I recently began ‘Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution‘ (Prometheus Books, 2012) and am absolutely hooked.
In Chapter 1: The Facade of the Modern Grocery Store, the author writes that ‘A topic discussed in food-security circles (…) that gets surprisingly little coverage in the general discussions about food is the estimate that cities nowadays have a mere three days’ worth of food at any given time to feed their populations.‘
I remember during the recent pandemic, moving through the aisles of our local grocery store in the heart of the city (we lived in a city in central Sweden at the time and there was no lockdown but the situation was still surreal….) and wondering just how much food supply was there that could nourish the population if a serious bout of panic buying occurred or there was prolonged disruption to supply chain.
The author of ‘Food and the City’ goes on to write that the British government set up an agency to study food security in the UK and the report concluded that major cities were at any given time ‘nine meals from anarchy’, a conclusion that would likely be discovered across other societies.
Photo: Annika Lundkvist at Biobazar, Warsaw
Issues of food security as well as food sovereignty (while they are completely different concepts, I read a brilliant statement recently that the former is also absolutely critical to establish the latter) are what motivate me in my nascent work with community and urban agriculture at Pedestrian Space and this book is already, in the early pages, hitting on so many notes that brought me to these issues. You can read more about our commitment to these issues below: