the early to mid ’70s, so it was mainly the dads) worked in blue collar jobs at the local automotive assembly plant, and most were recent immigrants from southern Italy. Food gardens were the norm in the culture of my large town—our neighborhood, anyway. (We had, by this point, moved from the small city where I’d spent my early years, where food gardens were rare.) Grape arbors covered the driveways, tomato plants flourished in backyards, and in autumn the air was redolent with the heady smells of wine and sauce production. My classmates, the children of immigrants, wanted nothing to do with it. For the most part, they looked on their parents’ food-growing and food-preserving labor with embarrassment. They viewed their parents as hopelessly attached to old-country ways and they couldn’t wait to leave such nostalgia— and nostalgia’s food gardens—behind.
Our historical complicity in the triumphant rush to create landscapes of ornament rather than those satisfying need was also accompanied by economic and structural changes that have severely diminished our capacity to feed ourselves. In the past fifty years, we have created a food system that depends on global circulation and that is vulnerable to everything from minor hiccups to major disruptions in the global market. We’re so inured to this long-distance choreography of goods that we fail to see its surreal logic. (Economist Herman Daly, in a 1993 Scientific American article, says it best: “Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”) In my own city of Toronto, for example, as Debbie Field, the executive director of the nonprofit organization FoodShare, pointed out in NOW magazine in 2009, “There is more arable land in downtown Toronto than there is in Newfoundland.” And yet, of the food consumed in Toronto, approximately 50 to 60 percent is imported, mostly from Florida, California, and Mexico.
Moving from the local to the regional level, the province of Ontario imports $4 billion more in food than it exports—this in a province that boasts more than 50 percent of Canada’s Class 1 farmland. The great majority of our country’s agricultural land is not devoted to what can be directly consumed—instead, just 6 percent of Canada’s farms produce fruits and vegetables. Nor would it necessarily take a massive shift to rectify the imbalance and thus be able to meet our own needs rather than depending on global production. A Region of Waterloo Public Health study, for example, found that with a shift in production on just 10 to 12 percent of local agricultural lands in that region—replacing the foods we eat too much of (such as meat and highly processed foods) with the whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables we don’t eat enough of from local lands—the regional population could sustain itself from local agricultural lands. (The study assumed that people would continue to eat imports of many foods, such as bananas, that don’t grow in the region.)
Retooling the food system in favor of the local and the regional, regaining control of what we eat and where it comes from, will require structural changes to every link in the long and complex chain that takes our food from seed to mouth. But reimagining our cities as places of committed food production, as one piece in that larger project, will require, above all else, not a shift in structure but a shift in attitude. Quite simply, the biggest barrier is an idea, a pervasive notion that food production does not belong in the city. Whether we came to this idea through a class-based discomfort that equates food growing with reduced economic status, or through other cultural channels (as my high school classmates did, viewing food growing as an ethnic marker of “otherness”), makes little difference, because the idea is now thoroughly entrenched, whatever its origins.
But there is a chink in the armor that surrounds our notion of what’s proper, what’s appropriate, what kinds of activities belong in the city. And that chink, that opening, lies in how we define the idea of urban productivity. What if we expanded our current yardsticks, which measure urban productivity in terms of jobs and economic output and widgets or services exchanged, to include a different question? What if, along with providing us with a place to live and work, our cities also provided us with the essential ingredient we can’t survive without—food?
I suspect that just asking the question will force us to look deeply at the definitional divide we’ve constructed between the urban and the rural. And the philosophical heart of that divide lies, I think, in our attitude toward the land itself—the land being the literal soil on which we build our notions of what properly belongs. We’re entirely comfortable with the idea of the rural landscape as a working landscape, the soil from which our food comes, the place where we negotiate productive effort with, and from, the earth. The city, on the other hand, is a landscape in which the land is little more than backdrop or platform for activities that aren’t intrinsically connected to it and don’t grow from it. Even urban places that don’t seem to fit this argument—parks and green spaces, for example—are either appreciated for the passive recreational opportunities they offer or, at worst, merely tolerated as long as they don’t get in the way of more important efforts of city building. (One can see the latter in the approach that many cities take with regard to community gardens, where people come together to grow food. The gardens are often considered to be temporary land uses until a “better,” “more appropriate” purpose can be found for the space.)
Closely connected to this conceptual divide between urban and rural is our attitude to nature. Nature exists “out there,” untouched by humans. Cultivation is a corruption of the pristine.
Reimagining our cities as places of food production encourages us to be guided by a different ethic, an ethic of productive possibility. It asks us to work the land—growing with it and from it—and to work with natural systems. It asks us to see the city as a living landscape, its soil generative of value precisely for what it is: something alive, something from which much goodness can grow.
THE OLDER FELLOW who lives in an apartment above a popular café at the end of my street, on a busy commercial corner, is one of the most productive urban food-growers I’ve ever met. In a space that consists of a parking pad for three cars, a fenced-in square of soil 10 feet by 10 feet, and a small outdoor deck on the second floor, he manages to grow more vegetables than I could eat in a year.
His arsenal consists of buckets lined up in tight rows against every edge of the property. I tried to count the gleaming white plastic containers (the kind bulk food comes in) and lost track just short of 100. When I asked him about the volume, he shrugged and said, “I used to do more.”
The containers may look unconventional, but they don’t look messy—they’re too purposeful for that. Filled with soil, each bucket contains a plant—tomato, pepper, eggplant, or some other vegetable—and sometimes there’s also a bean plant winding up the stake. The chain-link fencing around the property is likewise covered by midsummer with the green leaves of bean plants; a trellis behind the parking pad supports lush zucchinis. Off to the side of the car area, where there is a small square of soil, a fig tree spreads its tropical-looking foliage over in-ground plantings of eggplant, mint, basil, lettuce, peas, onions, and more. He eats a lot of salad, he tells me, and he makes vats of tomato sauce, freezes extra produce, and gives away plenty.
He’s out there most days, but I’ve noticed that, aside from watering, his work in the garden consists mainly of hanging around and chatting with the dozens of people who stop by. “It kills the time in summer,” he said when I complimented him on the garden. “It’s something to do.” I suspect that the food-growing traditions of his Portuguese heritage have something to do with it as well.
Maybe it’s his daily presence that protects his garden— that, and his vigilance. There’s something about his stance and demeanor—stocky and a little gruff, his ruddy face slow to smile—that seems to broadcast a “don’t mess with my planting” message. I’ve never seen any evidence of vandalism. What I have seen, though, is evidence of ingenuity. For one, a lack of soil— a “yard” that is three-quarters driveway, for example—is not an insurmountable barrier