Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Carrots are one of the most bizarre mass-farmed things out there. You grow carrots and they don't look or taste anything like those long, thin, bunches. You have to grow those in a bed of sifted something (probably not soil in most cases) to get them to turn out like that.
I can only imagine the urban farmers pulling a blood-red stubby thing out of their urban oasis and saying, huh, mabel, what's this hear thing?
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Urban farming is a very romantic notion, and like many such notions is largely bullshit. Yeah, you can grow some nice produce. But can you produce enough calories and enough variety on a hand-tended lot to provide a nutritious diet for the people working that lot? Highly doubtful, especially if it's just volunteers and activists doing the work.
And you are using a lot that could be used for a multi-family housing development, bringing people into a living situation where they consume vastly less energy per capita than they would elsewhere.
The real benefit of urban gardening projects is to get people used to growing -- and thus eating -- fresh produce, to move people away from prepackaged foods. That's a great goal, but it's not a method of replacing large-scale agriculture. And there are other ways to accomplish that, and to deal with the "food desert" issue. That same multi-family housing development can have a market on the ground floor that sells produce rather than the shit that some places sell, and that's a change I've been seeing all over.
I'm also skeptical of the health benefits of eating lettuce that has been breathing in the NYC air, but maybe that's just me.
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