project accomplishes the task of getting fresh, culturally appropriate food into neighborhoods that don't have the income potential needed to attract farmers’ markets. “A farmer won't go into a farmers’ market unless he or she can sell $1,000 per day,” Field explained, which is why low-income neighborhoods rarely are good candidates for farmers’ markets.

FoodShare is also heavily invested in the potential and payoffs of urban agriculture. It not only operates its demonstration urban farm and composting center at its headquarters in central Toronto, but it also supports urban-agriculture programs at addiction-treatment facilities, mental health centers, and schools. “I mean, right here, shouldn't there be corn growing right now?” Field asked seriously, as we contemplated the enormous manicured lawn surrounding the provincial legislature building.

Field then acknowledged that while the complexity of the city's food system poses challenges, it is also complex and developed in a good way. Notably because of the forty-acre (sixteen-hectare) Ontario Food Terminal, located on a major roadway in the city. “Toronto is one of the only cities in the world that has a provincially funded location where local farmers can go, and where everyone from small vendors to chains can come and get food.” Toronto is adjacent to the world's largest protected agricultural zone, the 1.8 million acres (728,400 hectares) of prime farmland and woodland called the Ontario Greenbelt.
⁷
The Ontario Food Terminal is a key element in facilitating the movement of local food grown in the Greenbelt to customers while earning farmers a living wage.

Indeed, the Ontario Food Terminal is one of the few noncorporate-owned major urban food-distribution hubs. They have all but disappeared because multinational corporate grocery chains have their own “supply management hubs” that effectively shut independent grocery retailers and smaller farming operations out of the market in cities without an open wholesale hub. Operated by the Ontario Ministry of
Agriculture as a small city-within-a-city, the Ontario Food Terminal is where area farmers can bring their fruit and produce to market and sell directly to retailers and restaurants. It competes directly with other fresh produce brought in from around the globe, but the fact that there is a terminal in which produce can be sold in a central location to buyers has allowed many smaller farmers to continue farming and has also enabled consumers to continue accessing local products through traditional grocery markets. This rarely happens anymore.

Field noted that in her Toronto neighborhood, her favored independent grocers and chefs all get up at four or four-thirty in the morning almost daily to get fresh local produce that has come directly from nearby farms. While Field's central downtown neighborhood has around twenty greengrocers, not every area in Toronto is as lucky.

I
NDIVIDUAL,
C
OMMUNITY, AND
S
OCIETY

Toronto has thirteen “priority neighborhoods,” as they are called—identified for their higher levels of social risk factors such as low-income, high-unemployment, single-parent families and recent immigrants.

As Field sees it, lack of income to purchase food is only a third of the problem in “our unsustainable, dysfunctional industrial food system.” There's a global “food and income crisis” where “1.2 billion people will go to sleep tonight hungry and undernourished from lack of money.” Most people, Field explained, intuitively understand this part of the food system. No money equals no food. And this equation is what the traditional food-bank model focuses on.

Field has also identified an equally destructive but less acknowledged problem: the global “food and health crisis” in which “for the first time in human history 1.2 billion people will go to sleep malnourished from overnourishment of the wrong kind of food! Childhood obesity and diabetes will overcome every government's budget in the world.” She then
remarked on the other side of this tragedy, the ongoing farmer suicides that occur because farmers can't make enough money to live on while growing these commodity crops that feed into our industrial food system—the very same system that is killing people with “diseases of affluence.”

“In Canada, right now, [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper has absolutely no idea how we would eat if the border between the United States and Canada closed, or the border between the United States and Mexico.” One of Field's political ambitions is to lobby the Canadian government to create a Ministry of Food Security. “In New York, during 9/11, there were
four
days of food in the city. Total.” Field explained that she hates the term
food security
because “it's war-based,” but she conceded that it's not a bad way of getting at part of the vulnerabilities of a food system.

“We need a Minister of Food Security. Neither Stephen Harper nor Barack Obama get up in the morning and think about how the people in their country are going to eat the way a woman thinks about what she's got in the fridge and what she's going to serve,” said Field. Part of our current food crisis challenge is the lack of representation of women “who remain connected to traditional attitudes toward food,” explained Field. She is not advocating for women to hunker back in their homes and stay out of sight; rather, Field contends that we need women in the political and social spheres who truly understand how food systems work on an individual, community, and social level.

The final element of Field's social food policy, the one that would address the “food and agriculture” crisis, is controversial, she admits. Field would like to see subsidies for farmers who produce for the local market. Even farmers balk at this idea, Field says, because their opinions are based on the US subsidy system. But she cites successful farming subsidies on certain items in Kerala, India, which have been in place for thirty years. “We could have five things in Ontario, like cheese, carrots, apples, soy nuts, and broccoli, that could all be twenty cents per kilogram in all the grocery stores. But the farmers could get the full [wholesale price] amount. So this is the policy we're working on right now.”