Food Among The Ruins by Mark Dowie
(selected excerpts below)
Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a
food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia,
or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts
scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. A food
desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which
healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or
where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a
head of lettuce. About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy
their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores,
liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire
shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a
seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social
Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves
a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed
hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants
are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for
dinner.
…
There are a few cities in the world that grow and provide about half
their total food supply within their urban and peri-urban regions—Dar
es Salaam, Tanzania; Havana, Cuba; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal;
Rosario, Argentina; Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines; and, my
personal favorite, Cuenca, Equador—all of which have much longer
growing seasons than Detroit. However, those cities evolved that way,
almost unintentionally. They are, in fact, about where Detroit was
agriculturally around one hundred and fifty years ago. Half of them
will almost surely drop under 50 percent sufficiency within the next
two decades as industry subsumes cultivated land to build factories (à
la China). Because of its unique situation, Detroit could come close
to being 100 percent self-sufficient.
…
Leading the way in Detroit’s soil remediation is Malik Yakini, owner
of the Black Star Community Book Store and founder of the Detroit
Black Community Food Security Network. Yakini and his colleagues begin
the remediation process by removing abandoned house foundations and
toxic debris from vacated industrial sites. Often that is all that
need be done to begin farming. Throw a little compost on the ground,
turn it in, sow some seeds, and water it. Water in Detroit is
remarkably clean and plentiful.
Although Detroiters have been growing produce in the city since its
days as an eighteenth-century French trading outpost, urban farming
was given a major boost in the nineteen eighties by a network of
African-American elders calling themselves the “Gardening Angels.” As
migrants from the rural South, where many had worked as small farmers
and field hands, they brought agrarian skills to vacant lots and
abandoned industrial sites of the city, and set out to reconnect their
descendants, children of asphalt, to the Earth, and teach them that
useful work doesn’t necessarily mean getting a job in a factory.
…
About five hundred small plots have been created by an international
organization called Urban Farming, founded by acclaimed songwriter
Taja Sevelle. Realizing that Detroit was the most agriculturally
promising of the fourteen cities in five countries where Urban Farming
now exists, Sevelle moved herself and her organization’s headquarters
there last year. Her goal is to triple the amount of land under
cultivation in Detroit every year. All food grown by Urban Farming is
given free to the poor. According to Urban Farming’s Detroit manager,
Michael Travis, that won’t change.
…
Any agro-economist will tell you that urban farming creates jobs. Even
without local production, the food industry creates three dollars of
job growth for every dollar spent on food—a larger multiplier effect
than almost any other product or industry. Farm a city, and that
figure jumps over five dollars. To a community with persistent
two-digit unemployment, that number is manna. But that’s only one
economic advantage of farming a city.
…
I tried to imagine what this weedy, decrepit, trash-ridden urban dead
zone would look like under cultivation. First, I removed the overhead
utilities and opened the sky a little. Then I tore up the useless grid
of potholed streets and sidewalks and replaced them with a long
winding road that would take vegetables to market and bring
parishioners to church. I wrecked and removed most of the houses I
saw, leaving a few that somehow held some charm and utility. Of
course, I left the churches standing, as I did a solid red brick
school, boarded up a decade ago when the student body dropped to a
dozen or so bored and unstimulated deadbeats. It could be reopened as
an urban ag-school, or SHAR’s residents could live there. I plowed and
planted rows of every imaginable vegetable, created orchards and
raised beds, set up beehives and built chicken coops, rabbit warrens,
barns, and corrals for sheep, goats, and horses. And of course, I
built sturdy hoop houses, rows of them, heated by burning methane from
composting manure and ag-waste to keep frost from winter crops. The
harvest was tended by former drug addicts who like so many before them
found salvation in growing things that keep their brethren alive.
…
That afternoon I visited Grace Lee Boggs, a ninety-three-year-old
Chinese-American widow who has been envisioning farms in Detroit for
decades. […] I asked her whether the city government would support
large-scale urban agriculture. “City government is irrelevant,” she
answered. “Positive change, leaps forward in the evolution of
humankind do not start with governments. They start right here in our
living rooms and kitchens. We are the leaders we are looking for.”
…
Detroit now offers America a perfect place to redefine urban
economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial
factory-town model to a resilient, holistic, economically diverse,
self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/urban community—and in doing
so become the first modern American city where agriculture, while
perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry.
—
“Don’t waste time protesting; it changes nothing—that is why it is
legal” (Keith Farnish)
My household GHG emissions including car travel ~9kg CO2e/day
Household daily use of Water 180L, Electricity 5.2kWh, Petrol 1.4L, Gas 0MJ