Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution Read Online Free PDF

12.8 million people 1 (and their cars) were living was without natural reference points. As the airplane circled and descended, the city became an enormous monochromatic computer circuit board with an infinite horizon. Its features were distinguished only by varying shades of gray: lighter gray boxes and rectangles that made up warehouses, shopping malls, and parking lots; the medium gray of the great freeways that cut above and through the city; and the charcoal gray of the smog that sat over what presumably was residential Los Angeles that day. I sat in awe of the lack of green space, despite how much I'd read about the city's complete concretization and continuous urban sprawl.
    Just north of Los Angeles, across a small mountain range, is Bakersfield, the southern tip of California's great Central Valley. It runs north to south, stretching 450 miles (720 kilometers), and is forty to sixty miles (sixty to one hundred kilometers) wide. This is where the lettuce, tomatoes, and strawberries that fill grocery stores in the United States and Canada—and maybe elsewhere—are grown. Home to one of the great tracks of farmland on the North American continent, the Central Valley is the produce basket of North America, providing 8 percent of the nation's agricultural output on less than 1 percent of the farmland. The mountains north of Los Angeles and those that divide the Pacific coastal cities of Monterey and San Francisco offer a very distinct barrier between rural farmland and the gleaming modernist cities and boundless suburbs that still shape Southern California and, most notably, Los Angeles.
    This friction between food and freeways has taken its toll. Los Angeles's metropolitan area, the globe's fourteenth-largest megacity, is home to the very rich and the very poor, a place of great excess and of endemic food insecurity. White neighborhoods in Los Angeles have three times as many supermarkets as do black neighborhoods and twice as many as do Latino ones. 2 South Los Angeles is often held up as a textbook example of a food desert.
    Despite the fact that south and central California are extremely productive agriculturally, one million Angelinos go hungry or are food insecure every day, making hunger every bit as much of a chronic condition as the disproportionately high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart problems, and other health conditions that arise when urbanization meets poverty. Los Angeles, according to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly known as the food stamps program) is the “epicenter of hunger” in the United States.
    My main purpose in traveling to Los Angeles was to meet up with some of the farmers who got the world's attention as they fought against the destruction of their fourteen-acre urban farm in South Los Angelesin 2004. It was the largest community gardening project of its time, and its destruction became the subject of a heart-wrenching Academy Award-nominated documentary called The Garden (2008). Perhaps this urban farm was ahead of its time, but several years earlier, another early urban-agriculture battle took place in the Goleta Valley, near Santa Barbara. Fairview Gardens Farm, which started out as a rural farm but found itself surrounded on all sides by residential sprawl throughout the years, retained its right to exist and is now the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens.
    What I found in the Los Angeles area—an early battleground where important struggles in urban agriculture have been fought and won, and fought and lost—is that it is still a frontier in many ways. It's a cautionary tale of how greed, politics, racial disharmony, and extreme urbanization can take their toll on a city's soul. But the city is making great strides to meet these challenges. There are a handful of people working to put food-growing spaces and alternative food-distribution models at the center of its makeover. Food gardens are rising from Los Angeles's notorious food