Part of the problem is the way we think of some of these foods. Chicken was once considered a bit of a delicacy. When I was kid, many of our dishes were meatless just because meat was expensive and we could only afford it a couple times a week.
Another piece of it is the rise of two-income households. It used to be common for homemakers to use more time- and labor-intensive cooking methods to make less expensive meat cuts more palatable, preserve their own vegetables, and similar activities that made their food dollars go farther; but almost no one has time for that these days, because they're working all the time just to keep ahead of the bills.
Old industrial cities like Detroit have decades and decades of soil contamination to deal with. Lead and arsenic from smelters. Lead from auto exhausts. This is probably not where you want to be growing food.
Other cities may not have that problem as severely, but they have another problem -- incredibly high land values. In Seattle an empty city lot is easily worth $200,000 before you even put a house on it. There's no way farming land that expensive can be cost-effective.
I think before we get too carried away with urban farming we first should focus on filling in the "food deserts" in many cities, where there are no easily accessible markets with decent produce. Farmer's markets also have a role to play here.
I hate to say it, but I've come around to a rather fatalistic view that perhaps the "solution" the lousy food problem is that human beings might just have to evolve to make the best possible use of the lousy food we're likely to be stuck with for as long as we inhabit this earth into the future
( ... )
I also think we sometimes focus a bit too heavily on the unhealthiness of our diet. There's a lot about it that isn't great, both from a health and a sustainability standpoint, but we're still living longer than at any previous point in history. Part of that's due to better medical science, but partly it's also because we don't usually lack for food during critical developmental stages. There's always room for improvement, but we're not doing as badly as all that, I think.
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Another piece of it is the rise of two-income households. It used to be common for homemakers to use more time- and labor-intensive cooking methods to make less expensive meat cuts more palatable, preserve their own vegetables, and similar activities that made their food dollars go farther; but almost no one has time for that these days, because they're working all the time just to keep ahead of the bills.
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Old industrial cities like Detroit have decades and decades of soil contamination to deal with. Lead and arsenic from smelters. Lead from auto exhausts. This is probably not where you want to be growing food.
Other cities may not have that problem as severely, but they have another problem -- incredibly high land values. In Seattle an empty city lot is easily worth $200,000 before you even put a house on it. There's no way farming land that expensive can be cost-effective.
I think before we get too carried away with urban farming we first should focus on filling in the "food deserts" in many cities, where there are no easily accessible markets with decent produce. Farmer's markets also have a role to play here.
Reply
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I also think we sometimes focus a bit too heavily on the unhealthiness of our diet. There's a lot about it that isn't great, both from a health and a sustainability standpoint, but we're still living longer than at any previous point in history. Part of that's due to better medical science, but partly it's also because we don't usually lack for food during critical developmental stages. There's always room for improvement, but we're not doing as badly as all that, I think.
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