Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (8 page)

Traditionally, agriculture and food have been the purview of larger regions, like states and provinces, as well as national governments. But we are entering the era of the megacities, where clusters of tens of millions of people are living in continuous metropolitan landscapes. It's not
surprising that cities, not nations or national agendas, are now the new drivers of change in the twenty-first century.

Urban agriculture, which this book is intently focused on, is going to change how cities are planned; how they work; how they look, smell, and feel. And with our rapidly urbanizing population, how cities feed themselves is going to be the defining obsession of the current century. And urban food production and local distribution chains are now emerging as major game-changing factors in how we city dwellers live and eat.

There are currently some eight hundred million people around the world engaged in some sort of urban food production, growing an estimated $500 million worth of fruits and vegetables—figures that make it seem as though urban agriculture is taking the world by storm.
¹⁹
Yet these alternative food systems of urban agriculture, CSAs, and farmers’ markets comprise a fraction of 1 percent of the food landscape in industrialized nations. The USDA reports that less than 1 percent of food sales in the United States are direct from farmer to consumer, via farmers’ markets or CSAs.
²⁰
There really are no numbers available for the fraction of food retail resulting from urban agriculture at this early stage.

The remaining percentage of food sales is still coming through the supermarkets and the supply chains, where the primary concern is cutting costs, and so those lowest prices are sourced from the global commodity markets and highly specialized industrial food chains.

In other words, we have a long, long way to go to revamp our food systems, but we
are
starting to rethink how we will feed our mostly urban population in a post-peak oil, post-peak water, and even post-peak land future. As the prolific author and food-justice advocate Vandana Shiva points out in
Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
, “No society can become a post-food society.”
²¹
Or, as even the most despondent farmer will tell you, we'll always need to eat.

P
erhaps my favorite moment from all my travels for this book happened while I was walking down a tree-lined Parisian boulevard. A jet-black, boxy police station, complete with black-tinted windows, stood out from the jumble of new and old architecture around it. The station was an excellent example of 1970s Brutalist architecture, designed to intimidate and terrorize. Someone, however, had planted grapevines in the window wells around the first level off the sidewalk, and the saplings were gamely doing their best to climb this slippery monolith. I burst out laughing at the juxtaposition of these vines struggling to soften the intentional harshness of this impersonal, aggression-inspired building. Neither the vines’ efforts nor the efforts of the gardener who planted them were in vain. The vines were winning.

T
HE
B
IRTH OF
F
RENCH
I
NTENSIVE
A
GRICULTURE IN
N
INETEENTH
-C
ENTURY
P
ARIS

French urban agriculture evolved from the walled gardens of medieval Paris to its apogee in nineteenth-century Paris. High stone walls were
built to enclose gardens, protecting valuable produce and absorbing heat during the day in order to release it back into the garden areas at night. These sheltered enclosures were microclimates for delicate food plants, not only extending the growing season but also allowing for early ripening of fruit and almost year-round growing of even the most tender vegetable crops. The soil was continually built up in raised beds (both for heat retention and drainage) through liberal dressings of the horse manure that Paris had in abundance, making use of what otherwise was a major transportation pollution problem at the time. Not only were nutrients returned to the soil, but the heat produced as the manure composted down created fermenting hotbeds, keeping the frost off delicate plants and extending the growing season to almost year-round. The use of heat retention with walls and creating heat through the manure used in the raised beds were two key reasons so much food could be grown out of season, fetching much more money for the market gardeners.

Glass-topped “cold frames” placed over crops, or the bell-shaped glass covers (known as
cloches
in French) were also widely used to force early growth and ripening of high-value food crops. Dense plantings reduced watering requirements, and companion planting—that is, using natural symbiotic relationships in plants to enhance growth and food production—was developed to keep both weeds and pests under control. (Certain plants and flowers repel common pests; for example, chives, onions, or even marigolds repel aphids; sunflowers attract aphids but can be used to keep them off tomatoes and artichokes. Some companion plants are used as structural support: corn can provide a “pole” for pole beans, and squash is a common low-growing groundcover that will keep weeds down in corn and other tall plants.)

This combination of efficient growing techniques, which later became known as French Intensive Agriculture, is still in use, though it is often called “square-foot gardening” or
potager
gardening. And it is what allowed the city's fresh fruit and vegetable production to flourish even as the city's population doubled from one million to two million in the last half of the 1800s.

Le Marais is a historic district of Paris on the right bank of the Seine River—now also known as the Third and Fourth Arrondissements, as the municipal subdivisions of Paris are called—and was the epicenter of the city's urban-agriculture industry.
(Marais
, French for “swamp,” is a holdover from when this area was boggy marsh. Though the swamps were drained in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the name stuck.) Its legacy is that market gardeners throughout France are known as
maraîchers
or
maraîchères:
essentially, swamp gardeners.

Not a lot of attention has been paid to these origins of intensive urban agricultural methods now employed from Cuba to Canada. The best account appeared in an academic agricultural journal,
Agro-Ecosystems
, in 1977. Dr. Gerald Stanhill's paper “An Urban Agro-Ecosystem: The Example of Nineteenth-Century Paris” calls it “one of the outstanding urban agro-ecosystems—the ‘marais’ of Paris, during the second half of the nineteenth century—the period of its maximum importance.”
¹

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Stanhill reports that an estimated 8,500 urban farmers, or
maraîchers
, were working just under 3,500 acres (1,400 hectares) in the city—one-sixth the area of Paris at the time. These small urban farms supplied the city year-round with one hundred thousand tons of high-quality, high-value salad and vegetable crops, with enough surplus to export to England. Each 2.5-acre plot (1 hectare) was capable of supplying fifteen Parisians with their caloric needs—assuming 2,400 kilocalories per person per day, and fifty-four Parisians with their vegetable-based protein of two ounces (fifty-four grams) per person per day. This system provided each Parisian with 110 pounds (50 kilograms) of fresh salads, vegetables, and fruits per person per year. Stanhill acknowledges that this was admittedly an extreme vegetarian diet, but as an urban food-production system, it was “equal to that of the most productive of current, agricultural cropping systems.”
²
Furthermore, “in terms of produce yields, the production of the ‘marais system’ one hundred years ago equaled that of all but the highest-yielding sugar and cereal crops grown today.”
³
Stanhill also notes that
these market gardeners were not interested in the highest yielding or the most calorie-dense crops. Instead, they were forcing out-of-season and therefore high-profit, quality crops, which makes this growing system even more impressive.

Stanhill was able to account for ten to twenty different salad, vegetable, and fruit crops produced in the Parisian market gardens.
Maraîchers
intercropped; that is, they used companion plants for structural support (planting climbing beans together with corn, for example), or they planted simultaneous sowings of plants known to enhance the growth or protection of another, such as aromatic herbs to keep aphids off artichokes or tomatoes. In this way,
maraîchers
allegedly could reap up to six harvests each year—and never fewer than three. It is thought to be one of the most productive cultivation systems ever documented.

By the close of the nineteenth century, the almost complete replacement of horses by cars as transportation and competition for land inside the city caused a precipitous decline in this type of urban agriculture in Paris. The main ingredient for the raised beds—horse manure—became scarce. Moreover, mechanized transportation allowed for farmers to seek land outside the city and still bring their produce to market.

Urban-intensive market gardening, however, persisted for a very long time in Paris, but it has all but died out in the past two decades. In 1988, there were still 1,900
maraîchers
growing and selling in the greater Paris region known as the île-de-France. By 1997, there were 800.
⁴

There are now only a handful of urban market gardeners remaining in the greater Paris area, yet I found one quite by accident. While browsing a local street market, le Marché Auguste-Blanqui, with my friend Jill, a Canadian expat who has lived in Paris for over a decade, Jill casually pointed out the market stall of Maraîcher Earl-Raehm, a local urban market gardening enterprise. The table was piled with several types of pointy-tipped red heirloom tomatoes, as well as delicate golden tomatoes that were slightly flattened at each end. There was a pyramid of celeriac root, various types of salads, basil, incredible bunches of
Italian flat-leaf parsley, freshly dug carrots, and potatoes on display, as well. The freshness and the quality were unparalleled. As it happens, this stall is one of Jill's regular stops at this incredible, massive street market that sets up every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday just a few blocks from her apartment. One look at the expression on my face, and Jill shot me an I-told-you-so smile that said, “Why would we go to the supermarket—in a car—when this is just outside our door?” We spent several minutes mulling over the choices before settling on delicate butterhead lettuce and some endives.

P
ARIS
T
ODAY

As in most cities in Europe and North America, interest in urban food gardening in Paris hit an all-time low in the 1990s but started to rebound just as it was threatening to become extinct. In 1999, a group of “guerilla gardeners”—activists who plant food gardens on underused or abandoned urban sites without approval of the land's owners—planted an illegal garden on a former industrial site. The project, called the Green Hand, received official approval a couple years later when Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë supported urban revitalization and urban greening initiatives like Paris's famous Vélib’ bicycle-sharing program and the citywide ban on horticultural pesticide use after his election in 2001. Now, La Main Verte is the city's official community-gardening resource organization, and community food gardens are making a comeback to the capital. (In the last decade, there has been a renewed interest in the protection of local culinary traditions, so heritage produce and fruits—Pontoise cabbage, Montmagny dandelion, Argenteuil asparagus, Montmorency cherry, and the Faro apple—are back in vogue.
⁵
) The city of Paris's official municipal website listed fifty-eight community gardening sites in 2011.
⁶

After the morning market trip to Marché Auguste-Blanqui, Jill, her
six-year-old daughter, Jesse, and I set out to find a community garden in her neighborhood that her husband, Luc, had stumbled across just a few weeks earlier.

The
Jardins familiaux du boulevard de l’Hôpital
(“community gardens on Boulevard d'Hopital”) is squeezed between a 1960s French government-subsidized housing apartment block on one side and high-rent apartments on the other and is accessible only by a sidewalk that cuts between the two buildings. As we approached, we noticed a wiry, grayhaired man fiddling with a row of grapevines, bifocals sliding toward the end of his nose and an unlit cigarette dangling from his bottom lip. His crew neck sweater, worn à la Jacques Cousteau, had a few pulled threads. He could have looked more French only if he had been wearing a beret and had a baguette tucked under his arm as he pruned his vines.

All that protected the garden plots from the footpath was a knee-high fence, with an even lower gate, good for keeping out toddlers or small pets, at the most. He immediately waved us into the garden. He seemed barely interested in my explanation of who I was and why we were interested in this garden. Jean Griffault introduced himself, warmly welcoming the three of us to “his” remarkable garden.

When I commented on the rather ineffective fencing, Griffault conceded that it did little to prevent produce-napping.
⁷
It was a problem at first, he explained, but it had slowed considerably. It's mostly young kids now, which is normal behavior, he added. He did the same thing as a kid. On the other hand, when grown-ups do it, it is annoying. And yes, he has seen adults arrive with shopping bags and proceed to pick anything that looked ripe. But usually there's a gardener around to curb that type of unwanted activity.

“There are twenty-seven plots here,” he told us, his unlit cigarette continuously bobbing on his bottom lip as he talked. Every gardener has to look after his or her own space, he stressed. (Gardens of the communal type, where everyone shares in the work and shares in the produce, are popular in France and are often referred to as community gardens, whereas the same term in North America almost always refers to the type of garden where each gardener has a designated spot to work.) Each gardener pays €90 (about $130) per year as a fee for a personal piece of the community garden and for use of the shed and communal tools and water.

Griffault said that he had been gardening here for five years. Before then, he'd never as much as watered a houseplant. “I was born in concrete, and I will die in concrete,” he declared rather enthusiastically, explaining that he had been born and lived in the very same Paris neighborhood
his whole life. He learned to garden only when he got his plot, mostly by watching the other gardeners.