Peter Ladner - The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities

Advance Praise for The Urban Food Revolution

After decades of food delivered by industrial agriculture based on cheap oil, we are learning the health costs to our own bodies and the biosphere are too great. A revolution in food where, how, and when its grown is now sweeping urban centres. Read this book to see why it matters and how we can do it.

David Suzuki, co-founder, David Suzuki Foundation

As a farmer Im amazed by the amount of discussion and debate there currently is about food systems and farming. Its overwhelming, but Peter Ladner really separates the wheat from the chaff. If you want to get your head around the important developments without ending up with a headache, this is the book for you.

Wally Satzewich, developer, SPIN-Farming

Peter Ladner has written a great book on food food of, by and for the people. He brings an insight and clarity to the issue that only a journalist, turned politician, turned journalist, could achieve. His lucid and accessible book tells us how we have lost what used to be common, and how we can make community agriculture common again. His book artfully synthesizes the myriad strands of what is a large but still largely incoherent revolution The Urban Food Revolution. This book should be required reading for anyone in North America who has interest in food. That would be all of us.

Professor Patrick. M. Condon,
UBC James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments

Things are changing; our relationship with food, the land where it is grown, the people whose hands harvest it, and how it is prepared and eaten are coming back into focus and demanding our attention. TheUrban Food Revolution provides an overview of this movement, and vignettes of some of its key players; farmers, planners, activists, politicians, and all of us who eat. Here are the people and their ideas; a grand experiment in re-imagining and re-creating one of the most fundamental aspects of our lives.

Michael Ableman, farmer; founder, Center For Urban Agriculture and
Centre For Arts, Ecology, and Agriculture, co-director of SOLEfood;
author, Fields of Plenty and On Good Land

Government leaders, policy makers and teachers will want to read Peter Ladners comprehensive view of what is driving todays urban agriculture phenomenon. With an academic background in urban planning, a successful career as a municipal politician and as a long time journalist, Ladner brings new insights to the subject in such chapters as Agriculture as the New Golf: Farming as a Development Amenity. The Urban FoodRevolution is a book by a passionate man who wants to change the way our food system works.

Michael Levenston, executive director, City Farmer

This book is well-written, well-organized, and well-researched. It has lots of practical examples and a wonderfully balanced assessment of options. It was a treat to read. Peter Ladners suggested policy interventions to promote urban agriculture are a great simile for parallel interventions required to promote sustainable enterprises. This book is a must-read for policymakers and CEOS with an interest in one of the most compelling issues of our time.

Bob Willard, author, The New Sustainability Advantage,
The Next Sustainability Wave, and The Sustainability Champions Guidebook

THE
URBAN FOOD
REVOLUTION

Changing the Way We Feed Cities

PETER LADNER

Copyright 2011 by Peter Ladner.All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane McIntosh.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-86571-683-4
eISBN: 978-1-55092-488-6

Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of The Urban Food Revolution
should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.

To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America)
1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com

Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:

New Society Publishers
P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada
(250) 247-9737

New Society Publishers mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision. We are committed to doing this not just through education, but through action. The interior pages of our bound books are printed on Forest Stewardship Council acid-free paper that is 100% post-consumer recycled (100% old growth forest-free), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetable-based, low-VOC inks, with covers produced using FSC stock. New Society also works to reduce its carbon footprint, and purchases carbon offsets based on an annual audit to ensure a carbon neutral footprint. For further information, or to browse our full list of books and purchase securely, visit our website at: www.newsociety.com

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Ladner, Peter
The urban food revolution : changing the way we feed cities / Peter Ladner.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-86571-683-4

1. Urban agriculture. 2. Sustainable agriculture. 3. Local foods. 4. Food supply.
5. Urban health. I. Title.

S494.5.U72L32 2011 630.91732 C2011-905558-9

Contents

5. Agriculture as the New Golf:
Farming as a Development Amenity

8. Economic Development through Urban Agriculture:
Chasing the Local Job Dream

People care most about what is closest to them. Nothing is closer to people than the food they put into their mouths every day. Nowhere is closer to people than their own backyard or schoolyard or front boulevard. The growing gap between our immediate world and the distant worlds that feed us is starting to gnaw at people. They see pieces of their lives fraying, and they see how much of that disintegration is related to the food they eat or dont eat. They see the most primal element of personal survival put into the hands of underpaid foreign workers, a few large corporations, and distant mega-farms and processors dependent on diminishing supplies of cheap oil and water.

North Americans health care costs, their childrens obesity, their own health, their insecurities about the future of oil, water and soil, their uncertainties about climate change, and their anxieties over the loss of agricultural land are all related to accessing quality, affordable, nutritious food from reliable sources. The low-nutrient, low-quality junk food so many of us depend on is, literally, killing us. While the threats to our food supply in North America are trivial compared to the billion people elsewhere who go to sleep hungry every night, theyre our issues and we must care about them.

The full story on urban food systems cant be told without looking at the corporate farmers and big global flows of food from one continent to the other that are laced with subsidies, floating in oil, and driving smaller farmers into bankruptcy. International treaties, national policies, commodity traders, and the price of tractors will always determine a lot of what we eat and how much we pay for it. This book will touch on that, but it will look more at what can be done at the local level, ramping up urban and near-urban local food production and distributing it more effectively. Thats where the passion is. Thats where we feel the wonder and simplicity of growing: I just planted this seed in a pot on my balcony